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"The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission," a seminar of CLALs Jewish Public Forum held March 18-19, 2002 in New York City, brought together leading thinkers on education, culture, Judaic studies, and online learning. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants contributions to the seminar. This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here. Dr. Elizabeth A. Cole is the director of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs Studies program on History and the Politics of Reconciliation. Her research interests include current reconciliation efforts in Central Europe, especially Polish-Jewish relations.The Future of American Memory
By Elizabeth A. Cole
Increasingly,
memory provides the moral dimension to discussion of what makes up the individual, to
quests for political justice, and to the desire to insure a better future. Sarah
Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944
Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
From debates over popular and
official Australian apologies for mistreatment of the Aborigines to expressions of
contrition over the role of Korean soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, from
litigation on behalf of children from Canadas First Nations abused in residential
schools to Belgian reckoning with atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo under King
Leopold, reckoning with the past and the search for justice for historical crimes have
become universal. Demands for accountability
for the past are growing, although accountability might take many forms: financial
reparations; restitution of art, human remains or property, truth or historical
commissions; trials; official apologies; the establishment of new monuments, museums and
commemorative holidays; or the revision of history textbooks and other national
narratives. Historical memory movements
appear to leap across national boundaries, and from one formerly unrepented event in a
nations history to another, in what French scholar Ariel Colonomos calls the
spillover effect from one remembrance movement to another. Sociologist Daniel Levy notes that where
national narratives once tended to be exemplary and glorifying, today increasingly they
include events that focus on past injustices of ones own nation, so that
national narratives must now include the history and memory of the Other.[i] But while the historical memory
movement has exploded worldwide, the U.S. has remained surprisingly immune. As we look to the future, we need to consider the
stakes of this immunity and consider what might alter this situation to make the U.S. more
like other societies that have tried to come to terms with difficult pasts. As a Jew, I feel particularly
committed to exploring this question. Redemptive
memory and the obligation to remember are integral to the Jewish tradition, as
encapsulated by the exhortation to remember when you were slaves in Egypt.
Even before the Shoah memory was deeply linked to ethics for Jews, and since the Shoah the
commemoration of that historical event, even the wrestling with the limits to representing
or commemorating it, are integral to Jewish identity.
In addition, the Holocaust has become paradigmatic for remembrance and the
search for justice and accountability. Nigerian
playwright Wole Soyinka has written that when Africans remember slavery and colonialism
and ask the former colonial powers to remember and make restitution, it is not
possible to ignore the example of the Jews and the obsessed commitment of survivors of the
Holocaust, and their descendants, to recover both their material patrimony and the
humanity of which they were brutally deprived.[ii] Images and events such as German reparations to
Israel, Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the
lawsuits and historical commissions over the role of the Swiss government and private
institutions in the Holocaust (which have undermined the famed opacity of Swiss banking
practices, as well as the impunity of private institutions such as insurance companies,
probably forever) have become part of what Daniel Levy calls the
cosmopolitanism of memory. They
mark a universalization of the demand for truth and justice in the aftermath of major
human rights atrocities.[iii] All
countries must regularly negotiate narratives of their past within the mutually
constitutive frameworks of international relations and domestic social change and contend
with the increasing interconnection between foreign and domestic pressures, argue
Laura Hein and Mark Selden in Censuring History:
Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States, a study of how history
textbooks in Germany, Japan and the USA portray each nations role in twentieth
century wars. Germanys textbooks were first subject to official censorship by the
Allies, but in the decades since World War II Germany has voluntarily taken part in joint
history textbook commissions with all its neighbors and Israel. Japans recent decision to issue a textbook
with a revisionist, nationalist portrayal of the Nanjing Massacre and other World War II
atrocities has led to increased levels of tension with both China and South Korea. But,
Hein and Selden point out, Americans are insulated from foreign criticism to a
degree unimaginable in either Germany or Japan. This
luxuryactually an obstacle to engaging historywill not last forever. [iv]
Two issues from the history of the
U.S. have yet to be addressed fully: One is the way our country remembers and commemorates
slavery and its aftermath. This includes the
broken promise of reparationsforty acres and a mule which left ex-slaves
little better off than before slavery ended. It
also includes the Jim Crow period, lynchings and pogroms such as Rosewood and Tulsa, and
the struggles of the Civil Rights movements. The
other issue is the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Americans probably have a general idea of the
degree of death and suffering the bombings caused, yet the difficulty of discussing this
historic decisionstill the only use of nuclear weapons worldwide to
dateremains highly controversial, nearly impossible, in fact, as the censorship of
the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum in 1993 demonstrated. Other issues from U.S. history
lynchings, retaliation against civilians
during the Vietnam War, the massacre of Korean refugees under a bridge at No Gun Ri --
have been taken up in popular culture and in the work of religious and civil society
institutions. Yet slavery and its aftermath
are, according to historian Eric Foner, subject to a high degree of amnesia. And except for the internment of Japanese
Americans, few historical injustices perpetrated by the U.S. receive official treatment in
