Why it's Time for Jews to get Over the Holocaust

Source:  http://thebeaconmag.com/2012/02/opinions/why-its-time-for-jews-to-get-over-the-holocaust/

The article was surprisingly well-written for such an ignorant title.  In it, author Binyamin Weinreich explains why Jews need to “get over” the Holocaust.  He believes that the Holocaust needs to become a part of cultural memory and history that we can learn from instead of an ugly wound that we continue to poke.  He also discusses how the Holocaust has taken over Jewish culture and how he hopes in the future it can be viewed as a part of Judaism, not its defining point.  The main point of the article was not to anger people but to say that by trying to preserve the Holocaust as if it just happened we are lessening the importance of what occurred and will, therefore, never learn from it.  Binyamin Weinreich is an author for the Beacon Magazine.  He attends Yeshiva University, a private Jewish college located in both New York and Israel.  I believe his intended audience is people in general but more specifically the Jewish community.  They are the ones he wants to “get over” the Holocaust.  However, he also addresses all of mankind in his request to not glorify the Holocaust but merely remember it.  This article was written in 2012, seventy years after the horrible events of the Holocaust, by a man who lives in a situation completely removed from that of Holocaust victims and survivors.  I think that for most people Weinreich did not achieve his purpose because he was very sloppy with his diction.  This can be seen in his choice of title, “Why it’s Time for Jews to get Over the Holocaust.”  He was trying to be clever and instead came off as insensitive and slightly anti-Semitic.  Pathos worked against him here because I, personally, was set on edge for the rest of the article, waiting for him to start praising Hitler or denying the Holocaust altogether.  Another example of where diction did not work out in Weinreich’s favor was when he wrote “get over.”  He meant get over as in accepting the past for what it is and trying to move forward.  Because of his poor word choice it instead sounded like he meant Jewish people needed to get over themselves because the Holocaust wasn’t a big deal.  I understood the points that he was trying to make, not to dwell in the past forever, but he made some unwise choices in relation to wording and offended a lot of people because of it.