YID AND THE PENGUINS
(ie: Sid and the Penguins, contextualized)
"Yid and the Penguins" is a reconceptualization
of the Holocaust discourse to embrace, on an
ironic metalevel, the desensitization resulting
from our entertainment-centered shared community of
popular culture. The fragmentation of this community
via a media-led assault upon its moral integrity
is represented by "penguins", which transmute the
principle of intolerance into a deceptively "cute
and fuzzy" archetype, thereby encoding the group-think
mindset which is a necessary precondition for atrocity.
By engaging the audience to identify equally with both
the oppressor penguins and the morally compromised
"Yid" victim character (whose desire to "fit in" leads
ultimately to self-rejection of his core ethnic values),
we create a dynamic of inter-ethnic tension in which
the audience itself becomes complicit in the ironically
fascist message that underlies the piece. The piece
thereby forges a direct link to the root psycho-traumatic
causes of the Holocaust (a subject which cannot, in its full
dimensions, be approached in a formally direct context).