Tik Tok & Holocaust Education
Most people were dubious when I decided to try Tik Tok to promote my book. Tik Tok? The social media platform where people lip-synch and turn their eyelids inside out? Yep, that one.
My book, The True Adventures of Gidon Lev: Rascal. Holocaust Survivor. Optimist. had been published independently in the summer of 2020, during the thick of the first wave of Covid. All bets were off. No book signings, no book tour, no nothing. I figured I’d have to learn how to use “Zoom.” The book was selling slowly, but it wasn’t reaching its target audience — young people who were shockingly ignorant about the Holocaust, according to poll after poll.
Tik Tok is a strange, sprawling parallel universe of cultures and sub-cultures that intersect, complement, compete and do battle with one another. Here and there are bright spots; who doesn’t like to see a puppy chasing a duck? And there are dark swathes of irredeemably dumb or depressing stuff. But there are also teenagers in Indonesia showing off their dance moves and Afghanis sharing their terrible plight. Whatever you might think, for better or ill, Tik Tok is used by almost 2 billion people all over the world. That’s a lot of eyeballs. 25% of Tik Tok users are teenagers, and 23% are between twenty and twenty-nine.
Gidon isn’t the first Holocaust survivor on Tik Tok. Lily Ebert, a 97-year-old Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz has over 1.2M followers on Tik Tok thanks to her great-grandson, Dov Forman, all of seventeen years old. But now there’s somebody new on Tik Tok, a certain @thetrueadventures. With 2.2M views, 420K “likes,” and 41K followers, Gidon Lev, 86 year-old Holocaust survivor, has gone viral.
Who is Gidon Lev?
Of the 15,000 children transported through or imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin, fewer than 100 survived. Gidon is one of those children. He spent 4 years in the camp. He lost 26 family members, including his father, who died on a death march. After liberation, Gidon and his mother emigrated to Brooklyn and, later, Toronto. In 1959, Gidon came to Israel, and he’s been there ever since.
A convert to Judaism, I had never met a Holocaust survivor until I met Gidon Lev in 2017. Originally from California, I made aliyah in 2012, on the heels of great loss. I had lived in Los Angeles for ten years. So Israel was, to put it lightly, quite a change.
I met Gidon because he was looking for someone to help him write a book about his life. At first, I turned him down. I didn’t feel qualified. But I was drawn to him by an overarching worry: What happens when the last Holocaust survivors are gone from this earth? What will we do then? I had to help Gidon with the book. It was clear to me that Gidon’s story was imperative.
As I worked on the book and wrote about Gidon’s experience and the fate of his family, it was impossible not to cast the net more widely and talk about the conditions that led to the Holocaust. Especially given the sorry state of affairs in the 21st century. The sharp rise in antisemitism and nationalism, hate, ignorance, and intolerance toward minorities these days is a breathtaking punch to the gut.
Our Tik Tok experience has been good overall — Gidon receives many heartfelt, earnest messages of love. But he also gets messages so hateful I cannot repeat them here. I must admit that my faith in humanity has taken a beating. I try to shield Gidon from the worst comments. The vilest reactions have come from those who compare the Covid vaccination to the steps that led to the Holocaust. History IS repeating, anti-vaxxers say, positive that their comparison is correct. “This is a deep fake,” someone named AlabamaMama said. “We aren’t denying the Holocaust,” said AmericanPatriot, “we just think the numbers are exaggerated.” This active erasing of antisemitism from history and appalling trivialization of genocide and unthinkable suffering has been hard to bear.
The vast majority of comments have been positive, even if many do show a marked ignorance of the facts of the Holocaust. But the thing is, Tik Tokers are asking questions. They want to learn. That’s a #win and points to the rewarding possibilities of migrating education from museums to social media platforms.
Gidon and I do this alone; we have a content strategist, Kirby Stuart, an AFI graduate in Dallas, Texas. Kirby is twenty years younger than me and fifty years younger than Gidon. Together we three combine our collective experiences and cultural references to reach out to a generation that may never meet a Holocaust survivor who isn’t a hologram.
Adapt or Perish
It is likely that Gidon’s notoriety on Tik Tok will be short-lived. Gidon and I are okay with that. Other Tik Tok content creators like @Holocausteducation, and @Jewishunpacked provide history lessons in sixty seconds that take deeper dives, with broader context and perspective. If this is the way that people learn today, we are okay with that too.
Gidon will be 87 in March 2022. Every day that I have with him is a gamble and a gift. Gidon may not be with us for as long as I’d like, but if my luck holds out, I will be around for a few more decades. And I’m not going to stop reaching out, talking about hate and its consequences, whether that’s on Tik Tok or Tok Tik or whatever the next big social media platform is. There is simply too much at stake to do otherwise.
