Annonce

**born_hittiste** · 11 février 2010, 13h57

CAPITALIZING THE HOLOCAUST

In a memorable exchange some years back, Gore Vidal accused Norman Podhoretz, then-editor of the
American Jewish Committee publication Commentary, of being un-American.1 The evidence was that
Podhoretz attached less importance to the Civil War - "the great single tragic event that continues to
give resonance to our Republic" - than to Jewish concerns. Yet Podhoretz was perhaps more American
than his accuser. For by then it was the "War Against the Jews," not the "War Between the States,"
that figured as more central to American cultural life. Most college professors can testify that
compared to the Civil War many more undergraduates are able to place the Nazi holocaust in the right
century and generally cite the number killed. In fact, the Nazi holocaust is just about the only
historical reference that resonates in a university classroom today. Polls show that many more
Americans can identify The Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan.

Until fairly recently, however, the Nazi holocaust barely figured in American life. Between the end of
World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. There was
only one university course offering in the United States on the topic.2 When Hannah Arendt published
Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she could draw on only two scholarly studies in the English language
-Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews.3
Hilberg's masterpiece itself just managed to see the light of day. His thesis advisor at Columbia
University, the German-Jewish social theorist Franz Neumann, strongly discouraged him from writing
on the topic ('it's your funeral»), and no university or mainstream publisher would touch the completed
manuscript. When it was finally published, The Destruction of the European Jews received only a
few, mostly critical, notices.4

Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including Jewish intellectuals, paid the Nazi
holocaust little heed. In an authoritative 1957 survey, sociologist Nathan Glazer reported that the Nazi
Final Solution (as well as Israel) «had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.»
In a 1961 Commentary symposium on "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," only two of
thirty-one contributors stressed its impact. Likewise, a 1961 roundtable convened by the journal
Judaism of twenty-one observant American Jews on "My Jewish Affirmation» almost completely
ignored the subject.5 No monuments or tributes marked the Nazi holocaust in the United States. To
the contrary, major Jewish organizations opposed such memorialization. The question is, Why?

The standard explanation is that Jews were traumatized by the Nazi holocaust and therefore repressed
the memory of it. In fact, there is no evidence to support this conclusion. No doubt some survivors did
not then or, for that matter, in later years want to speak about what had happened. Many others,
however, very much wanted to speak and, once the occasion availed itself, wouldn't stop speaking.6
The problem was that Americans didn't want to listen.

**born_hittiste** · 11 février 2010, 14h01

The real reason for public silence on the Nazi extermination was the conformist policies of the
American Jewish leadership and the political climate of postwar America. In both domestic and
international affairs American Jewish elites7 hewed closely to official US policy. Doing so in effect
facilitated the traditional goals of assimilation and access to power. With the inception of the Cold
War, mainstream Jewish organizations jumped into the fray. American Jewish elites "forgot» the Nazi
holocaust because Germany — West Germany by 1949 — became a crucial postwar American ally in
the US confrontation with the Soviet Union. Dredging up the past served no useful purpose; in fact it
complicated matters.

With minor reservations (soon discarded), major American Jewish organizations quickly fell into line
with US support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany. The American Jewish Committee
(AJC), fearful that "any organized opposition of American Jews against the new foreign policy and
strategic approach could isolate them in the eyes of the non-Jewish majority and endanger their
postwar achievements on the domestic scene," was the first to preach the virtues of realignment. The
pro-Zionist World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its American affiliate dropped opposition after signing
compensation agreements with Germany in the early 1 950s, while the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) was the first major Jewish organization to send an official delegation to Germany, in 1954.
Together these organizations collaborated with the Bonn government to contain the "anti-German
wave" of Jewish popular sentiment.8

The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for yet another reason. Leftist Jews,
who were opposed to the Cold War alignment with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop
harping on it. Remembrance of the Nazi holocaust was tagged as a Communist cause. Strapped with
the stereotype that conflated Jews with the Left — in fact, Jews did account for a third of the vote for
progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 — American Jewish elites did not shrink
from sacrificing fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish

subversives to government agencies, the AJC and the ADL actively collaborated in the McCarthy-era
witch-hunt. The AJC endorsed the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, while its monthly publication,
Commentary, editorialized that they weren't really Jews.

Fearful of association with the political Left abroad and at home, mainstream Jewish organizations
opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi German social-democrats as well as boycotts of German
manufactures and public demonstrations against ex-Nazis touring the United States. On the other
hand, prominent visiting German dissidents like Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who had spent
eight years in Nazi concentration camps and was now against the anti-Communist crusade, suffered
the obloquy of American Jewish leaders. Anxious to boost their anti-Communist credentials, Jewish
elites even enlisted in, and financially sustained, right-wing extremist organizations like the
All-American Conference to Combat Communism and turned a blind eye as veterans of the Nazi SS
entered the country.9

