On a recent trip to Poland, the writer Tanya Gold visited the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial site. In her lengthy travel essay on the visit, “My Auschwitz Vacation“, published in the September 2024 edition of Harper’s Magazine, she details the numerous absurdities of the Disneyfied extermination camp, from its notable lack of Jews to the oft-overlooked nearby castle, waterfall and theme park.
On today’s episode of Bonjour Chai, Tanya Gold joins to discuss her deeply personal journey, intermingled with the shifting lens of Holocaust memory in Poland, rising antisemitism in Europe, and the trap of focusing Holocaust education on death instead of life.
After that, hosts Avi and Phoebe discuss exploding Hezbollah pagers (are the jokes and memes hypocritical?) and the swift implosion of the storied British publication, the Jewish Chronicle.
Credits
- Hosts: Avi Finegold and Phoebe Maltz Bovy (@BovyMaltz)
- Production team: Michael Fraiman (producer), Zachary Kauffman (editor)
- Music: Socalled
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