AAARGH
[Note de
l'AAARGH: Finkelstein a un site web où l'on trouve le dossier
de son livre: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/index.html]
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is just about the only historical reference that resonates in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.
[12]
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 fÏew, mostly critical,
notices.4
Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including
[13] 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.
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 [14] 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
1950s, 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 [15] 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 Niemoeller, 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
[16]
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
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 [17] 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
[18] 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 Organ[19]ization 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 kidnaping 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 kidnaping 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
[20]
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.
For American Jewish elites, Israel's subordination to US power
was a windfall. Zionism had sprung from the premise that assimilation
was a pipe dream, that Jews would always be perceived as potentially
disloyal aliens. To resolve this dilemma, Zionists sought to establish
a homeland for the Jews. In fact, Israel's founding exacerbated
the problem, at any rate for diaspora Jewry: it gave the charge
of dual loyalty institutional expression. Paradoxically, after
June 1967, Israel facilitated assimilation in the United
States: Jews now stood on the front lines defending America indeed,
"Western civilization" -- against the retrograde Arab
hordes. Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the bogy of dual loyalty,
it now connoted super-loyalty. After all, it was not Americans
but Israelis fighting and [21] dying to protect US interests.
And unlike the American Gls in Vietnam, Israeli fighters were
not being humiliated by Third World upstarts.19
Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel.
After the 1967 war, Israel's military élan could be celebrated
because its guns pointed in the right direction against America's
enemies. Its martial prowess might even facilitate entry into
the inner sanctums of American power. Previously Jewish elites
could only offer a few lists of Jewish subversives; now, they
could pose as the natural interlocutors for America's newest strategic
asset. From bit players, they could advance to top billing in
the Cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United
States, Israel became a strategic asset.
In a memoir published just before the June war, Norman Podhoretz
giddily recalled attending a state dinner at the White House that
"included not a single person who was not visibly and absolutely
beside himself with delight to be there."20 Although already editor of the leading
American Jewish periodical, Commentary, his memoir includes
only one fleeting allusion to Israel. What did Israel have to
offer an ambitious American Jew? In a later memoir, Podhoretz
remembered that after June 1967 Israel became "the religion
of the American Jews."21
Now a prominent supporter of Israel, Podhoretz could boast not
merely of attending a White House dinner but of [22] meeting tête-à-tête
with the President to deliberate on the National Interest.
After the June war, mainstream American Jewish organizations worked
full time to firm up the American-Israeli alliance. In the case
of the ADL, this included a far-flung domestic surveillance operation
with ties to Israeli and South African intelligence.22 Coverage of Israel in The New York
Times. increased dramatically after June 1967. The 1955 and
1965 entries for Israel in The New York Times. Index each
filled 60 column inches. The entry for Israel in 1975 ran to fully
260 column inches. "When I want to feel better," Wiesel
reflected in 1973, "I turn to the Israeli items in The
New York Times.."23
Like Podhoretz, many mainstream American Jewish intellectuals
also suddenly found "religion" after the June war. Novick
reports that Lucy Dawidowicz, the doyenne of Holocaust literature,
had once been a "sharp critic of Israel." Israel could
not demand reparations from Germany, she railed in 1953, while
evading responsibility for displaced Palestinians: "Morality
cannot be that flexible." Yet almost immediately after the
June war, Dawidowicz became a "fervent supporter of Israel,"
acclaiming it as "the corporate paradigm for the ideal image
of the Jew in the modern world."24
[23]
A favorite posture of the post-1967 born-again Zionists was tacitly
to juxtapose their own outspoken support for a supposedly beleaguered
Israel against the cravenness of American Jewry during The Holocaust.
In fact, they were doing exactly what American Jewish elites had
always done: marching in lockstep with American power. The educated
classes proved particularly adept at striking heroic poses. Consider
the prominent left-liberal social critic lrving Howe. In 1956
the journal Howe edited, Dissent, condemned the "combined
attack on Egypt" as "immoral." Although truly standing
alone, Israel was also taken to task for "cultural chauvinism,"
a "quasi-messianic sense of manifest destiny," and "an
undercurrent of expansionism."25 After the October 1973 war, when American
support for Israel peaked, Howe published a personal manifesto
"filled with anxiety so intense" in defense of isolated
Israel. The Gentile world, he lamented in a Woody Allen-like parody,
was awash with anti-Semitism. Even in Upper Manhattan, he lamented,
Israel was "no longer chic": everyone, apart from himself,
was allegedly in thrall to Mao, Fanon and Guevara.26
As America's strategic asset, Israel was not without critics.
