Jewish obsession with the Holocaust knows few limits, and leaves no stone unturned in its quest for esoteric minutia. "Sometimes one is even tempted to ask whether historians working on the Holocaust are not stretching the bounds of common sense," says Evytat Friesel, "One example is the debate that took place in 1991 in Frankfurt, where a Study and Documentation Center is being planned, in which well-known historians participated in a learned discussion on whether the Holocaust had been rational, irrational, or anti-rational." [FRIESEL, p. 228-229]  "In the Jewish community," complains Gabriel Schoenfeld, "well-meaning organizations and individuals are mindlessly sponsoring Internet sites offering a 'Holocaust cybrary' or a 'virtual tour' of [concentration camp] Dachau! Already, an academic conference has been scheduled in Washington on the subject of 'Deaf People in Hitler's Europe,' where for four days scholars in three separate victimological fields -- 'Holocaust Studies, Deaf Studies, and Deaf History' -- will have an opportunity to 'interact.' Do we need more of this?" [SCHOENFELD, p. 46]

     By the end of the twentieth century the Holocaust is understood by Jews to be the tragically golden cap that proves the Jewish mythos of eternal victimization. "One lesson we [Jews] frequently derive from our history," says Steven Cohen, "a very powerful one -- is the lesson of victimization, whose paramount example is the Holocaust. Jews believe that we have been victimized over the years, that we have a unique history of persecution. The lesson gets pounded into us in a variety of ways. It starts with the central formative events in Jewish history, namely the enslavement in Egypt. It continues through to the Holocaust in Europe and is punctuated with invasions, expulsions, and pogroms in between. The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld has said that Jewish history is a series of Holocausts, with only some improvement in technology." [COHEN, Uses, p. 26]

      The popular formation of a modern Jewish identity that is completely Holocaust-centric is cause for some dissent in the Jewish community. "Some Jews actively search out anti-Semitism," says Adam Garfinkle, "as a raison d'etre  to be Jewish, along with the modern cult of martyrology -- the canonization of the Holocaust. This they do because positive motivation for Jewishness, flowing from their grasp of the value of the Jewish perspective, is all but absent in their lives." [GARFINKLE, p. 21] By 1981 Jacob Neusner was disturbed by the "puzzling frame of mind of people whose everyday vision of ordinary things is reshaped into a heightened, indeed mythic, mode of perception and being by reference to awful events they never witnessed, let alone experienced, and by the existence of a place which they surely do not plan to dwell in or even to visit." [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 2]

       "I think there is absolutely no question, as I look at the American Jewish experience," says Jonathan Woocher, "that we have appropriated both the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel in a mythic fashion. The myth has even been given a name, though not by me, 'From Holocaust to redemption.' Israel is a resurrection and all the world's great religions have a resurrection myth." [WOOCHER, Discussion, p. 28]

    As always in the Jewish collective understanding of itself, and reflecting the traditional Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism, victims of the Holocaust were all categorically "innocent." "Holocaust theology," notes Marc Ellis, declares that "the Jewish sense of purpose [is] that of an innocent, suffering people in search of their destiny." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 6] The innocence of the European Jews is thereby transferred categorically to the intrinsic innocence of Israelis fighting Arabs. "For Holocaust theologians," says Ellis,

     "the victory in the [1967] Six Day War was a miracle, a sign that an

      innocent people so recently victimized might be on the verge of

      redemption. That is, a subtheme of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust

      is the total innocence of the Jewish people and thus the innocence of

      those who defend the lives of Jews in Israel. For Holocaust theologians,

      the victory of Israel in 1967 is a victory of the innocent trying to forestall

      another catastrophe, another holocaust, and the redemptive sign is that

      this time Jews will prevail." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 3]

      Rooted in the mythology of relentless victimization of Jewish innocence across the centuries, one of the most curious obsessions for most Jews today is the militantly avowed "uniqueness" of the Holocaust in comparison to all other atrocities in the human record. The Jewish Holocaust's declared outstanding "specialness," grotesque and horrible, inevitably echoes -- and is sometimes overtly theologically linked to -- the traditional tenets of self-asserted Judaic claims to distinction, exclusiveness, and chosenness. Over the years, notes Edward Linenthal, the Holocaust became to be understood by Jews as even a pseudo-religious event itself,  "not only a transcendent event, it was unique, not to be compared to any other genocidal situations, and its victims were Jews. Any comparison of event or linkage to any other victim group could be, and often was, perceived as, if not the murder of memory, at least its dilution. Moreover, the story ended with a kind of redemption, the creation of the state of Israel." [LINENTHAL, p. 4] (This communal conviction has evolved over time, politically and socially, as it suited Jewish needs. As Peter Novick notes about earlier years: "After the war began, and after the main outlines of the Holcoaust had become known, it was common for Jewish writers to interpret Nazi atrocities in a univeralist fashion -- stressing that Jews were far from the only victims.") [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 38]

