American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
…It’s not clear how the myth of Israel as the world’s atonement for complicity in the Holocaust developed… There has been an apparent slide from the belief that the United States and its allies were guilty, to the belief that they did feel guilty — a tenuous progression. Some seem to confuse sympathy for the survivors, which there was in abundance, and guilt for the Holocaust, of which there is no contemporary evidence — a strange equation. American sympathy for the victims of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, or the Armenian earthquake of 1988, and the offering of aid to their victims implied no feelings of guilt for the events that produced the suffering.
…Emissaries from the Yishuv deliberately concentrated Jewish survivors in the American Occupation Zone of Germany so that the United States would be led to demand that the British allow them into Palestine. Recruitment for illegal immigration was shifted to relatively intact Jewish communities so that the Yishuv could be reinforced while the DP camps would keep up the pressure. Overall, illegal immigration was only secondarily meant to help survivors. In the words of the Israeli historian Anita shapira, it was “first and foremost a theater in the battle for the Jewish state.” And it was to a great extent a public relations battle. The voyage of the Exodus, loaded with survivors who eventually were returned to Germany, was the greatest triumph of this battle. The captain of the ship believed it would be possible to land the passengers of the shores of Palestine, but he was overruled by the senior Mossad representative on board: the goal was to “show how poor and weak and helpless we were, and how cruel the British were.”
Inside the DP camps, emissaries from the Yishuv organized survivor activity — crucially, the testimony the DPs gave to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the UN Special Committee on Palestine about where they wished to go. The results were gratifying to the proponents of a Jewish state. In response to a UN survey, more than 97 percent said that Palestine was their goal. Many wrote down, “First choice, Palestine. Second choice, crematorium.” …The Jewish Agency envoys reported home that they had been successful in preventing the appearance of “undesirable” witnesses at the hearings. One wrote to his girlfriend in Palestine that “we have to change our style and handwriting constantly so that they will think that the questionnaires were filled in by the refugees.”
…By the time of the birth of Israel there was a certain weariness with the DP problem in Germany among some Jewish elites. Chaplain Abraham Klausner, a militant Zionist who had worked with Jewish survivors and, earlier, closely identified with them, sounded the alarm:
“The great majority of the people are idle… The number of people involved in the black market is estimated at a minimum of 30%… There is hardly a moral standard to which the people adhere.”
…The goal of the campaign’s initiators was to bring in 100,000 Jewish survivors. But since it was impolitic and contrary to American tradition for legislation to specify the religion of immigrants, and since Jews were estimated to comprise 25% of all DPs, they pressed for a law that would bring in a total of 400,000 DPs over four years. To this end, the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons was established — ostensibly nondenominational, but in fact largely funded and staffed by Jews.
…An official of the American Jewish Committee described the desired kind of publicity: “where the case story is of a non-Jew, or one who plans to settle elsewhere than in New York or Chicago.” A Jewish CCDP staff member responded with frustration to a photograph in the New York Daily News that showed a Jewish-looking couple disembarking: “Something has got to be done to ease up or completely eliminate [this] type of publicity… We have been spending thousands of dollars to try to get across the idea that displaced persons are not all Jews, and if we continue to see such photographs…our campaign — public-relations-wise — is a dead duck.
…To an unknowable extent, survivors’ silence was a response to “market” considerations: few were interested. (Thirty and forty years later, with increased demand, there was increased supply.)
…Just as Jewish groups’ principled declarations against totalitarianism did not prevent them from seeking entry for Jews who had been Communists, so the Christian groups’ equally sincere hostility to totalitarianism did not prevent them from seeking admission for their coreligionists who were former Nazis.
…One constraint was fear of confirming a long-standing and widely held negative perception of Jews. No lesson in comparative theology was as assiduously taught in Sunday schools across the United States as the contrast between the Old Testament God of Vengeance and the New Testament God of Love and Forgiveness. Recent experience had shown its continued currency. Toward the end of the war, President Roosevelt had casually endorsed, then quickly repudiated, a plan advanced by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau for the permanent deindustrialization (“pastoralization”) of Germany. Secretary of War Henry Stimson privately called the Morgenthau Plan “semitism gone wild for vengeance.”
