April 2004 Feature

Is the Memory of Holocaust Being Exploited?

Three books have appeared within the past sever-al years that critique the place of the Holocaust in contemporary culture. Peter Novick’s well-researched work, The Holocaust in American Life, confines itself to the American experience. Tim Cole’s Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold considers the American, Israeli, and Polish experience yet, ironically, only in a minor way the German experience. Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering builds on the foundation set by Novick but with a decidedly politically left interpretation, one freed from precisely the balance and thoughtfulness that gives Novick’s work a sense of authority.
First, permit me a word about memory, how Jews remember and retell
“By the waters of Babylon we sat and we wept as we remembered Zion,” the Psalmist said appropriately. The place from which we remember an event shapes the content of that memory. This is perfectly acceptable in Jewish memory; indeed, it is normative. Certainly, the recollection of Zion immediately after the destruction in Jeremiah’s chapters of consolation is rather different from the Biblical book of Ezra or the anguished cries of the book of Lamentations. There is a legend told in the Talmud of two rabbis passing by the Temple Mount:
Once Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was walking with his disciple Rabbi Yehoshua near Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Yehoshua looked at the Temple ruins and said: “Alas for us! The place that atoned for the sins of the people Israel lies in ruins!” Then Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: “Be not grieved, my son. There is another equally meritorious way of gaining atonement even though the Temple is destroyed. We can still gain atonement through deeds of lovingkindness. For it is written: ‘Lovingkindness I desire, not sacrifice!’” (Hosea 6:6)1
Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s response was directly related to the revolution that he was imposing on Jewish history, the movement from a land-centered, sanctuary-centered, Jerusalem-centered religion to one that could survive in exile with remnants of that worship. The synagogue could be constituted anywhere a quorum of Jews gathered. The Torah was portable and could move with Jews from place to place and be transported in the hearts and minds of its people. Place, memory, and agenda are related.
Stories are retold for a reason, and they resonate for a reason. The dialogue between memory and its place of recollection, between an event and the transmission of an event, is appropriate. It is little wonder that time, distance, and agendas for the future shape the content of memory. I believe this is not only appropriate but also inevitable for a community as well as for an individual. It is also very deeply Jewish. Midrash and Chasidic tales, as well as rabbinic commentary, are in essence a retelling of ancient stories with new emphases that speak to the contemporary generation. This process is often masked because of the tradition’s reluctance to claim innovation and reveal its essential creativity, and it is denied by some who merely argue with a wink of the eye that it was there from the beginning, revealed to Moses at Sinai.
So perhaps I am less scandalized than Tim Cole regarding the transformation of memory in dialogue with contemporary needs, and having been party to such a deliberate transformation, I believe that the process can be done with integrity and is pure.

Problems of evidence
I was disturbed not by what Cole was aiming to prove, but by his use of evidence. Four illustrations should suffice. Cole, as Finkelstein, begins his work with an opening quote by Arnold Jacob Wolfe taken from a 1980 dialogue between Wolfe and myself that I reprinted in After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience, which was published in 1990. According to Cole, Wolfe said:
It is a simple fact that in New Haven, the Jewish community of 22,000 spends ten times as much money on the Holocaust memorial as it does on college students in New Haven. I think that is shocking.... The community is saying: “We have money for the Holocaust and that’s all.”... It seems to me that the Holocaust is being sold....2
The actual quote is more interesting but cannot be used because it is manifestly false.

Wolfe said:
The community is saying: “We have money for the Holocaust, and that’s all.” We have been decreasing funds for almost everything else you can think of and certainly for Jewish studies in Midrash or Talmud or philosophy or even Bible, but we have $1 million if you are willing to teach the Holocaust.3
Finkelstein begins his book with Wolfe’s final line and adds the other half of the line “it is not being taught.” However, it is not a simple fact. The statement regarding the comparative expenditure for the memorial as against that for college students may have been true for the year in the late 1970s, when the Holocaust memorial was being built in New Haven, but it was not true for the past two decades, if it ever was true, and Cole’s readers should know it. In the decades since Wolfe left his Hillel position at Yale, the Hillel Foundation at Yale has moved to the center of Yale’s Campus. It is housed in a large and well-endowed building. The Judaic Studies program at Yale is flourishing with distinguished faculty and excellent students, teaching the Bible, the Talmud, and Midrash. In fact, Harvard was forced to return a $3 million endowed chair in Holocaust Studies because some of its faculty believe that the “Holocaust was not a proud chapter in Jewish history.” Since when are academic subjects decided upon because of their pride? Imagine for a moment the uproar that would have followed such a statement by a German professor speaking about German history.
