It's not only her name which I can't stand to see around now - and I think I could never have kept reading her posts (which also applies to her fiction unfortunately) - but also the names of the people I recognised making those positive comments. I still feel ill thinking about a friend of mine - not in the lj friend sense - who was there. I'd never know how to talk to her about it, so I can't talk to her about anything else either. Perhaps your explanation really covers the whole difference of experience there, but I can't help thinking that nobody alive in the United States today can be that insulated by priviledge, can they? It wasn't so many generations ago. They must have contacts with jews, with people from the countries most touched by the Holocaust, with people who lived through the war. How many degrees of separation can possibly exist? How could that be enough? It strikes me as, like the arguments about slavery being in the past, shocking - shocking that that illusion of distance could even begin to exist for anyone. And I guess I'm just really unable to compartmentalise this issue in any way - maybe I just suck in general at compartmentalisation.