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.”
