When Israeli bad taste meets Holocaust consciousness, the polite thing to do is nod your approval. When I read this week's New York Times story about Israeli grandchildren (and some children) of Holocaust survivors who have tattooed their elders' concentration camp numbers onto their forearms (and in some cases ankles), I wasn't sure what to think. Who am I to put down a memorialization of the Holocaust? These people obviously feel strongly about what they're doing; what right do I have to judge them? Mention of the Holocaust, of course, has a tendency to paralyze one's critical faculties, and it…

The Jewish diaspora didn't always march lockstep behind Israel. My great-grandmother--who escaped pogroms and lost family in the Holocaust--was an anti-Zionist. Rampant anti-Semitism drove my great-grandmother from Eastern Europe. There’d been pogroms; there were restrictions on the type of work Jews could do. My family made their way to New York City with little more than the clothes on their backs; the relatives they’d left behind disappeared during the Holocaust, never to be heard from again. So when the United Nations voted in favor of the partition of Palestine in 1947, my great-grandmother’s son, my grandfather, rejoiced. He ran into…

In an attempt to raise revenues after they lowered them for the benefit of the rich, the Treasury Boys go after the Holocaust survivors Last night we found out there is an apparatchik at the Treasury who came up with a brilliant idea for curbing the deficit: Raising the rent of Holocaust survivors. As the clerk – his name is Tzahi David – proudly explained to the somewhat shocked Knesset members, the government subsidizes the rent of many Holocaust survivors, who pay only 8 percent of it. From October onward, said Tzahi David, they’ll pay 10 percent. This will cost…