Selected quotes from:
The Holocaust in American Life
Peter Novick, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1999, Boston
The argument for raising Holocaust consciousness that has been advanced
with the greatest urgency is, by any sober evaluation, the most absurd:
the alleged necessity of responding to the tiny band of cranks, kooks,
and misfits who deny the Holocaust took place. Concern about the "growing
influence" of this corporal's guard was widespread for a time, but now
seems to be abating.
The "star" of American Holocaust denial is Arthur Butz, an associate
professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, who
in 1976 arranged the private publication of "The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry."
A few years later the Institute for Historical Review was established
in California; its principal activity was publishing the Journal of
Historical Review, a slender quarterly devoted to exposing the "myth
of the six million." The Institute rented the mailing list of the unsuspecting
Organization of American Historians, and sent sample copies of its journal
to the organization's twelve thousand members, garnering some publicity
from the resulting reaction. More publicity came when its offer of $50,000
reward for anyone who could prove any Jews were gassed at Auschwitz
was taken up by Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of that camp; after bringing
a lawsuit, he collected. The deniers' most successful publicity coup
was their clever idea of sending college newspapers advertisements calling
for "open debate" on the Holocaust. A series of fusses was occasioned
by several undergraduate editors' notion that rejecting the ads raised
"First Amendment issues." This kept the pot boiling, though in no case
known to me was the Holocaust itself ever debated on campuses; rather,
it was a question of whether boycott or exposure was the best strategy
for dealing with thes screwballs. So far as one can tell, it was only
fellow screwballs that they ever attracted: John Hinckley, who shot
President Reagan, was a denier; so was Eric Rudolph, at this writing
wanted for the murder of a guard at an abortion clinic; so was the crazed
chess genius Bobby Fischer.
The activities of these fruitcakes were irritating, indeed infuriating
-- especially, though not exclusively, to survivors. Some insisted that
they deniers should be taken more seriously, but since there is no evidence
that they'd had the slightest influence, it was hard to say why
one should do so.
- End Quote -
Peter Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life", Houghton Mifflin
& Co., 1999, Boston, p. 270
Since the 1970's the Holocaust has come to be mentioned -- 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. The operating expenses of the Washington
Holocaust Museum -- originally to have been raised by private contributions
-- have been largely taken over by the federal government. In Boston,
the New England Holocaust Memorial is located on the Freedom Trail,
along with Paul Revere's house and the Bunker Hill Monument. Public
officials across the country told Americans that seeing Schindler's
List was their civic duty. How did this European event come to loom
so large in American consciousness?
A good part of the answer lies in 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 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 and 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 1970's, a cohort of Jews who either
didn't have much in the way of Jewish 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. [....]
Blu Greenberg, the wife of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, wrote that she had
originally favored exclusively Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust
[....] 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."
- End Quote -
Peter Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life", Houghton Mifflin
& Co., 1999, Boston, p. 207-208
It has been argued -- less now than formerly -- that once the survivor
witnesses are gone, Holocaust deniers will flourish in the absence of
those whose memories refute them. More generally, it is held that survivors's
memories are an indispensable historical source that must be preserved,
and elaborate projects are under way to collect them. In fact, those
memories are not a very useful historical source. Or, rather, some may
be, but we don't know which ones. A few years ago the director of Yad
Vashem's archive told a reporter that most of the twenty thousand testimonies
it had collected were unreliable: "Many were never in the places where
they claim to have witnessed atrocities, while others relied on secondhard
information given them by friends or passing strangers." Primo Levi,
one of the most renowned of survivor witnesses, has described this phenomenon:
"The greater part of the witnesses ... have ever more blurred and
stylized memories, often, unbeknownst to them, influenced by information
gained from later readings or the stories of others ... A memory evoked
too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed
in a stereotype ... crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself
in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense."
To say that survivors' memories, or some unknown portion of them,
are not a reliable historical source is not to say they haven't been,
or won't continue to be, important in evoking the Holocaust experience.
[....] (When evidence emerged that one Holocaust memoir, highly praised
for its authenticity might have been completely invented, [*] Deborah
Lipstadt, who used the memoir in her teaching of the Holocaust, acknowledged
that if this turned out to be the case, it "might complicate matters
somewhat," but that it would still be "powerful" as a novel.)
