Jews in the Mirror http://www.jg-berlin.org/en/articles/details/jews-in-the-mirror-i220d-2009-09-01.html

…. I was taught that this catastrophe simply reinforces a 2,000 year-old Jewish saw: scratch any gentile, no matter how gently, and underneath his or her skin lurks an anti-Semite.

While the Germans are taught the flaws of generalization, I was taught that stereotypes are valid: all Germans are Nazis, all Poles are anti-Semites, and chasing a Jew with a pitchfork is a Lithuanian national past-time.

Many Jews feel that Germans have not done enough to reflect upon and memorialize this tragedy and understand the evil of religious racism. Given the horrors they perpetrated on Jews I think this feeling is understandable, and I would imagine Jews will never fully judge the Germans as having done ‘enough.’ But while the Germans haven’t finished self-reflecting, I wonder if Jews have even begun? …

I hear Jews tell me they will donate organs but only if I they can stipulate the organs won’t go to gentiles. …

To take organs from gentiles when we need them but not to donate to them when asked would be unjust and unethical. …

many Jews still refuse to buy anything produced in Germany, implying that the Germans alive today are somehow to blame for the sins of their fathers. Yet when Christian anti-Semites claim that all Jews today are guilty for the killing of Christ, one of our defensive positions is that even if Jews did hand Jesus over to the Romans no Jew living today should bear the blame of his forefather. Why wouldn’t that argument apply to the Germans as well? …

Are Jews, like all other groups, somewhat racist? Don’t we, in some way, need to make an effort to integrate and claim membership in the brotherhood of the human race? Can we Jews learn something from the Holocaust that they can help us become better human beings? The answers are a resounding yes. ...