Another way of posing the question is — aside from victimhood and making a religion out of the Holocaust, is there any way of uniting Jews?
The answer is probably not.
A Jewish identity rooted in the Holocaust is good for fundraising at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and at the ADL and other Jewish victimhood organizations but it is lousy for Jews and for the non-Jews who are harmed by Jewish preoccupation with their own victimhood.
A group never becomes preoccupied with its own victimhood without strengthening its in-group identity and developing more negative views of outsiders. That’s fine if Jews choose to live in the Jewish state, but to have such victimhood Jews in their midst is really bad for gentile nations.
If you think Western civilization is by and large a good thing, you’ll hate Jews whose identity is primarily based on a feeling of victimhood at the hands of goyim.
Except when you are looking at things through the eyes of faith, there are no good guys and bad guys in the universe. There are only different forms of life struggling to survive and to propagate their genes.
Being an American Jew, more than anything else, means remembering the Holocaust.
That’s what nearly three quarters of Jewish Americans said, according to the Pew Research Center’s landmark 2013 study on American Jewry. Asked to pick attributes “essential” to being Jewish, more Jews said Holocaust remembrance than leading an ethical or moral life, caring about Israel or observing Jewish law.
If anyone personified that consensus, it was Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who through his writing and speaking turned himself into perhaps the leading moral voice of American Jewry. Some quarters of the left derided him for, in their view, being insufficiently sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But in a fragmented community, he was the closest thing American Jews had to a unifier.
Regardless of religious observance or thoughts on Israel, nearly all Jewish Americans agreed with Wiesel’s message of remembering the genocide and preventing another one.
Following Wiesel’s death on July 2, will another consensus leader rise to take his place? Or is the American Jewish community too divided to unite under any one person’s moral voice?
