Thread by @ewzucker

A story for Father’s Day about learning from my late father

As noted below, my dad was a political scientist & among his lines of work was some of the earliest social science analysis of the Holocaust.

https://twitter.com/ewzucker/status/1270871589245108230

My dad’s approach was to consider all the people involved- Jews, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, French, etc as human beings & to try to understand how ordinary people could end up perpetuating such inhumanity & to grapple with the impossible dilemmas the victims faced.

Growing up when this was one of my dad’s interests & in the Orthodox (& broader) Jewish community, both in the US & (for long visits of various kinds) in Israel, exposed me to many survivors & to leading Holocaust scholars & scholarship. All incredible gifts from my dad (& mom)

The story I went to tell occurred in 1983 or 84 at the Homowack Hotel in the Catskills. My cousins bought the hotel in ~1982 & we would go there for Passover. It was a modern Orthidox crowd. My dad would give lectures on topics at the intersection of Judaism & social science.

(This was around the time he & Cal Goldscheider published their book on how European Jewry had been transformed in the past 200 years)

One day my dad was giving a talk on the Holocaust. I don’t recall the specific theme but it was focused on the perpetrators & it treated them as human beings who had been transformed by circumstance (which was important to understand) into monsters but hadn’t been born monsters.

All of a sudden, a man in his sixties got up and started yelling at my dad. The man was extremely angry. He said he was a survivor. And he accused my father of justifying the murderous actions of the Nazis.

My dad was very sympathetic. But he also stood his ground. He reasoned that the Nazis (or was it collaborators?) were human like us & while their actions were evil, its critical we reckon with how human beings could behave that way. The man & his wife then stormed out.

This event made a strong impression on me, & for some time represented something of an ideal for me of what a social scientist should be. Feelings are important but one can’t let sentiment divert us from disciplined social scientific inquiry. I thought it was also very brave+

because the strong tendency on the (Orthodox) Jewish community was to treat the Holocaust as the logical culmination of hundreds of years of violent European antisemitism & to see “them” (sometimes non-Jews generally) as implacably against “us”

Fast forward about 25 years later, to about this time of year in 2009. My dad was on his deathbed (pancreatic cancer; he was 64 & lasted 5 months from diagnosis).

By this point, I was an established (tenured etc) social scientist myself.

I brought up this story & told him what a positive impression it had made on me.

His immediate response was to categorically disagree with my take of the incident. Here’s a paraphrase of what he said:

“I was wrong! I was a schmuck for giving a talk like that to a room where there obviously would be survivors. And when that man spoke, I should have just listened & been quiet. That was a huge mistake. +

You can’t reason with someone who had such an experience and they shouldn’t have to listen to some pointy-headed professor trying to explain their experience to them.”

I was taken aback but immediately recognized my dad’s deep wisdom.

Thanks Dad. I learned so much from you as a kid & I learned so much from how *you learned* as adult.
I miss you so much now & hope readers who have a living dad will take opportunity to ask them to compare notes on formative incidents from long ago & what you took away from them

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