      Irving Greenberg, Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Commission, "regarded comparison of the Holocaust with any other form of genocide as 'blasphemous, as well as dishonest.'" [LILENTHAL, p. 55] "The unique demands and inherent risks of teaching the Holocaust," says Richard Libowitz, "point to rejection of an instructor who merely instructs, in favor of the professor who will profess." [LIBOWITZ, p. 65] "The instrument of my return to [a Jewish identity] is not religion," says Jane Delynn, "but the Holocaust. It is where my identity as a Jew lies -- my chosen identification with an event in history that I have declared to be of significance as no other." [DELYNNE, p. 64]

      A public school study guide about the Holocaust, sponsored by the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit, begins with a question: "How is the Holocaust different from other mass murders or 'genocides?'" The volume then champions to the student the "uniqueness" of Jewish suffering:

     "Comparisons to determine which group suffered the worst tragedy

     serve neither the past nor the present. The uniqueness of the Holocaust,

     however, invites us to focus specific attention on it and its lessons for

     modern society." [BOLKOSKY, 1987, p. 13]

     The Holocaust gapes like a wound within the ongoing Jewish "particularist/universalist" tension: What's more important, a larger community of human beings in general, or Jews in particular? The traditional answer, and the renewed answer for many Jews today, is the latter. "It makes no sense," proclaims Alvin Rosenfeld, "to add up all the corpses [killed by the Nazis] without distinction and pile them on some abstract slaughter heap called 'mankind.' [ROSENFELD, p. 160] Rosenfeld, like most Jews, wants to wade through the dead and sort them out: Jews in the rays of light, the rest in shadows. (When Eric Yoffie observed the Muslim victims of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, he couldn't acknowledge the Muslims' own identity. He only saw Jews. "As Jews," he says, "we look at these slaughtered victims and see Jewish corpses. We look at the more than a million refugees and see Jewish faces." [YOFFIE, Military, p. 3] )

     "To cheaply universalize the Holocaust would be a distortion of history," says Elie Wiesel, and then, in vintage Orwellian doublespeak, "The universality of the Holocaust lies in its [Jewish] uniqueness.' [RITTNER, Chap 8] Emil Fackenheim condemns those who "universalize the Holocaust," those who "avoid precisely what ought to arrest philosophical thought. It is escapism into universalism." [FACKENHEIM, Holo, p. 17] "The uniqueness of the Holocaust," insists Gershon Mamlak, "was manifested in a dual form: the way the victims experienced it, and the way the Gentile world performed and/or witnessed it." [MAMLAK, p. 12]  "Of all he events in human history," declares Ivan Avisar, "none is more compelling and disturbing than the Holocaust ... The Holocaust was a unique or unprecedented historical experience ... Hitler's intent to exterminate an entire people is incomparable to any other episode of malice in the annals of human history." [AVISAR, p. vii]

     There is even a post-Holocaust Jewish rationale that encourages guilt in those Jews who still insist upon a universalist approach to other people. Deborah Lipstadt, for instance, claims that

      "The Holocaust ... poses ... fundamental questions for those [Jews]

      who have shunned the particular in Judaism and have embraced the

      universal. Those who have pursued in Judaism's name the causes of

      others and who have denied the legitimacy of specific Jewish concerns

      must recognize that the Holocaust calls many of the premises of their

      belief into question." [LIPSTADT, p. 340]

     Hence, for many Jews there is no space for reflection upon the commonality of human suffering in World War II. In popular Jewish opinion no other people are entitled, or allowed, to share Jewish center stage of Utmost Tragedy.

      "Nothing annoys Jews so much as to be told that other people have suffered," says Liebman and Cohen. "Not a few American Jewish spokesmen have bristled at the use of the words holocaust and even genocide to describe tragedies that have befallen other minorities and nationalities." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 31] 

     This Jewish offense was evidenced, for instance, against Archbishop Desmund Tutu, the Black leader of the Anglican Church of South Africa and internationally known activist against that country's apartheid system. "There is a kind of Jewish arrogance," says Tutu, "one can only call it that ... I sometimes say that apartheid is as evil as Nazism and there have been Jews who say I am insulting them. Jews seem to think they have a corner on the market of suffering." [HOFFMAN, p. 10]

