The Holocaust Industry (6 page)

16
See, for example, Alexander Bloom,
Prodigal Sons
(New York: 1986).

17
Lucy Dawidowicz and Milton Himmelfarb (eds),
Conference on Jewish Identity Here and Now

(American Jewish Committee: 1967).

18
After emigrating from Germany in 1933, Arendt became an activist in the French Zionist

movement; during World War II through Israel's founding, she wrote extensively on Zionism. The son

of a prominent American Hebraist, Chomsky was raised in a Zionist home and, shortly after Israel's

independence, spent time on a kibbutz. Both the public campaigns vilifying Arendt in the early 1960s

and Chomsky m the 1970s were spearheaded by the ADL. (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,
Hannah Arendt

[New Haven 1982], 105 - 8,138 - 9, 143 - 4,182 - 4,223 - 33, 348; Robert F. Barsky,
Noam Chomsky

[Cambridge 1997], 9 - 93; David Barsamian (ad.),
Chronicles of Dissent
[Monroe, ME: 19921, 38)

19
For an early prefigurement of my argument, see Hannah Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered" (1944),

m Ron Feldman (ed.),
The Jew as Pariah
(New York: 1978),159.

20
Making It
(New York: 1967),336.

21
Breaking Ranks
(New York: 1979),335.

22
Robert I. Friedman, "The Anti-Defamation League Is Spying on You," in
Village Voice
(11 May

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1993). Abdeen Jabara, "The Anti-Defamation League: Civic Rights and Wrongs," in
Covert Action

(Summer 1993). Matt Isaacs, "Spy vs Spite," in
SF Weekly
(2 - 8 February 2000).

23
Elie Wiesel,
Against Silence,
selected and edited by Irving Abrahamson (New York: 1984), v. i,

283.

24
Novick,
The Holocaust,
147. Lucy S. Dawidowicz,
The Jewish Presence
(New York: 1977), 26.

25
"Eruption in the Middle East," in
Dissent
(Winter 1957).

26
"Israel: Thinking the Unthinkable," in
New York
magazine (24 December 1973).

27
Norman G. Finkelstein,
Image
and
Reality of the Israel — Palestine Conflict
(New York: 1995),

chaps 5-6.

28
Noam Chomsky,
The Fateful Triangle
(Boston 1983), 4.

29
Elie Wiesel's career illuminates the nexus between The Holocaust and the June war. Although he

had already published his memoir of Auschwitz, Wiesel won public acclaim only after writing two

volumes celebrating Israel's victory. (Wiesel,
And the Sea,
16)

30
Kaufman,
Ambiguous Partnership,
287, 306 - 7. Steven
L.
Spiegel,
The Other Arab Israeli Conflict

(Chicago: 1985), 17, 32.

31
Benny Morris,
1948 And After
(Oxford 1990), 14 - 15. Uri Bialer,
Between East and West

(Cambridge 1990), 180-1

32
Novick,
The Holocaust,
148.

33
See, for example, Amnon Kapeliouk,
Israel: la fin des mythes
(Paris: 1975).

34
Novick,
The Holocaust,
152.

35
Commentary,
"Letter from Israel" (February 1957). Throughout the Suez crisis,
Commentary

repeatedly sounded the warning that Israel's "very survival" was at stake.

36
Abba Eban,
Personal Witness
(New York 1992), 272.

37
Peter Grose,
Israel in the Mind of America
(New York 1983), 304.

38
A.F.K. Organski,
The $36 Billion Bargain
(New York 1990), 163, 48.

39
Finkelstein,
Image and Reality,
chap. 6.

40
Novick,
The Holocaust, 149-50.
Novick cites here the noted Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner.

41
Ibid., 153, 155.

42
Ibid.. 69-77.

43
Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million
(New York: 1993), part
Vl.

44
Concern for survivors of the Nazi holocaust was equally contrived a liability before June 1967,

they were silenced; an asset after June 1967, they were sanctified.

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45
Response
(December 198S). Prominent Holocaust-mongers and Israel-supporters like ADL

national director Abraham Foxman, past president of the AJC Morris Abram, and chairman of the

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Kenneth Bialkin, not to mention

Henry Kissinger, all rose to Reagan's defense during the Bitburg visit, while the AJC hosted west

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's loyal foreign minister as the guest of honor at its annual meeting

the same week. In like spirit, Michael Berenbaum of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum

later attributed Reagan's Bitburg trip and statements to "the naive sense of American optimisms,

(Shafir,
Ambiguous Relations,
302 -
4;
Berenbaum,
After Tragedy, 14)

46
Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab,
Jews and the New American Scene
(Cambridge 1995), 159.

