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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/never-again-has-blinded-us/
Has "Never Again" Blinded Us?
(Times of Israel) Barry Mellinger - I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors - barely survivors - who stepped out of the camps into a world emptied of everyone they had ever loved. In the last three years, atrocities beyond imagination have been inflicted on us. Again and again we have watched parents bury their children. They tried to erase our entire nation. They tried to kill our faith and everything we bring to the world. And yet we rose again. We flourished, and we carried our dead forward by naming our sons and daughters after them and by making the world a better place. "Never Again" rests on a hope. We believed the world would learn, that no one could confront the piles of shoes, the children's faces, the naked corpses, and remain unchanged. But only those who already felt some bond to Jews were capable of caring. Millions did not. Billions did not. The world walked through our museums and remained largely unmoved, or moved only briefly, never long enough to restrain antisemitism. We wanted to believe morality could be taught. But not for the Jewish question. Pain does not create affinity; affinity must already exist for empathy to take root. And without that affinity, without some prior sense of connection to Jews as a living people, whatever response we think we see is not empathy, it is a grimace. We spent decades in the belief that if we exposed everything, if we spared nothing, truth itself would end antisemitism. It would compel compassion. It never did. Antisemitism was not waiting for enlightenment. It was waiting for permission. For years now, the world has behaved as if there were a statute of limitations on the moral freeze that followed the Holocaust, as if the restraint purchased by our six million dead had quietly expired. After the Oct. 7 pogrom, there was no pause in Jew-hatred, not even for one day. Antisemitism does not respond to evidence. It does not submit to reason. Hitler did not murder Jews because of what they believed, how they lived, or what they owned. He murdered the poor and the rich, the pious and the secular, the assimilated and the insular, the newborn and the elderly. There was no argument that could have saved them. There never is.