Introduction

In a memorable exchange some years back, Gore Vidal accused Norman Podhoretz, then-editor of the American Jewish Committee publication Commentary, of being un-American. The evidence was that Podhoretz attached less importance to the Civil War -- "the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our Republic" -- than to Jewish concerns. Yet Podhoretz was perhaps more American than his accuser. For by then it was the "War Against the Jews," not the "War Between the States," that figured as more central to American cultural life. Most college professors can testify that compared to the Civil War many more undergraduates are able to place the Nazi holocaust in the right century and generally cite the number killed. In fact, the Nazi holocaust is about the only historical reference that resonates in a university classroom today. Polls show that many more Americans can identify The Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan.

Until fairly recently, however, the Nazi holocaust barely figured in American life. Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. There was only one university course offering in the United States on the topic. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she could draw only on two scholarly studies in the English language -- Gerald Reitlainger's The Final Solution and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg's masterpiece itself just managed to see the light of day. His thesis advisor at Columbia University, the German-Jewish social theorist Franz Neumann, strongly discouraged him from writing on the topic ("Its your funeral"), and no university or mainstream publisher would touch the completed manuscript. When it was finally published, The Destruction of the European Jews received only a few, mostly critical, notices.

Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including Jewish intellectuals, paid the Nazi holocaust little heed. In an authoritative 1957 survey, sociologist Nathan Glazer reported that the Nazi Final Solution (as well as Israel) "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry." In a 1961 Commentary symposium on "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals," only two of thirty-one contributers stressed its impact. Likewise, a 1961 roundtable convened by the journal Judaism of twenty-one observant American Jews on "My Jewish Affirmation" almost completely ignored the subject. No monuments or tributes marked the Nazi holocaust in the United States. To the contrary, major Jewish organizations opposed such memorialization. The question is, why?

TBC

That book is good material. I used to have some articles about Holocaustianity displacing the Jewish religion itself as the most important aspect of a Jew's identity.

Likely, one jew tried making money of it first, and the rest just jumped on the wagon when they saw the success of this industry.

there's no business like shoa business ;)

The standard explanation is that Jews were traumatized by the Nazi holocaust and therefore repressed the memory of it. In fact, there is no evidence to support this conclusion. No doubt some survivors did not then or, for that matter, in later years want to speak about what had happened. Many others, however, very much wanted to speak and, once the occasion availed itself, wouldn't stop speaking. The problem was that Americans didn't want to listen.

The real reason for public silence on Nazi extermination was the conformist policies of the American Jewish leadership and the political climate of postwar America. In both domestic and international affairs American Jewish elites hewed closely to official US policy. Doing so in effect facilitated the traditional goals of assimilation and access to power. With the inception of the Cold War, mainstream Jewish organizations jumped into the fray. American Jewish elites "forgot" the Nazi holocaust because Germany -- West Germany by 1949 -- became a crucial postwar American ally in the US confrontation with the Soviet Union. Dredging up the past served no useful purpose; in fact it complicated matters.

With minor reservations (soon discarded), major American Jewish organizations quickly feel into line with US support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), fearful that "any organized opposition of American Jews against the new foreign policy and strategic approach could isolate them in the eyes of the non-Jewish majority and endanger the postwar achievements on the domestic scene," was the first to preach the virtues of realignment. The pro-Zionist World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its American affiliate dropped opposition after signing compensation agreements with Germany in the early 1950s, while the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was the first major Jewish organization to send an official delegation to Germany, in 1954. Together these organizations collaborated with the Bonn governmetn to contain the "anti-German wave" of Jewish popular sentiment.

The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for yet another reason. Leftist Jews, who were opposed to the Cold War alignment with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop harping on it. Rememberence of the Nazi holocaust was tagged as a Communist cause. Strapped with the stereotype that conflated Jews with the Left -- in fact, Jews did account for a third of the vote for progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 -- American Jewish elites did not shrink from sacrificing their fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish subversives to government agencies, the AJC and the ADL actively collaborated in the McCarthy-era witch-hunt. The AJC endorsed the death penalty for the Rosenbergs, while its monthly publication, Commentary, editorialized taht they weren't really Jews.