Besides the increasing international censure of its refusal to
negotiate a settlement with the Arabs in accordance with United
Nations resolutions and its truculent support of American global
ambitions,27
Israel had to cope with domestic US dissent as well. In American
ruling circles, [24] so-called Arabists maintained that putting
all the eggs in the Israel basket while ignoring Arab elites undermined
US national interests.
Some argued that Israel's subordination to US power and occupation
of neighboring Arab states were not only wrong in principle but
also harmful to its own interests. Israel would become increasingly
militarized and alienated from the Arab world. For Israel's new
American Jewish "supporters," however, such talk bordered
on heresy: an independent Israel at peace with its neighbors was
worthless; an Israel aligned with currents in the Arab world seeking
independence from the United States was a disaster. Only an Israeli
Sparta beholden to American power would do, because only then
could US Jewish leaders act as the spokesmen for American imperial
ambitions. Noam Chomsky has suggested that these "supporters
of Israel" should more properly be called "supporters
of the moral degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel."28
To protect their strategic asset, American Jewish elites "remembered"
The Holocaust.29
The conventional account is that they did so because, at the time
of the June war, they believed Israel to be in mortal danger and
were thus gripped by fears of a "second Holocaust."
This claim does not withstand scrutiny.
Consider the first Arab Israeli war. On the eve of independence
in 1948, the threat against Palestinian Jews seemed far more ominous.
David Ben-Gurion declared that "700,000 Jews" were "pitted
against [25] 27 million Arabs -- one against forty." The
United States joined a UN arms embargo on the region, solidifying
a clear edge in weaponry enjoyed by the Arab armies. Fears of
another Nazi Final Solution haunted American Jewry. Deploring
that the Arab states were now "arming Hitler's henchman,
the Mufti, while the United States was enforcing its arms embargo,"
the AJC anticipated "mass suicide and a complete holocaust
in Palestine." Even Secretary of State George Marshall and
the CIA openly predicted certain Jewish defeat in the event of
war.30
Although the "stronger side, in fact, won" (historian
Benny Morris), it was not a walkover for Israel. During the first
months of the war, in early 1948, and especially as independence
was declared in May, Israel's chances for survival were put at
"fifty-fifty" by Yigael Yadin, Haganah chief of operations.
Without a secret Czech arms deal, Israel would likely not have
survived.31
After fighting for a year, Israel suffered 6,000 casualties, one
percent of its population. Why, then, did The Holocaust not become
a focus of American Jewish life after the 1948 war?
Israel quickly proved to be far less vulnerable in 1967 than in
its independence struggle. Israeli and American leaders knew beforehand
that Israel would easily prevail in a war with the Arab states.
This reality became strikingly obvious as Israel routed its Arab
neighbors in a few days. As Novick reports, "There were surprisingly
few explicit references to the Holocaust in American Jewish mobilization
[26] on behalf of Israel before the war."32 The Holocaust industry sprung up only
after Israel's overwhelming display of military dominance and
flourished amid extreme Israeli triumphalism.33 The standard interpretative framework
cannot explain these anomalies.
Israel's shocking initial reverses and substantial casualties
during, and increasing international isolation after, the October
1973 Arab-Israeli war conventional accounts maintain -- exacerbated
American Jewish fears of Israel's vulnerability. Accordingly,
Holocaust memory now moved center stage. Novick typically reports:
"Among American Jews... the situation of a vulnerable and
isolated Israel came to be seen as terrifyingly similar to that
of European Jewry thirty years earlier.... [T]alk of the Holocaust
not only 'took off' in America but became increasing [sic] institutionalized."34 Yet Israel
had edged close to the precipice and, in both relative and absolute
terms, suffered many more casualties in the 1948 war than in 1973.
