...And Then the Music Stopped. (Part I)

Nova is not only being forgotten. It is transforming into the modern incarnation of Holocaust Denial.

On Sunday, June 9th, I visited the Nova Exhibit in New York City with several friends. We saw no protests or anger displayed on the streets - only a line around the block of fellow Jews intent on experiencing this intense tribute to a lost generation of promise before it closes.

I returned home needing to digest and process what I saw, heard, smelled, and felt. I wanted to share this knowledge with those not fortunate enough to live in proximity to New York City. In fact, the exhibition encouraged photography for this purpose.

Fate left no time to process.

Only one day later, in response to the miraculous rescue of four hostages, Wall Street seethed with the hate of Nerdeen Kiswani’s Within Our Lifetime followers screaming their blood lust for Jews, approval of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and desire to repeat this horror.

You have all seen the videos. No? I’ll share one so we are all on the same page regarding what “Within Our Lifetime” seeks. Within their lifetime, they seek the mass slaughter of Israelis.

What people may not realize is that, directly across the street from this vile protest, within the exhibit building itself, sat actual survivors of the Nova Festival. I met one such survivor who spoke at my synagogue several weeks ago while she is working in New York as the director of the project.

In an effort to bear witness to the atrocity they survived, they ended up doubly victimized by rabid deniers raging at the fact that four more people managed to survive this ordeal.

What these sick protestors are engaged in is no different that plain, old-fashioned Holocaust Denial.

What we are seeing on the streets of New York, London, and Toronto, on the campuses of UCLA, Stanford, and Harvard, in secondary classrooms across the nation is the modern incarnation of and increasingly widespread support for Holocaust Denial.

I capitalize that phrase because it is a phenomenon that exceeds the scope of one historical event. It is no longer taboo, but rather an integral part of the resurgence of the antisemitic sickness infecting the planet.

These are the same people who deny the Farhud - the 1941 massacre of Iraqi Jews resulting in their mass exodus from Iraq to Israel. They are the same people who deny the Islamic Republic of Iran’s daily abuse and murder of the Iranian people. They are the same people who danced with glee in the streets of Gaza following 9/11.

Holocaust Denial is a living, breathing horror to which Jews around you are subjected on a daily basis right now. I’m not sure any one of us anticipated that such scenes would recur within our lifetimes.

I want you to imagine what it must have felt like to be barricaded inside that exhibit on Monday as the participants in this “Day of Rage” railed in fury that you did not die.

Screamed for you to have to relive this trauma again and again and again.

Shouted that what you survived and are still surviving was not real.

Laughed at the depths of your bottomless well of pain.

Mocked the 15 friends you saw mowed down before your eyes.

Denied your rape.

Writhed and seethed as a mass of boiling execration at your continued existence.

Tried to silence your dead friends.

Tried to silence you.

Again.

This is why we keep saying that Never Again Is Now. This roiling volcano of hate is no different than that experienced during the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Pogroms, the Farhud, the Expulsions…I could go on, but we all have day jobs.

None of this is new, but that does not make it any less shameful.

We feel - deep in the blood coursing through our veins - every moment in history when this phenomenon assaulted our mothers and fathers. We are genetically coded for this moment. We are not going anywhere.

The most fitting reward for this hate crime against both the Nova survivors and dead is the extension of the exhibit from June 16 to June 22. For this reason, I IMPLORE you to go. See the last texts of the murdered. Touch the burnt shells of their cars. Watch their last moments captured on their phones as they are shot trying to excape. Hear the video testimony of survivors. Look at the tents, the shoes, the water bottles, the cat-ear headbands, the artwork, the hoodies, the backpacks, the lives they left behind on that bloody plain.

Do not let the Holocaust Deniers win. Go and bear their testimony forward as to what happened on the darkest day in modern Jewish history. Go as allies to your Jewish friends. Go because you are human. Go for your own sake.

Just go.