There’s a lot going on in the Middle East, but what is important for readers in the engine-room of the American empire? The New York Times ran a frontpage story yesterday by Jodi Rudoren titled “Holocaust Told in One Word, 6 Million Times”on a “book” published in Israel that seeks to memorialize victims of the Holocaust by printing the word “Jew” 6 million times over 1250 pages.

The Times’ Jerusalem correspondent flashes shoe-leather:

The book, more art than literature, consists of the single word “Jew,” in tiny type, printed six million times to signify the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. It is meant as a kind of coffee-table monument of memory, a conversation starter and thought provoker…. “That’s how the Nazis viewed their victims: These are not individuals, these are not people, these are just a mass we have to exterminate. “Now get closer, put on your reading glasses, and pick a ‘Jew,’ ” [originator of book, Phil] Chernofsky continued. “That Jew could be you. Next to him is your brother. Oh, look, your uncles and aunts and cousins and your whole extended family. A row, a line, those are your classmates. Now you get lost in a kind of meditative state where you look at one word, ‘Jew,’ you look at one Jew, you focus on it and then your mind starts to go because who is he, where did he live, what did he want to do when he grew up?”

Had enough? We read it so you don’t have to.

No Norman Finkelstein or the late Peter Novick on the sacralization/commercialization/trivializing of the Holocaust. No Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes. No Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust being a European crime for which Israel had to conduct a show trial of a Nazi leader.

Yes Abraham Foxman. (He wants one in the Oval Office… “It’s haunting.”) Yes a cute last paragraph.

No Roma. No homosexuals. No news.

Thanks to James North.