      Many Protestant and Catholic theologians, says Yaakov Ariel, "[have] tried to ascribe a universal significance -- over and above nationality, or religion -- to [Hitler's] murder of millions of innocent people. Jewish spokesmen often denounced such an outlook." [ARIEL, p. 338] Jesse Jackson, during a visit to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in 1979, created a wake of Jewish anger and indignation when he made the unpardonable sin of stating that the Jewish Holocaust "was one of the greatest tragedies of all times," instead of saying it was "unique." [CARSON, p. 135] Even the pope's beatification of Edith Stein, a Jewish woman who became a Catholic nun and was murdered as a Jew at Auschwitz, has offended Jewish sensibilities as a symbolic Christian appropriation, and honing in, of Jewish special suffering. [VIVIANO, p. 354-355]

     In 1982, an international conference in Israel on "The Holocaust and Genocide" drew attack from Jews "who feared the uniqueness of their tragedy would somehow be compromised by the conference's inclusion of other victims, including Armenians, Tibetans, Gypsies, and Cambodians." [LIBOWITZ, p. 272]  A few years later, in giving a speech memorializing Holocaust victims, President Carter offended -- among many others -- a professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yehuda Baer, for daring to mention victims other than Jews. Carter was trying to "de-Judaize" the Holocaust, wrote Baer, which was "an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes" based on "a certain paradoxical envy on the part of non-Jewish groups directed at the Jewish experience of the Holocaust." "To Baer," notes David Stannard, "the simple acknowledgement of the suffering of others constituted Jew-hating." [STANNARD, p. 168] Stannard, a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii,  notes the preposterous position taken on the subject by Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish Studies at Emory University:

       "Lipstadt regards as her enemy anyone who expressed doubts about the

       utter singularity in all of human history of Jewish suffering and death

       under Hitler ... In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the

       Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition --

       and like [former Ku Klux Klan member] David Duke -- a crypto-Nazi."

       [STANNARD, p. 168]

     British scholar John Fox notes Lipstadt's position on the Holocaust subject to be "nothing less than intellectual fascism." [FOX, J., 3-19-2000, p. 47, 48]

      Clinging tightly to the moral and political leverage afforded by the "uniqueness" of the Jewish experience in World War II, Christians are not welcome to search for parallel unity (in their own millions of dead) in the circle of suffering. "The Jewish community," Michael Berenbaum smugly notes, "has become ... deeply suspicious of Roman Catholic efforts to discover -- some would say invent -- a tradition of Roman Catholic martyrology in the Holocaust." [BERENBAUM, STRUGGLE, p. 85]

     A chorus of Jewish critics led an attack upon a non-Jewish novelist, William Styron, for daring to write about the death camps in a novel from a non-Jewish perspective. Theodore Ziolkowski cites Alvin Rosenfeld as a typical complainant: "Rosenfeld's attack on ... Styron is based on two premises: an unwillingness to see the universal implications of the Holocaust and indignation at Styron's assumption that a Polish Catholic woman could be viewed as a representative victim of the camps." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 602]

     "Some," says Jeffrey Shandler, "have come to regard the Holocaust as specifically, even exclusively, Jewish cultural property (literary scholar Edward Alexander describes it as the Jews' 'moral capital') that requires vigilant protection against misuse or misappropriation." [SHANDLER, p. 162] Alexander, a Jewish professor at the University of Washington, claims that the Holocaust serves  "a Jewish claim to a specific suffering that was of the 'highest,' the most distinguished grade available." Those who dare to debunk such bizarrely elitist Jewish claims about their experience under Hitler, he says, are seeking "to plunder the moral capital which the Jewish people, through its unparalleled suffering in World War II, had unwittingly accumulated." [STANNARD, p. 193]

      (In 1998 even the DC Comics company came under Jewish attack for robbing them of their unique "moral capital." In a new comic, Superman visits the concentration camps of World War II. The sin to Jews is that, although refugees wear yarmulkes and sport names like Moishe and Baruch in the comics, the word "Jew" (or, for that matter, Catholic or German) is never mentioned. Seeking to be politically correct and to avoid offence to anyone, the cartoon creators unwittingly exposed themselves to public attack by the Anti-Defamation League and others for "rob [bing] the [Jewish] victims of their identity." [NEWSDAY, p. A22]

     "The world owes Jews," demands Alan Dershowitz, "and the Jewish state [of Israel], which was built on the ashes of the Holocaust, a special understanding." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 136] Eliezer Berkovits claims the Holocaust and the subsequent creation of modern Israel renders the Jews "as the point for the crystallization of moral direction in history. That is the ultimate significance of being the chosen people of God." [BRESLAUER, p. 10] "[The] Holocaust stands alone in time," decreed Menachem Rosensaft, "as an aberration within history." [LOPATE, p. 290] "The uniqueness of Jewish destiny," suggests Jacob Agus, "consists principally in the fact that the Jew is the litmus test of civilized humanity." [AGUS, p. 363]

