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: 19751, 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 afterward (New
York: 1986), 207 .
7 . In
this text, Jewish elite 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 .
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: 19931, 24-4) .
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 in 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....
[The idea that Israel ... could in any serious way affect Judaism
in America ... is recognized as illusory" (115) .
15 .
Shafir, Ambiguous Relations, 222 .
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
in the 1970s were spearheaded by the ADL. (Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,
Hannah Arendt [New Haven: 19821, 105 8, 138-9, 143 4, 182
4, 223-33, 348; Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky [Cambridge:
19971, 9-93; David Barsamian (ed.), Chronicles of Dissent
[Monroe, ME: 19921, 38 )
19 .
For an early prefigurement of my argument, see Hannah Arendt,
"Zionism Reconsidered" (194-4), in 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 1993). Abdeen Jabara, "The
Anti-Defamation League: Civil Rights and Wrongs," in Covert
Action (Summer 1993). Matt Isaacs, "Spy Ìvs Spite,"
in SF Weekly (2-8 February 2000) .
23 .
Elie Wiesel, Against Silence, selected and edited by lrving
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: 198
3), 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 VI
.
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 .
45 .
Response (December 1988). 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
optimism." (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: 1986), 29-30 (Rubinstein)
.
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 shtetlchauvinist 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), Struggles in
the Promised Land, (New York: 1997), esp. chaps 6, 8, 9, 14,
1 5. (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).