What’s the point? When the figure of $168 million for the construction of the Holocaust Memorial Museum is bandied about, I find it both intriguing and misleading. If I remember correctly, the actual figure was in excess of $190 million, but it must be seen in the context in which the Jewish community spent more than $9 billion a year, or some $90 billion in the nineties, in which Holocaust Museums were opened in Washington, Los Angeles, Houston, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. So if the Holocaust is being sold, then it is fair to say that Jewish education is being sold, that synagogues are being sold, that universities are being sold, that hospitals are being sold. To build institutions in the United States and elsewhere monies must be raised, and there is nothing sinister or wrong about it. It is essential.
Cole repeatedly refers to a Holocaust cookbook, objecting to its kitsch. I doubt if he has read the book, but I have. I wrote the introduction to the book because it is a document that emerged from the Holocaust, no less a document than the children’s drawings and poems from Theresienstadt or the many diaries that have been published. Starving women sought to return in their imagination to their homes and their families and to reconstitute from memory the recipes that they served to their families at a time when they had homes, families, and food to put on their tables. In the years since the book’s publication, we have learned that this process of preserving recipes was not limited to Theresienstadt alone but was found in other concentration camps as well. I was persuaded of the authenticity of the document, and I am respectful of the responses of the women who shared their recipes as a way of spiritually dealing with starvation. In fact, I found it moving, and whenever I spoke on the book, I asked that those who bought the book only cook from it for an event of joy, for a simcha and tell the story — so much for kitsch.
Cole misrepresents fact. He writes: “[T]here is no place for Holocaust and Jewish heroism in Washington, D.C., but only Jewish victimization, and the telling of the story of the ‘Holocaust’ in all its gory horror.”4 He must have forgotten the exhibition on the bottom floor of the permanent exhibition dealing with resistance that occupies about 10 percent of that floor, or the middle floor exhibition on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that is deliberately placed between the Wannsee Conference exhibit and the deportation exhibit. When resistance occurred, it often took place on the eve of deportation. It was often a decision not about how to live, but about how to die; it was a last stand, a statement that was made regarding all but certain death. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was built after Yad Vashem and consciously sought to avoid the equation between Holocaust and heroism. I think it achieves a historically legitimate balance, one that even the creation of the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance will not be able to change.
As to the telling of the story of the “Holocaust in all its gory horror” elsewhere, Cole criticizes the decision not to use actual hair in the Museum’s exhibition, a decision I vehemently opposed. Among the planners of the Museum and its lay leaders, the decision whether or not to use actual hair was both a generational and a gender decision. The older the lay leaders, the more they shied away from using actual hair, and women tended to be more upset by its use than men. In the end, over the objection of many of his key staff, the late Jeshajahu Weinberg, then in his mid-seventies and recovering from a stroke, decided that the divisiveness such a display would engender was not worth the cost.
I believed then as now that the issue was museological. The controversy surrounding the hair had demonstrated that it is a powerful artifact. The question was whether we could create a display that effectively conveyed the power of the artifact without its being so overwhelmingly powerful that the visiting public could not take it. Finkelstein and others have criticized the use of walls that conceal some particularly graphic material without understanding that walls permitted us to introduce graphic material at a time when no one was quite certain how the public would react to these materials. Now that the sense of “taste” and “proportionality” in the Holocaust Museum is widely respected, these privacy walls could be removed — and should be removed — and this material could be treated like all other material. Over time, that will happen, as will the introduction of hair into the exhibition.
Cole quotes the distinguished Holocaust scholar Omar Bar Tov that the “Museum concludes with scenes of newly arrived survivors in Palestine. Zionism was, it seems, an appropriate answer to Nazism. And since Nazism is gone, and the State of Israel is alive and well, we no longer have any reason to worry.”5 With all due respect to Bar Tov, that is not how the Museum concludes. From there, visitors can see interactive films relating to American knowledge of the Holocaust, they can view a film entitled Testimony, they can see the fragments of tombstones that are a casting of the Remu Synagogue Wall in Cracow, and they exit with a quote that is the seal of the Museum from the words of Elie Wiesel: “For the dead and the living, we bear witness.” Indeed, if there were nothing to worry about, why would we bear witness for the living?

