When scholars representing two distinct strands of Judiac studies gathered in Houston Hall, they may not have signed any peace accords, but they did find some common ground.
By Samuel Hughes
FROM THE CONFERENCE
The Holocaust as an Israeli Experience
The Holocaust as an American Jewish Experience
There’s a Jewish saying — not quite a proverb — that if you put two Jews together in a room you’ll get 10 good arguments. Put 20 scholars of Judaica in a room for three days — as happened during a recent colloquium sponsored by Penn’s Center for Judaic Studies — and you’ll get enough scholarly arguments, counterarguments, and commentary to make your head spin like a dreidel. In the process, some brilliant, fractured light will be shined onto a broad mosaic of topics.
The
Gruss Colloquium in Jewish Studies was the culmination of a year-long
dialogue among the center’s visiting scholars. Its stated theme was
“Divergent Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America,” and
it represented two distinct groups — one studying American Jewish
culture and society in the 20th century, the other examining the
formative years of Israeli statehood — who came together to give and
discuss papers on topics ranging from “Starting Over: American Judaism
in the 1950s and the Early 1960s” to “Jewish Moroccan Saint Worship and
the Shaping of Israel’s Sacred Geography.” Many of those papers will
appear in Pennsylvania Studies in Jewish Civilization,
Vol. 3, published by Yale University Press.
While
some topics would interest few beyond a small group of scholars, others
touched subjects central to national and even international debates.
None was as potentially emotional as the Holocaust, and the two
excerpted papers that follow offer ample evidence of the scholars’
willingness to examine highly sensitive issues with relentless honesty.
This does not mean that they are “right,” or that their perspectives are
the only ones on this vast and highly-charged issue. But the papers —
and the lively but civil discussion that followed — do say something
about the spirit and quality of scholarly inquiry at the center, which
was created in 1993 by the merger of the Annenberg Research Institute
(formerly the Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning) and the
University. Located in a handsome sort of post-classical building on
Independence Mall, the center describes itself as the “only institution
in the world devoted exclusively to post-doctoral research on Jewish
civilization in all its historical and cultural manifestations.”
For
Dr. David Ruderman, the center’s director and the man who organized the
colloquium, the weekly presentations and debates in the months leading
up to it were a “kind of microcosmic battlefield of the polarized
tensions and deeply felt divisions that plague Jewish life” in America
and the Middle East. Despite the “regnant myth of one people indivisible
and united,” he added in a recent essay, “the reality of Jewish life in
past eras and certainly in our own suggests otherwise. The experiment
of living together in a kind of year-long ‘Camp David’ of Jewish studies
has been fraught with tensions, highly charged disputation, even mutual
recriminations. But we have survived as one group, and we respect each
other and even enjoy each other’s company.”
On
the second day of the colloquium, Dr. Ilan Peleg, professor of social
sciences at Lafayette College, gave a paper titled “The Political
Culture of the Ben-Gurionist Republic, 1948-63,” which did not sit well
with some of his colleagues. Among the “fundamental” and “dominant”
values under David Ben-Gurion — “and to some extent even today” —
were, in his view, “exclusive Jewish ethnocentricism,” “militarism as an
instrument” for attaining goals, and “religiosity as an occasional
legitimizer of state actions.” Israel, he argued, is “clearly not a
Western-style democracy,” and under Ben-Gurion it “clearly chose to
marginalize those Arabs who remained.”
One
of the two designated respondents, Dr. Daniel Elazar, president of the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and professor of political studies
at Bar-Ilan University, had sharp words for Peleg’s paper, though he
said that Peleg was a “nice guy,” a quality that came through more in
his delivery than in his writing. After criticizing his methodology, the
bearded, wheelchair-bound Elazar took Peleg to task for offering an
American-style liberal model “as the only acceptable model for
democracy,” and accused him of using a “sinister tone” to describe the
way things happened.
