American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
…the decline in American of an integrationist ethos (which focused on what Americans have in common and what unites us) and its replacement by a particularist ethos (which stresses what differentiates and divides us). The leaders of American Jewry, who once upon a time had sought to demonstrate that Jews were “just like everybody else, except more so,” now had to establish, for both Jews and gentiles, what there was about Jews that made them different…
What does differentiate American Jews from other Americans? On what grounds can distinctive Jewish identity in the United States be based? These days American Jews can’t define their Jewishness on the basis of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs, since most don’t have much in the way of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs, since most don’t have much in the way of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs. They can’t define it by distinctively Jewish cultural traits, since most don’t have any of these either. American Jews are sometimes said to be united by their Zionism, but if so, it is of a thin and abstract variety: most have never visited Israel; most contribute little to, and know even less about, that country. In any case, in recent years Israeli policies have alternatively outraged the secular and the religious, hawks and doves — a less than satisfactory foundation for unity. What American Jews do have in common is the knowledge that but for their parents’ or (more often) grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ immigration, they would have shared the fate of European Jewry…
At bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing number of communities, the child is “twinned” with a young victim 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 Aushwitz 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)…
Another, parallel development in contemporary American culture has furthered this development. There has been a change in the attitude toward victimhood from a status all but universally shunned and despised to one often eagerly embraced. On the individual level, the cultural icon of the strong, silent hero hero is replaced by the vulnerable and verbose antihero. Stoicism is replaced as a prime value by sensitivity. Instead of enduring in silence, one lets it all hang out. The voicing of pain and outrage is alleged to be “empowering” as well as therapeutic…
The historian Charles Maier of Harvard…has described modern American politics as a “competition for enshrining grievances. Every group claims its share of public honor and public funds by pressing disabilities and injustices. National public life becomes the settlement of a collective malpractice suit in which all citizens are patients and physicians simultaneously.” All of this…meshes with the new emphasis on separate group identity rather than on “all-American” identity. In practice, the assertion of the group’s historical victimization — on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation — is always central to the group’s assertion of its distinctive identity.
American Jews were by far the wealthiest, best-educated, most influential, in-every-way-most-successful group in American society — a group that, compared to most other identifiable minority groups, suffered no measurable discrimination and no disadvantages on account of that minority status. But insofar as Jewish identity could be anchored in the agony of European Jewry, certification as (vicarious) victims could be claimed, with all the moral privilege accompanying such certification.
The grounding of group identity and claims to group recognition in victimhood has produced not just a game of “show and tell,” with members of the class waving their arms to be called on to recount their story. In Jewish discourse on the Holocaust we have not just a competition 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… “Your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours is comprehensible; unlike ours is representable.”
Matter-of-fact references by blacks to their “ghetto” (a century-old usage) are condemned as pernicious attempts to steal “our” Holocaust. Let Ted Turner, denouncing what he regards as Rupert Murdoch’s autocratic behavior, refer to Murdoch as “fuhrer”, and the ADL (I’m not making this up) sends out a press release demanding an apology for Turner’s having demeaned the Holocaust. The greatest victory is to wring an acknowledgment of superior victimization from another contender. Officials of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum tell, with great satisfaction, a story of black youngsters learning of the Holocaust and saying, “God, we thought we had it bad.”
Aaprt from being our ticket of admission to this sordid game, American Jewish centering of the Holocaust has had other practical consequences. For many Jews…it has mandated an intransigent and self-righteous posture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the Middle Eastern dispute came to be viewed within a Holocaust paradigm, that tangled imbroglio was endowed with all the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Holocaust. And in this realm the Holocaust framework has promoted as well a belligerent stance toward any criticism of Israel: “Who are you, after what you did to us (or allowed to be done to us), to dare to criticize us now?”
…Judaism has consistently disparaged excessive or overly prolonged mourning. Cremation is forbidden because it would dispose of the body too soon, but also forbidden is embalming, because it would preserve the body too long. Mourn, to be sure, is the message, but then move on: “choose life.” One of the things I find most striking about much of the recent Jewish Holocaust commemoration is how “un-Jewish” — how Christian — it s. I am thinking of the ritual of reverently following the structured pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums, which resembles nothing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa…
We are not just “people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large.