…The popular association of Jews with Communism dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the “alien agitators” deported from the United States during the Red Scare after World War I had been Jews. In the interwar years the Communist Jew was a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda in both the United States and Europe….
Lucy Dawidowicz — later well known as an historian of the Holocaust, but in these years the American Jewish Committee’s expert on the percentage of Jews among ‘hostile witnesses’ before various investigative bodies. Jews, she found, often made up 75 percent or more of the totals. Worst of all, producing something near panic among mainstream Jewish organizations, was the number of Jews figuring in espionage prosecutions: the Amerasia case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon case — culminating in that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations, the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass.
Jewish organizations worked frantically to combat the Jew-Communist equation, but it was a difficult brief. They could insist, correctly, that only a small proportion of Jews were Communists, or even well disposed toward the Soviet Union. But it was also correct, and becoming manifest, that a great many — perhaps most — American Communists in these years were Jews.
…Jewish organizations, throughout the fifties and well into the sixties, worked on a variety of fronts to prevent, or at least limit, the association of Jews with Communism in the public mind. Their principal co-operative venture was the ‘Hollywood Project,’ in which they jointly employed a West Coast representative who lobbied movie producers to avoid any unsympathetic representations of Jews. A good deal of this lobbying dealt with the Jew-Communist issue. The producer of I Married a Communist promised to see that no Communist character had a ‘name that can even remotely be construed as Jewish…
The inward turn on the part of much of American Jewish leadership, their insistence that ‘Is it good for the Jews?’ be the first, if not the only, question that Jews ask themselves — inevitably mandated a rightward turn as well. By the 1970s Jews were preeminent among the ‘haves’ in American society, and the gap between Jews and non-Jew, in income as well as in representation in all elite positions, widened over subsequent decades. Jews had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the more equal distribution of rewards which had been the aim of liberal social policies … The political movement called neo-conservatism was almost exclusively a Jewish affair; Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, became America’s best-known conservative magazine.
…The hard-line anti-Soviet articles in its monthly magazine, Commentary, were, according to Norman Podhoretz, “part of a secret program to demonstrate that not all Jews were communists.” One of the [American Jewish] Committee’s staff members secured agreements from Time and Life and several New York newspapers not to publish letters from readers commenting on the Jewishness of accused Communists…
One Jewish official complained to a colleague that American Jews were “not taking anywhere near the measures or using the efforts in combating Communism as they do against Nazism.”
…One should never confuse the calculated public posture of Jewish officialdom with the “around the kitchen table” feelings of American Jewry, and especially not with respect to cold war inhibitions about discussing the Holocaust… Without official sanction, it could not become a public communal emblem; without official reinforcement, it tended, at least for many, to decline in salience…
While the principal impact of the cold war was to limit talk of the Holocaust, there was one realm in which it could be conscripted to the new crusade. At the center of American Jewish foreign policy during the early cold war was protest against anti-Semitism in the Soviet bloc. A particular target was the trial of Rudolph Slansky and other Jewish leaders of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in late 1952. There is no doubt that Jewish groups were sincere in their protests, and in their anxiety — which abated somewhat after the death of Stalin in early 1953 — that “anti-Zionist” campaigns threatened wider circles of Eastern European Jews. But neither is there any doubt that they were aware of the domestic “defense functions” their protests served. One memorandum on the objectives of the American Jewish Committee’s program to combat Soviet anti-Semitism noted that “even if no Jewish lives were at stake abroad, concern for the security of Jews in the United States would require us to act. Soviet policy opens up opportunities which must not be overlooked…to reinforce certain important aspects of ACJ’s domestic program.” “The Prague trial,” said another, “is the best opportunity we ever had to ‘dissociate Jews from Communism’ in the eyes of the general public.” The summary of a staff discussion noted general agreement that “tremendous Jewish public outcry on the subject will serve to dissociate Jews from Communism in the public mind.” The editor of Commentary was also struck by the “great opportunity” that protests against Soviet anti-Semitism offered at a time of anxiety about the public relations consequences of the Rosenberg case.
