Flutterby™! : When Jewishness Means Genocide

Jewish Currents: When Jewishness Means Genocide

My partner and I were hiking recently on an international trail in Spain. People passing each other on the trail would say hello in different languages. I was joking about the possibility of saying “shalom” to people. And it immediately became clear to both of us that today saying “shalom” would be provocative. I was thinking about how the word “shalom,” which is a nice word, a word of greeting, opening, peace, has become a marker of hate, in a sense. And then it dawned on me that there was a different but comparable process with the word “heil.” In German, it basically means holiness, peace, wholesomeness— good things. But it became the word for evil. You would not utter it today, in Germany or anywhere. And the comparison between these two words was very heavy, but it was there. It was not an intellectual process. It was kind of an instinctive feeling.

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