True, except for its alliance with the US, Israel was out of favor
internationally after the October 1973 war. Compare, however,
the 1956 Suez war. Israel and organized American Jewry alleged
that, on the eve of the Sinai invasion, Egypt threatened Israel's
very existence, and that a full Israeli withdrawal from Sinai
would fatally undermine "Israel's vital interests: her survival
as a state."35
The international [27] community nonetheless stood firm. Recounting
his brilliant performance at the UN General Assembly, Abba Eban
ruefully recalled, however, that "having applauded the speech
with sustained and vigorous applause, it had gone on to vote against
us by a huge majority."36
The United States figured prominently in this consensus. Not only
did Eisenhower force Israel's withdrawal, but US public support
for Israel fell into "frightening decline" (historian
Peter Grose).37
By contrast, immediately after the 1973 war, the United States
provided Israel with massive military assistance, much greater
than it had in the preceding four years combined, while American
public opinion firmly backed Israel.38 This was the occasion when "talk
of the Holocaust... 'took off' in America," at a time when
Israel was less isolated than it had been in 1956.
In fact, the Holocaust industry did not move center stage because
Israel's unexpected setbacks during, and pariah status following,
the October 1973 war prompted memories of the Final Solution.
Rather, Sadat's impressive military showing in the October war
convinced US and Israeli policy elites that a diplomatic settlement
with Egypt, including the return of Egyptian lands seized in June
1967, could no longer be avoided. To increase Israel's negotiating
leverage the Holocaust industry increased production quotas. The
crucial point is that after the 1973 war Israel was not isolated
from the United States: these developments occurred within the
framework of the US-Israeli alliance, which remained fully intact.39 The historical
[28] record strongly suggests that, if Israel had truly been alone
after the October war, American Jewish elites would no more have
remembered the Nazi holocaust than they did after the 1948 or
1956 war.
Novick provides ancillary explanations that are even less convincing.
Quoting religious Jewish scholars, for example, he suggests that
"the Six Day War offered a folk theology of 'Holocaust and
Redemption.'" The "light" of the June 1967 victory
redeemed the "darkness" of the Nazi genocide: "it
had given God a second chance." The Holocaust could emerge
in American life only after June 1967 because "the extermination
of European Jewry attained [an] -- if not happy, at least viable
-- ending." Yet in standard Jewish accounts, not the June
war but Israel's founding marked redemption. Why did The Holocaust
have to await a second redemption? Novick maintains that the "image
of Jews as military heroes" in the June war "worked
to efface the stereotype of weak and passive victims which...
previously inhibited Jewish discussion of the Holocaust."40 Yet for
sheer courage, the 1948 war was Israel's finest hour. And Moshe
Dayan's "daring" and "brilliant" 100-hour
Sinai campaign in 1956 prefigured the swift victory in June 1967.
Why, then, did American Jewry require the June war to "efface
the stereotype"?
Novick's account of how American Jewish elites came to instrumentalize
the Nazi holocaust is not persuasive. Consider these representative
passages:
[29]
As American Jewish leaders
sought to understand the reasons for Israel's isolation and vulnerability
-- reasons that might suggest a remedy -- the explanation commanding
the widest support was that the fading of the memories of Nazism's
crimes a gainst the Jews, and the arrival on the scene of a generation
ignorant of the Holocaust, had resulted in Israel's losing the
support it had once enjoyed.
[W]hile American Jewish
organizations could do nothing to alter the recent past in the
Middle East, and precious little to affect its future, they could
work to revive memories of the Holocaust. So the "fading
memories" explanation offered an agenda for action. [emphasis
in original] 41
Why did the "fading memories"
explanation for Israel's post-1967 predicament "command[]
the widest support"? Surely this was an improbable explanation.
As Novick himself copiously documents, the support Israel initially
garnered had little to do with "memories of Nazism's crimes,"42 and, anyhow,
these memories had faded long before Israel lost international
support. Why could Jewish elites do "Precious little to affect"
Israel's future? Surely they controlled a formidable organizational
network. Why was "reviv[ing] memories of the Holocaust"
the only agenda for action? Why not support the international
consensus that called for Israel's withdrawal from the lands occupied
in the June war as well as a "just and lasting peace"
between Israel and its Arab neighbors (UN Resolution 242)?
