Holocaust Selfies Are an (Awful) Thing
Image by Instagram
(JTA) — Smiley selfies from Auschwitz and Buchenwald? They’re trending, apparently
Blogger Hektor Brehl, writing for the German version of Vice magazine, has a piece about the tendency of young travelers to post pics taken at Holocaust memorials in which they show off their new sneakers and crack “uncool” jokes.
Brehl collected an array of examples. His 25 top offenders include a girl in mittens giving a thumbs-up sign (hashtags: #auschwitz #birkenau… #chilly #willy”), a grinning girl posed so a Jewish star appears to grow out of her head (#juden #arbeitmachtfrei #treblinka #zyklonB #feelgood), a smiling girl posing at the Treblinka memorial in Poland (#Look #cool #hot #treblinka #Poland) and a photo of the Berlin Holocaust memorial with the hashtag #instacaust.
Most of Brehl’s top 25 are girls posing cutely. But he also notes another trend in which gay men trolling for dates post selfies taken at the Berlin memorial.
“Instagram seems to work like a Polaroid filter for some people’s brains,” Brehl concludes, “turning off the #commonsense function.”
He wonders which memorial will be first to post a sign that reads, “Please instagram responsibly.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