Holocaust references abounded. With the Prague trial, announced an article in The New Leader, “Stalin is ready for his ‘final solution of the Jewish question.’ Stalin’s goal, said an editorial a week later, “is the liquidation of the remnants left by Hitler.” “Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,” said an article in Commentary. “He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe…”
* Despite the broad scope of the language adopted, over the next fifty years, which saw tens of millions die in actions that were, by the UN definition, clearly genocidal, the United Nations has never invoked the procedure for charging the crime of genocide. From the outset, “genocide” was a rhetorical rather than a juridical device, employed for purely propagandistic purposes.
* Genocide was a generic category, and example could be found to fit the needs of the moment. The Holocaust had an awkward specificity, and it was the “wrong atrocity” for contemporary purposes.
* Rabbi Eugene Borowitz in the 1950s: “To raise a cry against the God who tolerated such an enormity [Holocaust] would expose the full extent of Jewish unbelief to Christian America, thereby undermining Judaism’s status as one of America’s equivalent faiths.”
*…An official of the American Jewish Committee recalled that her first assignment, in the late forties, was promoting stories in the press that would show “Jews were as nice as anybody else; show them that they’re football players, they’re not all intellectuals.” It’s worth noting that the three leading promoters of the postwar “consensus school” of American history — which stressed what united Americans rather than what divided them — were all Jews.
* In recent decades, the leading Jewish organizations have invoked the Holocaust to argue that anti-Semitism is a distinctively virulent and murderous form of hatred. But in the first postwar decades their emphasis — powerfully reinforced by contemporary scholarly opinion — was on the common psychological roots of all forms of prejudice. Their research, educational, and political action programs consistently minimized differences between different targets of discrimination. If prejudice and discrimination were all of a set piece, they reasoned that they could serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination against blacks as by tackling anti-Semitism directly.
* What was Anne Frank’s national consciousness? “My first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch! I love the Dutch, I love this country… Even if I have to write to the Queen myself, I will not give up until I have reached my goal.”
* A film about Nazism was shown to thousands of high school students across the country to test its impact. The percentage of students who thought Jews were treated unequally in the United States fell by more than a third after seeing the film: it set a standard of “unequal treatment” that made discriminatory practices in America not worth nothing.
* From a Catholic newspaper called The Tablet: “All this Eichmann business that has been filling the papers lately sadly reminds us that there are still some influential people around who — like Shylock of old — demand their pound of flesh….This identical thinking was back of the notorious Nuremberg trials. And the same believers in ‘an eye for an eye’ continue today unregenerate and unashamed. Forgiveness is not in their makeup, not even forgiveness of the completely vanquished. For these warped minds there is no such word as pardon.”
* The general-circulation magazine that outdid all others in the frequency and vehemence of its attacks on the trial was William F. Buckley’s National Review.
In one editorial, the magazine wrote:
We are in for a great deal of Eichmann in the weeks ahead….We predict the country will tire of it all, and for perfectly healthy reasons. The Christian Church focuses hard on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for only one week out of the year. Three months—that is the minimum estimate made by the Israeli Government for the duration of the trial—is too long….Everyone knows the facts, and has known them for years. There is no more drama or suspense in store for us. …Beyond that there are the luridities….The counting of corpses, and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth….There is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany….it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims…
And finally, who will undertake to give as much publicity to those wretched persons, Jews and non-Jews, who are alive today, but will be dead before this trial is over—the continuing victims of Communist persecution, in China and Russia and Laos and Indonesia and Tibet and Hungary?
* In a meeting with radio and television executives, whose purpose was to influence the spin put on trial coverage, the American Jewish Committee leader John Slawson told them that the object of the [Eichmann] trial was to confront “hatred and totalitarianism…and their continued presence in the world today.” The themes to be stressed were “this must never happen again anywhere to any people” and “this is the result of letting bigotry grow.”
* …almost all scholars have come to accept [Hannah] Arendt’s thesis that the typical Holocaust perpetrator was “terrifyingly normal” and by no means a driven anti-Semite. Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust historian, writes: “The Germans did not have to hate the Jews in order to kill them.. One suspects that, had they received instructions to murder all the Poles, or all the Frenchmen, they would have performed equally well.”