Through various initiatives, of which the largest is Steven Spielberg's
$100 million project of collecting videotaped testimonies, survivors'
evocative accounts will outlive them. The uses to which they'll be put
in the future, and how much of an audience they'll command, we can't
know. [**]
* This is a reference to the Wilkomirski "memoirs"
** [original footnote] Early indications suggest that the way the
testimonies have been collected and presented by Spielberg's Survivors
of the Shoah Foundation will result in a meretricious, Hollywood-to-the-max
sort of evocation. Most interviewers have only the sketchiest knowledge
of the Holocaust. The format of the interviews (at Spielberg's insistence)
manipulates them in a "redemptive" direction, with all narratives ending
with the survivor surrounded by his or her family. The way in which
the material is being to the public also bodes ill. The foundation's
first educational CD-ROM is narrated by teen sex idol Leonardo DiCaprio.
[....]
- End Quote -
Peter Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life", Houghton Mifflin
& Co., 1999, Boston, p. 274-275, 351n
The same ambiguity, the same confusion and uncertainty, characterize
general American discourse about the Holocaust. Americans are exhorted
that they must "confront" or "remember" the Holocaust, but what is it
exactly that they are to confront or remember? This isn't a matter of
different interpretations or different theories but of what event we're
talking about. It's a truism -- Philosophy 101 -- that we never directly
encounter events, only representations of events, which offer different
versions of events. The more highly charged the event, the more evocative
it is, the greater the incentive to become invested in different versions
of it. An illustration. No text from the Holocaust is more often quoted
than Martin Niemoller's confession of his moral failure during the 1930's:
"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist --
so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was
not a Social Democrat -- so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists,
but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but
I was not a Jew -- so I did little. Then when they came for me, there
was no one left who could stand up for me."
Time magazine, Vice President Al Gore, and a speaker at the 1992
Republican Convention follow "The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" in
moving Jews from last to first place: "First they came for the Jews."
Time, Gore, and the Republican speaker omitted Communists and Social
Democrats; Gore omitted trade unionists as well. All three added Catholics
(not on Niemoller's original list.) Catholics are also added to the
version of the quotation inscribed on the Holocaust memorial in Boston,
a heavily Catholic city. The US Holocaust Museum preserves the list
and order intact except for prudently omitting Communists. Other versions
include homosexuals on Niemoller's list. (The quotation has been invoked
for causes ranging from Jewish settlement in the West Bank to freedom
of the insurance industry from government regulation.) [*]
* [original footnote] Murray Greenfield offered this analogy "First
they asked for Gasza/Jericho. I didn't live there, so I agreed. Then
they asked for Judea/Samaria ... [....] The Massachusetts Association
of Life Underwriters updated the quotation this way: "They came first
for the disability market and I didn't speak up because I didn't sell
disability insurance. Then they came for the nongroup health insurance
market ... " [....] Hugh Hefner invoked the Niemoller quotation as a
warning that the banning of Playboy from 7-Eleven stories was the first
step in the destruction of the First Amendment. [....]
- End Quote -
Peter Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life", Houghton Mifflin
& Co., 1999, Boston, p. 220-221, 337-338n
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,
Steven 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 the
argument.
I remarked in the Introduction that 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 only be sustained by gerrymandering: deliberately singling
out one or more distinctive features of the event and trivializing or
sweeping under the rug those features it shares with other events to
which it might be compared. For Katz, what makes the Holocaust unique,
makes it the only real genocide, is that "never before has a state set
out ... to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging
to a specific people." If Katz is historically correct on this point
-- and historians who have examined his arguments have their doubts
-- this would indeed be a distinctive feature of the Holocaust. How
did Katz decide that this is the criterion by which one should decide
whether the Holocaust is unique, the only genocide? He himself supplies
the answer when he writes that while the Final Solution has 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.
[....]
Katz, like virtually everyone else 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 disingenuous
because all of the talk of uniqueness takes place in a context in which,
for various purposes, atrocities are constantly compared. And the talk
of uniqueness cooexists with, overlaps with, and is inextricably intertwined
with repeated insistence that the Holocaust is the archetype and yardstick
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 prove 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?
- End Quote -
Peter Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life", Houghton Mifflin
& Co., 1999, Boston, p. 196, 197
