17. [Part
1]
THE HOLOCAUST
AND GENOCIDE
"Instead
of learning about the Holocaust
through the large lens of
Jewish
history, many Jews and non-Jews
in America
now learn the whole of Jewish
history through the lens
of the Holocaust." --
James
Young, p. 304
"The myth of the
Holocaust teaches that throughout
their
history of persecution the
Jews have been blameless, their
oppressors irrational." -- Liebman and Cohen p. 33
"It isn't the truth [about
Jews in the Holocaust era] that
frightens me but the suppression
of free speech in order to
protect communal myths that
are not lies but truths rendered
so sacrosanct and undiscussed
that they start to smell fishy."
-- Carol
Oppenheim, Jewish author,
p. 39
"Many Jews use, shamelessly,
the slaughter of the six million
by the Third Reich as proof
that they cannot be bigots -- or
in the hope of not being
held responsible for their bigotry.
It
is galling to be told by a Jew whom
you know to be
exploiting you that he cannot
be doing what you know he
is doing because he is a
Jew."
-- James
Baldwin, Black novelist,
p. 34
"Related to the film's box-office
success is the fact that
precisely because Schindler's
List has been watched
by
large numbers of people who had
very little previous
knowledge of the Holocaust,
and cannot be expected to
gain much more knowledge
in the future. This specific
version of the event may
remain the only source of
information about it for
many of its viewers."
--
Omer
Bartov, p. 46
"It is doubtful that history is the
genre for writers who are
so overwhelmed by the Holocaust
and yet want to describe
it. It seems that some fictional
form of expression may be
more suitable than history
for those who want to respond
emotionally
rather than historically to that
great tragedy."
--Richard
Lucas, p. 222
"[Jewish] manufactured claims
of uniqueness for their own
people are, after all, synonymous
with dismissal and denial of
the experience of others
... Narcissistic false claims of
uniqueness are joined with
brutal, racist denials of the
sufferings of others, becoming
two sides of the same coin."
-- David
Stannard, p. 198
"I would be the last to minimize
the atrocity of Auschwitz,
where my father and mother
perished. But don't the tears
of others count? " -- Maxime Rodinson, p. 9
"[The
Holocaust had been] hardly talked
about for the first twenty years
or so
after World War II; then, from the
1970s on, [it became] ever more
central in
American public discourse -- particularly,
of course, among Jews, but also
in the
culture at large. What accounts
for this unusual chronology?"
-- Peter Novick, 1999, p.
2
"The actual historical subject
[of the Holocaust] itself has
become almost unimportant
compared with its contemporary
political function in the
hands of some Jews."
-- John
Fox, non-Jewish faculty member
in Jewish history and Holocaust
studies at both
University College and Jews
College, London,
[3-19-2000, p. 47-48]
It is the profoundest
of ironies that Adolf Hitler and
the Nazis may have saved worldwide
Jewry from extinction. (In the case
of Jewish Hassids, Menachem Friedman
notes that "paradoxically, it was
the destruction of Eastern European
Jewry in the twentieth century that
created the conditions which enabled
the spread of ultra-orthodoxy.")
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 31] At
the very least, judging by common
Jewish commentary about their fate
in Europe over fifty years ago,
Hitler is responsible for a dramatic
Jewish revival. Before World War
II many Jews were on a slow but
steady path of assimilation wherever
they resided in their diaspora,
particularly in Western Europe,
each generation inched further away
from the separatist myths of the
Jewish past. Religion of all kinds
continued in retreat and the rationale
for being Jewish was -- at least
in some parts of the Jewish community
-- steadily weakening.
As the Nazi regime came to
power, however, many German Jews
(if we take what they say at face
value) had strayed from a specifically
Jewish connection in their lives
and were forced to re-examine their
identities. In 1935, for instance,
the German literary critic Jean
Amery (Hans Mayer) supposedly discovered
himself a Jew in a Viennese cafe
when reading a newspaper about new
Nazi laws on the subject. Likewise,
in 1938, the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein connected to his long
lost Jewish identity as a consequence
of Nazi dictates. They were both
suddenly Jews because Hitler said
so. [TRAVERSO, p. 39] Even Albert Einstein found his identity
as a Jew in the context of rising
political anti-Semitism in Germany
in 1914. There had been nothing
in Switzerland, he said, "that called
forth any Jewish sentiments in me.