As for the film, Cole is wrong when he writes: “With its use of the survivors, the Washington D.C. Holocaust [film] is given a suitably upbeat ending.”6 Lay leaders, led by the most influential chairman of the Development Committee, pressed for a happy ending. The professional staff withstood that quest for an upbeat ending because the dialogue between past, present, and future requires that we represent the past faithfully. Truth is orphaned when we try to mitigate the awesome evil of the Holocaust. The central theme of the story of the Holocaust is not regeneration and rebirth, goodness or resistance, liberation or justice, but death and destruction, dehumanization and devastation — above all, loss.7
I concur with Cole that in the representation of the Holocaust, a process of nativization has taken place. I believe that we differ in our assessment of the legitimacy, integrity, and inevitability of such a process of nativization. I concur with him that we have created a Holocaust myth — not one opposed to truth but rather a story that has strong sentiments and is used to transmit and reinforce basic social values. As a historian of religion, I often believe that myth is the story we tell that underlies the most powerful beliefs we hold. It is not the antithesis of truth but its embodiment. I just don’t believe that Cole has offered a sophisticated enough reading of the Museum to understand where it reinforces and where it undercuts the traditional American myth. In short, he has not read the text of the Museum accurately.

Finkelstein: throwing caution to the wind
Norman Finkelstein’s work, The Holocaust Industry, begins on a false note. It concludes on a bizarre one. His opening page quotes Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolfe: “It seems to me that the Holocaust is being sold — it is not being taught.” While such a statement may have been half true in 1980 when it was first said, it is disingenuous today, unless Finkelstein believes that the hundreds of university professors and thousands of high school teachers who teach the Holocaust throughout the world are out selling the Holocaust and not teaching it. The statement is offered for its shock value even though it is manifestly false.
As for his bizarre conclusion: convinced leftist that he is, Finkelstein is at once offering us a significant class and political analysis of the “Holocaust industry” and rising to the defense of German industry, Swiss banks, and international insurance countries who are being victimized by the “Holocaust industry.” He conspicuously avoids grappling with the most serious issue, and perhaps the place where true scandal may arise, the distribution of these funds among the various claimants. His claim that there were 100,000 survivors of the Holocaust is without substance.
His research is derivative. He relies upon Peter Novick, and he repeats Novick’s discoveries and builds upon them for his conclusion. Thus, we learn that there was little interest in the Holocaust until 1967. Because Novick did not follow theological controversies, there is no mention of Richard Rubenstein, whose highly controversial work, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and the Future of Judaism, received significant attention before the Six-Day War and forced Jewish theology to consider the twin revolution of contemporary Jewish life — the Holocaust and the rise of Israel — well before the events of June 1967.
We learn derivatively from Finkelstein, relying on Novick, that Elie Wiesel achieved prominence only after the Six-Day War. Yet Steven Schwarzschild, one of Israel’s most severe critics, had described Wiesel a year earlier as “the de facto high priest of our generation,” the “one man who speaks most tellingly of our time, of our hopes and fears, our tragedy and our protest.”8 On June 4, 1967, the day before the Six-Day-War broke out, a 38-year-old Wiesel was receiving an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary and giving its commencement address. Obviously, Wiesel had emerged long before June 1967, at least among his peers of academics, scholars, and rabbis, ranging from Steven Schwarzschild to David Hartman and from Richard Rubenstein to Louis Finkelstein and Saul Lieberman. But I suspect that Norman Finkelstein may not have heard these names or know of their standing in the Jewish community.
Finkelstein doesn’t share Novick’s caution as a serious historian. Novick maintains that, before the 1982 Lebanon war, “there is little reason to believe that even without the Holocaust framework, American Jews would have seen Israel’s situation in other than black and white terms.” And since then, while remaining on the whole supportive of Israel, increasing numbers of American Jews no longer see Israel’s situation as good versus evil, the few against the many, the weak against the powerful. Novick asks: “How plausible is it to believe that American policy toward Israel has been shaped by the memory of the Holocaust, not very. It was when the Holocaust was freshest in the minds of American leaders ... that the United States was least supportive of Israel.”9
Novick correctly traces the shift of the Holocaust from the margins to the center of American Jewish consciousness from the late 1960s onward. It reflected, and in turn promoted, far-reaching changes in the way American Jews came to understand themselves and their circumstances. Finkelstein writes with little such subtlety.
