Gaza and Jewish Memory

Before the destruction wrought by the Holocaust, there was the dislocation of the Great War. When Avraham Levite, a survivor of Auschwitz, came to write the story of his hometown—the Galician shtetl of Brzozow, which was annihilated by the Nazis—he traced the town’s entrance into modernity to the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire during World War I. Its collapse, Levite wrote, unshackled the “fathomless hatred of the Jews, endemic in Poland,” leading to pogroms and poverty. 

In these dire straits, a new consciousness emerged. Before, the shtetl had envisioned only two worlds: the current world of exile, where Jewish leaders sought no more than to ameliorate their people’s suffering, and the future world of redemption, to arrive in God’s own time and by God’s own hand. Now, a third horizon of possibility emerged: political activism aimed at fundamentally changing the Jews’ lot through collective self-determination. “Those were the first steps of the Zionist movement in the shtetl.”