When I moved to Berlin all that
changed." [CLARK, p. 377] (He was
helping to raise "funds for the
Zionist cause of a Hebrew university"
by 1921.) [RHODES, R., 1988, p.
173] "The composer Arnold Schoenberg
and many other baptized Jews," notes
Nachum Gidal, "now publicly declared
their return to Judaism." [GIDAL,
p. 425]
Sigmund Freud reflected,
at least publicly, the same experience:
"My language is German.
My culture, my attainments, are
German. I
could identify
myself German intellectually, until
I noticed the growth of
anti-Semitic
prejudice in Germany and German
Austria. Since that
time, I prefer
to call myself a Jew." [GAY, MOMENT,
p. 50]
In 1937, an American
Jew, Alfred Siegel, wrote in the
American Israelite that
"Hitler has
been a life-giving stimulant for
me. In times when there is no
Jewish flame
left in me and I am feeling very
cold, I get warm again on
account
of Hitler ... I know I shouldn't
say this, but ... Hitler [is] helping
me to
fulfill my status as an immortal
man ... What will become of me
when there
is no more Hitler and there is no
one to set flames under me
to keep
me warm? What if we come at last
to a world in which no
anti-Semite
is left and everybody loves me?
What of my poor Jewish
bones
which set so quickly cold without
stimulation? Who and what
will keep
me warm then?
-- May 27, 1937
[in GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]
For today's
many Jewish "ideologists," wrote
Jacob Neusner, decades after Hitler,
"there is no real choice about 'being
Jewish' if born one. The Holocaust
dictates that there is no escape
from it. Hitler knew you
were one." [NEUSNER, Holo,
p. 978] "The gas chambers at Auschwitz,"
notes Jonathan Sacks, "made no distinction
between [Jewish] assimilators and
traditionalists, believers and heretics,
atheists and Jews of faith." [SACKS,
J., p.6] Such comments are terribly true, but
always left unstated is the disturbing
fact that the same all-encompassing
view that "born Jews" (whatever
they choose to believe) are inescapably
Jewish is a concept intrinsic to
classic Jewish identity itself.
Hitler did not invent the idea that
being Jewish is a racial pedigree,
often these days euphemistically
referred to as a "community of fate."
Was not Hitler following the same
path as this 1970s observation by
a Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz?
: "To be a Jew means to have a bond
with every other Jew -- and somehow
know how to find him." [in SILBERMAN,
C., p. 76]
Whatever the case,
in attempting to racially define
and annihilate the Jewish people,
Hitler rejuvenated them. This is
exemplified in the famous plea by
the Jewish theologian, Emil Fackenheim,
who implored his fellow Jews to
renew with vigor their sense of
Jewishness. To allow it to wane
-- post-Holocaust -- was now equated
to be a posthumous victory for Hitler.
(Even for Jews married to non-Jews,
distinctive Jewish progeny
is often a burning issue. A liberal
feminist professor, Amy Sheldon,
notes that "although I had many
mixed feelings towards traditional
Judaism, there was never any doubt
in my mind that our children would
be raised as Jews. 'I can't finish
what Hitler started,' I told my
[non-Jewish] husband before we were
married." [SHELDON, p. 82])
We see in Hitler's
last breath in 1945 the birth of
Israel in 1948, and the conjoining
of the Holocaust and the modern
state of Israel as the sacred pillars
of a renewed Jewish identity rooted
in guilt, fear, resentment, hostility,
and rage. It was, however, not an
identity that took immediate shape
after Hitler's persecution of Jewry.
The martyr status of concentration
camp victims, the heroizing of survivors
no matter what they had to do to
live, the stress upon exaggerated
Jewish resistance to the Nazis,
a deeper embracement of Jewish tribalism,
and the political exploitation of
the Holocaust for Jewish and Israeli
myths and manipulations came later.
What came to be known as "the Holocaust,"
says Edward Lilenthal, "was often
indistinguishable, in the immediate
postwar years, from the millions
of noncombatant casualties due to
terror bombings of civilian populations,
epidemic illness, or starvation.
