Why does the Holocaust play such a large role in American life? And is that a good thing?
American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
…Serb’s central memory, the lost Battle of Kosovo in 1389, symbolizes the permanent Muslim intention to dominate them. The partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century gave that country as “essential” identity as “the Christ among nations,” crucified and recrucified by foreign oppression.
…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. 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.
Another theme was that a twisted evolutionary process had taken place. Samuel Lubell wrote in the Saturday Evening Post: “For the Jews of Eastern Europe the Nazi gas chambers constituted a kind of grim, perverted Darwinianism, psychologically and physically. Six years of systematic extermination — through a process that might be called ‘unnatural selection’ — bred a strange pattern of tenacious survival.” Nazi persecution, Lubell said, “toughened the bodies, hardened the hearts and sharpened the wits of the few who survived… It was a survival not of the fittest, not of the most high-minded or reasonable and certainly not of the meekest, but of the toughest.” “Often,” wrote one local Jewish official, “it was the ‘ex-ghetto’ elements rather than the upper class or white collar groups who survived…, the petty thief or leader of petty thieves who offered leadership to others, or developed techniques of survival.” From Europe, a top leader of the American Jewish Committee wrote to a colleague in New York: “Those who have survived are not the fittest…but are largely the lowest Jewish elements, who by cunning and animal instincts have been able to escape the terrible fat of the more refined and better elements who succumbed.”
The negative views of the survivors held by many American Jews were even more prevalent in the Yishuv…
…Of the countries that supported the establishment of Israel…there is no evidence that any of them were moved by “guilt” for the Holocaust.
…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.)
…there was never much of a black-Jewish alliance on the communal or organizational level. There were a great many individual Jews who over the years had worked on behalf of blacks, but, with some exceptions, they were leftist and liberal activists who had little connection to the Jewish community. This was certainly true of the Jewish lawyers and student volunteers who worked with the black movement in the South in the 1960s…During the McCarthy era, Jewish organizations repeatedly pointed out that it was a fallacy to infer from the fact that a great many (perhaps even a majority of) Communists were Jews that a great many, let alone a majority of, Jews were Communists. The logic was impeccable with respect to alleged Jewish pro-Communism, and equally impeccable with respect to alleged Jewish civil rights activism.
…From the 1970s on, the growth sector in the Jewish organizational world consisted of old and new “schrei gevalt” agencies, while those with other agendas, like the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, declined. The Anti-Defamation League, together with the enormously successful Simon Wiesenthal Center, bombarded Jews with mailings announcing new anti-Semitic threats. (The ADL was especially assiduous in giving wide circulation to anti-Semitic remarks by obscure black hustlers and demagogues, thus vastly increasing their audiences.) Of the dozens of local Jewish newspapers in the United States, all but a handful were organs of local Jewish Federations, whose success in fundraising was directly proportional to the level of anxiety among potential contributors.
…Once the Holocaust became centered in Jewish consciousness, and to the extent that it became centered, it provided a language and framework that deepened anxiety about American anti-Semitism, and a spiraling interaction came into play. Once one starts using imagery from that most extreme of events, it becomes impossible to say anything moderate, balanced or nuanced; the very language carries you along to hyperbole. A journalist who supported black community control of schools was told by Norman Podhoretz in 1969 that he was one of those who wanted to “shove the Jewish people back into the gas ovens.” “The ovens” recurred again and again. In Brooklyn, a militant protester against busing for school integration insisted that “we wouldn’t be led to the ovens this time.”
…As the Holocaust moved from history to myth, it became the bearer of “eternal truths” not bound by historical circumstances. Among other things, the Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism: first stop, an anti-Semitic joke; last stop, Treblinka. Every loudmouthed Farrakhan acolyte was the opening act in the Julius Streicher show.
…In the late sixties and early seventies, at the same time that the arrival of the “new anti-Semitism” was announced, American Jewish organizations were changing their priorities and their posture, a change that has so far proved permanent. It is probably best described as an inward turn — a shift away from the previously dominant “integrationist” perspective and toward an emphasis on the defense of distinctive Jewish interests, a kind of circling of the wagons…
The qualifications for certification as a Righteous Gentile [by Yad Vashem] had little connection with the everyday meaning of “righteousness”: following accepted moral norms and doing what people could reasonably be expected to do. The criteria were to have risked one’s life, and often the lives of the members of one’s family as well, to save another; to have displayed self-sacrificing heroism of the highest and rarest order. At Yad Vashem nominees for Righteous Gentiles are carefully screened. Often the process takes many years, and the most rigorous standards are applied. (Thus fishermen who transported Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943 are not eligible because they were paid.)