47
Novick,
The Holocaust, 166.

48
Lipset and Raab,
Jews, 26 -
7.

49
Charles Silberman,
A Certain People
(New York: 1985), 78, 80, 81.

50
Novick,
The Holocaust,
170-2.

51
Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein,
The New Anti-Semitism
(New York: 1974, 107.

52
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Anti-Semite and Jew
(New York 1965), 28.

53
Saidel,
Never Too Late,
222. Seth Mnookin, "Will NYPD Look to Los Angeles For Latest

'Sensitivity' Training?" in
Forward
(7 January 2000). The article reports that the ADL and Simon

Wiesenthal Center are vying for the franchise on programs teaching "tolerance."

54
Noam Chomsky,
Pirates and Emperors
(New York 19S6), 29 - 30 (Rubmstein).

55
For a survey of recent poll data confirming this trend, see Murray Friedman, "Are American Jews

Moving to the Right?" in
Commentary
(April 2000). In the 1997 New York City mayoral contest

pitting Ruth Messinger, a mainstream Democrat, against Rudolph Giuliani, a law-and-order

Republican, for example, fully 75% of the Jewish vote went for Giuliani. Significantly, to vote for

Giuliani, Jews had to cross traditional party as well as ethnic lines (Messinger is Jewish).

56
It seems that the shift was also in part due to the displacement of a cosmopolitan Central European

Jewish leadership by arriviste and shtetl chauvinist Jews of Eastern European descent like New York

City mayor Edward Koch and
New York Times
executive editor A.M. Rosenthal. In this regard it bears

notice that the Jewish historians dissenting from Holocaust dogmatism have typically come from

Central Europe — for example, Hannah Arendt, Henry Friedlander, Raul Hilberg, and Arno Mayer.

57
See, e.g., Jack Salzman and Cornel West (eds),
Strangers
in
the Promised Land
(New York: 1997),

esp. chaps 6, 8, 9, 14, 15. (Kaufman at 111; Greenberg at 166) To be sure, a vocal minority of Jews

dissented from this rightward drift.

58
Nathan Perlmutter and Ruth Ann Perlmutter,
The Real Anti-Semitism
in
America
(New York:

1982).

59
Novick,
The Holocaust
, 173 (Podhoretz)

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Chapter 2

HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS AND HISTORY

"Holocaust awareness," the respected Israeli writer Boas Evron observes, is actually "an official,

propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of

which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present." In and of itself, the

Nazi holocaust does not serve any particular political agenda. It can just as easily motivate dissent

from as support for Israeli policy. Refracted through an ideological prism, however, "the memory of

the Nazi extermination" came to serve — in Evron's words — "as a powerful tool in the hands of the

Israeli leadership and Jews abroad.
1
The Nazi holocaust became The Holocaust.

Two central dogmas underpin the Holocaust framework: (1) The Holocaust marks a categorically

unique historical event; (2) The Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of

Jews. Neither of these dogmas figured at all in public discourse before the June 1967 war; and,

although they became the centerpieces of Holocaust literature, neither figures at all in genuine

scholarship on the Nazi holocaust.
2
On the other hand, both dogmas draw on important strands in

Judaism and Zionism.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a

historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a

universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed.

"The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of

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American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel

in human history."
3
In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of

Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and

ingenuity of theological zealots."
4
The uniqueness dogma, after all, makes no sense.

At the most basic level, every historical event is unique, if merely by virtue of time and location, and

every historical event bears distinctive features as well as features in common with other historical

events. The anomaly of The Holocaust is that its uniqueness is held to be absolutely decisive. What

other historical event, one might ask, is framed largely for its categorical uniqueness? Typically,

distinctive features of The Holocaust are isolated in order to place the event in a category altogether

apart. It is never clear, however, why the many common features should be reckoned trivial by

comparison.

All Holocaust writers agree that The Holocaust is unique, but few, if any, agree why. Each time an

argument for Holocaust uniqueness is empirically refuted, a new argument is adduced in its stead. The

results, according to Jean-Michel Chaumont, are multiple, conflicting arguments that annul each other:

"Knowledge does not accumulate. Rather, to improve on the former argument, each new one starts

from zero."
5
Put otherwise: uniqueness is a given in the Holocaust framework; proving it is the