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The Holocaust as Obligation and Excuse

Yaffa Eliach (Sh'ma 9/18l, November 16,1979)

In the recent years the Holocaust has become one of the central issues which dominate the academic political, communal and educational activities of the American Jewish community. It has become a pivotal rallying point for American Jewry, a "consciousness-raiser" for Jewish identity and solidarity.

Arnold J. Wolf in "The Holocaust as Temptation." (Sh'ma, 9/180) points out that in New Haven the memorial statue to the Holocaust became the cultural place where most Jewish community events take place regardless of the nature of the cause and convocation be it in defense of Soviet Jewry, an anti -Palestinian rally or a mere fundraising function. The memorial became the usual place for Jews to get together. Wolf further states that even our languages and world outlook has become dominated by the Nazi image. The enemies of the Jews are depicted by the Nazi images; enemies or just normal rivals become Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann and S.S. officers.

Holocaust Imagery Part of Our Language

Indeed the present fascination with the Holocaust and its centrality in Jewish life calls for re-evaluation and re-examination. The current upsurge of interest in the Holocaust and especially in World War II, is not unique to American Jewry. Publications on the war and the Third Reich are proliferating. Films, television and, to a lesser extent, the theater also seem to be following this trend. Hitler and Germany's top wartime leadership are in limelight in such productions,which include a rock opera "Der Fuhrer" with sixty participants and Hitler as its superstar. Holocaust imagery has been incorporated into daily language, representing every extremity of human experience. Whenever individuals or groups perceive themselves as ultimate brutalized victims, Holocaust language and imagery are evoked. Sylvia Plath, in describing the ultimate in male-female tensions, transforms the male into Nazi official and the female into Jewess, a concentration camp inmate. An ethnic minority, in referring to its being discriminated against, whether real or imaginary, will resort to concentration camp images using such words as: extermination, selection, gas chambers, and many more. Even a distressed sportscaster may describe the defeat of a favorite home-team as a "Holocaust."

Holocaust Is Misused to Unify Jews

While the language of Auschwitz, is becoming more and more a permanent feature of the 20th century, vocabulary, the centrality of the Holocaust for the American Jewish community has unique implications. Because American Jews are often the trend setters for world Jewry, the current prominence of the Holocaust in America assumes universal dimensions. It has implications not only for the Jewish self-image but in the way the world perceives the Jews.

In America, to some extent, the Holocaust has become a surrogate for Jewish education, communal responsibility, and Jewish activism and creativity.

American Jewry most recently discovered that the Holocaust offers instant solutions to long range problems. It serves as an Judaizer by shocking people into Jewishness. The Holocaust represents an intense comradeship of suffering experienced by all Jews, regardless of their level of Jewishness. An experience shared by all because of the mere, accidental fact of being Jewish. The destruction of European Jewry was the most brutally equalizing force in modern history, a unifying force of death transcending all ideological orientations, national distinctions and socio-economic classifications.

The Shoah Must Be Put In Proper Context

In a community where the lack of knowledge of one's own heritage, culture and tradition is a growing reality, the Holocaust may be mistaken as a solution offering quick visible results by making inroads among the young and reaching out to alienated adults. In doing so, American Jewry may cause permanent damage for the price of an instant success, the awakening of superficial Jewish identity and solidarity. It may instill a distorted view of Jewish self-image, Jewish gentile relations and the Jewish place in world history. The Holocaust presents the Jew as the ultimate victim with no options left except, at times, selection of his own way of dying.

The Holocaust, currently seems to be the most popular course in the Jewish experience on the American campus and in the Jewish community. A single survey course on the Holocaust, by its very nature, tends to highlight only the calamities of Jewish history and the anti-Semitic tensions and frictions throughout the ages between the Jew and his environment. Jewish history becomes a record of futility and frustration, of a people fighting against insurmountable odds, in which the only encounter between Jew and non-Jew is in the shadow of death, one being the victims, the other the persecutor, both performing their eternal struggle before a world audience of onlookers -- at time passive and silent, at times collaborating with the persecutor. The Holocaust offers a distorted view of Jewish history, stressing only catastrophic elements and omitting the rich Jewish intellectual and communal activities which here based on traditional values as well as on positive interactions between Judaism and European society. Ideally, the Holocaust period should be a unit within a curriculum of Jewish and world history. The Holocaust should be studied as an event in which both its elements of continuity and its uniqueness in Jewish and world history must be analyzed.

Creativity and Growth Parallel Tragedies

Tensions, conflicts, and outbursts of anti-Jewish riots were an ever-present factor in the Jewish European experience, a factor which conditioned European society and established precedents which paved the, way for the Holocaust. Yet, parallel to these conflicts, for a period close to two thousand years, Jewish individuals and communities on European soil were constantly, enriching their European environment, and in turn invigorating their own traditions. Vigorous Jewish intellectual and communal life was taking place simultaneously with the crusades, the expulsion from Spain, the Bogdan Chmelnicki massacres, the Hep Hep Riots, the Edgar Mortara case, the programs of 1881 and the Dreyfus affair. To dwell only upon the latter, the elements of destruction and the catastrophe, is to deprive Jewish history of its very essence: its activism and creativity.

Holocaust studies and research attract some very distinguished and creative individuals, with impressive accomplishments in their respective fields. They are attracted to the Holocaust because of its all encompassing, intense nature. It is the ideal "lab" for almost any discipline. Yet, many of these distinguished individuals have no comprehensive knowledge of European history and only marginal information about Jewish history, which are crucial to Holocaust studies.

Jewish Component Lacking in Shoah Studies

The executioner, the onlooker and the victim acted and reacted within the framework of their past, carrying their actions and reactions during the Holocaust to their utmost extremes. Unfortunately, the Holocaust Studies scholar, who has an intensive Jewish background finds it a very lonely field. As a result Holocaust Studies is dominated by documentation and evidence based largely on the limited perspective of the executioner's and onlooker's viewpoints, those of European history alone. Jewish history, the most essential element in understanding the reaction of the innocent victim to the events of the Holocaust is almost totally absent. The Jewish response as guided both by centuries old-traditions and ideologies permeated by Jewish values.

In the years that followed the Holocaust, prominent Jewish thinkers, philosophers and historians avoided the Holocaust. Heschel, Agnon, Buber, Scholem and to some extent even Baron wrote about the Holocaust only indirectly. Wolf writes, that "their silence speaks volumes of fact and agony and love." This abdication of prominent Jewish minds from responding to the Holocaust within a Jewish context, for whatever the reason might have been, charted the course of Holocaust studies. Holocaust studies lack the viable dynamics of Jewish history, Jewish thought and Jewish values. If the current trend of Holocaust research continues one may expect that in the not too distant future the Holocaust may become a non-Jewish event. It will be seen as an overwhelming experience of western civilization, where the Jews were simply one group among many groups of victims or, Jewish victims eventually may even be posthumously denied their Jewishness.

Time to Reassess Our Holocaust Focus

The present fascination with the Holocaust must be guided into constructive channels. At present the state of Holocaust affairs has reached the nadir of its abuse. One is tempted to reflect quite often, "there is no business like Shoah business." It is time to place the Holocaust within Jewish history and within its proper historical perspective, so that the lingering shadows of Auschwitz will not overpower the lights of Jerusalem, lights of creativity and viability. It is time to reassess and re-evaluate the centrality of the Holocaust in the Jewish experience. It is time to relocate Jewish survival not in despair and death but in Jewish heritage and statehood. The bonds which unify Jews must emanate not from a common tragedy but from the experience of a rich past, of which the Holocaust is only one aspect. By doing so we will assure a sound foundation for a common future.