The intention of most commemoration of the “righteous minority” has been to damn the vast “unrighteous majority.” The article “Righteous among the Nations,” in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, stresses that “the acts of those few show that aid and rescue were possible…had there been more high-minded people.” The director of Yad Vashem’s Department of the Righteous explained that “spicing” the history of the Holocaust with stories of rescuers were indispensable in showing the delinquency of European Christians “against the background of the righteous.” In the United States, the head of the Anti-Defamation League discussed a book by the director of the ADL’s Foundation for Christian Rescuers. He insisted that “what is important about the book is that the reader comes away understanding that rescue of Jews was a rare phenomenon. [The fact is] that 700 million people lived in Nazi-occupied Europe; to date 11,000 have been honored by Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews. The ratio of unrighteous to righteous gentiles — thousands to one — is repeatedly underlined by commentators. “For every righteous person,” said Benjamin Meed, “there were thousands upon thousands who collaborated…or who, at best, stood idly by and did nothing.”
Those who have written or spoken about gentile rescuers, for purposes other than underlining their rarity, report that they often receive a hostile reception from Jewish audiences. …But the institutional use of the commemoration of Righteous Gentiles as “the exceptions that prove the rule” has usually been in the service of shoring up that mentality — promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles… “When I move to a new town,” writes a university teacher, “I give great thought to whom, among my gentile friends, I might entrust my children, should that ever become necessary.” A prominent Jewish feminist: “Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, ‘Would you hide me?’ — and suppresses the question for fear of hearing the sounds of silence.” A professor of psychology:
“Many Jews report that the unspoken question they ask themselves when interacting with a non-Jew is, ‘Would she or he have saved me from the Nazis?’ I have asked myself this question innumerable times: sometimes I surprise myself by answering, ‘I don’t know,’ when asking this question of a non-Jewish friend I had otherwise assumed was close to me. The answer is the ultimate standard by which to measure trust in a non-Jewish person.”
Hovering over all of this is the absurd maxim In extremis veritas — that it is imagining the most desperate circumstances that one gains insight into what gentiles really think of Jews. To be preoccupied with the question of whether one could be sure that one would be saved by gentile friends if a holocaust came to America is to actively solicit anxiety and doubt, because who could ever be sure of such a thing? The asking of this pointless question seems to have become culturally approved, a sign that one has learned “the lesson of the Holocaust.”
* Other dimensions of the inward turn of organized American Jewry, not all of them directly connected to growing Holocaust consciousness, often contributed to the fortress mentality that was both source and consequence of that consciousness. One indication of the extent of this new inwardness is that in a 1988 survey, more than a third of Reform rabbis — traditionally the most “integrated” and “outreaching” of the major Jewish denominations — endorsed the proposition that “ideally, one ought not to have any contact with non-Jews.” To the extent that one became convinced that only Jews could be depended upon to care about Jews, it made less and less sense for Jews to care about those who didn’t care about them…
From the late sixties on, this policy changed, and Jewish resources were increasingly reserved for exclusively Jewish purposes…
There was, around this time, a gradual but marked change in the personnel of the leading Jewish agencies. Whereas formerly almost all had been secularists, or at most minimally observant, there came to be a significant and growing Orthodox presence in their ranks…
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….
[Jews] greater liberalism was mostly restricted to questions of sexual morality, like abortion and gay rights…
Rabbi Avi Weiss, scaling the wall of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz to provoke a confrontation with the nuns, was a direct descendant of the Free Speech Movement activists at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in 1964 provoking the police. Particularly in Tikkun, the best-known Jewish magazine on the left, there was a good deal of psychobabble about “therapeutic rage” concerning the Holocaust. An insert with suggestions for modifying the Passover Haggadah argued that “to get beyond the pain, we must first be allowed to express our anger.” It included a stage direction: “Stop here and let seder participants speak about their righteous indignation.” On both the Jewish right and the Jewish it’s often difficult to sort out chickens and eggs: the extent to which thinking about the Holocaust led to a particular posture or, alternatively, provided a convenient mode of expressing a posture arrived at independently. But there was something for everybody in the Holocaust…
Apart from a certain number of Soviet Jews (not very Jewish) and Israelis (an embarrassment), there was no further external source of unassimilated Jews, to make up for those whose Jewishness was dissolving. …the evidence is clear that for all European immigrant groups, very much including Jews, ethnic identity continues to thin and attenuate from generation to generation…
Public events related to the Holocaust drew audiences far exceeding those on other subjects, and were scheduled with increasing frequency. Whereas other Jewish activities tended to attract those who already had a fairly high degree of Jewish commitment, programs related to the Holocaust showed a capacity to pull in Jews with an otherwise marginal Jewish identity… The millionaire who provided most of the original funding for the Simon Wiesenthal Center told a reporter that it was “a sad fact that Israel and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzzwords no longer seem to rally Jews behind the community. The Holocaust, though, works every time.”
…a survey of American Jewish volunteer fund-raisers in the late seventies found three quarters agreeing that “I feel more emotional when I hear Hatikvah [Israel’s national anthem] than when I hear the Star-Spangled Banner.”