Finkelstein takes liberty with facts. The Washington Post is described as Jewish-owned in 1961, when Philip Graham was its editor.10 Only a cursory reading of Katherine Graham’s impressive biography would lead one to say that The Washington Post — unlike The New York Times — was a Jewish-owned newspaper. If it was, it would only be in the Nuremberg definition of Jewish, that is, if we consider the religious identity of grandparents. In another example, he presumes in a footnote to document his point that the Rosenberg trial and the Arendt controversy were contemporaneous when they were almost a decade apart.11
His reasoning is glib, not reasoned. Elie Wiesel and Israel Gutman supported Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Elie Wiesel supported Jerzy Kosinski. Gutman and Goldhagen supported Wilkomirski (the author of Fragments who seems to have invented his background and imagined his childhood in the Holocaust). Connect the dots together and this is Holocaust literature. The reasoning is unworthy of comment. I may be a sentimentalist, but I believe that Primo Levi, Nelly Sachs, Jean Amery, and Paul Celan have written important and substantial work. Lawrence Langer is not alone as a brilliant literary student of the Holocaust. One would expect more substantial polemics.
Finkelstein is out of date.
Peter Novick correctly notes that the rise of interest in the Holocaust coincided with the emerging importance of Israel for the American Jews after the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. He demonstrates the growing interest of American Jewish organizations but does not consider whether the American Jewish establishment was merely playing “catch-up” or actually leading the effort. As one who worked on the inside, I think that a careful consideration of the evidence would indicate that the establishment was not leading but following its people. Certainly, it did not welcome the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum until the Museum proved successful. It was also certainly true that professors were following their students’ interests in teaching the Holocaust.
Novick is careful not to suggest a coordinated program, a conspiracy. Finkelstein throws caution to the wind. He writes: “The Holocaust became the weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel. Avowed concern for Holocaust memory was as contrived as the avowed concern for Israel.” Yet in 1982, and during the period of Intifada I, the Holocaust played a rather different role among Jews in Israel and elsewhere who dissented from Israel’s policy in Lebanon and from the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria. Some of the most prominent Holocaust scholars in Israel and the United States ranked in the forefront of such dissent.

An inaccurate and outdated analysis
Finkelstein also seems quite unaware that many Jews today want to move away from both the perception of Israel as a victim state and of the Jews as a victimized people. The attitude toward victimization is at best ambivalent. One source of opposition to the teaching of the Holocaust is Ismar Schorsch’s mistaken fear of the lachrymose theory of Jewish identity. It portrays Jews as sufferers, as victims, not as independent actors. When we were building the Holocaust Museum, the criticism of its building reflected the fear that American visitors to the Museum would see the Jews as victims. The response of visitors to the Museum has alleviated such fears in those willing to consider the empirical evidence of the Muse-um’s impact on its visitors.
He also seems unmindful that as the field has become more diverse with many more voices joining the conversation, Elie Wiesel’s make-or-break power in the field has diminished. Two examples will suffice. Wiesel strongly critiqued the 1978 docudrama The Holocaust in The New York Times, yet he did not diminish its impact or its acclaim. Similarly, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum took form after Wiesel resigned as chairman in 1986. And while its creators surely remained faithful to many of his values, including his insistence on the centrality of the Jewish experience and the unique voice of the survivor, we did not accept — and could not accept — his sense of the mystification of the event and its inexplicability, at least not as our starting point. We situated it in the world in history and attempted to approach the inner chambers. Wiesel takes issue with this approach in his recent memoir.
Surely he is not without influence, but he is not the be-all and end-all of Holocaust Studies nor could he be, even if he ever aspired to that role. Finkelstein is patently unfair, and Elie Wiesel seems to be the particular target of his animus.12
Perhaps it is time that an objective biography should be written of Wiesel and not a hagiography, a work that considers his writing and his celebrity, but Finkelstein is not its author. He dismisses Wiesel in footnotes by quoting Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. The more clearly one reads their comments, the more inappropriate they seem. It is also time to assess Wiesel’s role as celebrity, but surely any objective assessment must consider not only the honoraria he receives for speaking but the fact that most of his speaking has little to do with the Holocaust directly. His is a shadow that looms large, yet increasingly less in what he says than in the way in which he is viewed. And one must also indicate how often he does without an honorarium. I wonder, in the name of full disclosure, whether Finkelstein wrote his own work without payment from his publishers, and whether he will earn royalty on the work and receive honoraria for speaking about it. Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.
