@BenRossTransit @adamgreenfield if this is all you take from the essay, i don't think you are giving it a fair read. i don't think it is a diatribe. i think the author is pretty sad about the take on history he describes. as a jew growing up in america in gentler times, i certainly perceived how we made the shoah into a universal touchstone, a point of black and white in a world of gray. sometime this was to good purpose, sometime it was disingenuous. 1/

@BenRossTransit i think whatever your reaction to this detail or that in the piece, the author is correct that the current conflict has put an end to the era during which the shoah will serve as a universal moral touchstone. it remains a horror, unjustifiable and unforgivable and astonishing in its technical modernity, sure. but it can no longer stand out of time, it becomes horror and atrocity yet again enmeshed in the matrix of horror and atrocity that is all of human history. 2/

@BenRossTransit we, the jews, are no longer special, history's perennial dispossessed, perennial victims. we got ourselves a state, an army, bombs and atom bombs. and we've had our turns on the side of atrocity opposite from victims. 3/

@BenRossTransit that was true a year ago as well, but a year ago it was still somewhat credible to say, to feel, that once the horror of the shoah is in the balance, still we are so much more sinned against than sinning. quantitatively that is still true. Gaza's deaths aren't 6 million. but there are questions of the character of the action. that, more than the number, made the shoah the shoah. 4/

@BenRossTransit bombing, starving, and shooting a trapped population of civilians — even while you genuinely try to get them away from precisely where you are bombing and shooting, except when you have to shoot them because in their starvation they are threatening as they sack your aid trucks — that is a character of activity the world will not set aside as small beside the horrors we have suffered. i don't think the world will be wrong to not set it aside. but i certainly fear what's next. /fin