…The “culture of victimization” didn’t cause Jews to embrace a victim identity based on the Holocaust; it allowed this sort of identity to become dominant, because it was, after all, virtually the only one that could encompass those Jews whose faltering Jewish identity produced so much anxiety about Jewish survival.
It was very hard to find any other basis on which to ground a distinctive identity shared by all Jews.
* “Jewish history is a series of holocausts, with only some improvement in technique.” (Aharon Appelfeld)
* Simon Wiesenthal compiled a chronicle of Jewish martyrdom in almanac form, so that one could look up where, and by whom, Jews were murdered over the centuries on every day of the year.
* “The status of Jews as…persecuted outsiders is at the core of what Judaism and Jewishness is all about.” (Ellen Willis)
* An editorial in Tikkun insisted that Jews weren’t really white: “In current discourse, who gets labeled ‘white’ and who gets labeled ‘person of color’ derives not from the color of one’s skin…but from the degree to which one has been a victim of Western colonialist oppression. By that measure, Jews have been the greatest victims of Western societies throughout the past two thousand years and must certainly be understood to be one of the ‘peoples of color.'”
Whatever other functions they serve, the yellow stars Jewish students proudly wear on Yom Hashoah are their passport to the ranks of the oppressed.
* …But the success of Jews in gaining permanent possession of center stage for their tragedy, and their equal success in making it the benchmark against which other atrocities were judged, produced a fair amount of resentment — “Holocaust envy.”
Discussing the refusal of the Smithsonian Institution to return the skeletons of thousands of Indians to the tribes that wished to rebury them, Clara Spotted Elk asked: “What would happen if the Smithsonian had 18,500 Holocaust victims in the attic?” A leading Holocaust scholar concluded his argument that the massacring of the Pequot Indians wasn’t really genocidal by noting that many Pequot survived: “As recently as the 1960s, Pequots were still listed as a separate group residing in Connecticut,” he said. “While the British would certainly have been less thorough, less severe, less deadly in prosecuting their campaign against the Pequots, the campaign they actually did carry out, for all its vehemence, was not, either in intent or execution, genocidal.” Commenting on this, an historian of American Indians wondered what the response would be to the argument that the Holocaust wasn’t genocidal because while the Nazis “could certainly have been less thorough, less severe, less deadly” in their policy toward Jews, after all, some Jews survived, “a number of whom even live in Connecticut.”
Armenian Americans were offended by what they saw as Jewish insistence on making the Holocaust “unique,” while portraying the Armenian genocide as “ordinary.” A Jewish magazine published a symposium in which Jewish writers responded to an Armenian who, in moderate language, questioned the uniqueness of the Holocaust and suggested numerous ways in which it paralleled the events of 1915. Lucy Dawidowicz (quite falsely) accused the Armenian of “turn[ing] the subject into a vulgar contest about “who suffered more.” She added that while the Turks had “a rational reason” for killing Armenians, the Germans had no rational reason for killing Jews. Other contributors offered various reasons why the Holocaust, unlike the Armenian genocide, was “special”: that it took place in the heart of Christian Europe; that anti-Semitism was “sui generis”; that what happened to the Jews, unlike what happened to the Armenians, “represents a new divide in human history.”
Armenians had other grievances. The designers of the Washington Holocaust Museum went back on earlier commitments to give significant space to the Armenian genocide as part of the background of the Holocaust. They yielded to those in the museum’s governing councils who objected to any dilution of the Holocaust’s “unprecedented” character. They yielded as well to the urgent lobbying of the Israeli government, which was anxious not to offend Turkey — at the time, the only Muslim country with which Israel had diplomatic relations. (Turkey has consistently denied that there ever was an Armenian genocide.) Israeli lobbying also led a number of prominent American Jews, including Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Arthur Hertzberg, to withdraw from an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv when the Israeli organizers, despite heavy pressure from their government, refused to remove sessions on the Armenian case.
Perhaps most infuriating of all to Armenians — given how forthcoming the American Congress had been with proclamations and funding for commemorating the Holocaust — Israeli diplomats and important American Jewish activists joined in a coalition that helped defeat a congressional resolution memorializing the Armenian genocide. Major Jewish organizations that had originally planned to support the resolution backed off and stayed silent in response to urgings from Israel. One veteran Jewish leader explained what motivated his lobbying against the resolution: “Many contend the Holocaust was simply a terrible event, neither unique nor particular. To compare…Armenians [in 1915] to the situation of Europe’s Jews in 1933 or 1939 is a dangerous invitation to revisionism about the Holocaust… If Jews say every terrible event…is genocide, why should the world believe the Holocaust is distinctive?” There were those in the American Jewish world who supported the congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian genocide. But it would be hard to quarrel with Armenian or other observers who concluded that, as far as “official” Jewry was concerned, some memories were more equal than others.
