Godwin's law

Godwin's law appears in a conversation about the public’s desire to stop seeing the Holocaust invoked everywhere. Hannah uses the term to describe weariness with Holocaust comparisons in political arguments; Michal places that weariness in a particular Israeli moment, before public attitudes shifted in the 1990s. The phrase therefore serves not as a settled rule explained in the novel, but as a compact name for a conflict over historical memory, political rhetoric, and who is ready to hear the past recalled.

Meaning and use

Hannah introduces Godwin's law while interpreting Chaim Lerner’s story about magic eyeglasses. In her reading, the glasses stand for the new lenses people want: a way not to see the Holocaust everywhere. She says people are tired of Holocaust comparisons and of political arguments bringing the Holocaust into the discussion. The term gives that frustration a recognizable label, while the story’s metaphor makes the desire behind it more vivid: not simply to reject one comparison, but to look at the world without the Holocaust repeatedly coming into view.

Hannah also frames the fatigue as shared across different groups, though for different reasons. She says Jews are tired of feeling like victims and Europeans are tired of guilt. Her account presents the wish for new lenses as a retreat from an uncomfortable history, not merely a complaint about argumentative habits. The eyeglasses metaphor accordingly makes forgetting—or at least not seeing—the subject of the exchange.

A changing Israeli climate

Judah questions Hannah’s suggestion that Jews are sick of talking about the Holocaust, since it seems to him that they talk about it constantly. Michal answers by distinguishing periods: in Israel during the 1970s and 1980s, she says, people were ready for Holocaust victims to retire and stop reminding them of suffering. She calls this Shoah fatigue and says Chaim knew about it and complained of it.

Michal contrasts that earlier climate with the 1990s, when, after Schindler's List, Israelis began to open their hearts to victims. Chaim, she observes, missed that change. In this account, Godwin's law sits within a history of shifting attention: public willingness to hear Holocaust testimony is neither constant nor guaranteed, and the fatigue Chaim encountered did not define the later decade in the same way.

Political argument and the burden of analogy

The novel also shows why Holocaust comparisons could provoke more than fatigue. In a political argument about Chaim’s call for Jews to relinquish power in places including Lebanon, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shechem, Meir Alon condemns the implication that Israeli soldiers might become Nazis. He calls the accusation a blood libel and an insult to soldiers and commanders, and rejects Chaim’s argument that Israel’s power should be restrained lest Jews repeat Nazi conduct.

Alon’s response is not identified in the text as an example of Godwin's law. It does, however, reveal the political stakes surrounding the kind of comparison Hannah describes: invoking the Holocaust in an argument about current power can be heard as a moral warning by one person and as a grave accusation by another. The phrase thus marks a dispute over when historical memory illuminates present conduct and when its use is experienced as intolerable.

Narrative significance

By placing the term in Hannah and Michal’s exchange, the novel connects a compact expression about political rhetoric to a larger disagreement about remembrance. Hannah describes the wish to stop seeing the Holocaust everywhere; Michal recalls a period when survivors were expected to stop reminding Israelis of suffering, then identifies a later reopening of public attention. Chaim’s complaints about Holocaust fatigue place him on the side of continued witness, while his political arguments expose the risks of carrying that witness into contemporary debate.

The phrase’s significance lies in that tension rather than in a technical definition. It names a public impatience that can silence historical reference, but the surrounding scenes also show why such reference remains consequential—and contested. The novel leaves the reader with both pressures in view: the exhaustion produced by repeated analogy and the danger of treating the past as something that should no longer be brought to bear.