Wiesel began his work when few were interested in listening and fewer still willing to give heed. Like Raul Hilberg, Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, Isaiah Trunk, and many of that generation, they were working in isolation — and everyone who works with this material pays a price. One does not touch the fire without being burned.

A balanced yet disappointing analysis
There is much to like in Peter Novick’s work. He is serious and disciplined. He has done his homework and has spared little effort in reviewing documentary material. His field is history, and he uses the tools of his trade well. The entire field of theology is unexamined. Thus he misses some important and early considerations of the Holocaust and, I believe, misunderstands the role of Elie Wiesel and the timing of Wiesel’s emergence into prominence. His errors are magnified by Finkelstein’s misplaced emphases.
Novick correctly observes the changed Jewish condition. Jews are winning acceptance on every level of American society. The absence of hostility toward Jews endangered survival. Or, to put it in the language of Jean Paul Sartre — if it takes an antisemite to make the Jew, then the absence of antisemitism is dangerous to Jewish survival. Jews are an empowered people, and Israel, far from being vulnerable to genocide, is objectively a regional military superpower and a well-developed country economically with all economic trends promising an ever more prosperous future.
Novick is a scholar of the emergence of consciousness of the Holocaust — not a Holocaust scholar. He covers the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. He quotes Arendt’s most succinct description of the banality of evil:
The phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.... However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic.
And yet, Novick fails to consider that this is precisely the reason why Arendt’s book was incorrectly titled. Had she written on the banality of the evildoer rather than on the banality of evil, her work might have been far better accepted. Yet the Arendt controversy ended when I was in graduate school with the publication of Isaiah Trunk’s Judenrat, which examined with the tools of scholarship the role of the Jewish Councils. Good scholarship often replaces less valuable literature. Why should someone read Bruno Bettelheim’s The Informed Heart, when he can read Terrence Des Pres’s essay on “Excremental Assault” or Robert Jan Van-Pelt’s report on the construction of latrines at Auschwitz, both of which give a far more complete picture of the dehumanization process. Finkelstein sees a political process. I tend to believe that good scholarship endures, despite the controversies. Even Raul Hilberg’s greatest critics now regard his work as magisterial.

I believe that Novick and I differ on three important points, one historical and two philosophical. My own reading of the evidence has convinced me that the turning point for American Jewry was the Six-Day War. The Yom Kippur War only reinforced the perception of the threat of genocide and the vulnerability of Israel because of the oil boycott and the perception that the West was addicted to cheap supplies of energy. It was believed then that power would reside in the control of natural re-sources. I also find it curious that Novick would omit the actual genocidal threat. Just prior to the Six-Day War, Ahmud Shukeiry, Yasir Arafat’s distinguished predecessor, threatened to drive the Jews into the sea. The very words he used triggered an association with the Holo-caust, as Jews subliminally recalled the Netaneh Tokef prayer of the High Holidays: “On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Who shall live and who shall die? Who by Fire and who by water?” Many Jews were surprised by how much Israel had meant to them, by how deeply it touched them, and there was an outpouring of support that transformed the American Jewish community seemingly overnight.
Novick is correct in that the perception of an Israel poised on the brink of destruction shaped the response of American Jews. I experienced the difference in the perception and reality as I boarded a plane for Israel just on the eve of the June 1967 war. When I left for the airport, those around me believed that I was en route to slaughter. When I boarded the plane, the Israelis returning home understood that war was imminent, but they were prepared for battle and for victory, not for defeat and slaughter.
For Israelis, the change in Holocaust consciousness was far more related to the Yom Kippur War, where the Zionist dream of independence and an end to Jewish vulnerability was shaken by Israel’s dependence on the United States and its vulnerability as revealed by the attack. For 72 hours, the fate of the Jewish state depended upon a decision to be made by three men. One, President Richard M. Nixon, was an antisemite who supported Israel. The second, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, was born a Jew but had converted to Protestantism at Harvard. The third, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was the first Jew to serve in his high office and spoke of himself at that time as being “of Jewish origin.” They came to the rescue with massive arms shipments and decisive American backing. Israelis came to identify for the first time with the traditional fate of exilic Jews — dependence. The Zionist dream of independence, that an army, flag, and nation-state would put an end to Jewish vulnerability, was severely tested. And Israel, which had done so much to alleviate antisemitism and to give Jews a new sense of pride, suddenly became a source for antisemitism and not a defense against it.