As so often in these years, the most-publicized conflicts in this realm were between Jews and blacks. Those that attracted the greatest attention featured Louis Farrakhan and his merry band. “Don’t push your six million down our throats,” Farrakhan said, “when we lost 100 million.” “The black holocaust,” said his aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad, “was a hundred times worse than the so-called Jewish Holocaust.” Though one would be hard-pressed to find blacks outside the Nation of Islam who would endorse this sort of trash talk, a sense of being perpetually one-upped by Jews, and of Jews’ having stolen from blacks their rightful place as America’s number-one victim community, was widespread…
The greatest symbolic affront was that while Jews had a federally funded museum memorializing their victimhood, proposals for a museum of the black experience never made it through Congress. Blacks were well aware of the irony… It was American Jews’ wealth and political influence that made it possible for them to bring to the Mall in Washington a monument to their weakness and vulnerability. Those who remained weak and vulnerable — who were oppressed here rather than there — lacked the wherewithal to carry off such a venture.
The most common Jewish response to the charge that Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics has been to protest that it was others, not they, who were engaged in competition. Jews were the aggrieved party — “they are stealing the Holocaust from us,” said Elie Wiesel; others were illegitimately appropriating language and imagery to which they were not entitled… The use of the word “ghetto” for black slums were frequently cited as an example of “stealing the Holocaust”: “there is no barbed wire across 125th Street and there are no guard towers”; “no place in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago was even remotely like Buchenwald in 1938 or Warsaw in 1942 or Auschwitz in 1944. The most commonly expressed Jewish grievance was the use of the words “Holocaust” and “genocide” to describe other catastrophes. This sense of grievance was rooted in the conviction, axiomatic in at least “official” Jewish discourse, that the Holocaust was unique. Since Jews recognized the Holocaust’s uniqueness — that it was “incomparable,” beyond any analogy — they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable…
Over the years, various grounds for the Holocaust’s uniqueness have been offered, but many, for one or another reason, were found wanting: Stalin killed more innocents than Hitler; over the centuries many other targeted populations suffered greater proportional losses than did European Jews during World War II. Other criteria presented other difficulties. The most comprehensive argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust was also the most radical. Whereas many other writers were willing to acknowledge that there had been other genocides but only one Holocaust, Steve Katz, in a book of more than seven hundred pages (the first of three projected volumes), argued that even the word “genocide,” if correctly understood, could be applied only to the travail of European Jewry in World War II. It was on the basis of this book that Katz was named head of the Washington Holocaust Museum — which suggests the appeal of its argument.
…the very idea of uniqueness is fatuous, since any event — a war, a revolution, a genocide — will have significant features that it shares with events to which it might be compared as well as features that differentiate it from others. The claim that an event — as opposed to some features of an event — is unique can be sustained only by gerrymandering: deliberately singling out one or more distinctive features of the event and trivializing or sweeping under the rug whose features that it shares with other events to which it might be compared… [Katz] writes that while the Final Solution had many other features, “only the element of intentionality can serve as the individuating criterion by which to distinguish the Sho’ah from other instances of mass death.” Translation: I was determined to find that feature of the Holocaust which set it apart — made it unique — and this is the one I settled on…
The question transcends Katz’s book, which is of interest to us only insofar as it is the most systematic exposition of the doctrine of uniqueness, which sits astride all of contemporary Jewish discourse on the Holocaust. Katz, like virtually everyone who makes this argument, asserts again and again that “unique” doesn’t mean “worse,” that the claim is not for greater but only for different Jewish victimization, that no one is saying the Holocaust is more evil than other atrocities, just that it’s…unique. Such disavowals are either naive or, more often, disingenuous. They are naive or disingenuous because all the talk of uniqueness takes place in a context in which, for various purposes, atrocities are constantly compared. And the talk of uniqueness coexists with, overlaps with, and is inextricably intertwined with repeated insistence that comes from secularists like Raul Hilberg, for whom the Holocaust is “the benchmark, the defining moment in the drama of good and evil”; from rabbi like Michael Berenbaum, for whom it is “the paradigmatic manifestation of evil.” The claim that the assertion of the Holocaust’s uniqueness is not a form of invidious comparison produces systematic doubletalk. A rabbi, in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, writes that “it is degrading, even ghoulish, to seek to provide preeminence in suffering.” But, he continues, “the holocaust was unique,” and proceeds to offer a statistical demonstration. Does anyone (except, just conceivably, those making the argument) believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything other than a claim for preeminence?
“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.”
…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.
***
We begin at the beginning, with the response of American gentiles and Jews to the Holocaust while the killing was going on. Though we’ll be concerned mostly with how the Holocaust was talked about after 1945, the wartime years are the appropriate starting point. They were the point of departure for subsequent framing and representing, centering or marginalizing, and using for various purposes the story of the destruction of European Jewry.
