Notes |
[1] Peter
Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1999), 182-183. The Talmudic aphorism is from the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4.5.
In a standard scholarly translation -- The Mishnah, trans. Herbert
Danby (Oxford, 1933) -- it reads: "If any man has caused a single soul
to perish from Israel Scripture imputes it to him as though he had caused
a whole world to perish; and if any man saves alive a single soul from
Israel Scripture imputes it to him as though he had saved alive a whole
world." On the subject of Jewish ethnocentrism, the comments of the Talmudic
scholar Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a former American citizen now living in
Israel, are worth noting: "If every single cell in a Jewish body entails
divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of
God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.... If a Jew needs
a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The
Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There
is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish
life." Quoted in Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism
in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 43.
[2] For a religious Jew the two different versions of the Talmudic aphorism that Spielberg quotes would be identical in meaning, since the scriptural exegesis of classical Judaism regularly interprets superficially universal moral principles in exclusivist terms, with apparently generic language like "neighbor" and "thy fellow (man)" referring only to Jews. Traditional Jewish moral teachings assign great value to saving Jewish lives, but actually prohibit Jews from saving the lives of Gentiles, except in circumstances where inaction might provoke hostility. See Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 36-37, 80-81. The Babylonian Talmud is, in any case, the authoritative recension of the rabbinical writings that constitute Judaism's central religious text. See Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 214-215, 231ff. For Christian universalism versus Jewish particularism, see Acts 10.1-35 ("a Jew is contaminated if he consorts with one of another race, or visits him"; Knox) and Acts 15.7-11. For Old Testament fantasies of conquest and domination, see Exodus 17.14-16 and 1 Samuel 15.2-3 (Amalek, Israel's generic Gentile enemy); Deuteronomy 12.2-3 and 20.15-18 (Israel's fanaticism); and Isaiah 49.22-23 ("they shall bow down to you and lick the dust of your feet"; RSV). For Jewish blood purity, see Deuteronomy 7.1-6 and Joshua 23.12-13. For the Jewish poetry of racial revenge, see the remarkable Psalm 137 ("happy shall he be who takes your little ones [i.e infants] and dashes them against the rock!"; RSV).
[3] Novick, 195; Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000), 8.
[4] Quoted in Edward Norden, "Yes and No to the Holocaust Museums," Commentary 96, no. 2 (August 1993), 32.
[5] For Dayan, see Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1979), 14; for the Ghetto Fighters Museum at Samariah, see Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 450-451; Emil Fackenheim, "The Holocaust and the State of Israel: Their Relation," in EJ Yearbook (Jerusalem, 1974), 154f, quoted in Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (Oxford, 1990), 6; Alan Dershowitz, Chutzpah (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 136. Since 1973 America's masochistic "commitment to the autonomy and security of the State of Israel" has cost taxpayers about $1.6 trillion, according to the estimate of economist Thomas Stauffer. See David R. Francis, "Economist Tallies Swelling Cost of Israel to US," Christian Science Monitor, 9 December 2002.
[6] Blu Greenberg, "Talking to Kids about the Holocaust," in Roselyn Bell, The Hadassah Magazine Jewish Parenting Book (New York, 1989), 247, quoted in Novick, 208; Eliezer Berkovits, "Rewriting the History of the Holocaust," Sh'ma 10/198 (3 October 1980), available from: <http://www.clal.org/e57.html>.
[7] Arthur Miller, Focus (1945; New York: Penguin, 2001).
[8] Cf. David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 1997), 44: "It was not my parents' idealism that elicited fear and provoked hostility from the goyim. It was their hostility toward the goyim, and indeed everything the goyim held dear, that incited the hostility back." Horowitz, now a neo-conservative activist with a passionate commitment to Israel, was an important New Left ideologue in the 1960s; his parents were Stalinists.
[9] Novick, 85. The liberators, of course, misunderstood their discovery. Cf. Mark Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," JHR [= Journal of Historical Review] 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986), 411: "The great majority of those who died at Buchenwald perished during the chaotic final months of the war. They succumbed to disease, often aggravated by malnutrition, in spite of woefully inadequate efforts to keep them alive. They were victims, not of an 'extermination' program, but rather of the terrible overcrowding and severe lack of food and medical supplies due to a general collapse of order in Germany during the tumultuous final phase of the war."
