The Holocaust Industry (5 page)

superiority altogether," and "it is extraordinarily difficult for American Jews to expunge the sense of

superiority altogether, however much they may try to suppress it." What an American Jewish child

inherits, according to novelist Philip Roth, is "no body of law, no body of learning and no language,

and finally, no Lord . . . but a kind of psychology: and the psychology can be translated in three

words: 'Jews are better."'
49
As will be seen presently, The Holocaust was the negative version of their

vaunted worldly success: it served to validate Jewish chosenness.

By the 1970s, anti-Semitism was no longer a salient feature of American life. Nonetheless, Jewish

leaders started sounding alarm bells that American Jewry was threatened by a virulent "new

anti-Semitism."
50
The main exhibits of a prominent ADL study ("for those who have died because

they were Jews") included the Broadway show
Jesus Christ Superstar
and a counterculture tabloid

that "portrayed Kissinger as a fawning sycophant, coward, bully, flatterer, tyrant, social climber, evil

manipulator, insecure snob, unprincipled seeker after power" - in the event, an understatement.
51

For organized American Jewry, this contrived hysteria over a new anti-Semitism served multiple

purposes. It boosted Israel's stock as the refuge of last resort if and when American Jews needed one.

Moreover, the fund-raising appeals of Jewish organizations purportedly combating anti-Semitism fell

on more receptive ears. "The anti-Semite is in the unhappy position," Sartre once observed, "of having

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a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy."
52
For these Jewish organizations the reverse is

equally true. With anti-Semitism in short supply, a cutthroat rivalry between major Jewish "defense»

organizations - in particular, the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center - has erupted in recent

years.
53
In the matter of fund-raising, incidentally, the alleged threats confronting Israel serve a

similar purpose. Returning from a trip to the United States, the respected Israeli journalist Danny

Rubinstein reported: "According to most of the people in the Jewish establishment the important thing

is to stress again and again the external dangers that face Israel.... The Jewish establishment in

America needs Israel only as a victim of cruel Arab attack. For such an Israel one can get support,

donors, money.... Everybody knows the official tally of the contributions collected in the United

Jewish Appeal in America, where the name of Israel is used and about half of the sum goes not to

Israel but to the Jewish institutions in America. Is there a greater cynicism?" As we will see, the

Holocaust industry's exploitation of "needy Holocaust victims" is the latest and, arguably, ugliest

manifestation of this cynicism.
54

The main ulterior motive for sounding the anti-Semitism alarm bells, however, lay elsewhere. As

American Jews enjoyed greater secular success, they moved steadily to the right politically. Although

still left-of-center on cultural questions such as sexual morality and abortion, Jews grew increasingly

conservative on politics and the economy
.
55
Complementing the rightward turn was an inward turn,

as Jews, no longer mindful of past allies among the have-nots, increasingly earmarked their resources

for Jewish concerns only. This reorientation of American Jewry
56
was clearly evident in growing

tensions between Jews and Blacks. Traditionally aligned with black people against caste

discrimination in the United States, many Jews broke with the Civil Rights alliance in the late 1 960s

when, as Jonathan Kaufman reports, "the goals of the civil rights movement were shifting - from

demands for political and legal equality to demands for economic equality." "When the civil rights

movement moved north, into the neighborhoods of these liberal Jews," Cheryl Greenberg similarly

recalls, «the question of integration took on a different tone. With concerns now couched in class

rather than racial terms, Jews Red to the suburbs almost as quickly as white Christians to avoid what

they perceived as the deterioration of their schools and neighborhoods." The memorable climax was

the protracted 1968 New York City teachers' strike, which pitted a largely Jewish professional union

against Black community activists fighting for control of failing schools. Accounts of the strike often

refer to fringe anti-Semitism. The eruption of Jewish racism - not far below the surface before the

strike — is less often remembered. More recently, Jewish publicists and organizations have figured

prominently in efforts to dismantle affirmative action programs. In key Supreme Court tests —

DeFunis
(1974) and
Bakke
(1978) — the AJC, ADL, and AJ Congress, apparently reflecting

mainstream Jewish sentiment, all filed amicus briefs opposing affirmative action.
57

Moving aggressively to defend their corporate and class interests, Jewish elites branded all opposition

to their new conservative policies anti-Semitic. Thus ADL head Nathan Perlmutter maintained that the

«real anti-Semitism» in America consisted of policy initiatives «corrosive of Jewish interests," such as

affirmative action, cuts in the defense budget, and neo-isolationism, as well as opposition to nuclear

power and even Electoral College reform.
58

In this ideological offensive, The Holocaust came to play a critical role. Most obviously, evoking

historic persecution deflected present-day criticism. Jews could even gesture to the "quota system"

from which they suffered in the past as a pretext for opposing affirmative action programs. Beyond

this, however, the Holocaust framework apprehended anti-Semitism as a strictly irrational Gentile

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loathing of Jews. It precluded the possibility that animus toward Jews might be grounded in a real

conflict of interests (more on this later). Invoking The Holocaust was therefore a ploy to delegitimize

all criticism of Jews: such criticism could only spring from pathological hatred.

Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered The

Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked. The pretense, however, was that, there and here,

Jews faced an imminent «second Holocaust." Thus American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses

as they indulged in cowardly bullying. Norman Podhoretz, for example, pointed up the new Jewish

resolve after the June 1967 war to «resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any

reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm.... We would from now on stand our ground."
59
Just as

Israelis, armed to the teeth by the United States, courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so

American Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place.

Lording it over those least able to defend themselves: that is the real content of organized American

Jewry's reclaimed courage.

Footnotes:

1
Gore Vidal, "The Empire Lovers Strike Back," in
Nation (22
March 1986).

2
Rochelle G. Saidel,
Never Too Late to Remember
(New York 1996),32.

3
Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,
revised and enlarged

edition (New York: 1965), 282. The situation in Germany wasn't much different. For example,

Joachim Fest's justly admired biography of Hitler, published in Germany in 1973, devotes just four of

750 pages to the extermination of the Jews and a mere paragraph to Auschwitz and other death camps.

Joachim C. Fest,
Hitler
[New York: 1975], 679-82)

4
Raul Hilberg,
The Politics of Memory
(Chicago: 1996), 66, 105 - 37. As with scholarship, the

quality of the few films on the Nazi holocaust was, however, quite impressive. Amazingly, Stanley

Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961
) explicitly refers to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell

Holmes's 1927 decision sanctioning sterilization of the "mentally unfit" as a precursor of Nazi

eugenics programs; Winston Churchill's praise for Hitler as late as 1938; the arming of Hitler by

profiteering American industrialists; and the opportunist postwar acquittal of German industrialists by

the American military tribunal.

5
Nathan Glazer,
American Judaism
(Chicago: 1957), 114. Stephen J. Whitfield, "The Holocaust and

the American Jewish Intellectual," in Judaism (Fall 1979)

6
For sensitive commentary on these two contrasting types of survivor, see Primo Levi,
The

Reawakening,
with a new afterword (New York: 1986),207

7
In this text,
Jewish elites
designates individuals prominent in the organizational and cultural life of

the mainstream Jewish community.

8
Shlomo Shafir,
Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany Since 1945

(Detroit 1999), 88, 98, 100 - 1, 111, 113, 114, 177, 192, 215, 231,251.

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9
Ibid., 98,106,123-37,205,215-16,249. Robert Warshaw, "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel

Rosenberg," in
Commentary
(November 1953). was
it
merely a coincidence that at the same time,

mainstream Jewish organizations crucified Hannah Arendt for pointing up the collaboration of

aggrandizing Jewish elites during the Nazi era? Recalling the perfidious role of the Jewish Council

police force, Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, observed 'There weren't

any 'decent' policemen because decent men took off the uniform and became simple Jews»
(A Surplus

of Memory
[Oxford 1993], 244).

10
Novick,
The Holocaust,
98-100. In addition to the Cold war, other factors played an ancillary role

in American Jewry's postwar downplaying of the Nazi holocaust ~ for example, fear of anti-Semitism,

and the optimistic, assimilationist American ethos in the 1950s. Novick explores these matters in

chapters 4-7 of
The Holocaust.

11
Apparently the only one denying this connection is Elie Wiesel, who claims that the emergence of

The Holocaust m American Life was primarily his doing. (Saidel,
Never Too Late,
33-4)

12
Menahem Kaufman,
An Ambiguous Partnership
(Jerusalem 1991), 218, 276 - 7.

13
Arthur Hertzberg,
Jewish Polemics
(New York: 1992), 33; although misleadingly apologetic, cf.

Isaac Alteras, "Eisenhower, American Jewry, and Israel,» in
American Jewish Archives
(November

1985), and Michael Reiner, "The Reaction of US Jewish Organizations to the Sinai Campaign and
Its

Aftermath," in
Forum
(winter 1980 - 1).

14
Nathan Glazer,
American Judaism
(Chicago: 1957), 114. Glazer continued: "Israel has meant

almost nothing for American Judaism [T]he idea that Israel could in any serious way affect Judaism in

America is recognized as illusory" (115).

15
Shafir,
Ambiguous Relations, 222.