At the same time, America’s wartime response to the Holocaust is what a great deal of later Holocaust discourse in the United States has been about. The most common version tells of the culpable, sometimes willed obliviousness of American gentiles to the murder of European Jews; the indifference to their brethren’s fate by a timid and self-absorbed American Jewry; the “abandonment of the Jews” by the Roosevelt administration — a refusal to seize opportunities for rescue, which made the United States a passive accomplice in the crime.
By the 1970s and 1980s the Holocaust had become a shocking, massive, and distinctive thing: clearly marked off, qualitatively and quantitatively, from other Nazi atrocities and from previous Jewish persecutions, singular in its scope, its symbolism, and its world-historical significance. This way of looking at it is nowadays regarded as both proper and natural, the “normal human response.” But this was not the response of most Americans, even of American Jews, while the Holocaust was being carried out. Not only did the Holocaust have nowhere near the centrality in consciousness that it had from the 1970s on, but for the overwhelming majority of Americans — and, once again, this included a great many Jews as well — it barely existed as a singular event in its own right. The murderous actions of the Nazi regime, which killed between five and six million European Jews, were all too real. But “the Holocaust,” as we speak of it today, was largely a retrospective construction, something that would not have been recognizable to most people at the time. To speak of “the Holocaust” as a distinct entity, which Americans responded to (or failed to respond to) in various ways, is to introduce an anachronism that stands in the way of understanding contemporary responses.
The sheer number of victims of the Holocaust continues to inspire awe: between five and six million. But the Holocaust took place — we know this, of course, but we don’t often think of its implications — in the midst of a global war that eventually killed between fifty and sixty million people. There are those for whom any such contextualization is a trivializing of the Holocaust, a tacit denial of the special circumstances surrounding the destruction of European Jewry. Certainly such contextualization can be used for these purposes, as when the French rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen dismisses the Holocaust as a mere “detail” of the history of the Second World War. But it was the overall course of the war that dominated the minds of Americans in the early forties. Unless we keep that in mind, we will never understand how the Holocaust came to be swallowed up in the larger carnage surrounding it. By itself, the fact that during the war, and for some time thereafter, there was no agreed-upon word for the murder of Europe’s Jews is not all that significant. What is perhaps of some importance is that insofar as the word “holocaust” (lowercase) was employed during the war, as it occasionally was, it was almost always applied to the totality of the destruction wrought by the Axis, not to the special fate of the Jews. This usage is emblematic of wartime perceptions of what we now single out as “the Holocaust.”
There are many different dimensions to the wartime marginality of the Holocaust in the American mind: what one knew, and what one believed; how to frame what one knew or believed; devising an appropriate response. In principle these questions are separable; in practice they were inextricably entwined. In this chapter we’ll look at the perceptions and responses of the American people as a whole; in Chapter 2, at American Jews; in Chapter 3, at the American government.
Although no one could imagine its end result, all Americans — Jews and gentiles alike — were well aware of Nazi anti-Semitism from the regime’s beginning in 1933, if not earlier. Prewar Nazi actions against Jews, from early discriminatory measures to the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and culminating in Kristallnacht in 1938, were widely reported in the American press and repeatedly denounced at all levels of American society. No one doubted that Jews were high on the list of actual and potential victims of Nazism, but it was a long list, and Jews, by some measures, were not at the top. Despite Nazi attempts to keep secret what went on in concentration camps in the thirties, their horrors were known in the West, and were the main symbol of Nazi brutality. But until late 1938 there were few Jews, as Jews, among those imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in the camps. The victims were overwhelmingly Communists, socialists, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Hitler regime. And it was to be another four years before the special fate that Hitler had reserved for the Jews of Europe became known in the West.
The point should be underlined: from early 1933 to late 1942 — more than three quarters of the twelve years of Hitler’s Thousand – Year Reich — Jews were, quite reasonably, seen as among but by no means as the singled-out victims of the Nazi regime. This was the all-but-universal perception of American gentiles; it was the perception of many American Jews as well. By the time the news of the mass murder of Jews emerged in the middle of the war, those who had been following the crimes of the Nazis for ten years readily and naturally assimilated it to the already-existing framework.
Only in the aftermath of Kristallnacht were large numbers of Jews added to the camp populations, and even then for the most part briefly, as part of a German policy of pressuring Jews to emigrate. Up to that point, German Jewish deaths were a tiny fraction of those inflicted on Jews by murderous bands of Ukrainian anti-Soviet forces twenty years earlier. Though American Jews responded with deeper dismay and horror to prewar Nazi anti-Semitism than did gentile Americans, their reaction was not unmixed with a certain weary fatalism: such periods had recurred over the centuries; they would pass; in the meantime one did what one could and waited for better days.
