Luke Ford

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

…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.”

…Without doubt the most important moment in the entry of the Holocaust into general American consciousness was NBC’s presentation, in April 1978, of the miniseries Holocaust. Close to 100 million Americans watched all or most of the four-part, 9 1/2-hour program… The Anti-Defamation League distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-page tabloid The Record to promote the drama. Jewish organizations successfully lobbied major newspapers to serialize Gerald Green’s novelization of his television play, or to publish special inserts on the Holocaust. The American Jewish Committee, in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for viewers; teachers magazines carried other curricular material tied to the program. Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and organized advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was designated “Holocaust Sunday”; various activities were scheduled in cities across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day.

Those activities were directed at gentiles. But, following Berenbaum’s dictum that making the Holocaust important to all Americans would also make it more important to Jews, the NBC miniseries offered an unmatched opportunity to further that task as well… The director of a Jewish school in Pittsburgh called Holocaust a “shock treatment for developing Jewish identity.” …The study guides for Jewish young people, prepared by a consortium of Jewish organizations, were rather different. Christian anti-Semitism and Eastern European collaborators were frequently mentioned. There were disparaging references to how assimilated the family of Jewish protagonists were, and that they weren’t bothered by the son’s marriage to a gentile…

Not everyone was willing to endorse Wiesel’s claim that the Holocaust was a sacred mystery, whose secrets were confined to a priesthood of survivors. In a diffuse way, however, the assertion that the Holocaust was a holy event that resisted profane representation, that it was uniquely inaccessible to explanation or understanding, that survivors had privileged interpretative authority — all these themes continue to resonate… Many also came to believe that the Holocaust was uniquely inexplicable…

A substantial literature has developed on special problems that are alleged to exist in portraying the Holocaust in film, in fiction, and in scholarship. But it is a very academic literature — written by and for academics, almost always published in academic journals, often jargon-ridden…

The airing of the series, in January 1979, became the turning point in Germany’s long-delayed confrontation with the Holocaust…

…in 1993 public officials from the president on down were so actively promoting Spielberg’s film that it was hard to find room on the bandwagon. Free showings for high school students were arranged (during class time) across the country, as a contribution to their moral education, following the example of Oprah Winfrey, who announced on her talk show that “I’m a better person as a result of seeing Schindler’s List.”

…But nowadays, for a great many people, the real number of Holocaust victims is eleven million: six million Jews and five million non-Jews…

The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer reports that [Simon] Wiesenthal acknowledged to him in a private conversation that he simply invented [the numbers]… Wiesenthal’s invention of “eleven million” was bizarre…

…in return for a subsidy for his program of tracking down war criminals, a California rabbi obtained the use of his name for what became a highly visible Holocaust institution, the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Eleven million” was part of the baggage that came with the name…

At a ceremony on the White House lawn in honor of Israel’s thirtieth birthday, President Jimmy Carter announced that he was setting up a commission to explore creating a national memorial to “the six million who were killed in the Holocaust.” …Carter’s initiative was an attempt to placate American Jews, who were increasingly alienated by what they saw as the president’s “excessive evenhandedness” in dealing with Israelis and Palestinians. If the estrangement continued, it could be devastating for Carter’s prospects for reelection… The final staff discussions of the proposed memorial were conducted amid all the hoopla over NBC’s Holocaust.

On the day after Carter’s announcement of a proposal to commemorate “the six million,” one of [Stuart] Eizenstadt’s aides suggested to her boss that the new commission might “consider expanding this to eleven million,” following the example of the Simon Wiesenthal Center… This redefinition was, of course, deeply offensive to [Elie] Wiesel…

The following months saw an intense struggle between Wiesel and Jewish staffers in the White House over how the Holocaust should be described — who would be included. It was “morally repugnant,” said one presidential aide, “to create a category of second-class victims of the Holocaust as Mr. Wiesel would have us do.”

…Though Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had no role in the initiative that created the museum, they came, under the leadership of Wiesel, to dominate the council… When one survivor, Sigmund Strochlitz, was sworn in as a council member, he announced that it “unreasonable and inappropriate to ask survivors to share the term Holocaust…to equate our suffering…with others.” At one council meeting, another survivor, Kalman Sultanik, was asked whether Daniel Trocme, murdered at Maidanek for rescuing Jews and honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, could be remembered in the museum’s Hall of Remembrance. “No,” said Sultanik, because “he didn’t die as a Jew… The six million Jews died differently.”

There were also attempts to mobilize Jewish opinion at large against blurring the distinction between the victimhood of Jews and that of others. Survivor Henryk Grynberg even objected to the ancillary role accorded to gentiles in Wiesel’s phrase about other being, “as night descended…swept into this net of death.” This was, Grynberg said, “absolutely false.”: “Those millions of others would have perished in the war even if the Holocaust had never taken place.” Children of survivors were often among those who insisted on the distinction between the deaths of gentiles and of Jews. Gentiles, said one, “died a death invented for the Jews…victims of a ‘solution’ designed for others.” For another child of survivors, dismayed by what he saw as the museum’s blurring of the issue, the deaths of gentile victims “were of a different, non-theological order, untouched by the mysteries that reign at the heart of…the ‘Tremendum.'” Yehuda Bauer enlisted in the battle against what he called the “Wiesenthal-Carter definition.” It reflected, he wrote, gentile “envy” of the Jews’ experience in the Holocaust, which “would seem to be an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes.”

…In the end, largely as a result of the influence of survivors on the council, “other victims” wound up receiving little more than perfunctory mention in the museum’s permanent exhibition…

Americans are exhorted that they must “confront” or “remember” the Holocaust, but what is it that they are to confront or remember?

…Poles and Ukrainians…never had the political, cultural or financial resources to press their case. this was even more true of Gypsies, whose proportional losses to the Nazi murder program approximated that of Jews. And there were no lobbyists for former Soviet prisoners of the Germans, whose losses through deliberate starvation, disease, and execution ran into the millions.

…The actual number of gays who died or were killed in the camps appears to be around five thousand… But unlike other groups that wanted to be recognized as victims of the Holocaust, gays do have political and cultural resources, and they don’t face the same hostility to inclusion…encountered by Poles and Ukrainians. Their inclusion, moreover, could be seen as a contribution to the cause of combating homophobia. And many of their spokesmen, who press for inclusion, are Jewish.

* We respond not to events, but to representations of events.

* In the end, it hardly seemed to matter whether one was learning the lessons of the Holocaust or the lessons of the Potato Famine, because the lessons were all pretty much the same: tolerance and diversity were good, hate was bad.

* Though some Holocaust educators disapprove, role-playing games continue to be a feature of many Holocaust courses, and this certainly increases student interest.