He
took issue with the word “militarism” to describe what was, in Elazar’s
view, “an army that consisted essentially of citizen soldiers who saw
themselves as citizen soldiers,” and argued that Peleg treated security
issues “in a vacuum,” as if they were a “whole-cloth invention” of the
nation’s leaders.
“Accusing
a duck of being a duck is no great trick,” he concluded. “It’s best to
try to understand the duck than to pretend it was somehow being false to
itself because it quacked and flapped its wings.”
Most
of the presentations were less politically charged than that one —
though no less thought-provoking. One came from Dr. Samuel Heilman, Gr’73, professor
of sociology at Queens College in New York, who gave an engaging
account of American Judaism in the 1950s and 1960s based on his Portrait of American Jews: The Last Half of the 20th Century (reviewed in the March Gazette).
Dr.
Ilan Troen’s “‘Europe’ and ‘America’ in the Education of Israelis”
traced the evolution of secular Zionist education — “a reaction to
Jewish life as most educators knew and remembered it in Europe” — and
showed how it has been increasingly influenced by the individualistic
American models of education. Troen, professor of modern history at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, noted that in secular Zionist
schooling, both modern Hebrew literature and Jewish history were viewed
as “moral and political instruments” to reinforce the “role of the
people in shaping Jewish culture,” while the “immanence of God was
excised from Jewish history even as the Divine was removed from the
Bible and all other writings considered sacred.” Whereas the operating
assumption for secular Zionist educators “was that the individual child
should be molded in the national culture to serve national purposes,” in
an American model, “the opportunities of individualism are given
priority over the demands for continuity of the collective.” As a
result, the “infiltration of American ideas and examples has further
complicated and deepened the problem of maintaining through education a
commitment to Jewish community and continuity.”
Ah, those subversive American ideas. It’s hard to say how much they influenced this colloquium. Come to think of it, that would make for a pretty lively panel discussion …
FROM THE CONFERENCE
The Holocaust as an Israeli Experience
By Gulie Ne’eman Arad
As the Shoah is passing from memory to history, its previously secured position as a salient component of Israel’s collective consciousness is beginning to reveal some signs of weakness. For an increasing number of Israelis this event is no longer the legitimizing factor for the state’s right to exist, nor a unique moral justification for pursuing its national interests. Put differently, as this collective trauma transforms into history and the carriers of its lived memories die away, the Shoah loses some of its credibility as a force of forging Israel’s national cohesiveness, as a rationale for the state’s policies and actions, and as the central lesson for its future. Let me emphasize that I do not mean to argue or imply that the Shoah has become peripheral to Israel’s collective consciousness. Rather, I wish to contend that the meanings attached to this past and its significance for the present are being reevaluated.
As we have increasingly come to recognize, collective memory is socially constructed. We remember because we are prodded to do so by those who have the power and interest to invoke certain memories. Remembrance, being a relatively inexpensive gesture, goes a long way, especially with the previously forgotten. Thus it is often adopted by the politically powerful as a means to coopt dissident elements, or alternatively to acknowledge sub-groups whose support brought victory in the polls. Changes in the demographic profile and in the social and political climate of a society also have an impact on “memory work” — that is, on “the work of giving order and meaning to the past.” During the past two decades and more, such conditions were clearly discernible in Israeli society. The major change took place as a result of the Likud’s victory in 1977, when three decades of secular-Labor Ashkenazi hegemony had ended. The partners of the new ruling elite — the Mizrachiem [Jews who came from Moslem countries], the Orthodox, and the national-religious zealots — were quick to demand space in the national pantheon for their own particular cultures and memories. Insofar as the destruction of European Jewry was paramount in Israel’s master narrative and its remembrance was entrusted to the dominant secular Ashkenazi elite under the emerging new paradigm, its position in the national cosmology came under criticism. The plurality and diversity of Israeli society could no longer be contained about unity of Am Israel (the people of Israel) resulted instead in its fragmentation.
