MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

When Steven Levenson’s play If I Forget opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company in February 2017, New York Times theatre reviewer Alexis Soloski described it as “passionate and provoking”: “a family play, a political play, and a kitchen-sink play.” In 2018, an era of heightened debate about immigration, human rights abuse, and the question of how people of conscience can best respond to institutional bias, the play has also become highly relevant. The protagonist is a Jewish studies professor who has just written a controversial book about the Holocaust, and one of the monologues he delivers to his family explains that everyone said “never again” after the Holocaust, but that we learned the wrong things from it: instead of learning that “never again” ought to mean “never again for anyone,” the lesson many people took away was that “the world hates Jews.” He goes on to say, “It already has happened again! It just didn’t happen to us!”—in Bosnia, Rwanda, and more. This has renewed significance today, as young members of the Jewish community take to Facebook and Twitter to sort out their feelings about the current situation on the Mexican/American border. One camp argues that while the current situation at the border is atrocious, it dilutes what happened during the Holocaust to compare the two. In contrast, I believe that the current attacks on “others” fueled by the Trump administration closely resemble the conditions in Nazi Germany that preceded the eventual horror of the gas chambers. This paper connects the discussions between baby boomer and World War II era Jews in If I Forget to current debates among Generation X and Y, both considering the role played by heritage, memory, and justice today.