Slate Magazine
August 24, 2012 Friday 8:20 AM GMT
A New Slur: Calling people “Holocaust-obsessed” is the new holocaust denial.
by Ron Rosenbaum
Is there an algorithm for suffering? One that calibrates how much
empathy we should feel for the victims of genocide? What degree of
concern is “rational”? What degree is excessive, “obsessed”? Should
the degree to which we grieve about, analyze-and react to the threat
of-mass murders be calculable objectively?
It would make things easier if we could just take number of actual
dead, say, (or the number the killers wanted dead), times the
percentage of victim-group killed, maybe multiplied by the logarithm
of cruelty of the methodology of mass killing, divided by the number
of decades in the past the crime occurred. (Time is a factor: Hitler
was famously quoted as saying, in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today
of the extermination of the Armenians?” After all, the Holocaust took
place seven decades ago, the Armenian horror a little more than two
decades before Hitler’s remark. Lucky for him there were few
“obsessed” with this mass murder at the time.)
If there were an algorithm for suffering perhaps we would be able to
judiciously appraise the claims that there are some among us (mostly
Jewish) who are “holocaust obsessed.” It’s the new fashionable meme
for those who don’t want to be overly troubled by the memory of the
death camps and looming threats of a second holocaust. The term
enables those who use it to suggest that those more concerned than
they are “obsessed” in an unseemly way.
It’s the word “obsessed” that seems problematic to me. It implies a
bright line between legitimate interest and something else, something
over-intense, feverish, and counterproductive. But where is that line?
How much time should we spend worrying about the threat of future
Holocausts and genocides, not just those involving Jews.
The much-lauded German novelist W.G. Sebald has been quoted saying “no
serious person thinks of anything else.” This was obviously a form of
hyperbole designed to jolt people out of complacency. But it raises
the question: How much does a serious person think about the
Holocaust? What does it mean to be “obsessed” and what does it mean to
give the Holocaust an appropriate place in our political and cultural
consciousness?
I admit I was stunned in exploring this question to find no less than
272,000 Google hits for “obsessed with the Holocaust.” And it’s not
just racist sites (including David Duke’s) or anti-Zionist sites like
Mondoweiss.
Increasingly the word “obsessed”-as “obsessed with the holocaust” or
“holocaust obsessed”-has entered contemporary discourse, often used by
Jews as an epithet to describe other Jews. It may have entered the
mainstream as far back as the publication of Peter Novick’s 1999 book
, in which he accuses American Jews as a whole of exploiting the
Holocaust in bad faith, either as a “victimization Olympics” or for
political (primarily pro-Israel) purposes.
The term “holocaust-obsessed” appeared in The New Yorker in an article
about Israeli politician Avraham Burg who, according to David Remnick,
“describes the country in its current state as Holocaust obsessed.
…” Too much attention to the extermination of 6 million Jews oh so
long ago, just because 6 million or so more are being threatened with
exterminationist rhetoric today.
It’s lately become a trope of novelists and memoirists who seek to
show how much more sophisticated they’ve become about the whole thing.
And recently the epithet has become a focus of the debate over the
Israeli response to Iranian nuclear intentions. It was a prominent
“peace activist” there, Uri Avnery who applied the phrase “holocaust
obsessed fantasist” to current Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
(Netanyahu had said not long ago, “It’s 1938, Iran is Germany.”)
Demonstrating that it has become a widely recognized shibboleth on
both sides of the discourse over American Israeli relations, Jonathan
Rosen, in his astute critique of Peter Beinart’s Crisis in Zion
offered a caustic assessment of those self-proclaimed enlightened
moralists who accuse others of a “Holocaust-obsessed” mentality.
And the term has entered the realm of high-profile literary culture in
the widespread discussion of Nathan Englander’s highly praised short
story collection . In the title story, for instance, you can find an
American wife described as “a little obsessed with the Holocaust.”
(Although, as we’ll see, it’s a bit more complicated.)
Much of the recent use of the phrase has been prompted by people
comparing Iran today to Hitler’s Germany. I should mention that I am
not necessarily in favor of a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran’s
nuclear capacity. I think the issue is insoluble and either way I see
a catastrophe coming. But I just don’t have patience with those who
try to exclude the real historical catastrophe from relevance by
denigrating any concern with it as “obsession.”