[11] For the racial composition of the camps liberated by Americans, see Novick, 65, 295n.8. Josef Kramer, commandant of Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank succumbed to typhus, told British liberators that his camp's internees were "habitual criminals, felons, and homosexuals," which was inaccurate, but more accurate than the now dominant judaizing interpretation that makes every camp survivor an inoffensive Jew. Many of the earliest accounts of wartime internment were written by non-Jews, because the nazi concentration camp had not yet become exclusive Jewish cultural property. For a critical discussion of early camp literature, see Paul Rassinier, The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses (Costa Mesa, CA: IHR, 1978), where the ethnic demography of the internees is evident. As Novick pointedly notes, the relative scarcity of Jews in the camps liberated by Americans did not prevent Holocaust industrialist Deborah Lipstadt (author of Denying the Holocaust) from spotting malicious anti-Semitism in the failure of press coverage to mention Jewish internees with sufficient frequency. It would be hard to find a more succinctly illustrative example of Holocaust scholarship, which is essentially an aggressive scrounging for sources of racial grievance. Lipstadt was, of course, engaged in her own small-scale nazification of the liberators. A concentration camp, regardless of its actual demographics, has retroactively become holy Jewish soil, and belligerent Jews will characterize as racial hatred any failure to specify its exclusive owners. Cf. Cynthia Ozick, "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination," Commentary 105, no. 3 (March 1999), 27: "How is it possible for a writer to set forth as a purposeful embodiment of the inmost meaning of the camps any emblem other than a Jewish emblem? It is possible the way it is possible to plant crosses, with heated [i.e. "racist, hateful"] intent, over the soil of Auschwitz." This passionate belief in exclusive Jewish ownership of the concentration camp is a product of current Jewish identity politics, which will be touched on later, and constitutes a rejection of earlier interpretations of the war. In Memory of the Camps, a British propaganda film containing the dramatic documentary footage of Bergen-Belsen, the narrator (actor Trevor Howard) carefully practices a literal ecumenicism in his description of the assembled corpses: "And so they lie -- Jews, Lutherans, and Catholics, indistinguishable, cheek-to-cheek in a common grave." Similarly for Dachau: "Here were 32,000 men of every European nationality, including 5,660 Germans." Leon Uris, in his militantly Zionist Exodus (New York: Bantam, 1958), an unapologetic celebration of Jewish apartness in ethnically cleansed Israel, retained (with no "heated intent") the same broad inclusion even in his account of the genesis of Auschwitz: "In addition to Jews to dispose of there were Russian, French, and other prisoners of war, partisans, political enemies in occupied countries, religious fanatics, especially Christians of the Catholic faith, gypsies, criminals, Freemasons, Marxists, Bolsheviks, and Germans who talked peace, liberalism, trade unionism, or defeatism. There were suspected foreign agents, prostitutes, homosexuals, and many other undesirable elements. All these had to be eliminated to make Europe a fit place for Aryans to live" (133-134). Few Holocaust pedagogues practice such (admittedly comical) inclusion today. The USHMM rigorously excludes non-Jewish victims, despite an explicit mandate to the contrary, and when Americans liberate a Dachau satellite in an episode ("Why We Fight") of Spielberg's HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), the "others" that Uris so carefully listed as targets of nazi mass murder have vanished, leaving only Jews with yellow stars. As an unparalleled racial crime against Jews, the Jewish Holocaust has no tolerance for White Gentiles distorting its symmetry, and it therefore prefers to annihilate them from memory. The USHMM-sanctioned Liberators Project, a notorious fabrication in which Black soldiers liberate Jews from Buchenwald and Dachau, thus had the advantage, from a Jewish perspective, of eliminating White Gentiles not only from the inmates of the camps but also from their liberators, thereby constructing liberation as a symbolic episode in the history of anti-racism. See Mark Weber and Greg Raven, "Multi-Media 'Liberators' Project Exposed as Fraud," JHR 13, no. 3 (May-June 1993), 4.
