I wanted to love We Were the Lucky Ones, a Hulu original series.  After all, the story resonates with me.  Like my real-life Jewish family, the family in the show is dispersed by the Nazi invasion, set adrift in the world.  It’s a masterful series, well acted, realistically written, and beautifully shot.  Yet, after the second or third episode, I found myself feeling sick, resenting the artistry of it.  The why eluded me at first.

The drama is certainly harrowing.  An embattled family encounters every possible horror that the Holocaust meted. They witness, narrowly escape, suffer aftershocks, and move on. The music is Schindleresque sad, and the scenes of torture and cruelty are horrifying.  But that’s not it. Nothing in this show is any worse than what Keneally or Spielberg depicted or what Primo Levi described.  No loss is any more heartbreaking than those Daniel Mendelsohn memorialized.  There is nothing to see in this series that we haven’t seen in any one of the honorable Holocaust museums across the world.   So why does this show so offend me? 

Over my head, I hear the whirr of helicopters, and I run to the TV to check the local news. On the screen, hate-spewing,  pro-Palestinians rally on my Alma Mater campus, just up the street from my home.  An angry child-woman glares into the camera and shouts, “They are weaponizing the holocaust” while hundreds scream, “From the river to the sea.” 

At another gathering in midtown Manhattan, youngsters in checkered scarves and green, white, black, and red flags scream “Free Palestine.” A middle-aged man proudly waves a Hamas flag.  Online, a headline from the ADL: “Chicago Sees Rise in Antisemitism and Activism Amid Action by Anti-Israel Groups.”

There it is. Now I get it.

Our stories are betraying us.  It’s time to revise.

Real life has become scary, and those of us who inherited our parents’ PTSD, who were born with memories we cannot decipher, are reliving the dreams we cannot comprehend of the terror they fled.  The specters that used to visit only by night are fully animated by day.  Once upon a time, the anticipation of violence was easily quelled by stories that assured us that the world was sufficiently sorry; pogroms were a thing of the past. We believed our parents when they reminded us that this is America, after all, and we could feel safe.  No more.  Those night fears loom omnipresent over my home, my security, my grandchildren.  The stories no longer heal.

The haters are wrong.  It is not that we are weaponizing the Holocaust or antisemitism.  But we are hiding behind it.  We hold up our past like medals won in the Suffering Olympics that proclaim our capable willingness to suffer.  There is no more reassurance in the idea that it can’t happen here because clearly it can.  And it will if we let it. 

Those who wish for our annihilation are fueled by our pain.  Many display their own medals and say we have not suffered nearly enough.  Others are simply irritated by what they perceive as our whining insistence that enough is enough. 

We have to stop thinking that this approach will work. Many in the world deem it passive aggression.  We have to stop apologizing for our coreligionists who are fighting for the survival of Israel.  We have to stop disclaiming our right to fight back.  We have to take control of the rhetoric and paint ourselves as a far more positive, authoritatively powerful people. As Rabbi Diana Fersko recently wrote for Tablet magazine, “We have to stop running defense” (“American Jews Should Become a Little more Israeli” April 1024).  Just because millions of us were killed in the holocaust doesn’t mean we must beg for survival by reminding our foes we don’t deserve to be exterminated.  Would we be any less deserving if we had not suffered the mass murders? 

Art is a wonderful place to find relief and transformation.  Which is what so many writers and filmmakers, artists and curators have done by insisting on telling our truth.  But at this moment, the profusion of new Holocaust reenactments feels like a Hail Mary play that is doomed to failure.  We cannot think that because Hulu shows The Lucky Ones for ten weeks on their streaming app our detractors will suddenly see the folly of their ways and back off.  Will one Jewish family’s miraculous survival of that great apocalypse convince the world to watch any less dispassionately while the Ayatollah rattles Iran’s nuclear sword?   Not a chance.

We should have more films like Munich or Raid on Entebbe or even Exodus. We need to see heroes like Liev Schreiber’s character in “Defiance,” heroes who defied the stereotypes and showed our refusal to let the world beat us up.  There should be more series like Tehran that explore the ways in which Israel and world Jewry are endangered every minute of every day by adversaries who hate us for no reason but that they do. We should have filmmakers creating films like Watching the Moon at Night that expose Hamas leaders’ vitriolic calls for the extermination of all Jews everywhere. We need documentary footage of Jews standing up to the hate, holding their ground. . . winning.

We cannot expect the world to feel sorry for us just because we wear our thorny laurels in public.  People are not moved by pictures of dead Jews.  They take those images for granted.