[30]
A more coherent, if less charitable, explanation is that American
Jewish elites remembered the Nazi holocaust before June 1967 only
when it was politically expedient. Israel, their new patron, had
capitalized on the Nazi holocaust during the Eichmann trial.43 Given its
proven utility, organized American Jewry exploited the Nazi holocaust
after the June war. Once ideologically recast, The Holocaust (capitalized
as I have previously noted) proved to be the perfect weapon for
deflecting criticism of Israel. Exactly how I will illustrate
presently. What deserves emphasis here, however, is that for American
Jewish elites The Holocaust performed the same function as Israel:
another invaluable chip in a high-stakes power game. The avowed
concern for Holocaust memory was as contrived as the avowed concern
for Israel's fate.44
Thus, organized American Jewry quickly forgave and forgot Ronald
Reagan's demented 1985 declaration at Bitburg cemetery that the
German soldiers (including Waffen SS members) buried there were
"victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in the
concentration camps." In 1988, Reagan was honored with the
"Humanitarian of the Year" award by one of the most
prominent Holocaust institutions, the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
for his "staunch support of Israel," and in 1994 with
the "Torch of Liberty" award by the pro-Israel ADL.45
[31]
The Reverend jesse jackson's earlier outburst in 1979 that he
was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust"
was not so quickly forgiven or forgotten, however. Indeed, the
attacks by American Jewish elites on Jackson never let up, although
not for his "anti-Semitic remarks" but rather for his
"espousal of the Palestinian position" (Seymour Martin
Lipset and Earl Raab).46
In Jackson's case, an additional factor was at work: he represented
domestic constituencies with which organized American Jewry had
been at loggerheads since the late 1960s. In these conflicts,
too, The Holocaust proved to he a potent ideological weapon.
It was not Israel's alleged weakness and isolation, not the fear
of a "second Holocaust," but rather its proven strength
and strategic alliance with the United States that led Jewish
elites to gear up the Holocaust industry after June 1967. However
unwittingly, Novick provides the best evidence to support that
conclusion. To prove that power considerations, not the Nazi Final
Solution, determined American policy toward Israel, he writes:
"it was when the Holocaust was freshest in the mind of American
leaders -- the first twenty-five years after the end of the war
-- that the United States was least supportive [32] of
Israel.... It was not when Israel was perceived as weak and vulnerable,
but after it demonstrated its strength, in the Six Day War, that
American aid to Israel changed from a trickle to a flood"
(emphasis in original).47
That argument applies with equal force to American Jewish elites.
There are also domestic sources
of the Holocaust industry. Mainstream interpretations point to
the recent emergence of "identity politics," on the
one hand, and the "culture of victimization," on the
other. In effect, each identity was grounded in a particular history
of oppression; Jews accordingly sought their own ethnic identity
in the Holocaust.
Yet, among groups decrying their victimization, including Blacks,
Latinos, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Jews alone
are not disadvantaged in American society. In fact, identity politics
and The Holocaust have taken hold among American Jews not because
of victim status but because they are not victims.
As anti-Semitic barriers quickly fell away after World War II,
Jews rose to preeminence in the United States. According to Lipset
and Raab, per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews.
sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews; 40 percent
of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics are Jewish,
as are 20 percent of professors at major universities; and 40
percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington.
[33]
The list goes on.48
Far from constituting an obstacle to success, Jewish identity
has become the crown of that success. Just as many Jews kept Israel
at arm's length when it constituted a liability and became born-again
Zionists when it constituted an asset, so they kept their ethnic
identity at arm's length when it constituted a liability and became
born-again Jews when it constituted an asset.
Indeed, the secular success. story of American Jewry validated
a core -- perhaps the sole -- tenet of their newly acquired identity
as Jews. Who could any longer dispute that Jews were a "chosen"
people? In A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives
Today, Charles Silberman -- himself a born-again Jew -- typically
gushes: "Jews would have been less than human had they eschewed
any notion of 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-[34]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 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 [35] 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 Jewry56
was clearly evident in growing [36] 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 1960s 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 fled 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
[37]
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
loathing of Jews. It precluded the possibility that animus toward
Jews might be grounded inÍ 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
[38] 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.
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