The Day the Holocaust Died
Text by Bradford R. Pilcher
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
The Holocaust stopped mattering to me on August 18, 2007. It was around
dinner, a late dinner, so it was around 7:30 in the evening. It’s Abe
Foxman’s fault. I blame him, and I may never forgive him.
Abe Foxman survived the Holocaust, the one that no longer matters to
me, in the care of his Catholic nanny, who enrolled him in the church
and taught him to spit at Jews on the street. His parents got him back
after the war. On some level it is ironic that this man, technically a
survivor though not exactly Elie Wiesel, killed the Holocaust for me.
If you don’t know who Foxman is, you’re lucky. He runs the
Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded about a century ago in
the wake of Leo Frank being lynched in Georgia. Leo Frank was a Jew,
and that’s more or less why they lynched him. More than a few people
hated Jews back then, so the Anti-Defamation League was formed in
response.
They’ve done a fine job, because I haven’t seen or heard of a Jew being
lynched by a very large mob in this country in some time. I’m a Jew,
and I live in the city where Frank was strung up a tree, so I like to
keep tabs on whether Jew-lynching has come back into vogue. To the best
of my knowledge, it hasn’t.
This has not stopped Mr. Foxman from professing, pretty much ad
nauseam, how much Jews are hated these days. We’re endangered, he says.
Anti-Semites are all among us, so we must be vigilant lest the
Jew-lynching and Jew-gassing returns. He’s written a couple of books on
the subject. One was called Never Again? The Threat of the New
Anti-Semitism. The old anti-Semitism cost many millions of Jews their
lives. The new anti-Semitism seems to involve a large number of
Muslims, Arabs, and leftie professors who are not fond of Israel, or at
least Israeli policy.
His latest book? The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of
Jewish Control. The deadliest? Have I missed a rash of Jews being
executed in this country due to the myth of insidious Jewish influence?
Alarmist much?
That Foxman is a blowhard who opens his mouth way too often to
overstate things way too much, a fact which I think is largely
indisputable, is not why I stopped caring about the Holocaust – or at
least listening to people talk about it.
Some people’s blood is going to boil when they read that. Only a child
of privilege, having grown up half a dozen decades, and a sizeable
ocean, away from the horrors could so flippantly say something like
that. I don’t care about the Holocaust? What? Do I own it? Do I really
think I deserve a better Holocaust, a more fulfilling mass murder to
read about? What chutzpah! Who do I think I am?
Oh, calm down. Open your ears, and I’ll explain. I’m not a completely
spoiled tyrant. Of course the Holocaust matters. Six million Jews died,
along with about five million other souls deemed undesirable by
Hitler’s regime, and by died I mean they were stripped of their
belongings, forced from their homes, walled off in ghettos, worked to
death, starved to death, then left to disease and despair. The ones who
fought back were shot, bombed, and buried in the rubble, and that was
before they were packed up in boxcars and shipped like cattle to the
camps. Where they were gassed.
You know, in case they needed one more way to die.
That matters. That’s something you probably should look into. As
mistakes go, history doesn’t really need to repeat this one. If you
elect an addle-brained stumblebum for a president, you can get away
with that four or five times. On the other hand, annihilating millions
of people for being Jewish – or gay, or black, or Communist, or just
about anything really – doesn’t qualify as an oops. You don’t get a
mulligan on something like that.
So it’s not that the Holocaust stopped mattering to me on that Friday
afternoon in August. It’s just that on that day, I stopped listening to
most of the people who frequently comment on the genocide of the Jews.
I decided I wasn’t going to read any more of their books – all 59,176
of them – or watch any more of their movies. Not even the ones that get
the Oscar for best documentary every year. Then there are the museums,
the memorials, and the traveling exhibits. I’ve been to most, if not
all, of them.
>From now on, I boycott.
If you’d like to know why, if your personal political correctness
thermometer isn’t wedged too far up your rear exit canal, let me direct
your attention to the greater metropolitan area of Boston,
Massachusetts.
There, in the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, lives an
Armenian-American named David Boyajian. He wrote to a local newspaper
over the summer, criticizing the town’s anti-bigotry program, which
just so happens to be administered by Foxman’s ADL. According to his
letter, the ADL "has made the Holocaust and its denial key pieces" of
its program, all while "hypocritically working with Turkey to oppose
recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915-23."
You may not know about the Armenian genocide. That’s not surprising.
There are hundreds of museums and memorials, large and small, keeping
alive the memory of the Holocaust. The Armenians, on the other hand,
have no such institutional power and face the continued efforts of
Turkey to deny that any genocide took place.
Believe me, it did. Or don’t believe me. Ask any one of a litany of
respected scholars and historians, including Emory University professor
Deborah Lipstadt. She’s been lionized by the Jewish world, and
rightfully so, for fighting tirelessly against Holocaust deniers. Time
and time again, including in op-eds and interviews, she’s made it very
clear that Armenians suffered a genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks
during World War I. One-and-a-half million of them were slaughtered. It
isn’t a question for historical debate, it’s a settled question with
piles of evidence backing up the claim.
That hasn’t stopped Foxman – and other Jewish leaders – from acting
like nothing ever happened. When he was asked in July if the Armenian
slaughter was genocide, his answer was a short, "I don’t know." The ADL
has joined other Jewish groups, such as the American Jewish Committee,
in opposing efforts at recognizing the Armenian genocide.
Stop for a moment and think about the reaction of the Jewish community
to Holocaust deniers. Every time the Iranian president spouts off about
the "myth" of the Holocaust, Jewish groups – the Anti-Defamation League
at the front of the line – roundly condemns him. So why would an
organization that fights so hard against those who would deny the
Holocaust, become an adamant denier of another genocide? The answer is
simple, if ugly. They didn’t want to offend Turkey, a major ally of
Israel in the Middle East.