[12] Paraphrasing here the PBS documentary America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference (WGBH Educational Foundation, 1994): "In the spring of 1940, the fate of European Jews now fell into the hands of a new Roosevelt appointee, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long.... Long endorsed the anti-alien bigotry of the times." America and the Holocaust, based on influential Holocaust scholarship, was written and produced by Martin Ostrow and boasted a wealth of well-known Jewish scholars (including Deborah Lipstadt) on its academic panel. The deliberate "abandonment of the Jews" also figures prominently in Herman Wouk's 1978 novel War and Remembrance, which gave fictional expression to the charge that American anti-Semitism caused the Holocaust. The most popular Jewish inculpation of the British invokes their reluctance to permit European Jews to displace Arabs in Palestine, their motive being (unsurprisingly) anti-Semitism.
[13] ABC World News Tonight, 21 April 1993, quoted in Novick, 48. Prof. Fagin, a Holocaust pedagogue who specializes in European anti-Semitism and Holocaust literature, was the chair of the USHMM's Education Committee.
[14] Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 26.
[15] On "Holocaust," see Novick, 20, 133-134; on "Shoah," see Segev, 434. Shoah commemoration was first proposed by Mordecai Shenhabi -- the initiator of the memorial project that would later become Yad Vashem, Israel's most important Holocaust museum -- as "a new cause that can turn into a pipeline for large sums." For Shenhabi and the early history of Yad Vashem, see Segev, 427ff. Etymologically "holocaust" ("completely burned") derives from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, where holokauston translates Hebrew holah ("that which goes up"). A "holocaust" (e.g. Leviticus 1.3-17, Judges 6.26-28, 1 Samuel 7.9) was a burnt offering (Gk. holos = wholly; kaustos = burned), usually an unblemished male animal sacrificed to Jehovah, to whom its smoke "went up." The biblical origin of the term is, however, immaterial to its initial deployment, although the religious connotations of a "holocaust," together with the prevalence of smoke and fire in some Holocaust writing, may have facilitated the later sacralization of Jewish deaths. Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner, Eichmann's Polish-born prosecutor, used "holocaust" (for Shoah) in English-language media interviews, and during and especially after the trial lowercase "holocaust" gradually became common in discussions of nazi persecution, following the word's standard nonbiblical meaning ("consuming conflagration, wholesale destruction"); Elie Wiesel did not (as Holocaust scholarship, assisted by Wiesel's own inaccurate memory, often assumes) first apply "holocaust" to nazi genocide in 1963. Cf. Oscar Handlin, "Jewish Resistance to the Nazis," Commentary 34, no. 5 (November 1962), 401: "The holocaust ... was a product not of the Jewish response or of the Jewish situation, but rather of the powerful engine of destruction the Germans controlled -- a bureaucracy of uniquely remorseless and irresistible efficiency." In Handlin's usage "holocaust" means "massive (racial) destruction," thus "genocide"; but although he may have felt a Jewish proprietary interest in the term, in 1962 "holocaust" could still easily be applied to non-Jewish deaths and non-German perpetrators, with no risk of trespassing on Jewish cultural property. Handlin's holocaust was not precisely "the Holocaust," since the latter had not yet come into full conceptual existence in the West. Two years later Alfred Alvarez, in a survey of "The Literature of the Holocaust" (Commentary 38, no. 5 [November 1964], 65-69), discussed the concentration camps in largely ecumenical terms as "symbols of our own in-turned nihilism" and "a focus of contemporary suffering," with the suggestion that they might prove a mere "small-scale trial run for a nuclear war." (In American usage of the early 1960s, "holocaust" referred commonly to "nuclear holocaust.") For Alvarez, a noted literary critic writing in an official Jewish publication, "the holocaust" (still uncapitalized) was a distinct event but not a distinctly Jewish event, a convenient opportunity for erudite philosophizing about the traumas of modernity rather than a source of racial grievance or anti-Western polemics. Earlier in the same year Emil Fackenheim could still write "On the Eclipse of God" (Commentary, 37, no. 6 [June 1964], 55-60) without mentioning the holocaust or nazi persecution, briefly adducing only unspecified "catastrophes" that imperiled religious belief; by the end of the decade Fackenheim had become (along with Berkovits and Richard Rubenstein) a founder of "Holocaust theology," busily explicating "the commanding voice of Auschwitz," his new vocation devoted to rhetorically outdoing co-workers in discovering bold new formulations of the Holocaust's cataclysmic significance. See "Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future: A Symposium," Judaism 16, no. 3 (Summer 1967), 266-299, and Fackenheim, God's Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970). The Holocaust, as the powerful propaganda construction we experience today, began coalescing around 1965 with the publication of Alexander Donat's family memoir The Holocaust Kingdom, a phrase which other Jewish writers (including Fackenheim) soon adopted; Donat and his wife, we may note in