In any case, the dismissive epithet does service not just for
anti-Semites or anti-Zionists but for Jews who don’t like the
association with victimhood, so parochial, so ghetto, so shtetl, so
shameful to the faux-sophisticate universalist citizen of the world.
Is it better, then, to be “somewhat interested” in the holocaust,
rather than “holocaust-obsessed”? Moderately interested? Temperately
troubled? How much is the correct amount of interest one should devote
to rapidly receding history? How much should the charge of obsession
affect the way we look at the victims of collective hate murders in
the present: 9/11, the Oslo slayings and the Sikhs, for instance. Do
they qualify for a heightened degree of concern since the killers
obviously-had they the means-would have wanted to murder many, many
more? How should it affect the way we view exterminationist threats
not yet realized?
It’s so convenient, isn’t it, to deplore those who are said to be
“holocaust obsessed.” It allows one to avoid all the troubling
implications of the past for the future. It allows Jews to avoid
having to be a Debbie Downer at dinner parties when the subject comes
up, usually in the context of discussing the kind of threats to the
state of Israel that are even more explicit and realizable today than
those to the Jews of Europe in the prewar era. It’s so unchic, so
indicative of “ethnic panic.” It makes you think of that scene in at
the dinner table of Annie’s Christian family.
Consider that Nathan Englander story in which a husband calls his wife
“a little obsessed with the Holocaust … here we are twenty minutes
from downtown Miami but really it’s 1937 and we live on the edge of
Berlin.” His is a self-subverting condescension since no one thinks
the danger of a second holocaust will come from “downtown Miami” (or
to America at all) but from the exterminationist threats to the people
of downtown Tel Aviv. (Is it an accident this downer of a wife is
named Deb?) Frankly I don’t attribute this caricature to Englander
himself; it’s too simplistic for such a good writer. I suspect he’s
just as much caricaturing the thick-headed husband who disparages his
wife in this way.
But the portrait of her irrational fear of an American holocaust
comforts those who might otherwise have to be concerned about the
genuine potential of a second holocaust in the Middle East.
Imagine: worrying about extermination threats just because Hitler made
extermination threats which he carried out. No reason to get all
obsessed because another anti-Semitic leader who is seeking nuclear
weapons makes similar threats, right? No reason to be troubled about
the exterminationist anti-Semitic rhetoric that pervades the airwaves
and the cyber realm of every other nation in the region.
Anyone who seeks to draw comparisons with the warnings of a “Final
Solution” in the 1930s and the situation today-in other words to take
history into account-is met with scorn as “Holocaust-obsessed.” Or
accused of “hoarding the Holocaust,” as Peter Beinart has put it.
Indeed using “holocaust-obsessed” as an epithet has become, in effect,
the new Holocaust denial. The new holocaust denial doesn’t deny the
holocaust happened, it just denies it should have any historical
relevance today. In an afterword she wrote for an anthology I
compiled, Cynthia Ozick spoke about an English writer who castigated
Menachim Begin for invoking the Holocaust murder of a million Jewish
children as a reason for ordering the Israeli attack on Saddam’s
potential bomb-making nuclear reactor in 1981. She called the
castigation a denial of the very essence of historical discourse:
making connections. “Is the imagination’s capacity to ‘connect’ worthy
of such scorn … ?” she asked.
By the way, you can always tell one of this new breed of Holocaust
denier by the way they claim that careful parsing of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map” or “wipe Israel from
the page of time” (depending on how its translated), doesn’t really
mean he wants to harm a single hair on the head of single Jew. See, if
you read it carefully it’s nothing to worry about. He just wants to
change the governmental set up! You know, so the state of Israel will
no longer exist and thus not appear on the map (or the page of time).
They cling desperately to the notion that it’s not a sinister
euphemism like, say, Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
Speaking of which, there’s a lesson in the way “Final Solution” was
euphemized to Hitler’s benefit. While researching the archives of an
anti-Hitler newspaper for my book on Hitler explanations, I discovered
that euphemism, “Final Solution”-“Endlösung” in German-had been used
by the Nazi party, and published in the Munich Post -as far back as
1931. But evidently there were those back then who didn’t want to see
through the euphemism just as there are those who don’t want to see
through the sinister euphemisms in Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements today.