Fearful of association with the political Left abroad and at home, mainstream Jewish organizations opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi German social-democrats as well as boycotts of German manafactures and public demonstrations against ex-Nazis touring the United States. On the other hand, prominent visiting German dissidents like Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who had spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps and was now against the anti-Communist crusade, suffered the obloquy of American Jewish leaders. Anxious to boost their anti-Communist credentials, Jewish elites even enlisted in, and financially sustained, right-wing extremist organizations like the All-American Conference to Combat Communism and turned a blind eye as veterans of the Nazi SS entered the country.

Ever anxious to ingratiate themselves with US ruling elites and dissociate themselves from the Jewish Left, organized American Jewry did invoke the Nazi holocaust in one special context: to denounce the USSR. "Soviet [anti-Jewish] policy opens up opportunities which must not be overlooked," an internal AJC memorandum quoted by Novick gleefully noted, "to reinforce certain aspects of AJC domestic program." Typically, that meant bracketing the Nazi Final Solution with Russian anti-Semitism. "Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,' Commentary direly predicted. "He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe . . . The parallel with the policy of Nazi extermination is almost complete." Major American Jewish organizations even denounced Soviet repression in Hungary as "only the first station on the way to a Russian Auschwitz."

Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life. The standard explanation of this transformation is that Israel's extreme isolation and vulnerability during the June war revived memories of the Nazi extermination. In fact, this analysis misrepresents both the reality of Mideast power relations at the time and the nature of the evolving relationship between American Jewish elites and Israel.

Just as mainstream American Jewish organizations downplayed the Nazi holocaust in the years after World War II to conform to the US government's Cold War priorities, so their attitude to Israel kept in step with US policy. From early on, American Jewish elites harbored profound misgivings about the Jewish state. Uppermost was their fear that it would lend credence to the "dual loyalty" charge. As the Cold War intensified, these worries multiplied. Already before the founding of Israel, American Jewish leaders voiced concerns that its largely Eastern European, left-wing leadership would join the Soviet camp. Although they eventually embraced the Zionist-led campaign for statehood, American Jewish organizations closely monitored and adjusted to signals from Washington. Indeed, the AJC supported Israel's founding mainly out of fear that a domestic backlash against Jews might ensue if the Jewish DPs in Europe were not quickly settled. Although Israel aligned with the West soon after the state was formed, many Israelis in and out of government retained strong affection for the Soviet Union; predictably, American Jewish leaders kept Israel at arm's length.

From its founding in 1948 through the June 1967 war, Israel did not figure centrally in American strategic planning. As the Palestinian Jewish leadership prepared to declare statehood, President Truman waffled, weighing domestic considerations (the Jewish vote) against State Department alarm (suppport for a Jewish state would alienate the Arab world). To secure US interests in the Middle East, the Eisenhower administration balanced support for Israel and for Arab nations, favouring, however, the Arabs.

Intermittent Israeli clashes with the United States over policy issues culminated in the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Israel colluded with Britain and France to attack Egypt's nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Although Israel's lightning victory and seizure of the Sinai Peninsula drew general attention to its strategic potential, the United States still counted its as only one among several regional assets. Accordingly, President Eisenhower forced Israel's full, virtually unconditional withdrawal from the Sinai. During the crisis, American Jewish leaders did briefly back Israeli efforts to wrest American concessions, but ultimately, as Arthur Hertzberg recalls, they "preferred to counsel Israel to heed [Eisenhower] rather than oppose the wishes of the leader of the United States.

Except as an occasionaly object of charity, Israel practically dropped from sight in American Jewish life soon after the founding of the state. In fact, Israel was not important to American Jews. In his 1957 survey, Nathan Glazer reported that Israel "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry." Membership in the Zionist Organization of America dropped from the hundreds of thousands in 1948 to the tens of thousands in the 1960s. Only 1 in 20 American Jews cared to visit Israel before June 1967. In his 1956 reelection, which occured immediantly after he forced Israel's humiliating withdrawal from the Sinai, the already considerable Jewish support for Eisenhower increased. In the early 1960s, Israel even faced a drubbing for the Eichmann kidnapping from sections of elite Jewish opinion like Joseph Prokauer, past president of the AJC, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin and the Jewish-owned Washington Post. "The kidnapping of Eichmann," Erich Fromm opined, "is an act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves . . . have been guilty."

