The Shoah after Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra
JVL Introduction
Early in February the Barbican withdrew from hosting a London Review of Books lecture series at a late stage because it included the talk, posted below, by Pankraj Mishra.
It is called The Shoah after Gaza and in it Mishra asks “What is the fate of universal values after Israel’s collapse into violent nationalism?”
Mishra criticised the Barbican’s decision, saying that a “pervasive sense of fear and panic” was closing down debate on the issue within cultural spaces.
Fortunately the talk was able to go ahead at St James Church, Clerkenwell.
We link to a video of the presentation and repost the text of the talk here.
It is long, but well worth listening to and/or reading, posing questions that should be in the forefront of all of our concerns.
Highly recommended.
RK
This article was originally published by London Review of Books on Wed 28 Feb 2024. Read the original here.
The Shoah after Gaza
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All the more powerful for being so quietly, concentratedly delivered. But it’s left me quite unsettled, apprehensive. Perhaps it’s meant to have that effect.
This is a big book. No wonder the Barbican did not have space for it.
For information, from the London Review of Books:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/letters
Letters
Vol. 46 No. 7 · 4 April 2024
The Shoah after Gaza
Pankaj Mishra’s essay is a tour de force (LRB, 21 March). However, I find one detail in it jarring: his use of the Hebrew term ‘Shoah’ to refer to the Nazi genocide of Jews. The Nazi Judeocide was perpetrated in Europe; its victims were overwhelmingly European Jews, the vast majority of whom did not speak Hebrew and were not familiar with the word.
On the other hand, Hebrew, my native tongue, is the language spoken in one country, Israel, where the word shoah, meaning ‘catastrophe’, has long been used – with the definite article: ha-shoah – to denote the Nazi genocide. Borrowing this term in a text in any other language carries a hidden but heavy ideological load.
This borrowed usage of ‘Shoah’ has spread since Claude Lanzmann’s film of that name appeared in 1985. The film is an impressive work of Zionist propaganda. Most people won’t see its biases (not a word about the Romany people and other groups who got the same treatment as Jews; not a word about the many brave non-Jews who risked their lives helping Jews to survive). Lanzmann’s choice of this title was one element of his ideological strategy. The more commonly used term ‘Holocaust’ was felt to be too general. A new term had to be introduced to the world. Lanzmann’s ingenious idea was to make a subliminal terminological connection between the genocide of Jews and the state of Israel. It is part of the hasbarah justification of the Zionist colonisation project as compensation for Jewish victimhood.
Moshé Machover
London NW6