Descendants of the early pioneers and the newcomers, Mizrachiem and non-Zionist ultra-orthodox, survivors of the Shoah and World War II veterans of the Soviet army — all of these sectors launched a campaign to redeem their particular past. Concurrently, a number of other major cords in the previously tightly woven Zionist cosmology began to show signs of wear and tear. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, the military lost its position as a quasi-sacred institution; the 1982 war had jolted the belief that Israel only fights “just” wars. When parents took to the streets to protest against the government for sending their children to die in an unjust war, the notion of patriotism as an unqualified readiness to die for one’s country was also weakened.
Without much time to work through these crises of confidence, young Israelis were called to perform another controversial task in the intifada. Watching daily on television how the historic victims are being transformed into victimizers, many Israelis embarked on an inward journey.
Under these circumstances even the Holocaust-anxiety rhetoric that the Gulf War provoked did not have much of an impact. Instead, many Israelis became intoxicated with the hope for peace. However, rather ironically, it was the peace process that brought to the fore the deep divisions within Israeli society.
It is within this volatile context that Israel is experiencing what Richard Terdiman called a “memory crisis.” There is a sense that the nation’s collective historical past and its ideological essence are somewhat evading memory, that the traditional patterns of remembrance cease to integrate with present-day consciousness. Indeed, a number of Israel’s most time-honored assumptions are presently being challenged by a generation for whom neither the Shoah nor the birth of the state constitute living memories. Being privileged, this generation is also skeptical. It questions if Zionism is the only solution to the “Jewish problem”; if the victimized collective Jewish past is the dictum for Israel’s future self-definition and self-understanding; and if this “essential” Jewish victimhood is a tenable qualifier that should earn discounts in assessing Israel’s past and present conduct.
Summons to reconsider these sacred-like truisms have reached every sphere of Israeli life. While ostensibly the Shoah can be viewed as peripheral to this discourse, a closer look reveals its connectedness. In the political sphere a consequential segment of the Israeli public has begun to question why a society that was born under the banner of the need to efface the Jews’ abnormal diasporic existence, keeps clinging to the epitome of aberration as a focus of its national existence.
But to repeal the “Angst” that still possesses many Israelis — objectively or subjectively — is not a simple matter. The late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was aware of the negative political ramifications that the long misuse of Shoah memory, of which he too was guilty, generated. When trying to win support for his Syrian peace initiative in 1995, he said in the Knesset: “We must begin to understand that the whole world is not against us … in fact, we must get used to a new situation in which most of the world is for us.” For some the message was a rude awakening to the fact that Israel must be prepared to forego certain political and moral exemptions from which it gained certain dubious benefits, as a result of the Shoah. Put differently, “normalcy” entailed disclaiming the rank of history’s principal victims.
Indeed, some have voiced the opinion that the time has come “to cure the wound instead of only administering to it.” One such claim was aired in 1988 under the title, “The Need to Forget.” It was four months into the intifada, while [accused Nazi war criminal] John Demanjuk was awaiting his verdict, that Yehuda Elkana published his plea in HaAretz. A philosophy professor who was 10 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz, Elkana asserted that what activates Israeli society in its relation to the Palestinians is a “profound existential ‘Angst’ fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust, and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are its eternal victim.” For Israel, he claimed, to base its understanding of human existence on the Holocaust “is disastrous.
“Without overlooking the historical importance of collective memory,” he added, the “… more important political and educational task for the leaders of Israel” is “to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to building our future, and not to be preoccupied from morning to night with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust.”
Although engendered by the intifida, Elkana’s critique echoed sounds of a deeper change. As Israeli society is evolving from a “national community” into a civil society, the Shoah no longer serves effectively as its major unifying component.
Yet, as I have previously intimated, a society whose existence is objectively no longer threatened — and where ethnic, religious, and class divisions characterize politics and culture — is prone to develop a highly differentiated reading of its past. The different sub-groups, coming to feel more secure about their position in society, have also become less intimidated by the sacredness of the national master narrative.
