Israel Marks Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day

Social media sites have been the context for the vast majority of Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day.

Tel Aviv, January 27 – International Holocaust Memorial Day occurs today, on the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, or, as it is observed in Israel, Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day.

As observed locally, the annual ritual provides an occasion for politicians, feuding neighbors, gossipers, and other sensitive individuals to point out another’s lack of sensitivity and propriety in engaging in normal, even happy, activities on such a somber day. Israel already has two other days to mark Holocaust memory, but neither Yom HaShoah nor the tenth of Tevet – which piggybacks on an existing fast day in mourning for various aspects of destruction and exile – has developed the characteristic smugness that January 27 has managed.

The political arena has provided the most prominent observances of Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day, with non-Likud figures hardly able to conceal glee at the opportunity to mention a festive Likud function in the southern resort town of Eilat. Some, however, have challenged the prevailing tradition of the day, and argue instead for Complain-That-Israel-Makes-Entirely-Too-Much-Of-The -Holocaust-Day. Those partisans have struggled to spread their message effectively, as that type of observance would not appreciably distinguish January 27 from any other day of the calendar. Their contention has also been weakened by the fact that International Holocaust Remembrance Day is not an Israeli observance, but a global one.

Social media sites have been the context for the vast majority of Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, feature rafts of posts righteously inveighing against people or institutions for neglecting to give attention, or for giving an insufficient level of attention to, the solemn day.

A related observance, though less prominently practiced, involves searching the social media histories of people observing Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day for evidence of hypocrisy. Journalists and commentators have been active on both ends of the observance since this morning.

Social commentators note that Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day is a comparatively recent institution. The UN designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005, with the first international observance of it in 2006, but not until 2015 did Israelis begin to observe it as Smugly-Note-Others’-Non-Observance-Of-International-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day Day.

“It’s actually a surprise that it took this long,” commented Keren Neubach, a radio talk-show host. “Getting offended on behalf of others is of course not a new thing in Western culture, and it’s long past the time that Western phenomena took a while to cross the ocean to us. What’s even more surprising, though, is that usually, when a woke person gets offended on behalf of others, those others are never Jews.”

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