passing, skillfully eluded nazi genocide, surviving internment in a total of ten death camps. In the years that followed "Holocaust," now often capitalized and preceded by the definite article, appeared in a growing body of essays and books authored by Jews, who by the late 1960s were asserting their ownership of the term and feeling a strong political interest in its further propagation. Nora Levin's The Holocaust appeared in 1968, and in the same year the Library of Congress adopted "Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)" as a Judeocentric rubric for titles that had previously been listed under headings like "World War, 1939-1945 -- Jews." In the early 1960s Jewish writers had sometimes spoken of "Hitler's holocaust" in order to distinguish their holocaust from other holocausts (e.g. Edwin Samuel, "One for Six Million," Saturday Review, 18 May 1963); by the beginning of the next decade such clarification seldom seemed necessary. The 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, by far the most influential popularization of Judeocentric wartime history, placed capitalized "Holocaust" firmly in American consciousness as (in Elie Wiesel's words) "the Event," a distinctly Jewish tragedy of unparalleled magnitude; but that carefully orchestrated propaganda triumph only solidified a semantic invention that had been effected several years earlier, namely the creation of "the Holocaust," a superholocaust which does not simply tower above other holocausts but actually reduces them to mere comparisons. Since the early 1970s anyone speaking of an uncapitalized, non-Jewish "holocaust" (e.g. "an ecological holocaust," "the Ukrainian holocaust," or even "a nuclear holocaust") has understood that the word properly belongs to the Jews and that he is only briefly borrowing it to suggest a similarity, an analogical practice now regularly denounced by belligerent Jews as lexical theft.
[16] (Berenbaum) Washington Times, 10 January 1991, quoted in JHR 14, no. 3 (May-June 1994), 44; Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973), 18. Cf. Marcia Sachs Littell, "Holocaust Education in the 21st Century," in Proceedings of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1999), 874: "Merging Holocaust Studies into Jewish Studies is the wrong approach. It simply sends the wrong message. That the Holocaust is the most traumatic event in the death and life of the Jewish people since the destruction of the Second Temple goes without saying. But study of the Holocaust is also to study the pathology of Western civilization and its flawed structures. It must not be hidden away by false bracketing of courses" (emphasis added). Dr. Sachs Littell, a professional Holocaust pedagogue, is the director of the National Academy for Holocaust and Genocide Teacher Training. Her ideas for educating Euro-Americans about "the pathology of Western civilization" are in essence no different from the unvarnished hatred of Rabbi Dov Fischer, vice-president of the Zionist Organization of America: "We [Jews] remember that the food they [White Europeans] eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria" ("We're Right, the Whole World's Wrong," Forward, 19 April 2002).
[17] Gershon Mamlak, "The Holocaust: Commodity?", Midstream (April 1983); (Riskin) Tom Hundley, "Two Views of Horror," Chicago Tribune, 9 May 1993, quoted in Novick, 160; Berkovits, "Rewriting."
[18] Earlier Jewish literary interpretations of nazi persecution generally aimed at inclusion. In Edward Lewis Wallant's strange 1961 novel The Pawnbroker, the protagonist, a concentration camp survivor isolated from the world by his incommunicable experience of nazi savagery, is reintegrated into the human community through the empathic commiseration of a WASP woman named Marilyn and the redemptive sacrifice of a Puerto Rican named Jesus, an assimilationist thematic structure that later Jewish Holocaust writers would studiously avoid. The novel's uplifting conclusion, based on its heavily marked Christian symbolism, was effectively excised in Sidney Lumet's 1965 film adaptation. Wallant's Pawnbroker has recognizable Holocaust themes (the radical isolation of survivors, the judaizing of the concentration camps, spectacular nazi barbarity, etc.) but none of the political meanings that the institutionalized Holocaust would later express. The Painted Bird, on the other hand, is a true Holocaust novel with a Holocaust political structure, even though the nazi concentration camp is only tangential to its subject matter. For Kosinski's fabrications, see James Park Sloan, "Kosinski's War," New Yorker, 10 October 1994: "[Polish journalist] Joanna Siedlecka portrays the elder Kosinski [i.e. Jerzy Kosinski's father] not just as a wily survivor but as a man without scruples. She maintains that he may have collaborated with the Germans during the war and very likely did collaborate with the NKVD, after the liberation of Dabrowa by the Red Army, in sending to Siberia for minor infractions, such as hoarding, some of the very peasants who saved his family. Her real scorn, however, is reserved for the son, who turned his back on the family's saviors and vilified them, along with the entire Polish nation, in the eyes of the world. Indeed, the heart of Siedlecka's revelations is her depiction of the young Jerzy Kosinski spending the war years eating sausages and drinking cocoa -- goods unavailable to the neighbors' children -- in the safety of his house and yard."