The orthodox-religious sector is one such group. Until recently it avoided, for the most part, participating in the national discourse on the Shoah. Yet, having recently discovered the political power of its imageries, its leadership is not abashed to make use of it. Concurrently the ultra orthodox are busying themselves with reinventing the history of both Zionism and the Holocaust. Imagining themselves to have been the forerunners of secular Zionist settlers in Palestine, and arguing falsely that the majority of European Jews prior to the Holocaust were orthodox, are preliminary steps in the cultural-political war that the orthodox are waging against a modern democratic Israel.
It should be made clear that the Shoah was abused by both the Right and Left. It would also be misleading to give the impression that these exploits are presently limited to the religious Right. The Shoah is still deployed for the purpose of reawakening national commitment. When in 1995, for example, Israel’s national soccer team went to Poland to play against the Polish national team in the qualifying pre-European cup competition, it was staged as a show of base nationalism. Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest- circulation daily, ran a two-page (centerfold) headline, reading: “The Poles did not want the ‘HaTikvha’ to be heard before the game, but they received it in Auschwitz today.” Just before the game the team was taken to the death camp.
Was it intended to raise motivation? That evening the visit was aired on the main news program. The young players wept as they spoke. “We are playing today on a soil saturated with blood,” said one; “our aim is to prove that we exist;” “On the field we shall give vent to all the pent-up emotions …” Another said, “Today I understand why it was so important to establish a Jewish state.” The Israeli team lost 4 to 3.
One may justifiably ask, if all of this is still going on, what’s the change? What is new is the widespread reactions that the appropriation of the Shoah has been generating in recent years. These critiques take a variety of forms and are invested with different meaning. Not less significantly, they engage a cross-section of the Israeli public, a fact that may be reflective of the deeper transformation that Israel is undergoing.
In the domain of commemorative rituals there is a trend, as Eliezer Don-Yehiya observed, “to replace the power-oriented message” of the Shoah “with a more humanistic one …” There is also an apparent disparaging attitude toward symbols and expressions of national heroism. And there is a conspicuous desire to privatize memory, to mourn the private losses rather than glorify the collective gains. “Each Person has a Name,” a grass-root invention of reading on Yom Hashoa the names of relatives who perished, is a conspicuous example.
Along with a revealed tendency to privatize (that is de-nationalize) Holocaust commemoration, there is also a manifest bid to de-Ashkenize it by extending remembrance to other groups of victims.
Indeed, the recent inclusion of the Shoah in the artistic repertoire of artists who identify themselves as Mizrachiem, is a case in point. Highly acclaimed productions in the theater, cinema and popular music (such as: “Arbeit Macht Frei” and “Don’t touch my Holocaust”) were conceived, produced, and performed by young artists who made it a point to stress their non-Ashkenazi identity. Here too there is an additional and not a deeply concealed message about the self-perception of Mizrachiem as victims, not only of history but also of memory. When asked about limits of representation of the Shoah, Dudi Mayan, the creator of “Arbeit Macht Frei” said: “there is no limit … everything is legitimate, there is no sacred territory, and there is no need to be granted permission to touch this nerve or hurt someone.”
And there is yet another group, the privileged younger generation that rejects as “abnormal” the ideological trump cards of “the whole world is against us” or, that “what happened before can happen again.” Unwilling to live under the shadow of Auschwitz, this sector, dubbed as “Zefonieem” mocks “Shoah business” through the arts and popular culture.
It is difficult to explain with any certainty the appeal of the Shoah as a theme in popular culture. But perhaps it is linked to the fact that it communicates well to a generation that turned skeptical and cynical, but still has the need to identify with a history that is more overpowering and fascinating than its present.