Like many historians, Novick admits that he doubts that history has any lessons to teach. He writes: “Hovering over all of this is the absurd maxim, In extremis caritas — that it is in imagining the most desperate circumstance that one gains insight into what gentiles really think of Jews.”13 I suspect that Jews are not alone in this imagination. One of the reasons for the significant transformation of Christian doctrine regarding the Jews by Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II, Vatican Council II, and the American Lutheran Church, among others, is be-cause they believe that the extreme revealed something disquieting. That is, it is better to attack it at its roots and make it more difficult for such an extreme situation to arise again, and for believing Christians to participate. One of the powers of Primo Levi’s work is that he perceives precisely what is extreme about the camps and how that transforms the ordinary circumstances of ordinary men, and what we can learn from it. The same is true for the work of Robert Proctor on Nazi Medicine, for Richard Rubenstein, who regards the Holocaust as a manifestation in the extreme of what is present in the mainstream, and for numerous other scholars, writers, theologians, psychologists, and sociologists.

Why the Holocaust is of interest
Perhaps the most major disappointment in Novick’s work is that he does not seem to understand why the Holocaust is of interest to the American people. It is at those moments in the book that he resorts to opinion instead of looking for evidence, where evidence can be found. Perhaps it is the limits of the tools of his trade as a historian, or of some other limitation, but I think it is important to illustrate this tendency specifically.
Our disagreement is evident in Novick’s work. I wrote: “When America is at its best, the Holocaust is impossible in the United States. The Museum teaches fundamental American values of pluralism, democracy, restraint on the powers of government, the inalienable rights of individuals, the inability of the government to enter into freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship....” He comments, “If Americans need a demonstration of the way that these values were violated in the Holocaust, we are in worse shape than I’d thought.”14 Perhaps we are. Or perhaps Novick should listen to the diverse groups that visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and its counterparts in several large American cities, whether they be inner city students, or Naval Academy midshipmen, or Roman Catholic parochial school children, or African Americans whose churches have been bombed, in order to assess both the impact of a Museum visit and what they sense their needs to be. An objective assessment of the Museum must engage the objective information that exists regarding the impact of the Museum on its visitors. In the early days of the Museum’s history, anecdotal information or the personal response of one critic or another may have sufficed, but after 10 years and 20 million visitors — seven years and 14 million visitors when Novick wrote his book — other tools of assessment are available. Though a historian may have to read in sociology or educational literature, he is not free to ignore such findings, at least not without offering a justification.
Similarly, Novick writes:
The Washington Holocaust Museum has been overwhelmed by millions of non-Jewish visitors, “voting with their feet” for the encounter the Museum provides. Some unknown portion of that stream of visitors has been led to its doors by deeply felt interest and concern. For some equally unknown portion of visitors, the museum has become something that one has to “do” when one tours Washington, just as one has to “do” the Louvre in Paris.15
Frankly, I am touched by the comparison with the Louvre but disappointed by use of the phrase “unknown portion ... of visitors.” One of the things that the Museum has done well is to survey its visitors and the reasons they come to visit. This material is available for the asking, and the answers to Novick’s “unknown portion of visitors” is probably available for the asking and surely available for the researching. One could even review the readers’ comments book placed at the end of the Hall of Remembrance or speak with visitors who might just fall into both categories. Perhaps more important, the question should not be what brought them in the door, but what did they learn within the Museum and what was the content of their visit.
I sense that Novick does not quite grasp why the Holocaust has taken hold within the United States, though it was a European event that occurred a continent away more than half-a-century ago. He does provide the glimpse of one answer. The Holocaust has become the negative absolute.
In a world of relativism, we don’t know what is good. We don’t know what is bad. But we do know that the Holocaust is evil, absolute evil. It is for that reason people use the word in the plural as they attempt to call attention to their suffering — the Black Holocaust, the Holocaust of the American Indians, the Holocaust in Kosovo, Rwanda, Bosnia. The Holocaust is the nuclear bomb of moral epithets. It is an event of such magnitude that the more we sense the relativism of values, the more we require the Holocaust as the foundation for a negative absolute. I suspect this is the reason why the leaders of European nations have rediscovered the importance of the Holocaust for contemporary moral education. I also suspect this is the reason why it becomes the focal point for papal visits to Israel, for German society, and for American society. I also suspect that this is the reason why Holocaust deniers deny an event that all reason, all standards of rationality, demonstrate cannot be denied. It is in this function as a negative absolute that the Holocaust may loom largest in the coming years.