It was considered by most as simply
part of the horror of war." [LILENTHAL,
p. 5]
In Israel, in
the early years after the Holocaust,
Jewish survivors were even scorned
with contempt by Israeli Jews as
"soap" (i.e., feebly passive Jews
who were passively turned into bars
of soap by Nazi tormentors, [GOREN, p. 159] the fulfillment of demeaning
stereotypes about fellow Jews.
"With what scorn," noted
Georges Tamarin in 1973, "Israeli
youth reacts to the alleged faint-heartedness
of the six million victims of Nazis!"
[TAMARIN, p. 115] The Holocaust
was an emblem of shame to Jewry,
little discussed, more often avoided.
"Even in their extraordinary death
agony," notes Haim Breseeth, "the
millions of European Jews had not
attracted sympathy [in Israel] --
a minimum expectation from an important
Jewish community." [BRESEETH, p. 196] "In retrospect," says Arye Carmon,"
it appears that a disturbing conjunction
evolved between the incomprehensible
magnitude of evil of the Nazis and
the victims who conscientiously
were presented as an ideological
object to be disassociated from.
This conjunction may explain the
duality of guilt and shame that
has portrayed mourning in Israel."
[CARMON, p. 76]
A daughter of Holocaust survivors
who was raised in Israel remarked
at a conference there that
"What I hated and dreaded
most when I was a child was summertime.
It was a time when the [tattooed
concentration camp] numbers on my
mother's arm would be there
for all to see and people would
know
that she was a survivor and
was one of the despised people.
People
like my parents were despised
in Israel, and I was ashamed of
them." [EMMETT, p. 147]
"In 1947 a Jewish
concentration camp survivor, Primo
Levy, could only interest a small,
obscure press to publish an account
of his experiences and the volume
was little noticed. [TRAVERSO, p.
104] Even Eli Wiesel's ultimately
influential work about the Holocaust,
Night, did not appear in
English until 1960, after twenty
publishers had rejected it. [WHITFIELD
p. 74] "We would look in vain in the 1950s,"
says Jacob Neusner, "for what some
call 'Holocaustomania.'" [NEUSNER,
STRANGER, p. 84]
"Many Jews raised
in the United States in the wake
of the Holocaust," notes Melanie
Kaye-Kantrowitz, "experienced it
like a family secret -- hovering,
controlling, but barely mentioned
except in code or casual reference."
[BRODKIN, K., p. 141]
In 1961 only two of
31 discussants in a major Jewish
magazine's symposium on "Jewishness
and Younger Intellectuals" put any
emphasis on the Holocaust effecting
their lives. In that same year,
another important Jewish magazine's
theme of "My Jewish Affirmation"
overlooked the Holocaust almost
completely. [LINENTHAL, p. 8] Even
as late as 1966, when Commentary
published a forum on "Jewish belief"
in its pages, "the Holocaust," notes
Nathan Glazer, "did not figure in any of the questions,
nor, it must be said, did it figure
in the answers." [GLAZER, American,
p. 172]
In a collection of 1960s-era
interviews with Israeli prime minister
David Ben Gurion "the word Holocaust
never appears." [STERNBERGER, I.,
8-15-95]
The book that
first attracted, and furthered,
widespread interest in the particularly
Jewish experiences of World War
II was the diary of Ann Frank (The
Diary of a Young Girl), a volume
that a Jewish novelist, Meyer Levin,
almost single-handedly pushed to
fame. Levin urged the diary's publication
in the American Jewish Congress
Weekly; it was serialized in
the Jewish magazine, Commentary.
Doubleday eventually published it
and Levin himself heralded its importance
on the front page of the New
York Times Book Review,
his editors not informed about his
own "vested interest" -- commercially
and politically -- in the story.
[BLAIR, p. 3] The volume has since
sold over sixty million copies in
fifty-one languages. [WHITFIELD,
p. 72] (There appeared with such
revelations a corresponding shame
and guilt among diaspora Jews and
a rising need to atone for their
own sin of doing so little to help
European Jewry during the Hitler
era. [RUBENSTEIN, p. 24]) The diary
of Ann Frank is so well publicized
internationally that, note David
Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa,
"Ann Frank's
Diary of a Young Girl has
sold over a four million copies
in Japan,
more than any other country except
the United States. So
beloved
is Ann Frank in Japan that the first
Japanese company to market
sanitary
napkins designed especially for
Japanese women called itself
Anne Co.,
Ltd., and sold its product under
the brand name 'Anne's
Day' (Anne
no hi), which quickly became a euphemism
for menstruation
in Japan."
