When I was a boy in Brazil in the 1970s, the yellow star was the one thing at the Jewish school that nobody explained, and nobody explained it because there was nothing to explain. What I learned, without anyone saying it aloud, was that the star is not ours. It was designed by other people, who chose the shape, the size, the cloth and the place on the chest, and it was made to humiliate and to set apart. My parents did not lecture anyone about this. That generation rarely spoke of the Shoah aloud, but it passed along something simpler and harder to dismantle, which is that certain images belong to the dead and are not available to the living.

On the 12th of August, on Route 4, several hundred men in black coats sat down on the melting asphalt with the yellow star stitched to the chest and the word haredi printed at its center, chanting that they would sooner die than serve, while a placard clarified, for the slower members of the audience, that dying in the Holocaust would have been preferable to entering a training camp of the Israeli army. Taken literally, and it deserves to be taken literally, the statement means that those men declared a preference for the fate of their own grandfathers over the fate of the neighbors’ sons. They declared it while living on the money of the people who serve. Those who died wearing that star shamed no one. These men shame all of us.

The most revealing moment of that afternoon occurred weeks before it, in a room, when somebody looked at the printed sample and said it was fine. There was a proposal and there was somebody who liked it.........

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