FACES AND PLACES: Manipulating the Holocaust (09/05/99)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Manipulating the Holocaust

Once again Ukrainian Canadian leaders are engaged in an acrimonious debate with Jewish Canadian leaders over historical truth. Jewish leaders are promoting an exclusively Jewish Holocaust museum, similar to the one in Washington, to be built in Ottawa at taxpayer expense. Ukrainian leaders support a more universal genocide museum that would include the Holocaust as well as the Great Famine and other crimes against humanity.

As accusations and counter-accusations are published in the Canadian press, compromise between the two groups appears unlikely. Why? Much of the reason can be found in a new book by a University of Chicago professor, Peter Novick, titled "The Holocaust in American Life."

Like the Jews, Ukrainians have suffered the horrors of regimes whose bestial savagery threatened their very existence as a people. And, like the Jews, Ukrainians want their suffering to be recognized and never forgotten. There is a difference in approach to past horrors by the two groups, however. Writes Prof. Novick: "In Jewish discourse on the Holocaust we have not just a competition for recognition ... but a competition for primacy." Jews have succeeded in making their tragedy the benchmark against which all other atrocities are to be judged. In American usage, a Holocaust survivor is always a Jew. When Ukrainians and Poles voice their resentment, Jews such as Sol Littman of the Simon Weisenthal Center accuse them of "Holocaust envy." And it's not just the Holocaust. It's also genocide, a term that some Jews now claim can apply only to them.

It wasn't always that way. "After the war began, and after the main outlines of the Holocaust had become known," writes Dr. Novick, "it was common for Jewish writers to interpret Nazi atrocities in a universalist fashion - stressing that Jews were far from the only victims." A 1944 American Jewish Committee staff memorandum urged emphasis on "the new spirit of Poland under the heel of the Nazis, the new spirit of kinship and camaraderie among all sections of the Polish population - Catholics, Protestants, Jews."

These sentiments were essentially a political ploy. Anti-Semitism was relatively prevalent in America during the war; some Americans believed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a closet Jew and that this was the main reason he concentrated our military might not on Japan, which had attacked America, but on Germany, which hadn't. Jewish leaders feared that emphasizing Jewish suffering would lend credence to this canard. Defeating Hitler took precedence over Jewish rescue.

Today, of course, the situation is quite different, especially at the Holocaust Museum in Washington where it is claimed that Jewish leaders petitioned the war department to bomb Auschwitz. Not so, argues Prof. Novick.

When the war ended, Jewish survivors were held in contempt by Jews in Israel and America because they didn't resist Hitler's murder machine. A top leader of the AJC, for example, wrote to a colleague in 1946: "Those who have survived are the not the fittest ... but are largely the lowest Jewish elements, who by cunning and animal instincts have been able to escape the terrible fate of the more refined and better elements who succumbed."

Between the end of the war and the 1960s, the Holocaust was rarely discussed among Jews. In his 1957 scholarly survey of Jews in the 1950s, Prof. Nathan Glazer noted that the Holocaust "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry." The Holocaust was not even mentioned in a similar survey by Norman Podhoretz that same year. The Cold War notion that criticism of Germany played into the Communists' hands also contributed to making the Holocaust yesterday's news for American and Jews alike. The inclusionary perception remained, however. Even Simon Wiesenthal spoke of the 11 million victims of Nazism.

The Eichmann trial changed all that, both in Israel and the United States. Attempts by the Anti-Defamation League and the AJC to present the trial in a universalist fashion soon dissipated as the prosecution placed Eichmann "in a genealogy that extended from Pharaoh through Haman, Chmielnicki [Khmelnytsky] and Petlura [Petliura]." Survivors such as Elie Wiesel ("all of Ukraine is Babi Yar," he once wrote) were suddenly sanctified. For Mr. Wiesel, the Holocaust became "equal to the revelation at Sinai" in its religious significance, a symbol of eternal Jewish vulnerability.

Beginning in the late 1960s and especially in the 1970s, Jewish leaders promoted the idea that a new anti-Semitism had arisen and that Jews, as perpetual victims, were always at risk. Heightened Holocaust awareness one rabbi argued, would prepare American Jews for the day when they might have to flee the U.S. Ironically, Prof. Novick writes, "anti-Semitism in the United States was, by every measure, continuing its long-term decline, diminishing to the point that it presented no significant barriers or disadvantages to American Jews."

Why the disparity between reality and reaction? According to Dr. Novick, a significant reason is assimilation, the "vanishing Jews" phenomenon. At a time when neither religious beliefs nor cultural traits unite most Jews, and as Israel is no longer perceived as pristine, the Holocaust has become 'the defining Jewish experience,' he writes. "Insofar as it attained mythic status, expressing truths about an ensuring Jewish condition, all were united in an essential victim identity."

I can appreciate Jewish concerns with assimilation. Ukrainians have similar worries about their future in North America. What I resent, however, is the way Jewish leaders have manipulated public discourse on the Holocaust to the point that any discussion that is not in lock-step with their position can be interpreted either as "anti-Semitic" or "bordering on anti-Semitism" - accusations for which there is no defense.

Yes, the Jewish Shoah is unique. "But to single out these aspects of the Holocaust that were distinctive (there certainly were such)," writes Prof. Novick, "and to ignore those aspects that it shares with other atrocities, and on the basis of this gerrymandering to declare the Holocaust unique, is intellectual slight of hand. The assertion that the Holocaust is unique - like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable - is in practice deeply offensive. What else can all this possibly mean except your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours, is comprehensible; unlike ours, is presentable."

Few nations suffered more anguish and misery in this century than Ukraine. No group has the right to pervert this historical fact for its own convenience.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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