How Hitler Killed Half the Jewish Diaspora and Zionism Projects Death of the Rest
I recently participated in an online panel that accompanied the screening of the film documentary, Yiddish: the Mama Loshn, for the Boulder Jewish Film Festival. .....he film offered a sweeping visual montage of the bustling, thriving Jewish life of eastern and central Europe conducted mostly in the Yiddish language. There were the actors of the Warsaw Jewish theater, the Klezmer troubadour musicians performing at chosenehs (‘weddings’) in villages from Poland to Romania to Ukraine. In the same period here in America, there were the Borsht Belt tummelers; Abraham Cahan, long-time editor of the Forverts; the Second Avenue Yiddish theater; and the schmatteh businesses lining 7th Avenue. Where did they go? What happened to them?..........If we turn to the Yiddish-speaking world of Europe, of course, the sole reason for its demise was the Holocaust. Hitler killed 6-million Jews, the majority of whom spoke Yiddish. The genocide was not only a death blow to Jews themselves, it was a death blow to centuries of European Jewish culture including theater, literature, music and art.
We know that nature abhors a vacuum. So where the Nazis hollowed out a void in Diaspora Jewish life, something would fill it. That “something” was Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel. After the Holocaust, Jews responded to the genocide by flocking to a movement they had hitherto either rejected or ignored. In 1920s Warsaw or Manhattan, there was a bracing heterogeneity of Jewish life: there were the Orthodox, the Zionists, the secularists. They each offered a different element of Jewish existence to their adherents. The whole was as rich or richer than the sum of its parts.
But post-1945, Jews were forced to realize that Hitler had not only eviscerated European Jewry, he had destroyed secular and Yiddishist culture along with it. What was left? Zionism offered an answer to Jews aghast at the vast catastrophe their people had suffered. If six-million could be murdered, then Jews must turn to the only movement that seemed to offer a response to the killing. The Holocaust validated the Zionist movement as it had never been validated before. Creating a nation-state for the Jews went from one among many expressions of Jewish identity, to the only one that appeared to make any sense.
https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2021/03/21/how-hitler-killed-european-jewry-and-zionism-envisioned-the-death-of-the-rest/