The fact that Hitler successfully cloaked his exterminationist
intentions in such euphemisms should of course not cause us to look
askance at Ahmadinejad’s. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice,
shame on me, as they say. Shame on those who don’t get this for fear
of being called “holocaust-obsessed.”
In the past I’ve had occasion to call this “Holocaust
inconsequentialism”: Yes, it happened, we’re all so sorry, but the
fact that the world allowed and the entire continent of Europe
collaborated in industrialized mass murder shouldn’t have any
consequences for how we view the present situation. Or for how we
assess the nature of human nature. But “holocaust inconsequentialism”
only differs from Holocaust denial in that it is practiced by more
sophisticated types who would never consider themselves (and mostly
aren’t) anti-Semites. In fact most are Jews and not, I should add,
“self-hating Jews,” as some have called them. Rather they are
inordinately self-loving Jews, who like to pride themselves as having
transcended their parochial pasts, not shackled to the supposed
limiting shtetl or ethnic mentality, but rising above all that
unpleasantness to a realm of Pure Kantian Ideal. Unaware of the
blindness that believing only the best about humanity entails.
If we agree on the fatuousness of those who fling “holocaust-obsessed”
around as an epithet for anyone holocaust-concerned or -cognizant, how
obsessed, concerned, affected should one be, then? There remain
serious questions about the tragedy that are worthy of further
consideration. Indeed in the past few years newly available archives
of former Eastern European police states such as Poland, Lithuania,
and Ukraine have opened a Pandora’s box of new Holocaust questions and
exacerbated old debates, mostly involving the often shocking
complicity of Eastern European anti-Semitic populaces in the machinery
of extermination and the wartime and postwar “nationalist” pogroms
against Jews that ran parallel to Hitler’s Final Solution. (It wasn’t
only Germans who were enthusiasts for extermination. Far from it.)
It’s all very ugly, as this essay in about the divisive conflicts
among Polish historians demonstrates.
Most salient recent debate has focused on Timothy Snyder’s , which I
wrote about here in and which raises a whole other series of questions
about comparative evil-and comparative responsibility-in Stalin’s and
Hitler’s mass murders and their different methodologies of mass
murder: Stalin apparently preferred deliberate mass starvation-often
leading to cannibalism-to Hitler’s gas chambers. The tactic raised his
body count, according to most estimates, above the Führer’s, and also
raised the question of whether his mass slow death was more or less
cruel than the Nazis’ quick shooting and gassing. Recent review essays
by Frederic Raphael in the London and Christopher Browning in the
demonstrate the complexity of the questions the newly opened archives
prompt, questions about how the nations of Europe reacted (or failed
to react) to prewar threats of extermination and their wartime
complicities in the extermination.
Reading their arguments and the debates they invoke makes me wonder if
we’re “holocaust-obsessed” enough. If there still are many more
questions about the phenomenon to pursue. The nature of human nature
for instance. George Steiner once told me he believed the Holocaust
“removed the reinsurance on human hope,” meaning the conceptual safety
net beneath which our belief in the capability for evil could not go.
Now we know it can go far lower. But how far below does this
unimaginable hell stretch?
One thing the new evidence has done is re-enforce a perception I’ve
had that Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” description of
Eichmann-the concept of “banality of evil” itself-is now looking ever
more foolish. I’ve argued that Arendt arrogantly and ignorantly bought
into Eichmann’s defense that he was “just following orders” in a way
that absolved him from the “radical evil” that she, Arendt, once
believed in. When it turns out Eichmann was a bloodthirsty Jew-hater
who, even after the war was effectively lost, was trying desperately
to extract every last Jew from Hungary to be murdered. Above and
beyond the call of duty that “following orders” implies.
How holocaust-obsessed should we be? Perhaps if we were more
“holocaust-conscious” (a term I’d prefer), we wouldn’t have stood by
as Rwandans were slaughtered. Or waited till after Srebrenica to care
about the Bosnians. Perhaps if we were more Holocaust-conscious the
historically ignorant and often racist idiots who promote the idea of
“American exceptionalism” (America was established and ordained in
grace and glory by God and was never complicit in sin) might take note
of the fact that this nation was founded upon two genocides-that of
the Native Americans and that of the African-American slaves. Whose
death toll over three centuries is almost incalculably high.