      Lawrence Langer calls the Holocaust "an episode without parallel in history or eschatology." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 683] Alvin Rosenfeld calls it "a major turning point in history and in the history of consciousness." [ROSENFELD, p. 10] For Emil Fackenheim, the word "Holocaust" is so sacred that "it has seemed to me that this word should be used sparingly lest it be used in vain." [FACKENHEIM, p. 16]  George Kren and Leon Rappoport "hold that the Holocaust was unique because no other event of the modern era has so undercut the moral/humanitarian credibility of western civilization." [KREN, Was, p. 22]  Irving Greenberg and Rosenfeld declared that "the Holocaust is an event of such magnitude that it creates a historical force field of its own.' [BRESLAUER, p. 6]

    "This curious elitism," argues Theodore Ziolkowski, "reduces a tragedy of humanity to an episode in Jewish mythology ... [Such elitist commentators] unwittingly evade history by mythifying it." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 683] And what's worse, says Jewish author Philip Lopate, "is the degree to which such an apocalyptic religious-mythological rendering of historical events has come to be accepted by the culture at large." [LOPATE, p. 290]

     Sociologist John Murray Cuddihy is particularly insightful, and damning, in unearthing the latent -- and classically Jewish -- meaning behind the Jewish dictate of incomparable Jewish suffering in World War II:

            "This [Jewish Holocaust] exemption from comparison is a heady

             privilege ... Among the many items selected by culture to symbolize

             status, incomparability alone is inimitable." [CUDDIHY, p. 77]

 
     "In Jewish discourse on the Holocaust," says Peter Novick, in an unusual Jewish perspective, "we have not just a competition [among other alleged "victims"] for recognition but a competition for primacy. This takes many forms. Among the most widespread and pervasive is an angry insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust ... The assertion that the Holocaust is unique -- like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable -- is, in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours is comprehensible; unilike ours is representable." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 9]

     In other words, classical Judaism's insistent self-heralding as a "nation apart" from others and its innate class-conscious self-image of all-encompassing uniqueness and exceptionality, is the conceptual master for Jewish understanding of their holy Holocaust, a latent religious-based encoding of their role in the World War II disaster, a perspective that is actually militantly enforced upon non-Jews from a position of Jewish "prestige as a control system." [CUDDIHY, Holo, p. 72]   Cuddihy underscores the racist undercurrent to the "Holocaust uniqueness" claim as a latent expression of the Chosen People paradigm, noting that Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim even calls the non-Jewish dead at the Nazi concentration camps "quasi-Jews," [CUDDIHY, p. 67] marginalized stand-ins for those really worth counting. "The 'Holocaust' is the Jews' special thing," says Rabbi Jacob Neusner, "It is what sets them apart from others while giving them a claim upon others. That is why Jews insist on the 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust." [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978] "Let us be frank," says Cuddihy, "National priority and national uniquity (uniqueness) are both covert claims to superiority, parallel paths to the same summit, and that summit is what [Robert] Merton calls 'ethnocentric glory.'" [CUDDIHY, Holo, p. 74] ... Like social class symbols, cultural symbols serve 'to influence in a desired direction other persons' judgments' of the group that is the symbol's carrier." [CUDDIHY, p. 75]

     Uniqueness linked to incomparable suffering makes deep demands upon others. "Beyond moral privileges," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "the Jews feel that their suffering entitles them to a special consideration from the non-Jewish world. Groups (and individuals) often make much of their history of suffering as a way of strengthening their claims to certain rewards." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 44] "Out of this peculiar [Jewish] emphasis on suffering," noted Rabbi Richard Singer in 1960 when the post-Holocaust political dimensions of this had hardly begun to take shape, " there has developed an attitude, a new attitude of vicarious suffering -- a feeling among numbers of Jews today that because other Jews suffered and died they, the living, are somehow entitled to special consideration." [ZUKERMAN, p. 66] "One of the characteristics of nationalist Jews," said William Zukerman (noting, also in 1960, the commentary of Rabbi Singer), "is to look upon the Jewish group as isolated from the rest of humanity, particularly when it comes to suffering. They see only Jewish suffering and do not see the context of the entire world scene. The result is a distorted historical picture, showing Jews as the only sufferers, while the rest of the world presumably basks in happiness. As compensation for their suffering, it is assumed that Jews, as a group, are somehow entitled to special privileges which other people do not deserve (for instance, special immigration facilities, special fund raising, emigration from communist countries, etc.). [ZUKERMAN, p. 66]