In the West, the onset of the war resulted in less rather than more attention being paid to the fate of the Jews. The beginning of the military struggle — and dramatic dispatches from the battlefronts — drove Jewish persecution from the front pages and from public consciousness. Kristallnacht, in which dozens of Jews were killed, had been on the front page of the New York Times for more than a week; as the wartime Jewish death toll passed through thousands and into millions, it was never again featured so prominently.
From the autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1941 everyone’s attention was riveted on military events: the war at sea, the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. As Americans confronted what appeared to be the imminent prospect of unchallenged Nazi dominion over the entire European continent, it was hardly surprising that except for some Jews, few paid much attention to what was happening to Europe’s Jewish population under Nazi rule. That the ghettoization of Polish Jewry and the deportation of German and Austrian Jews to Polish ghettos had brought enormous suffering no one doubted. Beyond this, little was known with any certainty, and the fragmentary reports reaching the West were often contradictory. Thus in December 1939 a press agency first estimated that a quarter of a million Jews had been killed; two weeks later the agency reported that losses were about one tenth that number. (Similar wildly differing estimates recurred throughout the war, no doubt leading many to suspend judgment on the facts and suspect exaggeration. In March 1943 The Nation wrote of seven thousand Jews being massacred each week, while The New Republic used the same figure as a conservative daily estimate.)
In the course of 1940, 1941, and 1942 reports of atrocities against Jews began to accumulate. But these, like the numbers cited, were often contradictory. In the nature of the situation, there were no firsthand reports from Western journalists. Rather, they came from a handful of Jews who had escaped, from underground sources, from anonymous German informants, and, perhaps most unreliable of all, from the Soviet government. If, as many suspected, the Soviets were lying about the Katyn Forest massacre, why not preserve a healthy skepticism when they spoke of Nazi atrocities against Soviet Jews? Thus, after the Soviet recapture of Kiev, the New York Times correspondent traveling with the Red Army underlined that while Soviet officials claimed that tens of thousands of Jews had been killed at Babi Yar, “no witnesses to the shooting … talked with the correspondents”; “it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity of the story told to us”; “there is little evidence in the ravine to prove or disprove the story.”
The most important single report on the Holocaust that reached the West came from a then-anonymous German businessman, and was passed on in mid-1942 by Gerhard Riegner, representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland. But Riegner forwarded the report “with due reserve” concerning its truth. Though the main outlines of the mass-murder campaign reported by Riegner were all too true, his informant also claimed to have “personal knowledge” of the rendering of Jewish corpses into soap — a grisly symbol of Nazi atrocity now dismissed as without foundation by historians of the Holocaust. By the fall of 1943, more than a year after Riegner’s information was transmitted, an internal U.S. State Department memorandum concluded that the reports were “essentially correct.” But it was hard to quarrel with the accompanying observation that the 1942 reports were “at times confused and contradictory” and that they “incorporated stories which were obviously left over from the horror tales of the last war.”
Such embellishments as the soap story furthered a will to disbelieve that was common among Jews and gentiles — an understandable attitude. Who, after all, would want to think that such things were true? Who would not welcome an opportunity to believe that while terrible things were happening, their scale was being exaggerated; that much of what was being said was war propaganda that the prudent reader should discount? One British diplomat, skeptical of the Soviet story about Babi Yar, observed that “we ourselves put out rumours of atrocities and horrors for various purposes, and I have no doubt this game is widely played.” Indeed, officials of both the U.S. Office of War Information and the British Ministry of Information ultimately concluded that though the facts of the Holocaust appeared to be confirmed, they were so likely to be thought exaggerated that the agencies would lose credibility by disseminating them.
If American newspapers published relatively little about the ongoing Holocaust, it was in part because there was little hard news about it to present — only secondhand and thirdhand reports of problematic authenticity. News is event-, not process-oriented: bombing raids, invasions, and naval battles are the stuff of news, not delayed, often hearsay accounts of the wheels of the murder machine grinding relentlessly on. And for senior news editors the experience of having been bamboozled by propaganda during the First World War was not something they’d read about in history books; they had themselves been made to appear foolish by gullibly swallowing fake atrocity stories, and they weren’t going to let it happen again.
Perhaps another reason for limited press attention to the continuing murder of European Jewry was that, in a sense, it didn’t seem interesting. This is not a decadent aestheticism but is in the very nature of “the interesting”: something that violates our expectations. We are interested in the televangelist caught with the bimbo, the gangster who is devout in his religious observance: vice where we expect virtue, virtue where we expect vice; that which shatters our preconceptions. To a generation that was not witness to the apparently limitless depravity of the Nazi regime, the Holocaust may tell us something about what mankind is capable of. But Americans in the early forties took it for granted that Nazism was the embodiment of absolute evil, even if the sheer scale of its crimes was not appreciated. The repetition of examples was not, as a result, “interesting.” (For some dedicated anti-Communists, including a number of Jewish intellectuals writing for Partisan Review and The New Leader, it was Soviet iniquity, played down in the press during the wartime Russian-American honeymoon, that was more interesting, and more in need of exposure.)