And perhaps if we were more “holocaust-obsessed” and surveyed the way
genocides have spread over the landscape of history, covered the map
of the world like bloodstains, we would be less Pollyannaish about the
future. Perhaps we’d be more alert to intervene before the killing
started or at least before it finished. Perhaps, as I’ve suggested in
my most recent book, we’d realize that any nuclear war even a “small”
one is a genocidal event. A definition that should call for more
urgency than a sluggish crawl toward arms control.
But the second point I’d like to make-the second big question about
the algorithm of suffering-is the broadening of holocaust concern
beyond one’s “own” holocaust. I know there are excesses in this
line-in emphasizing the similarity of all mass murderers-excesses that
can trivialize the unimaginable magnitude of the suffering of the
European Jews, and they’ve recently been well-documented by Indiana
University’s Alvin H. Rosenfeld in a book called . I’ve written in
praise of the book, particularly his stance against all the weepy
attempts to turn the Holocaust into a lesson about the “triumph of the
human spirit” in the face of evil and other such clichés. The
obscenity of such execrable phenomena as the unbearably
self-congratulatory Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.
But it was something I read in another review of the Rosenfeld book,
by a scholar I admire, Walter Reich, that raised the issue of
“transferability,” which I think deserves consideration.
Reich-who holds the Yitzhak Rabin memorial chair in international
affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University,
will always have my respect for doing a rare thing in Washington: He
resigned as head of the U.S. Holocaust Museum because he refused to
give a man responsible for the murder of Jews, Yasser Arafat, a tour
of the Holocaust Museum as the State Department had asked him to.
Realpolitik is one thing, Reich was in effect saying, but this is a
bridge too far.
I’ve often found his thinking to be unexpected and provocative
(consider his essay on the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in the ). In
any case he wrote his essay in praise of Rosenfeld’s book for the last
print edition of the .
There was a paragraph early in the essay that caught my attention.
He writes of Rosenfeld: “he shows how the horror of the Holocaust has
been minimized and even disparaged by those who want the public to
focus on their own historical traumas and are frustrated by the
Holocaust’s power to eclipse other tragic national experiences.”
This passage I think poses the real difficulty the fools who throw
around the epithet “holocaust-obsessed” fail to see.
It has always seemed to me important not to use the holocaust to
separate Jewish experience from the “historical traumas” and “tragic
national experiences” of others. Important to err on the side of
commonality and solidarity with other victims rather than to spend
time arguing about what sets us apart from them.
It works both ways. Reich called my attention to an eloquent-and
angry-column by ‘s Colbert King, in which a non-white, non-Jewish
descendant of slaves expresses the rage he feels at the open
expression of exterminationist anti-Semitism by the leaders of
Iran-and the world’s culpable failure to respond. I recommend this to
those who think such concern is limited to “holocaust-obsessed”
neo-cons.
It’s a matter of choice, of emphasis. Why should we emphasize, even if
it is true, the differences between our Holocausts and those of others
even if they don’t measure up in body count or evil of the
perpetrators exterminationist designs? Are the differences more
important than the tragic similarities? Must we invoke the Passover
night question: “Why is this night different from all other nights” to
ask and answer “why is our holocaust different from all other
holocausts?”
I don’t think so. I don’t think it diminishes what happened to one
people if it leads to empathy for others-and to proactive intervention
to prevent looming threats of genocidal mass murder.
That’s another kind of holocaust inconsequentialism. A removal of
“our” Holocaust from history. From historical connection to others.
And while it’s not a prescription for blithe spirits, perhaps we’d be
better off if we were more holocaust-obsessed, in the sense of being
concerned with all holocausts, historical and potential, and the
profound flaws in human nature and human civilization that make them
such a salient feature of our collective history.
While I was writing this I came upon, in that monument to
civilization, New York’s Strand Bookstore, the semi-famous
not-quite-forgotten short story collection by Delmore Schwartz, the
Bellovian prodigy who died too young to fulfill his promise.
But almost everyone agrees on the merits of the book of stories named
after the title story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”
Yes, and in nightmares too.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