The universalization of Holocaust Memory:
perils, promise, and problems
Within the Jewish community, there is ample evidence of Holocaust fatigue, at least among prominent Jews, religious and secular, conservative, liberal, and progressive. What’s the problem?
As the Holocaust enters into the larger domain, it ceases to become the particular inheritance of the Jewish people. So Jews who want an increase in Jewish parochialism — and who correctly perceive that such parochialism is essential to Jewish survival — are angered that the particular experience of the Jews has been used in the service of the universal.
Their counterparts who believe in universalism are angered by the emphasis on the particular Jewish experience. They argue that we must tackle the larger issue of genocide, not the Holocaust; that we must consider slavery and what my feminist friends call man’s inhumanity to people, and not just genocide.
Some are embarrassed by this particularism. Some fear that an emphasis on the uniqueness of the Holocaust is some sort of special pleading. They see it as a secret way of speaking of Jewish chosenness, an undisguised way of saying, as the book of Lamentations says, “Is there no pain like my pain?”
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the popularity of the United States Holocaust Memor-ial Museum and the film Schindler’s List, some continue to fear that the Jewish experience is parochial and will not be of interest to non-Jews, forgetting what we have seen again and again. The more deeply particular the human experience, the more universal it is — provided it is presented as a human story.
Some religious leaders object to the dissonant religious implications of the Holocaust. Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivot have difficulty studying the Holocaust. How does one speak of a benevolent, all powerful God who is engaged in Jewish history after Auschwitz? How does one deal with Irving Greenberg’s principle of authentic religious expression after the Holocaust: “No statement — theological or otherwise — can be made, which cannot be made in the presence of burning children.”
If Jews were afraid of genocide a quarter century ago, when Novick wrote his book, this fear no longer seemed prevalent and far less realistic. Jewish leaders were arguing in the late 1990s that a generation ago the enemies were external. Today they are internal. Divisions between secular and religious in Israel threaten civil culture, the struggle between assimilation and parochialization in the United States threatens Jewish survival and Jewish participation in American culture. The absence of external pressure permits the Jews all sorts of options, including intermarriage, and forces Jewish identity to compete with other forms of identity available to participants in the global universe. Young American Jews are sent to Israel to find their Jewish identity. Their post-army Israeli counterparts become pilgrims to Nepal in search of something else. For all those who have begun a journey of return to the Jewish people, there have been others who have ventured forth into uncharted territory.
This is somewhat changed in the charged atmosphere of resurgent antisemitism in Europe and the emergence of vehement antisemitism in the Islamic world, which had led some Jewish leaders to erroneously compare the first four years of the new millennium with the 1930s.
Twenty-five years ago, the story of Holocaust and redemption resonated within the lives of many Jews. It rang true to their experience and it gave them the imperatives that were the content of Jewish life, solidarity, political activism, and Jewish power. Today the story resonates less, as an empowered Jewish people enjoys the fruits of its power and the freedoms of the global universe. Contemporary Jews have internalized these messages. They have less need of the Holocaust to reinforce these values.
Yet something else — something more significant has happened. As consciousness of the Holocaust has moved way beyond the Jewish community, we have transformed the bereaved memories of a parochial community into an act of conscience. We have responded in the most deeply Jewish way of all: remembering suffering and transmitting that memory in order to fortify conscience, to plead for decency, to strengthen values, and thus to intensify a commitment to human dignity. That is how the Torah taught us to remember that we were slaves in Egypt. The Jewish experience of slavery and redemption from slavery became universal. Witness its importance in Michael Waltzer’s excellent book Exodus and Revolution. It is too early to tell what will be the impact of remembering the Holocaust. But the impulse to use the memory to fortify conscience and to plead for decency is to push in the proper direction, at least by the norms of Jewish memory.• About the author
Michael Berenbaum is Director of the Sigi Ziering Insti-tute:Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and Professor of Theology [Adjunct] at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. His most recent work is A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors.