Jews and Judaism in the New York Times by Vecsey Christopher;

Author:Vecsey, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fascination

Another type of revisionism took place, beginning in the 1980s. By then a veritable “‘Holocaust industry’” (Hyman September 14, 1980) had developed. The Holocaust had become “marketable” since the mid-1970s, in an “explosion of Holocaust-related material” available for popular consumption: books, films, news reports, conferences, lecture series, museum exhibitions, and so on. Hundreds of college courses examined the Holocaust and a President’s Commission on the Holocaust recognized the need in the United States to memorialize Nazi atrocities, particularly to the Jews. Holocaust museums took shape—in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and elsewhere—not only to document “the horror of the Holocaust but also to portray the vitality and variety of Jewish life, which the Holocaust nearly extinguished, as well as the renewal of Jewish faith and traditions” in many lands (McGill March 7, 1988; see Goldman January 29, 1989). Eight state curriculums mandated Holocaust studies for high school students (Berger October 3, 1988). By 1990, one could consult a “monumental” (Shepard May 3, 1990), four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, from A to Zyklon B, or peruse “the definitive popularization” (Sanders November 4, 1990) of “the most enormous tragedy in human history.”

Elie Wiesel, whose memoir, Night, had opened the way for an American encounter with the Nazi death camps, worried that “the proliferation of sensationalized books and popularized television programs and films has dishonored the victims and rendered the public insensitive to the tragedy” (Hyman September 14, 1980). Other Jewish critics, like Arnold Jacob Wolf and Jacob Neusner, cautioned American Jews against too much “passionate interest” in the Holocaust, for the barriers it might erect to “healthy intergroup relations” with non-Jews, and the “vicariousness” it might give to American Jewish “identity.” “‘The turning of the murder of European Jewry into a paramount symbol of what it means to be a Jew,’” Neusner said, “‘presents altogether too simple and too repulsive an account of reality.’” Furthermore, it was said, focus on the Holocaust served to deflect criticism of the “legitimacy of current Israeli Government policy.”

The Times gave voice to these critics, and to those who decried an exclusive focus on the suffering of Jews in Nazi concentration camps, to the exclusion of non-Jewish victims, such as Communists, Gypsies, or homosexuals. A sociologist reproached such a focus, calling it “Jewish triumphalism and a reworking in secular terms of the concept of the ‘chosen people.’” Even recognizing the special Nazi policies to annihilate Jews, members of the President’s Commission said “The appropriate Jewish response to Nazi persecution must be a heightened vigilance to all human suffering.” Wiesel agreed that Holocaust studies should make learners “‘more compassionate, and more passionate for learning,’” and he feared that a “saturation point has been reached, whether mention of the Holocaust produces only apathy.” Nonetheless, he denounced the denial of “special status of the Jews as victims of Nazi persecution. . . . ‘They are stealing the Holocaust from us,’” he said, and “‘this is exactly what the Germans wanted to accomplish, to erase the memory of the Jewish people.

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