Brad Pitt takes on IBM

As if we needed another reason to heart Mr. Jolie.

IndieWire reports the still-hot actor/producer (Moneyball, The Tree of Life) is going to produce and possibly star in the movie adaptation of Edwin Black‘s, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation.

Claude Brodesseur-Akner reports in Vulture, New York Magazine’s culture portal,

“While the Holocaust obviously predates the personal computer, it did not precede the information age, and Black’s book answers one of the Holocaust’s most obvious questions: How did the Nazis identify and round up so many Jews with such precision and speed?”

Courtesy of Wallace Graphic Design

Of course there are other companies complicit in helping the Nazis implement their master plan that are still around today: Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen,  Ford (see Ford and the Führer). Other household names including Krupp, Kellogg and Bayer also profited from forced labor of Holocaust victims.

I remember learning about some of these companies’ involvement when I was younger and swearing I would never purchase or use any of their products. Well, to date I’ve never owned a Ford, Mercedes or VW but I’ve certainly ridden in all three. And I’ve taken Bayer aspirin on more than one occasion and although not a coffee drinker, my husband (the son of two Holocaust survivors) uses a Krupps coffee grinder to get his beans just right. Oh, and Kellogg’s? Please. Like Seinfeld, I could eat cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I’m getting off track here. The purpose of this post is that I’m excited for this movie to be made. And in a weird way I’m glad Brad Pitt is the force behind it, if only for the fact that he’ll be able to attract the right people and backers to get it done.

It’s interesting because you’d think this is a movie Steven Spielberg, with his Shoah Foundation and Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, would make. But I’m glad that it’s being made by a gentile — a smart, sexy, talented gentile, at that. I like when nonmembers of the tribe take up our cause.

“Legitimate Rape” Theory Has Roots in Nazi Germany

Why am I not surprised? (And, really, how much uglier could Todd Akin‘s story get?)

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Akin’s source about the rarity of pregnancy resulting in rape is from a 1972 study by Dr. Fred Mecklenburg, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School at the time. The Post-Dispatch writes:

In supporting his claim about trauma and ovulation, Mecklenburg cited experiments conducted in Nazi death camps.

The Nazis tested this hypothesis ‘by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock-killing, to see what the effect this had on their ovulatory patterns. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate.'”

I’m shocked to silence. Luckily, this commenter, who goes by the name of DriveBy, isn’t:

It would appear that the links between the Republican brain and the Nazi brain are even deeper than the obvious.”

You Cannot Wear a Swastika Ironically

One pair left. Credit: Gothamist

An accessories store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn called Bejeweled is selling $5.99 Swastika earrings. There’s only one pair left. Gawker’s Brian Moylan has some choice words for the store and its clientele: “Greenpoint fauxhemians, you cannot wear a Swastika ironically.”

As pointed out in other articles and posts regarding this incident, the swastikas in the photo are backwards, which has some commenters insisting it’s not the same symbol.

That’s ridiculous.

Yes, the swastika was around way before Hitler appropriated it for his Let’s Kill All Jews agenda, but the key word here is ‘appropriated’. Post-1945, the swastika symbol will never be looked at the same way again. It’s forever tainted by Hitler and his SS-minions. Nobody looking at those earrings is thinking it’s a benign symbol with Hindu or Buddhist origins. The first thing that comes to mind is Hitler and the Holocaust. There’s just no way it doesn’t. Wearing a swastika in Western society and saying it’s not an offensive or aggressive act is ignorant at best. If you’re a Neo-Nazi and you’re not wearing it ironically, then sure, wear it. At least you’re being honest about your intent (yes, I’m being slightly ironic here myself). But if you think it’s OK to wear it, you’re mistaken.

P.S. In researching this post, I discovered a small town in Ontario named Swastika. The town was incorporated in 1908. During WWII the local government renamed the town Winston (after Winston Churchill) but the residents protested and erected a sign that said, “To hell with Hitler, we came up with our name first.”

Related: Good Jewish Boy, Also Loves Swastikas

“I Grew Up with Dead Relatives”

Hall of Names at Yad Vashem; photo: David Shankbone

That sentence stopped me in my tracks.

At last week’s 10th Biennial International Holocaust Studies Conference at Middle Tennessee State University, Steven Leonard Jacobs, uttered those words.

The Jewish studies professor from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa also said: 

“There were 150 members of my family murdered between 1939 and 1945. My father was one of seven survivors. All seven are now deceased. But growing up, I knew my family was different somehow. We weren’t like other families. I grew up with dead relatives. When I would tell stories about playing with friends, my father would say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my cousin who was killed by the Nazis.’”

Imagine your own mother or father doing that? I’m sure it would become tiresome, if not downright depressing. I’ve spoken with other offspring of survivors who tell similar stories. Perhaps some children would be inclined to stop sharing playground anecdotes with their survivor parents simply to avoid hearing about dead relatives, but Prof. Jacobs seems to have gone in the opposite direction by becoming a professor who specializes in Holocaust studies. He seems to have come to it with great passion and vigor, and I applaud that.

“All of us,” he said, “the second and third and fourth generations of parents who survived this terrible thing, represent a bridge over Hitler. When I was born, my dad said I was the victory. The Nazis didn’t defeat us.”

Indeed, every child and grandchild and great-grandchild and so on down the line is a triumph over Hitler. My husband and children included.

One of the goal’s of this biennial conference is to give middle- and high-school educators the tools they need to teach Holocaust curriculum.

According to the article in The Tennessean, Prof. Jacobs told the teachers that it is not their job to provide answers but to “have a solid knowledge base about the subject and to wrestle with the question: Are there lessons we can learn from it today?”

I, for one, appreciated that question he posed because I can only hear, “We must keep it from happening again,” so many times. Of course, we don’t want mass genocide to ever happen again, but it’s said so often that it’s become trite and I feel almost deaf to it now. Hopefully these new educators will bring some new thoughts and words, and in turn, their students will also breathe new life into Holocaust studies.

A Child’s View of 9/11

Manhattan skyline at night. Photo: davidcmc58

Driving home from New Jersey last Saturday night, my six-year-old son Jack looked toward the twinkling Manhattan skyline ahead and asked what those blinking red lights were, you know, “the ones way up high, close to the spire of the Empire State building.”

“Those are lights that let planes know they’re flying too close to a building,” my husband Tom said. “They help pilots avoid crashing into skyscrapers.”

“Oh,” Jack said, reveling in this new bit of trivia. “I guess they didn’t have those during 9/11. If they did, those pilots wouldn’t have crashed into the World Trade Center, right?”

My husband and I turned toward each other in the front seat, and I’m pretty sure we had the exact same expression on our faces—that of shock and delight at our child’s innocence. Basking in that warm and rosy glow of a child who can’t even comprehend why anyone would ever purposely fly a plane filled with people into a building filled with people, my husband softly responded, “Yeah. Something like that.”

Satisfied with that answer, Jack went back to poking his sister in her car seat.

“Wow,” Tom whispered. “He can’t yet comprehend that a person would actually do something that terrible.”

“I know,” I said. “But neither could we until it actually happened.”

After that exchange it occurred to me that in our lifetimes, we lose our innocence many times over. Even as adults. Evil comes at us in new and awful ways that are as startling as they are incomprehensible. And that’s what it’s been like for me writing about the Holocaust. Even though I know so much about it from years of reading and research, I continue to discover new and different ways in which the Nazis committed their dastardly deeds. It shouldn’t continue to amaze me, but it does. And I don’t want to lose that innocence. I want to still believe that there is good in this world. For now, I have my children to help me savor that innocence.