Professing himself a lifelong Zionist, Roger Cohen proclaimed a kind of apostasy yesterday:
I am reminded of the conflict dramatized in Ira Levin's terror novel, The Boys from Brazil (spoiler alert). In it, a relentless Jewish Nazi hunter gets a tip from a caller in Brazil and tracks down a final life project set in motion by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele: cloning dozens of little Hitlers around the globe and placing them with elderly, authoritarian adoptive fathers. Ultimately the protagonist, Liebermann, obtains a list of the (literal) Hitler youth and their locations. A militant "never-again" rabbi, Gorin, demands the list, determined to have the clones killed. That leads to a final confrontation:
Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.
I am reminded of the conflict dramatized in Ira Levin's terror novel, The Boys from Brazil (spoiler alert). In it, a relentless Jewish Nazi hunter gets a tip from a caller in Brazil and tracks down a final life project set in motion by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele: cloning dozens of little Hitlers around the globe and placing them with elderly, authoritarian adoptive fathers. Ultimately the protagonist, Liebermann, obtains a list of the (literal) Hitler youth and their locations. A militant "never-again" rabbi, Gorin, demands the list, determined to have the clones killed. That leads to a final confrontation:
