Ironically, one the same Sunday, May 1, that Osama bin Laden was killed, PBS was showing "Our Holocaust Vacation" up and down California. We got this post from a viewer in Simi Valley.
"Amidst all the joy about the death of Osama Bin Laden, at 11pm, I was flipping through the channels and came upon the beginning of 'Our Holocaust Vacation' and instead of watching anything about Osama, I spent the hour with you and your family, still blown away about the strength of your mother and the journey of your whole family on that 'vacation.' Peace, Jeffrey"
Since the film is about healing from terror, that is appropriate. I applaud what is now happening in the Arab democracy movement, but for it to flourish, its members will have to normalize thinking about Israel. A good way to start would be to recognize the history of the Holocaust and its healing.
This is not to compare suffering but to understand history as pre-natal psychology.
Our Holocaust Vacation was supposedly accepted by the Tehran International Film festival but we didn't submit it because we didn't receive an upper level administrator's OK. Nevertheless, we are very interested in communicating with Iranians, Arabs and Muslims about the Holocaust story, people's right to flee terror and the subsequent land swap with Arabs and the conflicting narrative of the Jews as only Zionist colonialists.
Art and story telling is the way to allow these two competing narratives to heal and move the Middle East culture towards acceptance of Israel as well as its own democracies.