* Why, then, was it so often claimed that [Hannah Arendt] had blamed Jews for not resisting? One partial explanation is that by her offhand characterization of Jewish resistance as inconsequential, she was breaking with the myth of widespread Jewish resistance which, for various reasons, had been assiduously promoted since the war. This was not a Jewish peculiarity: all people who had lived (and died) in Hitler’s Europe inflated their resistance credentials…
* Hannah Arendt: “But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (p. 111) . . . he [Eichmann] did expect more than compliance, be expected—and received, to a truly extraordinary degree—their cooperation. This was “of course the very corner stone” of everything he did. . . . To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. . . . (p. 104)”
* Raul Hilberg tells of presenting to his Doktorvater at Columbia, the tough-minded Marxist emigre scholar Franz Neumann, the portion of his dissertation that talked of how “the Jews had cooperated in their own destruction”: “Neumann did not say that this finding was contradicted by any facts; he did not say that it was underresearched. He said, ‘This is too much to take — cut it out.’ I deleted the passage, silently determined to restore it to my larger work.”
The Holocaust had not, at this point, become as sacralized as it was subsequently to become. But there was already a great deal of visceral resistance to its being discussed in terms other than the confrontation of pure evil and pure virtue. Arendt’s failure to abide by these norms — her insistence on stressing complexity and ambiguity — was clearly, and understandably, one of the things that gave the greatest offense.
* Oscar Cohen, a long-time official of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote to a friend that by the 1970s organized American Jewry had become “an agency of the Israeli government…follow[ing] its directions from day to day.” Popular Jewish attitudes underwent a profound “Israelization.” The hallmark of the good Jew became the depth of his or her commitment to Israel. Failure to fulfill religious obligations, near-total Jewish illiteracy, even intermarriage, were all permissible; lack of enthusiasm for the Israeli cause (not to speak of public criticism of Israel) became unforgivable.
* Leonard Fein, editor of the Jewish magazine Moment [September 1975], wrote:
A complex fear has taken hold of us since October 1973. Its roots lie in our renewed awareness of Jewish vulnerability, now widely perceived as permanent, perhaps even ultimate. . . . The terrible isolation of Israel, the dramatic ascendance of the Arabs . . . Israel’s near total dependence on the United States – all these are aspects of our present gloom.
We cast about uncertainly for a way of making the case for Israel, a way that will be sufficiently compelling to overcome the threat of an oil embargo, of Arab economic reprisal…a way sufficiently compelling to persuade a post-Vietnam America to assume the burdens and the risks of Israel’s defense… With the stakes so large, and the perils so manifest, we search for the most powerful arguments…. We speak tentatively, testing the strength of one approach against another…
Two ADL officials laid out the new case for Israel after the Yom Kippur war:
For a long while after World War II, sympathy for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide . . . helped to open doors long closed to Jews here and abroad. Certainly the State of Israel was one direct beneficiary of world empathy with the Jewish victims of Nazism.
In the postwar world . . . the time during which the non-Jewish world continued to view Jews as oppressed was incredibly short. Within twenty-five years after the photographs of the bestiality in the concentration camps shocked the world . . . Jews had ceased being victims.
We are all attracted to explanations that make clear that our troubles are someone else’s fault, that we are blameless.
* The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex…
Of course, invoking the Holocaust was far from the only rhetorical strategy pursued in mobilizing support for Israel. Depending on the audience and the context, one might argue that Israel was an important American strategic asset or stress the support given to Israel’s enemies by the Soviet Union. With some Christian audiences, biblical claims were effective…
Israel’s cause has never much concerned the American public, whose interest in international affairs is usually limited to those situations which directly engage American interests — and troops. If there has been, over the years, a generally pro-Israel tilt among Americans, this had mostly to do with the fact that Israel was aligned with the West in the cold war; to an unknowable but probably significant extent, it has reflected pervasive, often racist anti-Arab attitudes. The memory of the Holocaust has probably tended to inhibit public criticism of Israel. (The Holocaust made most Americans bend over backward to avoid anything that could be represented, or misrepresented, as anti-Semitism.)