[GOODMAN, p. 6]
The
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
noted continued popular promotion
of Anne Frank in 2001, half a century
after her death:
"A
four hour miniseries, following
Anne's life from her happy school
days
through
her two years in hiding in Amsterdam
and to her final days in the
concentration
camp, air nationally over ABC TV
on May 20 and May 21.
The
20th Century Fox studio is developing
a feature move based on
'The Diary
of Anne Frank.'
A
new edition of the diary, including
five previously unpublished pages
describing
her parents' difficult marriage,
was released in March.
The
Helos Dance Theatre premiered 'About
Anne: A Diary in Dance'
in
Los Angeles last month.
An
interactive CDROM titled 'Anne Frank
House: A House with a Story'
was released earlier
this year, offering a virtual tour
of the building and
the
'secret annex' where the Frank family
hid.
In
Boise, Idaho, ground has been broken
on a $1.6 million Anne
Frank
Human Rights Memorial Park." [TUGEND,
T., 5-13-01]
In formal literature,
"apart from the notable exception
of [Saul] Bellow's The Dangling
Man," says Theodore Ziolkowski,
"it was not until the 60s with Edward
Wallant's The Pawnbroker,
Norma Rosen's Touching Evil,
Susan Schaeffer's Anya, Arthur
Cohen's In the Days of Simon
Stern, and later works by Cynthia
Ozick and Saul Bellow -- that the
Holocaust became a genuine theme."
[ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 599] By 1998, however, Sheila Schimpf noted
that
"For 10 years Barry
Gross has asked Michigan State University
students
in his English
classes how many have read or seen
'The Diary of Anne
Frank.' Almost
every hand goes up. 'It has become
almost the common
text for this
generation of students,' Gross says."
[SCHIMPF, p. E1]
In 1967, with the multiple-nation Arab
war against Israel, worldwide Jewry
snapped to a new kind of attention
and consciousness, one that has
since accelerated to our own day
into deeply politicized Jewish obsessions
with anti-Semitism, the hallowed
specialness of the Holocaust, and
the absolute sanctity of Israel.
During the 1967 Arab war, Jews everywhere
(as it is told and retold in Jewish
scholarship) imagined the prospect
for another Holocaust.
"It would be impossible to
understand the present Israeli stance
toward the Arabs without taking
full account of the Holocaust,"
says Jay Gonen. [GONEN, p. 151]
In the Arab armies Jews saw Nazi
storm troopers. In the PLO leadership
of Yassar Arafat, they stamped the
face of Hitler. "Israel," says Melvin
Urofsky, "made it possible [for
Jews worldwide] to endure the memory
of Auschwitz. Were Israel to be
destroyed [by Arabs], then Hitler
would be alive again, the final
victory would be his." [UROFSKY,
M., 1978, p. 351]
The old Jewish self-identity
of weakness and victimization --
based on the Jewish martyrological
tradition of death, destruction,
and terror -- became now a conviction
of armor, militantly wielded, shaped
with the very shame and horror of
the Holocaust. The resultant Israeli
victory over the Arabs meant a symbolic
return to physical power, along
biblical lines even, for many Jews,
redemption.
It also meant the springboard for
a new Holocaust-centeredness, aggressive
in its character, hostile and embittered
to non-Jews everywhere around them. And it was adept in milking communal
guilt from comfortable Jews in America
who experienced nothing of the risks
of 1967 Israel nor the European
Holocaust years. A victorious Israel
rising up out of ashes of the Holocaust
became the cornerstone of Jewish
self-conception. The Holocaust was
no longer shamefully harmful to
the Jewish self-image. It was now
a much-heralded building block for
the state of Israel and impassioned
Jewish vigor, everywhere discussed,
everywhere publicized.