Ever anxious to ingratiate themselves with US ruling elites and dissociate themselves from the Jewish
Left, organized American Jewry did invoke the Nazi holocaust in one special context: to denounce the
USSR. "Soviet [anti-Jewish] policy opens up opportunities which must not be overlooked,» an
internal AJC memorandum quoted by Novick gleefully noted, "to reinforce certain aspects of AJC
domestic program." Typically, that meant bracketing the Nazi Final Solution with Russian
anti-Semitism. "Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed," Commentary direly predicted. «He will
finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.... The parallel with the policy of Nazi
extermination is almost complete.» Major American Jewish organizations even denounced the 1956
Soviet invasion of Hungary as "only the first station on the way to a Russian Auschwitz.10

**born_hittiste** · 11 février 2010, 14h07

Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after
this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life.11 The standard explanation
of this transformation is that Israel's extreme isolation and vulnerability during the June war revived
memories of the Nazi extermination. In fact, this analysis misrepresents both the reality of Mideast
power relations at the time and the nature of the evolving relationship between American Jewish elites
and Israel.

Just as mainstream American Jewish organizations downplayed the Nazi holocaust in the years after
World War II to conform to the US government's Cold War priorities, so their attitude to Israel kept in
step with US policy. From early on, American Jewish elites harbored profound misgivings about a
Jewish state. Uppermost was their fear that it would lend credence to the "dual loyalty" charge. As the
Cold War intensified, these worries multiplied. Already before the founding of Israel, American
Jewish leaders voiced concern that its largely Eastern European, left-wing leadership would join the
Soviet camp. Although they eventually embraced the Zionist-led campaign for statehood, American
Jewish organizations closely monitored and adjusted to signals from Washington. Indeed, the AJC
supported Israel's founding mainly out of fear that a domestic backlash against Jews might ensue if the
Jewish DPs in Europe were not quickly settled.12 Although Israel aligned with the West soon after
the state was formed, many Israelis in and out of government retained strong affection for the Soviet
Union; predictably, American Jewish leaders kept Israel at arm's length.

From its founding in 1948 through the June 1967 war, Israel did not figure centrally in American
strategic planning. As the Palestinian Jewish leadership prepared to declare statehood, President
Truman waffled, weighing domestic considerations (the Jewish vote) against State Department alarm
(support for a Jewish state would alienate the Arab world). To secure US interests in the Middle East,
the Eisenhower Administration balanced support for Israel and for Arab nations, favoring, however,
the Arabs.

Intermittent Israeli clashes with the United States over policy issues culminated in the Suez crisis of
1956, when Israel colluded with Britain and France to attack Egypt's nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel
Nasser. Although Israel's lightning victory and seizure of the Sinai Peninsula drew general attention to
its strategic potential, the United States still counted it as only one among several regional assets.
Accordingly, President Eisenhower forced Israel's full, virtually unconditional withdrawal from the
Sinai. During the crisis, American Jewish leaders did briefly back Israeli efforts to wrest American
concessions, but ultimately, as Arthur Hertzberg recalls, they "preferred to counsel Israel to heed
[Eisenhower] rather than oppose the wishes of the leader of the United States."13

Except as an occasional object of charity, Israel practically dropped from sight in American Jewish
life soon after the founding of the state. In fact, Israel was not important to American Jews. In his
1957 survey, Nathan Glazer reported that Israel "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of
American Jewry."14 Membership in the Zionist Organization of America dropped from the hundreds
of thousands in 1948 to the tens of thousands in the 1960s. Only 1 in 20 American Jews cared to visit
Israel before June 1967. In his 1956 reelection, which occurred immediately after he forced Israel's
humiliating withdrawal from the Sinai, the already considerable Jewish support for Eisenhower
increased. In the early 1960s, Israel even faced a drubbing for the Eichmann kidnapping from sections
of elite Jewish opinion like Joseph Proskauer, past president of the AJC, Harvard historian Oscar
Handlin and the Jewish-owned Washington Post. the kidnapping of Eichmann," Erich Fromm opined,
"is an act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves . . . have been guilty."15

Across the political spectrum, American Jewish intellectuals proved especially indifferent to Israel's
fate. Detailed studies of the left-liberal New York Jewish intellectual scene through the 1960s barely
mention Israel.16 Just before the June war, the AJC sponsored a symposium on "Jewish Identity Here
and Now." Only three of the thirty-one "best minds in the Jewish community" even alluded to Israel;
two of them did so only to dismiss its relevance.17 Telling irony: just about the only two public
Jewish intellectuals who had forged a bond with Israel before June 1967 were Hannah Arendt and
Noam Chomsky.18

Then came the June war. Impressed by Israel's overwhelming display of force, the United States
moved to incorporate it as a strategic asset. (Already before the June war the United States had
cautiously tilted toward Israel as the Egyptian and Syrian regimes charted an increasingly independent
course in the mid-1960s.) Military and economic assistance began to pour in as Israel turned into a
proxy for US power in the Middle East.

Annonce

Norman G. Finkelstein et l'industrie de l'holocauste

Norman G. Finkelstein et l'industrie de l'holocauste

Commentaire

Commentaire

Commentaire