Luke Ford

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

“Holocaust envy” contends with “Holocaust possessiveness.” Claims by others that they have experienced genocide or a holocaust — claims that are indeed sometimes hyperbolic — are treated as felonious assault…

Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically — subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they’re unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the “inexplicable mystery” of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious. Consider “awe,” which my dictionary defines as “a mixed emotion of reverence, dread and wonder.” For how many Jews does the word describe their emotions when contemplating God? For how many their emotions when contemplating the Holocaust? It has become standard practice to use the term “sacred” to describe the Holocaust and everything connected with it. “Sacred Image, Sacred Text” was the title of an exhibition of art dealing with the Holocaust at the B’nai B’rith’s Klutznick Museum in Washington. Survivors’ accounts are routinely described as sacred, as are the survivors themselves: “the American Jewish equivalent of saints and relics,” says Leon Wieseltier, himself the son of a survivor. An important influence in all of this, of course, has been Elie Wiesel, the most influential American interpreter of the Holocaust. Like Greenberg, Wiesel sees the Holocaust as “equal to the revelation at Sinai” in its religious significance; attempts to “desanctify” or “demystify” the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism. And Wiesel, with his insistence that “any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened,” appears to have persuaded many Jews to treat the Holocaust as something of a “mystery religion,” with survivors having privileged (priestly) authority to interpret the mystery. “The survivor has become a priest,” the education director of Yad Vashem said, with some irritation: “because of his story, he is holy.”

…The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is the principal symbol and “address” of American Jewry, our “epistle to the gentiles” about what it means to be Jewish. The museum on the Mall is matched by dozens of smaller Holocaust museums in cities across the country. …[T]hese monuments to suffering and death are described by their builders as “the natural site for interfaith services”; they function to “explain our Jewish heritage and our Jewish needs to the Gentile as well as to the Jew.”

…Since the 1970s, the Holocaust has come to be presented — come to be thought of — as not just a Jewish memory but an American memory. In a growing number of states the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools is legislatively mandated. Instructions for conducting “Days of Remembrance” are distributed throughout the American military establishment, and commemorative ceremonies are held annually in the Capitol Rotunda. Over the past twenty years every president has urged Americans to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. …How did this European event come to loom so large in American consciousness?

A good part of the answer is the fact — not less of 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. This is not, of course, a matter of any “Jewish conspiracy” — Jews in the media do not dance to the tune of the “elders of Zion.” It’s not even a matter of Jews in the media per se, which is an old story, but of what sort of Jews. Beginning in the 1970s, a cohort of Jews who either didn’t have much in the way of Jewish concerns or were diffident about voicing the concerns they did have came to be replaced by a cohort that included many for whom those concerns were more deeply felt and who were more up-front about them. In large part the movement of the Holocaust from the Jewish to the general American arena resulted from private and spontaneous decisions of Jews who happened to occupy strategic positions in the mass media.

But that movement was not completely private and spontaneous. If, as many in Jewish organizations believed, Americans could be made more sympathetic to Israel, or to American Jews, through awareness of the Holocaust, efforts had to be made to spread that awareness throughout American society. Blu Greenberg, the wife of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, wrote that she had originally favored exclusively Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust; such occasions were “a moment to withdraw into the embrace of one’s group.” After attending an interfaith Yom HaShoah ceremony, however, she found it “moving and comforting to see Christians share tears with us, acknowledge Christian guilt, and commit themselves to the security of Israel.” Indeed, even the aim of promoting awareness of the Holocaust among Jews — for “survivalist” or other purposes — could be accomplished only by making that awareness general. “For Jews to solidify the place of the Holocaust within Jewish consciousness,” wrote Michael Berenbaum of the Washington Holocaust Museum, “they must establish its importance for the American people as a whole.”

American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:

The most common Jewish response to the charge that Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics has been to protest that it was others, not they, who were engaged in competition. Jews were the aggrieved party — “they are stealing the Holocaust from us,” said Elie Wiesel; others were illegitimately appropriating language and imagery to which they were not entitled… The use of the word “ghetto” for black slums were frequently cited as an example of “stealing the Holocaust”: “there is no barbed wire across 125th Street and there are no guard towers”; “no place in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago was even remotely like Buchenwald in 1938 or Warsaw in 1942 or Auschwitz in 1944. The most commonly expressed Jewish grievance was the use of the words “Holocaust” and “genocide” to describe other catastrophes. This sense of grievance was rooted in the conviction, axiomatic in at least “official” Jewish discourse, that the Holocaust was unique. Since Jews recognized the Holocaust’s uniqueness — that it was “incomparable,” beyond any analogy — they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable…

Over the years, various grounds for the Holocaust’s uniqueness have been offered, but many, for one or another reason, were found wanting: Stalin killed more innocents than Hitler; over the centuries many other targeted populations suffered greater proportional losses than did European Jews during World War II. Other criteria presented other difficulties. The most comprehensive argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust was also the most radical. Whereas many other writers were willing to acknowledge that there had been other genocides but only one Holocaust, Steve Katz, in a book of more than seven hundred pages (the first of three projected volumes), argued that even the word “genocide,” if correctly understood, could be applied only to the travail of European Jewry in World War II. It was on the basis of this book that Katz was named head of the Washington Holocaust Museum — which suggests the appeal of its argument.

…the very idea of uniqueness is fatuous, since any event — a war, a revolution, a genocide — will have significant features that it shares with events to which it might be compared as well as features that differentiate it from others. The claim that an event — as opposed to some features of an event — is unique can be sustained only by gerrymandering: deliberately singling out one or more distinctive features of the event and trivializing or sweeping under the rug whose features that it shares with other events to which it might be compared… [Katz] writes that while the Final Solution had many other features, “only the element of intentionality can serve as the individuating criterion by which to distinguish the Sho’ah from other instances of mass death.” Translation: I was determined to find that feature of the Holocaust which set it apart — made it unique — and this is the one I settled on…

The question transcends Katz’s book, which is of interest to us only insofar as it is the most systematic exposition of the doctrine of uniqueness, which sits astride all of contemporary Jewish discourse on the Holocaust. Katz, like virtually everyone who makes this argument, asserts again and again that “unique” doesn’t mean “worse,” that the claim is not for greater but only for different Jewish victimization, that no one is saying the Holocaust is more evil than other atrocities, just that it’s…unique. Such disavowals are either naive or, more often, disingenuous. They are naive or disingenuous because all the talk of uniqueness takes place in a context in which, for various purposes, atrocities are constantly compared. And the talk of uniqueness coexists with, overlaps with, and is inextricably intertwined with repeated insistence that comes from secularists like Raul Hilberg, for whom the Holocaust is “the benchmark, the defining moment in the drama of good and evil”; from rabbi like Michael Berenbaum, for whom it is “the paradigmatic manifestation of evil.” The claim that the assertion of the Holocaust’s uniqueness is not a form of invidious comparison produces systematic doubletalk. A rabbi, in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, writes that “it is degrading, even ghoulish, to seek to provide preeminence in suffering.” But, he continues, “the holocaust was unique,” and proceeds to offer a statistical demonstration. Does anyone (except, just conceivably, those making the argument) believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything other than a claim for preeminence?

“Holocaust envy” contends with “Holocaust possessiveness.” Claims by others that they have experienced genocide or a holocaust — claims that are indeed sometimes hyperbolic — are treated as felonious assault.