the form of formal apologies and reparations. Today in the United States, the
virulence of lynchings and the existence of massacres like those in Tulsa and Rosewood
remain unknown to large numbers of non-African-American citizens (until recently, myself
included). No official museum of
African-American experience in the U.S. exists within the Smithsonian complex. Information
on African-Americans is minimal there and no memorial to slavery and the long struggle for
racial equality stands on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
This in spite of the fact that the memory of the Holocaust, which took place
outside the U.S. boundaries, and the Vietnam War are represented there. But the very problematic call for
reparations by the descendants of slaves through class action lawsuits against the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and insurance companies which either discriminated against
blacks over the course of a century or benefited from slavery, an institution that ended
in 1863, is forcing the issue into national consciousness. This search for financial compensation through
the adversarial process of suits is probably not by itself the most productive way to ask
the nation to reflect on the legacy of slavery since slavery affected so many other
national institutions beyond the Deep South, from Ivy League universities to newspapers
such as the Hartford Courant to major life
insurance companies. Is there another or a new form of
remembrance, which would allow the U.S. to reckon with injustice whose root
causesslaveryended well over a century ago, which has no direct victims,
perpetrators or bystanders alive today? Could
we devise a mechanism that would allow the U.S. to address the victims of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, and their direct descendants, expressing deep regret over the enormous degree
of suffering caused by bombs which took over 200,000 lives and yet avoiding apology, since
to the best of our knowledge the bombs, while never uncontroversial, were perceived by
leaders at the time to be the quickest and most humane way to end the war? The former
would require open deliberation and creativity in finding a way to address an ancient
injustice that would feel fair to a majority of living US citizens, African- and
non-African-Americans. One of the recent
lawsuits on behalf of descendants of slaves against Aetna, CSX and FleetBoston Financial
calls for the appointment of an independent historical commission, as well as for
financial compensation to African-Americans in the form of a fund for education and health
care. An officially convoked independent
commission on slavery and its legacy would be a novel development in the U.S. (although
other countries are no strangers to historical and truth commissions). What might influence the direction
American memory could take? One possibility
is that increased unilateralism and patriotic solidarity in the wake of 9/11 and the war
on terrorism may make us less rather than more responsive to pressure from other peoples
and countries to acknowledge suffering we have caused them.
The ethical need for the U.S. to recognize the suffering caused in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki continues to be restricted by the countrys need for a good
war, an uncomplicated narrative of American victory.
However, there is also the possibility that the need to confront the question of
why they hate us may bring about more rather than less engagement with legal
and moral trends in the international community. This
might push the U.S. to reckon with many of our actions abroad, which caused harm to other
peoples, especially those carried out during the Cold War. Domestically, the U.S. reparations
movement, led by academics like Charles Ogletree of Harvard, is about more than just
reparations. In Ogletrees words, it seeks to generate a public debate on
slavery and the role its legacy continues to play in our society; but
litigation is required to promote this discussion.[v] Will the rise of suits for slavery
reparationsthe locating of memory in the legal sphereinspire a search for new,
less adversarial ways to overcome our national amnesia about the enormity of slavery and
the failed promise of Reconstruction? This
is possible, although I could envision as well a backlash, increased hostility from
non-African-Americans over the call for financial reparations at such a late date, and an
unwillingness to engage the issue at all. In
addition, Americas changing demographics may affect this particular struggle over
memory: in regions where the major minority
is now Hispanic, black-white relations in U.S. history are increasingly not seen to be a
pressing issue. Despite the dangers inherent in our
contemporary memory explosion, and there clearly are some, I believe new and more ethical
ways of remembering are worth our national consideration.
Our sense of our groups history and its moral nature go to the core of
our identity both as individuals and as members of a group.
The challenge to our natural sense of ourselves as an essentially ethical
nation is naturally bound to be both painful and potentially dangerous. Yet I agree with Michael Ignatieff when he says in
Warriors Honor, No questions of
national identity in the present can ever avoid encountering the painful secrets of the
past. In this sense, as long as these
questions are alive
there can be no forgetting. In 1929, at a meeting with military
chiefs, Hitler praised the achievements of powerful men who committed mass murder, saying,
Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians? With all its problems, if the insistence on the
memory of historys victims gives future perpetrators pause, I believe memory and the
attendant search for justice are ethical activities to which we are obligated, especially
as post-Holocaust Jews. [i] Levy, Daniel and
Sznaider, Natan, "Memory Unbound: The
Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory," in European Journal of Social
Theory, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 87-106. [ii] Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford: Oxford
U. Press, 1999. [iii] Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan, "Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan
Memory," in European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 87-106. [iv] Laura Hein and Mark
Selden, Editors. Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the
United States. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. [v] Op-ed in The New York Times, April 7, 2002. To view other essays from "The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission" seminar, click here.
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