The XX Factor: What women really think.

Once More, With Subtitles

Ben, your response to my defense of Herman Rosenblat made me think that maybe my post was itself too inaccessible, so let me be clearer: My point wasn't that films about the Holocaust have been made in other countries, too. (Duh.) It was that the impulse to focus on resistance fighters and the odd righteous Gentile is not just an American thing, and that prettifying is what Hollywood does. But I am not arguing in favor of spiffing up the Holocaust, for heaven's sake. And I am certainly not saying that art of any kind has to be uplifting in order to be accessible. I personally think everyone should see Shoah, preferably in a theater and on back-to-back evenings, but there are other, more accessible ways to tell the truth about the Holocaust, and they don't necessarily have to be sneered at.

I do not defend the Hallmarkization of the Holocaust; what I defend is this man who lived through it and needs no lectures from us about the truth of it. None of us knows how we would come through an experience like his, but if his way of keeping his sanity was to imagine a girl tossing apples at him, I don't think it is my place to stand in judgment.