For years, Turkey has lobbied Jewish groups to stay away from the
genocide label, explicitly saying they might be less supportive of
Israel. The highest ranks of Turkish officials, including their foreign
minister, approached the ADL and others to make their case, and in a
fit of fear and realpolitik, the ADL shook hands with Turkey and
essentially became accomplices in genocide denial.
Then came 7:30 p.m. on August 18. I was picking through my usual diet
of news and magazines when I stumbled on the story. Andrew Tarsy, head
of the ADL’s New England office, had been fired. His crime was
demanding that the national organization remove its head from its
hypocritical posterior and recognize the Armenian genocide.
I’ll admit I became a bit of a zealot after that. I fired up LexisNexis
on a daily basis, scouring the wire services and news outlets for any
morsel of information on the ADL’s moral implosion. That’s what I
called it, a moral implosion. I was happy when the backlash came, when
Boston’s Jewish community rallied behind Tarsy and demanded the ADL
reverse itself. At least some people get it.
A little over a week later, Foxman was forced to relent. He rehired
Tarsy and issued a statement calling the "consequences" of the massacre
of Armenians "tantamount to genocide." This is a little bit like saying
the consequences of Nazi gas chambers was tantamount to mass murder. In
the words of Joey Kurtzman, the executive editor of Jewcy.com, "It
denies the intentionality of genocide."
Foxman wasn’t content just hedging his bets though, tiptoeing around
the genocide of 1.5 million people. Almost as soon as he sent out his
pseudo mea culpa, he sent another letter to the Turkish prime minister.
In it, he literally apologized for admitting that yes, Turks had done a
bad thing a hundred years ago.
"We had no intention," Foxman proclaims in the letter, "to put the
Turkish people or its leaders in a difficult position. I am writing
this letter to you to express our sorrow over what we have caused for
the leadership and people of Turkey in the past few days."
I was eating lunch when I read that one. My reaction involved an
attempt to curse through a mouthful of very hot soup. What exactly was
Foxman apologizing for? I wondered if he’d ever thought to express deep
sorrow to the leadership and people of Germany. "We had no intention of
putting you in the difficult position of having to answer for mass
murder," I imagined he might say, "but you did kind of kill several
million of us. We would like to express our deep sorrow over the
embarrassment we’ve caused you."
This is an organization created to fight bigotry generally and
anti-Semitism in particular, to make our world better by exposing
hatred and holding racism, genocidal or otherwise, to account. Where
exactly do they get off apologizing to genocide deniers? In two
sentences, Foxman had broken the camel’s back, letting a deluge of
missteps and hyperbolic statements turn into the absolute shredding of
his organization’s moral authority.
That shredding goes far beyond the issue of Armenian genocide. Earlier
this year, Foxman publicly criticized the only Muslim member of
Congress, Keith Ellison, for comparing some of Bush’s post-9/11 power
grabs with the Nazi use of the Reichstag Fire to seize absolute control
of Germany. This he did after the ADL had privately worked with Ellison
on a statement of retraction and apology, and this he did despite the
fact there isn’t anything inherently wrong with drawing historical
comparisons to modern events. Why is history there if not to be
analyzed, applied, and learned from? The history of the Nazis and the
Holocaust isn’t immune from that, nor should it be.
Then there’s the use of anti-Semitism, cast as a dire threat to the
state of Israel, as cudgel against political opponents. I could quote
from Foxman’s new book where so many people who are merely critics of
Israeli policy get recast as anti-Semites. But it would be just as easy
to quote from Alvin Rosenfeld’s recent article, "’Progressive’ Jewish
Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," endorsed and released by the
American Jewish Committee. It explicitly equates progressive political
positions, including critiques of Israeli policy, with anti-Semitic
belief. The guise of an Israel wiped out by Arab nukes is often
presented as a potential "second Holocaust," and at best these
progressive critics are aiding and abetting the enemies of Jews.
Rosenfeld is hardly alone in putting forth this position, though he may
be the most explicit.
This is why the Holocaust no longer matters to me, why I’d just as soon
we forget about it, if this is what we’re going to do with it. By this,
I mean put it in museums, memorialize it to the point of irrelevance,
and use it as a platform for moral authoritarianism. By this, I mean
use it as a cudgel to silence critics we don’t want to hear from, all
the while ignoring the crimes of people who support us – or support
Israel, which isn’t necessarily the same as supporting us. By this, I
mean render the Holocaust from a disaster of human action and inaction
to be learned from into some kind of memorial flame, too hot to touch
and too fragile to light the way to a better tomorrow.
I’m not hopeless about this. Abe Foxman and his ilk can’t occupy the
stage forever. At the very least, perhaps he could get laryngitis. But
I’m not particularly hopeful either. We’ve made a civic religion,
eagerly adopted by plenty of Jews who can’t be bothered to meander into
a synagogue more than a couple times a year, out of Holocaust
remembrance. We’ve replaced a wandering Diaspora of Torah scholars with
an affluent American populace of Jews holding up the flame for the
Holocaust without bothering to ask ourselves what moral imperatives
that memory requires of us.
If we’re not going to ask those questions, and listen to the difficult
answers, then we’re probably better off not remembering at all. After
all, a false veneer of moral authority in the absence of moral action
may be the most immoral thing of all.
Editor’s Note: We realize Bradford R. Pilcher’s views may upset some so
please feel free to write us letters which we’ll publish in the next
issue. And, in the meantime, we promise you that Pilcher is not the
president of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Southeastern Fan Club.