The Politics of Memorialization

Attacking the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture

Three books have appeared within the past year that examine – or perhaps attack is the more accurate term -- the place of the Holocaust in contemporary culture. Peter Novick’s well-researched work The Holocaust in American Life confines itself to the American experience.  Tim Cole’s Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold considers the American, Israeli and Polish experience, yet ironically only in a minor way the German experience.  Norman Finkelstein,’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering builds on the foundation set by Novick but with a decidedly politically left interpretation, one freed from precisely the balance and thoughtfulness that gives Novick’s work a sense of authority.

This is not the occasion for a lengthy review of the three works, which while different in kind and in emphasis share a critical approach to the state of Holocaust education and scholarship. However, some of what I presented at Lehigh University relates to the very subject of these works and an engagement in dialogue is both timely and appropriate.

First, permit to address Tim Cole’s work.

“By the Waters of Babylon we sat and we wept as we remembered Zion,” the Psalmist said appropriately. The place from which we remember an event shapes the content of that memory. This is perfectly acceptable in Jewish memory: indeed, it is normative. Certainly, the recollection of Zion immediately after the destruction in Jeremiah’s chapters of consolation are rather different than the Biblical book of Ezra or the anguished cries of the book of Lamentations. There is a legend told in the

Talmud of two rabbis passing by the Temple mount:

Once Rabban Yohanan be Zakkia was walking with his disciple Rabbi Yehoshua near Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Yehoshua looked at the Temple ruins and said: “Alas for us! The place that atoned for the sins of the people Israel lies in ruins!” Then Rabbi Yohanan be Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: “Be not grieved my son. There is another equally meritorious way of gaining atonement even though the Temple is destroyed. We can still gain atonemenet through deeds of lovingkindness.” For it is written: “Lovingkindness I desire, not sacrifice” (Hosea 6:6).[1]

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s reponse was directly related to the revolution that he was imposing on Jewish history, the movement from a land-centered, sanctuary centered, Jerusalem-centered religion to one that could survive in exile with remnants of that worship.  The synagogue could be constituted anywhere a quorum of Jews gathered.  Tthe Torah was portable and could move with Jews from place to place and be transported in the hearts and minds of its people. Place, memory and agenda are related.

Stories are retold for a reason and they resonate for a reason. The dialogue between memory and place of its recollection, between an event and the transmission of an event is appropriate.  It is little wonder that time, distance, and agendas for the future shape the content of memory. I believe this is not only appropriate but also inevitable for a community as well as an individual. It is also very deeply Jewish. Midrash and Hasidic Tales as well as rabbinic commentary are in essence a retelling of ancient stories with new emphases that speak to the contemporary generation. This process is often masked because of the traditions reluctance to claim innovation and reveal its essential creativity, and it is denied by some who merely argue with a wink of the eye that it was there from the beginning, revealed to Moses at Sinai.

               So perhaps I am less scandalized than Cole regarding the transformation of memory in dialogue with contemporary needs, and having been party to such a deliberate transformation, I believe that the process can be done with integrity and is pure.

I was disturbed not by what Cole was aiming to prove, but by his use of evidence. Four illustrations should suffice. Cole as Finkelstein begins his work with an opening quote by Arnold Jacob Wolfe taken from a 1980 dialogue between Wolfe and myself that I reprinted in After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience, which was published in 1990. According to Cole, Wolfe said:

It is a simple fact that in New Haven, the Jewish community of 22,000 spends ten times as much money on the Holocaust memorial as it does on college students in New Haven. I think that is shocking…The community is saying: “We have money for the Holocaust and that’s all”… It seems to me that the Holocaust is being sold…[2]

The actual quote is more interesting but cannot be used because it is manifestly false.

Wolfe said:

The community is saying: “We have money for the Holocaust, and that’s all.” We have been decreasing funds for almost everything else you can think of and certainly for Jewish studies in Midrash or Talmud or philosophy or even Bible, but we have $1 million if you are willing to teach the Holocaust.[3]

Finkelstein begins his book with Wolfe’s final line and adds the other half of the line “it is not being taught.” However, it is not a simple fact. The statement regarding the comparative expenditure for the memorial as for college students may have been true for the year in the late 1970s when the Holocaust memorial was being built in New Haven, but it was not true for the past two decades, if it ever was true, and Cole’s readers should know it. As director of the Hillel at Yale in 1980, Wolfe was in the business of raising funds for Jewish college students and his personal struggles with the leaders of the New Haven Jewish community were what they were. In the decades since his departure, the Hillel Foundation at Yale has moved to the Center of the Campus. It is housed in a building that is large and well-endowed. The Judaic Studies program at Yale is flourishing with distinguished faculty and excellent students, teaching the Bible, Talmud and Midrash. In fact, Harvard was forced to return a $3 million endowed chair in Holocaust Studies because some of its faculty believe that the “Holocaust was not a proud chapter in Jewish history.” Since when are academic subjects decided upon because of their pride?  Imagine for a moment the uproar that would have followed such a statement by a German Professor speaking about German history.

               What’s the point? When the figure of $168 million for the construction of the Holocaust Memorial Museum is bandied about, I find it both intriguing and misleading. If I remember correctly, the actual figure was in excess of $190 million but must be seen in the context in which the Jewish community spent more than $9 billion a year, or some $90 billion in the nineties, in which Holocaust Museums were opened in Washington, Los Angeles, Houston and Tampa-St. Petersburg. So if the Holocaust is being sold, then it is fair to say that Jewish education is being sold, that synagogues are being sold, that universities are being sold, that hospitals are being sold. To build institutions in the United States and elsewhere, monies must be raised and there is nothing sinister or wrong about it. It is essential.