While young Israelis are pleading for normalcy, it should not be mistaken as a yearning for forgetfulness. This is not far from what Abba Kovner thought in 1946, when he said: “to remember everything is madness, to forget is betrayal.”
Be it as it may, this generation is perhaps the first one that is trying to understand the Shoah.
We cannot assume that remembrance traditions can exist without change, including changing modes of reception. What ought to concern us is how change is introduced or accepted.
The notion that “We are One” is, perhaps, a useful slogan for the United Jewish Appeal or other fundraising organizations. But as a characterization of modern Jewry, whether in Israel or elsewhere, it is little more than a fancy fabrication of reality. Not only among the nations of the world, but within Israel as well, the memory of the Shoah is being fragmented and then integrated by associating it with particular historical and cultural meanings. Hence, we have to accept the fact that the expanding global awareness of the Holocaust is derived from and linked to the universalization of the Shoah itself. And as such, more than one authentic and exclusive memory of the event will be formed.
And there is another issue that calls for contemplation: the difference between obsession with victimization and preoccupation with survival. That difference is crucial. Victimization is about murder and death, domination and helplessness. Survival is about coping, living after, going on. The Holocaust ought to survive; it ought not to become a victim of memory.
Indeed, the deluge of memories in which our contemporary sensibilities have been immersed attests, perhaps, to what Frances Yates thought of us when she wrote: “We moderns have no memories at all.”
If that is indeed the lamentable human condition, we are all the more obliged to efface the rhetorical, political, and religious misuses to which this catastrophe has been put; to guard that what we remember is the victims’ truth in as innocent a manner as their tragic fate was.
Dr. Gulie Ne’eman Arad is professor of history at Tel-Aviv University.
The Holocaust as an American Jewish Experience
By Peter Novak
There are two problems with the title of my talk today. One is that the essentializing phrase American Jewish covers millions of individuals with the most diverse sensibilities. Within the brief compass of this talk, I can deal with that difficulty only by painting with the broadest of strokes, cavalierly sweeping exceptions and qualifications under the rug.
The more serious difficulty is with that protean word experience. Because with the exception of at most two percent of American Jewry there is no direct experience of the Holocaust, but at most a vicarious experience of the Holocaust. And while as individuals we all have considerable latitude in marginalizing or centering (and how we interpret) our direct experiences, when it comes to vicarious experiences our freedom is unbounded. We make decisions about which vicarious experiences to reject and which to embrace, based on how we choose to understand ourselves and represent ourselves to others.
Over the past half century, American Jews have fully exercised that freedom with respect to the Holocaust. As is well known, the Holocaust has moved from striking marginality in the first postwar years, when it figured very little in Jewish discourse, to striking centrality in recent decades, when it has become omnipresent.
The move of the Holocaust from the margins to the center of American Jewish self-understanding and self-representation can, it is often claimed, be explained in the implicitly-psychoanalytic language of “collective memory”: “trauma repressed” followed by the “return of the repressed.” For reasons I don’t have time to explicate, I don’t find this model useful. Though there were important exceptions, I do not think that American Jewry initially experienced the Holocaust as “traumatic” in any worthwhile sense of that word. More generally, I don’t find the organic metaphor of “collective memory” a useful concept in the very inorganic societies of the late 20th century, and particularly not in the case under discussion.
One important element in an alternative explanation — not by itself, by any means a total explanation — is American Jewish response to — American Jewish participation in — the transvaluation of victimhood in our society: from a status all-but-universally shunned, to one frequently, often zealously, pursued. As contrasted with a depth- psychological model, which considers the actors to be largely moved by subconscious forces, I see decisions about whether or not to vicariously experience the Holocaust — to marginalize or center it in consciousness — as largely (though not exclusively) a matter of decisions and choices.
