The German Genius

Holocaust was historicized—thought about and talked about as just one terrible feature of the period that had ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany. “The Holocaust had not, in the postwar years, attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that could be derived from contemplating it. Since the Holocaust was over and done with, there was no practical advantage to compensate for the pain of staring into that awful abyss.” In his 1957 book, American Judaism , a scholarly survey of Jews in the fifties, Nathan Glazer observed that the Holocaust “had had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.” 18
    In the immediate aftermath of World War II “everything about the contemporary presentation of the reports, testimonies, photographs, and newsreels was congruent with the wartime framing of Nazi atrocities as having been directed, in the main , at political opponents of the Third Reich.” (Italics added.) The words “Jew” or “Jewish” did not appear in Edward R. Murrow’s (horrifed, awestruck) radio broadcast about entering Buchenwald. General Dwight Eisenhower, disturbed by the camps, said he wanted “legislators and editors” to visit these locations where the Nazis had incarcerated “political prisoners”—again, no mention of Jews. Other reports spoke of “political prisoners, slave laborers and civilians of many nationalities.” Jews did not go unmentioned, and some reports observed that they had been treated worse than others. “But there was nothing about the reporting on the liberation of the camps that treated Jews as more than among the victims of the Nazis…nothing, that is, that associated them with what is now designated ‘the Holocaust.’” (Italics in the original.) 19
    Attitudes only began to change, Novick says, with the Eichmann trial in 1961–62, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967, and, most of all, after the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, when Israel—for a brief time—looked as though she might be defeated. Novick again: “As part of this process, there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the Holocaust’—an event in its own right, not simply a subdivision of general Nazi barbarism.” 20 It was now that the word “Holocaust” entered the language as a description of all manner of horrors.
    It was now, Novick says, that the Holocaust became in effect sacralized, so that it was almost above criticism. Almost, but not quite. Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist and author of Touch the Water, Touch the Wind , about two Holocaust survivors who fall in love, was one who asked whether, alongside the obligation to remember, there wasn’t also a right to forget: “Are we…to sit forever mourning for our dead?” In the first year of the Intifada (1987), the distinguished Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana, who had been interned in Auschwitz as a child, published “A Plea for Forgetting.” The Holocaust’s “lesson,” that “the whole world is against us,” that the Jews “are the eternal victims,” was, for Elkana, “the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler.” This lesson, he thought, had contributed to Israeli brutalities on the West Bank and to the unwillingness to make peace with the Palestinians. 21 This change in feeling culminated in 1998 when, in a survey of American Jewish opinion, respondents were asked to rate the importance of various activities to their Jewish identity. This was the first year that “remembrance of the Holocaust” was included (a revealing development in itself)—and it won hands down, chosen many more times than “attending synagogue” or “observing Jewish holidays.” 22
    Novick further observed that since the 1970s the Holocaust has come to be presented as not just a Jewish memory but as an American one. In a 1995 poll, to gauge Americans’ knowledge of World War II, 97 percent knew what the Holocaust was, substantially more than could identify Pearl Harbor or knew that the United States had dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and far more than the 49 percent who knew that the Soviet Union fought on the American side in the war. 23 By 2002, in a growing number of states, the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools was mandated by law.
    Norman G. Finkelstein was much more acerbic than Novick. In The Holocaust Industry , published to some acclaim in 2000, stimulating great interest (and criticism) in Germany but relative silence in the United States,