Throughout the war few Americans were aware of the scale of the European Jewish catastrophe. By late 1944 three quarters of the American population believed that the Germans had “murdered many people in concentration camps,” but of those willing to estimate how many had been killed, most thought it was 100,000 or fewer. By May 1945, at the end of the war in Europe, most people guessed that about a million (including, it should be noted, both Jews and non-Jews) had been killed in the camps. That the man in the street was ill informed about the Holocaust, as about so much else, is hardly shocking. But lack of awareness was common among the highly placed and generally knowledgeable as well: only at the very end of the war did ignorance dissipate. William Casey, later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was head of secret intelligence in the European theater for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.
“The most devastating experience of the war for most of us was the first visit to a concentration camp…. We knew in a general way that Jews were being persecuted, that they were being rounded up … and that brutality and murder took place at these camps. But few if any comprehended the appalling magnitude of it. It wasn’t sufficiently real to stand out from the general brutality and slaughter which is war.”
William L. Shirer, the best-selling author of Berlin Diary, who during the war was a European correspondent for CBS, reported that it was only at the end of 1945 that he learned “for sure” about the Holocaust; the news burst upon him “like a thunderbolt.”
How many Americans had knowledge of the Holocaust while it was going on is as much a semantic as a quantitative question. It calls for distinctions among varieties of awareness, consciousness, belief, attention. There was an inclination on the part of many to avert their eyes from things too painful to contemplate. Life magazine, in 1945, printed a letter from a distressed reader:
“Why, oh why, did you have to print that picture? The truth of the atrocity is there and can never be erased from the minds of the American people, but why can’t we be spared some of it? The stories are awful enough but I think the picture should be retained for records and not shown to the public.”
The picture in question was not of Jewish bodies stacked like cordwood at a liberated concentration camp, but of a captured American airman on his knees, being beheaded by a Japanese officer. (Inundated as we have been in recent decades by images of violence — oceans of blood, in vivid color, brought by television into our living rooms — it is easy to forget how much less hardened sensibilities were in the forties.) War doesn’t put concern for civilians — especially civilians who are not one’s own citizens — anywhere on the agenda. War is about killing the enemy, and in World War II this included killing unprecedented numbers of enemy civilians. War isn’t about softening one’s heart, but about hardening it. A much-decorated veteran of the Eighth Air Force:
“You drop a load of bombs and, if you’re cursed with any imagination at all you have at least one quick horrid glimpse of a child lying in bed with a whole ton of masonry tumbling down on top of him; or a three-year-old girl wailing for Mutter … Mutter … because she has been burned. Then you have to turn away from the picture if you intend to retain your sanity. And also if you intend to keep on doing the work your Nation expects of you.”
It has often been said that when the full story of the ongoing Holocaust reached the West, beginning in 1942, it was disbelieved because the sheer magnitude of the Nazi plan of mass murder made it, literally, incredible — beyond belief. There is surely a good deal to this, but perhaps at least as often, the gradually emerging and gradually worsening news from Europe produced a kind of immunity to shock. A final point on disbelief. Accounts of the persecution of Jews between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1941 often spoke of “extermination” and “annihilation.” This was not prescience but hyperbole, and prudent listeners took it as such. By the following years, when such words were all too accurate, they had been somewhat debased by premature invocation.
Probably more important than “knowledge” in the narrow sense is how knowledge is framed. We have already seen how prewar experience — indeed, experience down through 1942 — placed Jews among but not as the singled-out victims of Nazism. (As of the spring of 1942, the Germans had murdered more Soviet prisoners of war than Jews.) This kind of preexisting framework lasted for most Americans through the remainder of the war. But there were other reasons why the particularly savage and systematic program of murdering European Jewry tended to be lost amid the overall carnage of war.
For most Americans, the Pacific conflict was a matter of much greater concern than the war in Europe. Working fourteen hours a day in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the future playwright Arthur Miller observed “the near absence among the men I worked with … of any comprehension of what Nazism meant — we were fighting Germany essentially because she had allied herself with the Japanese who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” American soldiers and sailors were continuously engaged in combat with the Japanese from the beginning to the end of the war — first retreating, then advancing across the islands of the Pacific. It was not until the last year of the war, after the Normandy invasion, that there was equal attention given to the European theater. Certainly in popular representations of the war, especially in the movies, it was the Japanese who were America’s leading enemy. “Axis atrocities” summoned up images of American victims of the Bataan Death March — not of Europeans, Jewish or gentile, under the Nazi heel.
When wartime attention did turn to Nazi barbarism, there were many reasons for not highlighting Jewish suffering. One was sheer ignorance — the lack of awareness until late 1942 of the special fate of Jews in Hitler’s Europe. The Nazi concentration camp was the most common symbol of the enemy regime, and its archetypal inmate was usually represented as a political oppositionist or member of the resistance. Probably one of the reasons for this was that the seemingly natural framework for the war was one of actively contending forces: the dramatically satisfying victim of Nazism was the heroic and principled oppositionist. By contrast, Jews killed by the Nazis were widely perceived, less inspirationally, as passive victims, though sometimes they were portrayed as opponents of Nazism to fit the script. Thus the editor of the Detroit Free Press explained that the Nazi prisoners he saw liberated had been in the camps because “they refused to accept the political philosophy of the Nazi party…. First Jews and anti-Nazi Germans, then other brave souls who refused to conform.”
In the Hollywood version of the camps, which perhaps reached more Americans than any other, it was the dissident or résistant who was the exemplary victim. One of the few wartime Hollywood films that depicted Jewish victimhood and resistance was None Shall Escape, which concludes with a rabbi exhorting his people to resist the Nazis — which they do, “dying on their feet” and taking some German troops with them. The rabbi’s speech included a line about “tak[ing] our place along with all other oppressed peoples,” and the rebellion ended beneath a cruciform signpost on a railroad platform, the rabbi and his people dying at the foot of a cross.
If some of the reasons for deemphasizing special Jewish victimhood were more or less spontaneous, others were calculated. In the case of Germany — unlike Japan — there was no offense against Americans to be avenged, no equivalent of “Remember Pearl Harbor.” The task of American wartime propagandists was to portray Nazi Germany as the mortal enemy of “free men everywhere.” That the Nazis were the enemy of the Jews was well known; there was no rhetorical advantage in continuing to underline the fact. The challenge was to show that they were everyone’s enemy, to broaden rather than narrow the range of Nazi victims. In meeting this challenge, the Office of War Information resisted suggestions for a focus on Jewish victimhood. Leo Rosten, head of the OWI’s “Nature of the Enemy” department and a popular Jewish writer, responding to a suggestion that atrocities against Jews be highlighted, said that “according to [our] experience, the impression on the average American is much stronger if the question is not exclusively Jewish.” Indeed, it was stronger among one segment of the population engaged in fighting the Nazis. In November 1944 the army magazine Yank decided not to run a story of Nazi atrocities against Jews on the grounds — as related to the man who wrote the story — that “because of latent anti-Semitism in the Army, he ought, if possible, to get something with a less Semitic slant.”
There was another reason for not emphasizing Hitler’s “war against the Jews”: to sidestep the claim that America’s struggle with Germany was a war for the Jews. The claim that American Jews were dragging the country into a war on behalf of their brethren in Europe was a staple of prewar isolationist discourse. The America First Bulletin had spoken of “numerous groups which fight for America’s entry into the war — foreign and racial groups which have special and just grievances against Hitler.” This view was endorsed by Charles Lindbergh in a notorious speech. Public assertions of this kind ceased with Pearl Harbor, but they had a lively underground existence thereafter. In 1943 former ambassador William Bullitt was telling people that “the Roosevelt administration’s emphasis on the European war as opposed to the Asian one was the result of Jewish influence.”
The charge of Jewish warmongering had often focused on Hollywood. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota held hearings on the subject, summoning for interrogation those with “Jewish-sounding” names. The Nye hearings were called off after the war began, but there was continued sensitivity on this score in Hollywood. And it was reinforced by Washington. 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.” Hollywood executives probably didn’t need prodding on this score. Responding to a 1943 suggestion that a film be made about Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, studio heads who were polled replied that it would be better to consider a film “covering various groups that have been subject to the Nazi treatment [which] of course would take in the Jews.”
Along with the minimizing of particular Jewish victimhood was the development of formulas stressing Nazi “godlessness,” which exaggerated Nazi animus toward Christian denominations. Wartime discourse was filled with references to the “Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish” victims of Nazism. (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 on “Christian civilization.”) A variant of this theme acknowledged the present Jewish priority in victimhood but held that, once finished with Jews, Hitler would turn on others.
For all of these reasons, in all media and in almost all public pronouncements, there was throughout the war not much awareness of the special fate of the Jews of Europe. Sometimes this was simply due to a lack of information, sometimes the result of spontaneous and “well-meaning” categories of thought and speech. 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. Among those who minimized special Jewish suffering there were surely some with less high-minded motives, but there is little reason to believe they had much influence. In any event, the result was that for the overwhelming majority of Americans, throughout the war (and, as we will see, for some time thereafter) what we now call the Holocaust was neither a distinct entity nor particularly salient. The murder of European Jewry, insofar as it was understood or acknowledged, was just one among the countless dimensions of a conflict that was consuming the lives of tens of millions around the globe. It was not “the Holocaust”; it was simply the (underestimated) Jewish fraction of the holocaust then engulfing the world.
