A few months back, Oprah visited visited Auchswitz with Elie Weisel when she made “Night” part of her book club. It was her “make good” after the ‘million little pieces’ debacle. There was something a bit creepy about an anesthetic walk through an empty, abandoned death camp may be effective in person, but TV is 2-d. She was quoted saying at yesterday’s fund-raiser in Chicago for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “I still cannot even imagine what it was like to go through a concentration camp and come out alive and sane.” Try to imagine that MOST came out neither alive nor sane…
The world needs Oprah’s soft emotional approach to genocide like it needs…Oprah. Show some of that same celebrity shock, outrage and work to prevent the systematic murder of innocent people as you do pedophiles or James Frey. Anything less falls short. Debbie Schlussel goes overboard and Shmuly Boteach“still haunted” by her visit fawns, but one would hope this interest, like the Holocaust itself, is more complex and nuanced. My fear is that it is not. At the fundraiser this week, Oprah said she was . But didn she collect a fat check for speaking at that event, which raised $20MM for USHMM? Didn’t she also hawk “special edition” dvd’s of the Night show and tshirts that say “thou shalt not stand idly by.” Those selling the shirts admonishing that must be exempt.
One need not be Jewish to comprehend the horror at the hands of the Nazis, we hope. But clearly on no longer need be Jewish to be able to cash in on it, either. This was more than PR people trying to recover from James Frey; Oprah is a savvy business woman whose stayed at the top by keeping an eye on viewership, magazine sales and sponsorship.
Poor Oprah, let me fetch your Evian while you “bear witness…” She feels our pain… Does that feeling include heat from the Ovens? Or the weight of my relatives, having been stripped naked, humuiliated, seperated from family and forced to dig their graves, are machine-gunned and fall atop you in a mass grave, still alive but bleeding to death? I think not.
It took Oprah two decades to ‘discover’ the Holocaust, and when she did it was uninterrupted thanks to a sponsorship by AT&T. Shameless. But too then isn’t USHMM for not taking her to task and then inviting her to speak? Maybe they asked her to put her fat ass where her mouth is and turned the tables. Maybe they exploited her exploiting the Holocaust. All I know is that it isn’t sitting well with me.