Jews who paid
little attention to the Jewish annihilation
during World War II, and in the
early years after, two decades later
were increasingly consumed with
it. "A profound sense of their status
as survivors seized world Jewry,"
notes Jacob Neusner. [NEUSNER, Holo,
p. 976] "The question," adds Hanno
Loewy, "which constantly recurs
is, 'Why did I of all people survive?'
-- a question which pursues the
survivor and to which there is no
answer." [LOWEY, p. 240] "Every
time I attend a gathering of Jewish
children," wrote well-known lawyer
Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "at a family
event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath
Torah -- I imagine SS guards lining
up these children for the gas chambers."
[DERSHOWITZ, p. 178]
"To some extent,"
says Jacob Petuchowski, "this preoccupation
[with the Holocaust] represents
a repercussion of the guilt-complex
of the survivors (and perhaps more
so of those who survived at a safe
trans-Atlantic distance than of
the actual survivors of the camp.)"
[PETUCHOWSKI, p. 6] The Jew, says
James Yaffe, "feels guilty over
the six million Jews who were killed
by Hitler. What more could he have
done to help them? Perhaps nothing,
but his guilt stems from his sense
that he might so easily have died
instead of them." [YAFFE, J., 1968,
p. 59] "The notion of survivor guilt
and of resurrecting the dead to
greater power than they had in life,"
suggests Samuel Heilman, "is of
course an old one, most dramatically
elaborated in Freud's famous essay
Totem and Taboo." [HEILMAN, S, 1992,
p. 370] It is important for many
Jews to diffuse their own guilt
by dumping much of it into the laps
of others: "I am burdened with collective
guilt," said Hans Meyer, "I say;
not they. The world, which forgives
and forgets, has sentenced me, not
those who murdered or allowed the
murder to occur." Meyer, Ruth Wisse
informs us, "committed suicide,
driven 'to the mind's limits' and
beyond by the dishonest postwar
reimposition of normalcy." [WISSE,
p. 48]
"Ironically,"
says Leon Wieseltier, "for many
Jews what remains [of Jewish identity]
most vivid and 'ethnically' alive
is the Holocaust." [BECHSTEL, p.
118] Rabbi David Novak even argues
that today's Holocaust-based Jewish
identity (i.e., the peculiar notion
that modern Jewish identity is fundamentally
defined by its contradistinction
from real, and imagined, enemies)
ironically owes much of its conception
-- in the modern post-Holocaust
context -- to the existentialist
non-Jew, Jean Paul-Sartre, and his
own book about anti-Semitism.
[NOVAK, p. El of Is,
p. 20]
With the growing emphasis
upon a Jewish identity largely defined
by the Holocaust, vacation tours
were created for American and other
diaspora Jews to visit death camps
in Europe as part of an immersion
in "the Jewish experience." "At
bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing
number of communities," notes Peter
Novick,
"the child
is 'twinned' with a young vicitm
of the Holocaust who never lived
to
have
the ceremony, and by all reports
the kids like it a lot. Adolescent
Jews
who
go on organized tours to Auschwitz
and Treblinka have reported that
they
were 'never so proud to be a Jew'
as when, at these sites, they vicariously
experienced
the Holocaust. Jewish college students
oversubscribe courses on the Holocaust,
and rush to pin yellow stars to
their lapels on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust
Remembrance
DAy). And it's not just the young.
Adult Jews flock to Holocaust
events
as to no others and give millions
unstintingly to build yet another
Holocaust memorial."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8]
The
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles,
one of the greatest Holocaust centers,
built a multi-million dollar high-tech
environment to "recreate the Holocaust
experience" for Jews who missed
it. The director of a Jewish education
committee even proposed a high school
course about the Holocaust so that
all students could be able to understand
"what it means to be Jewish." [LIPSTADT,
p. 356] By 1986, a quarter of all
new books reviewed in Judaica
Book News had a Holocaust subject
and more college students were taking
courses about the Holocaust than
any other Jewish concern. [SILVER,
p. 460] In 1985, 86% of American
Jewry, as evidenced in one survey,
believed that "there's no doubt
that the Holocaust has deeply affected
the way I think and feel about being
Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 33]
"For American Jews," notes
David Schnall, "Israel has become
vitally important not as a living
alternative [as a place to live]
but more so as a refuge, a final
port in the storm of humanity, should
the unthinkable occur once more."
[SCHNALL, p. 124]
The horror
of the Nazi's mass murder of Jews
was not just that so many millions
of people were sadistically violated,
tortured, and murdered. The human
capacity for mass atrocity is as
old as humanity itself. History
is full of Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans,
and Crusaders of every type riding
into pillaged villages by ruthless
exterminators, entire vistas laid
waste in carnage. Tribe, clan, kingdom,
and nation have, over the millennia,
taken turns in being victim and
victimizer.
The REAL horror
of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe
was that this atrocity was elaborately
construed and constructed in modern
times by a supposedly "civilized"
state, Germany. It was not carried
out by a band of head hunters or
Neanderthal brutes, but by people
who drove cars, went to the grocery
store, paid taxes, and lived in
familiar-looking homes and apartment
buildings. Strangely, they were
people quite like us, like anybody,
wrapped in nationalist institutions.
That is what is most frightening
about it. All the Nazis needed was a national
narcissism about themselves, their
past, and their destiny which was
the precondition necessary to entirely
dehumanize, enslave, and exterminate
others. Where have we seen these
preconditions before?
To the everlasting
shame of our sad species, none of
this is new. The rudimentary foundation
of the Nazi's "Master Race" self-perception
and glorification finds a fanatic
precursor, among others, in the
most ironic of places: the origins
of the Judaic faith itself in the
Jewish self-conception as the "Chosen
People." What is the essential ideological
difference, really, between those
who envision themselves to have
partnership in a superior racial
lineage (in the Nazi case, pure
Aryans) and those who traditionally
understand themselves to be a likewise
hereditary lineage of human beings,
in the Jewish case supposedly descended
from a single man, Abraham, especially
graced and privileged by God (Jews)?
Both rely, traditionally and fundamentally
-- in origin -- upon racist criteria
in their respective belief systems.
For the Nazis, it is essential to
prove pure Germanic lineage to qualify
in the Aryan membership. By Nazi
standards, if a grandparent was
a Jew, a person was considered racially
tainted, and Jewish. For Jews, as
legally established in today's secular
state of Israel, the racial lineage
is matrilineal: a Jew is defined
as someone who has a Jewish natural
mother. If the father was Jewish
and the mother not, the child is
tainted and is not, by Orthodox
standards, Jewish.
Dr. Joseph Mengele,
the horrible Nazi medical experimenter
and "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz,
echoed this racial antithesis --
at least as he saw it -- when he
reputedly remarked "that the [Nazi's]
Final Solution was the ultimate
struggle for the control of the
world between the only two peoples
superior enough to vie for it, the
Jews and the Germans. [LESHEM, p.
63] Or, as Hannah Arendt saw it,
"[The Nazi movements'] claim to
chosenness could clash seriously
only with the Jewish claim ... Leaders
[of Nazism] knew quite well that
the Jews had divided the world,
exactly as they had, into two halves
-- themselves and all the others."
[ARENDT, p. 240]
In 1937, amidst
the rise of German fascism, Charles
Clayton Morrison at the liberal
Protestant journal, The Christian
Century, (which was a well-known
crusader against Hitler and anti-Semitism)
wrote that "[it is] this obsession
with the doctrine of a covenant
race that now menaces the whole
world, and Jews themselves are the
chief sufferers from it. [The Jewish
idea] of an integral race, with
its own exclusive culture, hallowed
and kept unified by a racial religion,
is itself the prototype of nazism."
[MORRISON, p. 736] "Nazi racism,"
notes Richard L. Rubenstein, "was
an attempt to reestablish a basis
for community on shared archaic
roots. The exclusion of the alien
was intrinsic to its very nature."
[RUBENSTEIN, p. 110] This exclusionism,
as we have repeatedly seen, is also
integral to traditional Judaism.
The Nazis were indeed
conscious of themselves as a counter-Chosen
People, based upon their racially
Aryan-centered ideology which was
antithetical and ultimately violent
to the Jewish self-assertion of
superiority. Adolf Hitler appropriated
for his Aryan Master Race the Jewish
notion of being a Chosen People,
and t