Toward the end of World War II the American Jewish Committee sponsored an academic conference on American anti-Semitism. Shortly thereafter the committee’s director reported its findings to a meeting of Jewish organizations. He began by noting that, in the experts’ view, dedicated anti-Semites, though they claimed Jews were powerful, subconsciously knew they were weak, and this perception stimulated their sadistic impulses. Thus, he said, defense agencies … should avoid representing the Jew as weak, victimized, and suffering … There needs to be an elimination or at least a reduction of horror stories of victimized Jewry … We must normalize the image of the Jew … War hero stories are excellent … The Jew should be represented as like others, rather than unlike others … In an effort to arouse the conscience of the world, as the one possible means of alleviating the tragic plight of our brethren in Europe, we have had to publicize the mass atrocities committed by the Nazis. That was unavoidable … It is necessary first to identify and analyze the characteristics that seem to distinguish the Jewish from the non- Jewish American, and then to encourage the adaptation of the Jewish mores to the mores prevailing in this country … Retention of positive and useful traits and the gradual sloughing off of useless and outworn characteristics in favor of desirable American characteristics …
There was a perfect fit between the experts’ view that the victim image worsened rather than alleviated anti-Semitism, and [the director’s] preference for Jews adapting to “the mores prevailing in this country … desirable American characteristics.” The all-but-universal American notion of desirable characteristics at this time was embodied in the strong, silent, stoical, and self-reliant cowboy … or victorious war hero. Nobody in America at this time thought there was anything at all desirable about being a victim — vicariously identifying with the victim experience. Among the “useless and outworn characteristics” to be “sloughed off” was surely the common negative stereotype of the “whining” or “complaining” or “self-pitying” Jew.
It may be objected that the “accommodationist” American Jewish Committee, in its desire to repudiate the victim image and adapt to American norms, was not wholly representative of American Jewry. But this was a time when the Anti-Defamation League was instructing Jews on proper American deportment at Miami Beach. A time when, insofar as Zionist ideology was influencing American Jewish consciousness, the imperative to “negate the Diaspora” meant, above all, to repudiate the “victim condition” of Diaspora Jews. And in any case, most American Jews in their forties and younger were hardly less in the thrall of the macho, anti-victim norms of American culture than their gentile countrymen; equally prone to choose vicarious identification with winners rather than losers. Moreover, the overall agenda of American Jewry in these years was unequivocally for integration rather than any kind of separation; for stressing what united Jews with other Americans, not what separated or distinguished them.
The bearing of all this on the centering or marginalizing of the Holocaust became manifest when, on three separate occasions in the late ’40s, the leading Jewish organizations were presented with a proposal for a major Holocaust memorial structure in New York City. On each occasion the representatives of the participating groups unanimously rejected the idea. Their grounds were that such a monument would inevitably center in the American mind the image of the Jew as victim, which was the last thing they wanted to do …
There were many factors at work in the marginalization of the Holocaust in American Jewish consciousness in the first postwar years. No doubt, though less among American Jews than in the Yishuv [the Jewish community in pre-statehood Israel], there was an undercurrent of shame at the alleged passivity of the victims of the Holocaust. But high on the list was the decision made explicitly by Jewish leaders, tacitly by the rank and file, that to center it would inevitably mean centering “essential” Jewish victimhood. And, in the time-honored phrase, this — in the culture of the ’40s and ’50s — would not be “good for the Jews.”
Fast forward to the ’80s and ’90s. Those who speak these days of America as dominated by a “culture of victimization” often have right-wing and mean-spirited motives and agendas. They are themselves often participants of a “culture of complacency” which would like the oppressed and the victimized to go away and shut up. That said, it seems to me undeniable that there has been, for various reasons, a fairly widespread transvaluation of victimization in American culture.
On the individual level, the cultural icon of the strong, silent hero now coexists with the often more-highly-valued vulnerable and verbose anti-hero. 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. Transformations on the individual level are mirrored at the level of the group. Historian Charles Maier of Harvard University, with perhaps a little (but only a little) exaggeration, 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.
