Now we must make movies about it instead | .poetry.

This is my favorite film about the Holocaust.
My favorite film in the Holocaust genre, as it were.
This time the tears are really real.
And it is not so much cinema as the telling of this story
which we know, over and over.

In 40 years, will they be saying this about Palestine?
I found the portrayal of Palestinian humanity was so profound.
How is it that Israel got this far while the world watched?
They should have stopped trade, cut them off.
But no, they paid for the whole thing until it was too late.

I heard a song and it goes like this
the minor fall and the major lift
over and over we sang baruch atah adonai
never ever again
But we could not hear our own words.

What justice might have been:
a pathetic echo in the history books.
We know, yes we do,
we Jews and Palestinians.
We could have stopped it, we Jews.

In watching the stunning film Adam Resurrected, which stars Jeff Goldblum as a Shoah survivor living in an insane asylum, the thought that echoed loudest in my mind was this: what kind of movies will they make about Palestine in 40 years? In 60 years? How will history look each of us in the eye, knowing who we are and what we stood for?

Of course, this is not the only thing I thought about. I thought about the will of a nation to destroy a people — to drive them into the metaphorical ocean. I thought about how they wanted to kill me. Or the making of me. How they wanted me to never exist for never and never.

We Jews. We know this story. We know it so well. We are the unfortunate bearers of a terrible burden. And now the wound suppurates over Palestine.