[19] For the Zionist objectives behind the Eichmann trial, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1964), 5-10, and Segev 327-328.
[20] MacDonald documents this campaign in his Culture of Critique, esp. chapters 5-6. Cf. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Revised and Definitive Edition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 1044: "When in the early days of 1933 the first civil servant wrote the first definition of 'non-Aryan' into a civil service ordinance, the fate of European Jewry was sealed." Even if every word of the Holocaust story were true, Hilberg's pronouncement would remain obviously false. Its political purpose is, however, unmistakable. Racial classifications and definitions are routine in Israel, and it is unlikely that a single American Zionist has ever worried that they might lead to a Palestinian holocaust. As Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 7) noted: "In Israel ... rabbinical law rules the personal status of Jewish citizens, with the result that no Jew can marry a non-Jew; marriages concluded abroad are recognized, but children of mixed marriages are legally bastards (children of Jewish parentage born out of wedlock are legitimate), and if one happens to have a non-Jewish mother he can neither be married nor buried.... There certainly was something breathtaking in the naivete with which the prosecution [in the Eichmann trial] denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. The better informed among the correspondents were well aware of the irony, but they did not mention it in their reports."
[21] Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago, 1957), 114-115, quoted in Novick, 105.
[22] Novick, 113; Cynthia Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" New Yorker, 6 October 1997. Jewish hostility to the popular stage (1955) and film (1959) adaptations of Anne's Diary, both written by the White husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Albert and Frances Hackett, has become strident in recent years, a result of Holocaust consciousness and modern Jewish identity politics colliding with an established monument of wartime patriotism. Ozick, an especially volatile Zionist, argues that it would have been better if the Diary had been burned before publication, to prevent it from teaching anodyne, dejudaized lessons about Jewish suffering mediated through the moral universalism of non-Jews. Ozick and others import into Anne Frank's life a strong Jewish consciousness she never possessed, while bizarrely blaming Gentiles (along with Anne's "deracinated" father) for having disfigured her into a WASP in all but birth, a pallid symbol of the Jew as merely one of us. In fact current Jewish anger at the broadly faithful film version, which Jews in the 1950s justifiably considered a remarkable propaganda triumph, reveals growing frustration with Anne and the heroic version of the war she embraced, frustration so great that some Holocaust pedagogues recommend ejecting her from the canon of Holocaust authors for teaching insufficiently Judeocentric lessons; but because her Diary has become a quasi-religious document, scrutinized for its spiritual insights as fundamentalist Christians pore over their bibles, belligerent Jews generally direct their attack against White America, which in the 1950s allegedly betrayed the text for malevolently assimilationist purposes, an example of what Ozick calls "them stealing our Holocaust." Accordingly in Holocaust education programs White students now not only read The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank, but also learn about the Eurocentric act of cultural theft that once misappropriated it from its rightful owners. The falsely rejudaized Diary, surrounded by polemical commentary, becomes in the process a Holocaust text with a Holocaust political structure. For summaries of the Jewish culture war over the Diary, an emotional intramural dispute barely comprehensible to any non-Jew, see Novick, 117-120, and Ian Buruma, "The Afterlife of Anne Frank," New York Review of Books, 19 February 1998.