Across the political spectrum, American Jewish intellectuals proved especially indifferent to Israel's fate. Detailed studies of the left-liberal New York Jewish intellectual scene through the 1960s barely mention Israel. Just before the June war, the AJC sponsered a symposium on "Jewish Identity Here and Now." Only three of the thirty-one "best minds in the Jewish community" even alluded to Israel; two of them did so to dismiss its relevance. Telling irony: just about the only two Jewish public intellectuals who had forged a bond with Israel before June 1967 were Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky.

Then came the June war. Impressed by Israel's overwhelming display of force, the United States moved to incorporate it as a strategic asset. (Already before the June war the United States had cautiously tilted toward Israel as the Egyptian and Syrian regimes charted an increasingly independent course in the mid-1960s). Military and economic assistance began to pour in as Israel turned into a proxy for US power in the Middle East.

For American Jewish elites, Israel's subordination to US power was a windfall. Zionism had sprung from the premise that assimilation was a pipe dream, that Jews would always be perceived as potentially disloyal aliens. To resolve this dilemma, Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the Jews. In fact, Israel's founding exacerbated the problem, at any rate for diaspora Jewry: it gave the charge of dual loyalty institutional expression. Paradoxically, after June 1967, Israel facilitated assimilation in the United States: Jews now stood on the front lines defending America -- indeed, "Western Civilization" -- against the retrogade Arab hordes. Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the bogy of dual loyalty, it now connoted super-loyalty. After all, it was not Americans but Israelis fighting and dying to protect US interests. And unlike the American GIs in Vietnam, Israeli fighters were not being humiliated by Third World upstarts.

Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel. After the 1967 war, Israel's military élan could be celebrated because its guns pointed in the right direction -- against America's enemies. Its martial prowess might even facilitate entry into the inner sanctums of American power. Previously Jewish elites could only offer a few lists of Jewish subversives; now, they could pose as the natural interlocuters for American's newest strategic asset. From bit players, they could advance to top billing in the Cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United States, Israel became a strategic asset.

In a memoir published just before the June war, Norman Podhoretz giddily recalled attending a state dinner at the White House that "included not a single person who was not visibly and absolutely beside himself with delight to be there." Although already editor of the leading American Jewish periodical, Commentary, his memoir includes only one fleeting allusion to Israel. What did Israel have to offer an ambitious American Jew? In a later memoir, Podhoretz remembered that after June 1967 Israel became "the religion of the American Jews." Now a prominent supporter of Israel, Podhoretz could boast not merely of attending a White House dinner but of meeting tête-à-tête with the President to deliberate on the National Interest.

After the June war, mainstream American Jewish organizations worked full time to firm up the American-Israeli alliance. In the case of the ADL, this included a far-flung domestic surveillance operation with ties to Israeli and South African intelligence. Coverage of Israel in The New York Times increased dramatically after June 1967. The 1955 and 1965 entries for Israel in The New York Times Index each filled 60 column inches. The entry for Israel in 1975 ran to fully 260 column inches. "When I start to feel better," Wiesel reflected in 1973, "I turn to the Israeli items in The New York Times. Like Podhoretz, many mainstream American Jewish intellectuals also suddenly found "religion" after the June war. Novick reports that Lucy Dawidowicz, the doyenne of Holocaust literature, had once been a "sharp critic of Israel." Israel could not demand reparations from Germany, she railed in 1953, while evading responsibility for displaced Palestinians: "Morality cannot be that flexible." Yet almost immediantly after the June war, Dawidowicz became a "fervent supporter of Israel," acclaiming it as "the corporate paradigm for the ideal image of the Jew in the modern world."

That book is good material. I used to have some articles about Holocaustianity displacing the Jewish religion itself as the most important aspect of a Jew's identity.

yeah....i picked it up when it first came out. The Swiss swindle involving Edgar Bronfman was most enlightening.

I believe that what is now referred to as the Holocaust took place, although the term "Holocaust" has been injected with nonhistorical meaning.