Where the integration, if not the “melting,” of groups within American society was valorized in the ’40s and ’50s, assertive (often belligerent) particularism is the norm in the ’80s and ’90s. And the assertion of the group’s historic victimization — on the basis of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation — is always central to the group’s assertion of its distinctive identity. American Jews certainly did not invent the practice of legitimating, or even valorizing, the aggressive assertion of individual and group victimization. But once the practice began to spread, as it did from the late ’60s onward, we have been consenting — even zealous — participants. And that participation is, of course, grounded in the Holocaust.
I am not — I can’t emphasize this too strongly — not saying that the growth of a “victim culture” in the United States was the principal cause of American Jewry’s centering of the Holocaust in recent decades. What I am suggesting is that the transvaluation of victimhood in American culture has been an indispensable background condition to the centrality which the Holocaust has assumed in American Jewish life — the extent to which American Jews, in myriad ways, have chosen to vicariously experience the Holocaust.
Whereas in the ’40s and ’50s American Jews believed they had even more reason than others to shun a victim identity, by the ’80s and ’90s they had more reason than others to embrace it. In today’s cultural climate, no moral merit attaches to saying: “I am a member of what is by far the wealthiest, best-educated, most influential, in-every- way-most-successful group in American society.” A group which, compared to most other identifiable minority groups, suffers no measurable discrimination and no disadvantages on account of that minority status. But anchor your identity in the agony of European Jewry — vicariously experience that agony — and, in the cultural climate which valorizes victimization, boundless possibilities of individual and collective moral aggrandizement appear.
Then, too, there is the matter of group survival: the top priority of organized Jewry these days. A very large portion of American Jews cannot define their Jewishness on the basis of distinctive religious beliefs, since they don’t have much in the way of distinctively Jewish religious beliefs. Most can’t define it by distinctively Jewish cultural traits, since they don’t have much of these either. For a very substantial section of American Jewry virtually the only basis of their Jewish identity is a vicarious sense of shared persecution and victimhood; for another very substantial section, this isn’t the only basis, but it is fundamental. To put it perhaps a bit too starkly, much of American Jewry appears to need a self-understanding as victim to remain Jewish — a functional substitute for the anti-Semitism which once countered centrifugal forces. The centering of the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness, vicariously experiencing and re-experiencing the Holocaust, fills this need. And, often with great ambivalence, much of American Jewish leadership, desperately concerned with communal survival, accepts Holocaust-centered Jewishness because, after a fashion, at least so far, it “works.”
Currently in America, Jewish victim-identity grounded in the Holocaust has become enormously popular. In a growing number of communities, at bar- and bat-mitzvas 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 visits to Auschwitz and Treblinka regularly report that they were “never so proud to be a Jew” as when, at these sites, they vicariously experienced the Holocaust. College students rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels on Yom Hashoah. The victim-identification cards for visitors at the Washington Holocaust Museum — an explicit invitation to the vicarious experience of Holocaust victim — were a “smash hit” with the focus group organized by the Museum’s marketing consultants.
We are, as is well-known, an entrepreneurial and competitive people. We didn’t invent chess, establish the Nobel Prize, or initiate violin competitions, but once they were in place we went all out to win. And so it has become with the victim culture, in which we jealously guard our primacy. We accept it with good grace when a gentile wins the Nobel Prize, but fiercely defend our championship in the victim sweepstakes. We insist that the Holocaust was “unique” (a totally vacuous concept): trespassers will be prosecuted. 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 a “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 Washington Museum tell, with great satisfaction, a story of black youngsters learning of the Holocaust and saying “God, we thought we had it bad.”
A moment ago I referred to us as a competitive people. We are also said to have two other qualities (among others): to be adaptable and to be smart. We have shown our capacity to adapt, successively, to a cultural climate in which we were ashamed of the Holocaust, and a cultural climate in which we are proud of it. Are we smart enough to think of some alternative?
Dr. Peter Novick is professor of history at the University of Chicago.