Whatever its origins, the public rationale for Americans’ “confronting” the Holocaust…is that the Holocaust is the bearer of important lessons that we all ignore at our peril… Individuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test…
If there are, in fact, lessons to be drawn from history, the Holocaust would seem an unlikely source, not because of its alleged uniqueness, but because of its extremity. Lessons for dealing with the sorts of issues that confront us in ordinary life, public or private, are not likely to be found in this most extraordinary of events. There are, in my view, more important lessons about how easily we become victimizers to be drawn from the behavior of normal Americas in normal times than from the behavior of the SS in wartime. In any case, the typical “confrontation” with the Holocaust for visitors to American Holocaust museums, and in burgeoning curricula, does not incline us toward thinking of ourselves as potential victimizers — rather the opposite. …And it is accepted as a matter of faith, beyond discussion, that the mere act of walking through a Holocaust museum, or viewing a Holocaust movie, is going to be morally therapeutic, that multiplying such encounters will make one a better person.
…A June 1942 Government Information Manual for the Motion Pictures feared that “there are still groups in this country who are thinking only in terms of their particular group. Some citizens have not been aware of the fact that this is a people’s war, not a group war.”
…It was during the Hitler years that American philo-Semites invented the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to combat innocent, or not so innocent, language that spoke of a totalitarian assault of “Christian civilization.”
…When downplaying Jewish victimhood was conscious and deliberate, the purposes were hardly vicious: to emphasize that the Nazis were the enemy of all mankind, in order both to broaden support for the anti-Nazi struggle and to combat the charge that World War II was a war fought for the Jews.
…The very visible presence of so many Jews among Roosevelt’s closest aides led anti-Semites to call his administration the “Jew Deal.”
…In recent years it has become not just permissible but in some circles laudable for American Jews to assert the primacy of Jewish over American loyalty. “We are Jews first and whatever else second,” says Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the author of a searing indictment of American Jews’ reaction to the Holocaust. But in the early forties such assertions weren’t just (publicly) unsayable; they were, except for some members of the immigrant generation, unthinkable for most American Jews.
…If since the 1960s there has been a revival of ethnic identity in American culture, this followed on a period in which ethnicity as a basis of identity seemed of dubious legitimacy. Indeed, the very word hardly existed… Identity was properly based not on “blood” but on the values, habits, and animating vision of the culture in which you were raised. And that, for most American Jews except older members of the immigrant generation, was American culture. The revulsion against identity (and politics) based on “blood” or tribal loyalties was, of course, powerfully reinforced after 1933 when such notions came to be embodied in Der Sturmer.
…There was an enormous range of responses to the Holocaust among American Jews: on the one hand, instances of psychic devastation verging on derangement; on the other, indifference verging on obliviousness…
The one thing that can be said with reasonable certainty is that, on the whole, recency of immigration — which meant stronger family connections to Europe — was closely tied to the depth of feeling the Holocaust evoked among American Jews. Baldly stated, it was the difference between contemplating that abstraction “European Jewry” being destroyed and imagining Aunt Minnie at Treblinka…
One can’t, of course, infer grassroots Jewish framings of the Holocaust from the statements of Jewish organizational spokesmen or from journalists who wrote for the Jewish press. Such people are unrepresentative of American Jewry as a whole, being simultaneously more Jewish and less Jewish than those for whom they claimed to speak. They are “more Jewish” in the obvious sense that most Jews don’t have their degree of full-time commitment to Jewishness. And they are “less Jewish” in that their public role, the fact that they know what they say is being listened to by a gentile audience, may make their utterances less frank, less expressive of spontaneous feelings, more “correct,” than conversation around the kitchen table…
During the war, Republican campaigners, referring to Roosevelt’s prominent Jewish associate Sidney Hillman, put up billboards across the nation: “It’s Your Country — Why Let Sidney Hillman Run It.” And without necessarily willing it, Republicans were well aware that it was they who benefited from all the talk of “Jew Deal” and “President Rosenfeld.”
…In the early 1940s hardly anyone inside government — and hardly anyone outside it, Jew or gentile — would have understood the phrase “abandonment of the Jews.” The verb “to abandon” has a perfectly straightforward meaning: to withdraw support or help in spite of an existing obligation. The notion that the rescue of threatened foreign civilian populations was an obligation of a country involved in total war didn’t occur to Americans during World War II or in its immediate aftermath.
At the end of the war almost all Americans, certainly the overwhelming majority of American Jews, were proud of the role of the U.S. armed forces in defeating Hitler; justifiably or not, proud of whatever their own contribution to victory had been. What we now call “the Holocaust” — what seemed to most people at the time simply the Jewish portion of the worldwide holocaust that had consumed between fifty and sixty million victims — had come to an end…
…Jews accounted for about one-fifth of those liberated from concentration camps in Germany by American troops.
