At the London Centre conference on antisemitism, @simon_schama delivered a tour de force keynote, addressing, among other things, ongoing attempts to de-Judaize the Holocaust. (About Jonathan Glazer’s movie: “What you’ll all notice about The Zone of Interest, it was completely Jew free, totally Jew free.”) He also went after the Holocaust-inverting Pankaj Mishra — “the kind of darling of the English intellectual literati left” — and his obscene LRB essay “Shoah after Gaza,” which Schama called “an exercise in sustained moral depravity.” A few choice quotes as noted by the reporter (I myself was too captivated to take notes): “Arguments such as those advanced by Mishra on Israel and Gaza” leave a condition in which Jews are only allowed to “say kaddish, in effect, for the six million if you come out like Naomi Klein and Judith Butler and Peter Beinhart and you come out as anti-Zionist. “So we have a kind of moral selection ramp between those who are allowed to grieve and explain and write and study the Holocaust on condition that you repudiate the Jewish state – 20 percent of whom in its earliest years were Holocaust survivors.” Schama spoke alongside Jan Grabowski, who delivered a powerful keynote of his own. Video should be coming out soon. Meanwhile, be on the lookout for Schama’s new documentary “Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz” — “the most personal & unflinching film of his career” — premiering on BBC2 on April 7. @centre_as @compercenter
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