     There are few Jewish voices like those of Singer and Zukerman today. On the contrary. The "unique" suffering of Jews affords the possibility to make even this preposterously manipulative  declaration by Jewish journalist-novelist Ann Roiphe: "The scale and terror of the Holocaust makes it clear that Jews are innocent and a wronged people, murdered and abandoned to their fate. This makes Christians, even Christians who were not in Europe at the time, a guilty people." [ROIPHE, CHANES, p. 461] Among those many who have succumbed to Jewish Holocaust mythology demands in the name of "interfaith dialogue" include the Catholic Church of France which in 1997 formally "asked for forgiveness" from Jews for Church "silence" when the Nazis were routinely slaughtering all who opened their mouths in protest of anything, and the Pope himself who entertained a historic first by hosting a menorah, symbolic candles of Jewish victims, and "7500 spectators" in the Vatican to "commemorate the Holocaust." [LA TIMES, 4-8-94, p. A10]

      Such Christian requests to Jews for "foregiveness" are the results of a long Jewish lobbying and pressure effort, heavily leaning on guilt-based non-Jewish associates who seek to bask in the Christian tenets of compassion and religious tolerance. In the late 1970s, for example, the largely Jewish "National Conference of Christians and Jews" (with branches in 77 major U. S. cities) published "A Holocaust Memorial Service for Christians." The volume appeals to a grandiose universalistic morality, and suggests that Christians incorporate, on a yearly basis, "a special day" (April 22) in their religious services to pay homage to the Holocaust, [NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, p. 3] particularly underscoring that righteous Christians are morally bound to protect Jews from anti-Jewish hostility. [p.4] Likewise, "Christianity's role in the Holocaust must not remain hidden or unstated. It must be faced, no matter how painful an undertaking it may be." [p. 4] A section even tries to diffuse the obvious question, which is given a bold-type heading: "Are You Asking Us to Lay a 'Guilt Trip' on Our People?" [p. 5] For those who might wonder why the Holocaust is so suddenly relevant, "more than thirty years" after the fact, a small chapter explains that, through the prism of the Holocaust, we all "can better prepare ourselves to meet the chalenges of the day," [p. 6] (i.e., the consequences of Jewish particularism may be used to explore generalized principles of human universalism, even though the Holocaust must be held to be separate, distinct, from all other historic atrocities). In subsuming Christian identity beneath that of Jewish martyrs, "Many Christians have wished to have a Christian symbol attached to the yellow Star of David when they wear it ... If you choose to use the Yellow Star as a symbol, and wish to have some Christian identification on it, it is recommended that you use the Sign of the Fish, the oldest Christian symbol. This is preferable to using the Cross." [p. 11] (And why can't Christians wear the cross? Because Jews hate the cross, and from time immemorial have understood it -- rival religion -- as a sign of evil. Spitting at the Christian symbol is an old Jewish tradition, long before the Holocaust). [See citations elsewhere] The National Conference of Christians and Jews have even provided a page-long prayer for Christian penance for the Holocaust, with the recurring refrain: "For the sin which we have committed before You" -- 14 times. [p. 15]

      Joel Epstein, a professor of history in Michigan, in an overview of "world civilization" textbooks, uses in-depth addressment of the Holocaust and its alleged "uniqueness" as his criteria for recommending them or not. "The uniqueness of the Holocaust in history needs to be explained," he says. One textbook which "recognize [d] the fact that the extermination of the Jews was the most shocking aspect of the war, an attempt at genocide on an unprecedented scale," falls short of Epstein's standards. "If the centrality of the Holocaust to this process had been emphasized," he advises, "this text would be noteworthy. As it is, however, such emphasis is lacking and the uniqueness of the event is not articulated clearly." [EPSTEIN, p. 65, 70]

      In discussing classroom methodologies to teach the Holocaust, Richard Libowitz observes that

       "The Holocaust is a unique event in human history ... Efforts to

       constrain knowledge within standard lines will conceal the uniqueness,

       effecting diminishing student perceptions ... Students must be taken ...

       to the edge of the abyss and made to look down ... Traditional

       pedagogical norms caution educators against subjective involvement

       with their materials; the Holocaust, on the contrary, demands entry

       into the event." [LIBOWITZ, Asking, p. 63]

     A Jewish professor of twentieth century history at Miami University in Ohio, Allan Winkler, noted in 1996 that