[23] Cf. "Farrakhan's Jewish Problem," Tikkun 9 (March-April 1994), 10, quoted in Novick, 191: "In current discourse, who gets labeled 'white' and who gets labeled 'person of color' derives not from the color of one's skin ... but from the degree to which one has been a victim of Western colonialist oppression. By that measure, Jews have been the greatest victims of Western societies throughout the past two thousand years and must certainly be understood to be one of the 'peoples of color.'"
[24] (Belzberg) S. Teitelbaum and T. Waldman, "The Unorthodox Rabbi," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 15 July 1990, quoted in Mark Weber, "The Simon Wiesenthal Center," JHR 15, no. 4 (July-August 1995), 3; Abraham Foxman, "Schindler's List -- The Meaning of Spielberg's Film," ADL newsletter On the Frontline (January 1994), quoted in JHR 14, no. 2 (March-April 1994), 41. Sincere belief in the Jewish Holocaust does not of course preclude cynical exploitation of it. Cf. Novick, 157: "At a time [1981] when West Germany was considering the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, [Hyman] Bookbinder wrote to the German ambassador to the United States in his capacity as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council -- though he was not, he made clear, speaking for the council. Plans for the Washington museum were now being developed, he said. 'How Germany will be treated in that museum may well be affected by the decision you make pertaining to the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia.'" Bookbinder believed that Gentile Holocaust consciousness was essential for preserving American "commitment to Israel," but for the sake of Israel the USHMM's presentation of nazi atrocities was negotiable: the unique horrors of the Holocaust could become slightly less horrific if the West German government proved properly compliant.
[25] On collective memory, see Novick, 3-6, 170ff. Novick, reflecting the consensus view, locates the principal source of awakened Holocaust memory in Jewish anxieties over Israel, prompted by the Six Day War of 1967 and especially by the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Cf. Marcia Sachs Littell, "Holocaust Education," 870: "In the years directly following liberation [of the camps] there was silence -- stunning silence. From the Jewish Community, from the churches, from government agencies. During this time, the majority of Americans were comfortable with the silence. Even the word 'Holocaust' did not come into current use until the 1960's.... Americans received their first real jolt of awareness at the time of the Six Day War (1967) in Israel, when 'a Second Holocaust' seemed threatened. With the realization that Jews might be destroyed in their homeland, not only Jews in the Diaspora were aroused: Christians friendly to Jewish survival were also moved to act." But no explanation for the Jewish Holocaust that fails to acknowledge the racial hostility that animates it can be taken seriously. Elie Wiesel calls Auschwitz "the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization" not because he supports Israel and fears for its survival, but because he hates the people he has chosen to live among and believes that he can now insult them with impunity. Holocaust memory had, in any case, clearly taken shape well before 1973 and even before 1967. There were already important (though lightly marked) Holocaust political themes in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), a "message picture" that gently suggested, for the educational benefit of British and American Gentiles, their own complicity in nazi evil; the nazification of Pope Pius XII, a process that continues today, began in the early 1960s, well before Diaspora Jews could possibly have felt any fears about an imminent holocaust in Israel; and Holocaust theology, a now massive body of theopolitical scholarship centering all of human history in the Holocaust's various Judeocentric revelations, also precedes Israel's Six Day War. See Richard Rubenstein's seminal After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
[26] (Sher) Jewish World (Long Island), May 8-14, 1992, quoted in JHR 13, no. 1 (January-February 1993), 46; Ozick, "All the World Wants the Jews Dead," Esquire (November 1974), quoted in Finkelstein. Sher, who left his job as a nazi-hunter to become Executive Director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the chief Zionist lobby group in Washington, was speaking at a Yom Hashoah commemoration. The Brooklyn-born Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 slaughtered twenty-nine Muslims praying in Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, often wore a yellow star, marked with the German "Jude" ("Jew"), in order to commemorate his particularist understanding of the Holocaust's moral lessons. Cf. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 153: "We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?"; Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), 166: "After the Holocaust, the Israeli nation has become collectively, what the survivor is individually."
[27] Novick, 12. Novick (207) comments further: "A good part of the answer is the fact -- not less a fact because anti-Semites turn it into a grievance -- that Jews play an important and influential role in Hollywood, the television industry, and the newspaper, magazine, and book publishing worlds. Anyone who would explain the massive attention the Holocaust has received in these media in recent years without reference to that fact is being naive or disingenuous." |