However, the way that the HI completely ignores non-Jewish victims, gives money to itself rather than to even Jewish victims, and acts as though each cash payout is the first time they've EVER managed to get any money, is completely disgusting.

And the way they act as though it is the be-all and end-all of genocide, persecution, prosecution, and anything remotely connected, is a complete crock. Especially when they ignore the genocide, persecution, and prosecution of homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavs, Communists, etc, in the same linked events.

What actually happened involved people from many different groups being attacked, used for slave labour, and many being killed by various different means, with a large amount being Jewish, with numbers possibly going as high as 11 million, with up to 5 or 6 million being Jewish.

What the term "big-h" Holocaust refers to is the carefully edited version put forth by the HI, in which 6 million people, all Jews, were killed, all in gas trucks or chambers. Nobody and nothing else, except for the occasional nod to another group, as in "Oh, well, I guess they killed maybe three or four Gypsies".

I believe that what is now referred to as the Holocaust took place, although the term "Holocaust" has been injected with nonhistorical meaning.

However, the way that the HI completely ignores non-Jewish victims, gives money to itself rather than to even Jewish victims, and acts as though each cash payout is the first time they've EVER managed to get any money, is completely disgusting.

So if they actually gave all the money they extorted from Germany and various corporations to the 'survivors' that would be ok? :jew:

Yes, as and when everything involved could be verified. And I don't see what's with the star of David, as I made clear that not only Jews were persecuted.

LOL this is a great excerpt:

"Dubbed by Novick the "sacrilization of the Holocaust," this mystification's most practiced purveyor is Elie Wiesel. For Wiesel, Novick rightly observes, The Holocaust is effectively a "mystery" religion. Thus Wiesel intones that the Holocaust "leads into darkness," "negates all answers," "lies outside, if not beyond, history," "defies both knowledge and description," "cannot be explained nor visualized," is "never to be comprehended or transmitted," marks a "destruction of history" and a "mutation on a cosmic scale." Only the survivor-priest (read: only Wiesel) is qualified to divine its mystery. And yet, The Holocaust's mystery, Wiesel avows, is "noncommunicable"; "we cannot even talk about it." Thus, for his standard fee of $25,000 (plus chauffeured limosine), Wiesel lectures that the "secret" of Auschwitz's "truth lies in silence."

Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, p.45

Wiesel is a nut. Everything can be put into historical context. Doesn't make it right, but 6 million or 11 million dying for reasons of persecution is not different from 6 or 11 dying in the same fashion, except for magnitude.

Yes, as and when everything involved could be verified. And I don't see what's with the star of David, as I made clear that not only Jews were persecuted.

I disagree. Where is this money coming from? Why do they "deserve" money?

You know what would happen if everyone who was the "victim" of something or another during WWII were entitled to reperations? A huge mess. Since you can't squeeze juice from dried out old corpses, all the "victims" then turn to looting from people who weren't involved, such as taxpayers.

They were used as slave labour. This is different from, say, black slave reparations, since no actual black slaves are still alive, and their ancestors, despite all the problems, sorta benefitted from the whole "getting the mother **** outta Africa" thing.

But what about German companies that benefitted from slave labour? Did they not benefit from that? What about back-dated wages?

Sinclair, my in-laws had their property stolen by the Soviets. The Soviets then divied up this property amongst themselves and other people. They have not asked for reparations or gone on some legal crusade. They picked up and moved on with their lives.

I suggest everyone else do the same.

But an attempt to get money there is impossible. If the groups persecuted by the Nazis can get a bit of money, which is possible, since the companies that benefitted still exist, than I have no objections.

I mean, the AMOUNT of money the HI gets is ridiculous, and the way that every claim (by Jews, that is) gets accepted is also ridiculous, but I figure that some money is due to various groups.

But an attempt to get money there is impossible.

Why?

If the groups persecuted by the Nazis can get a bit of money, which is possible, since the companies that benefitted still exist, than I have no objections.

My objections are grounded in the fact that countless people lost property in WWII, not just "people persecuted by Nazis". That entire period of history is a mess. Attempts to jump back into the past and nab money cause more tangled messes. If you try to loot companies, it's not people who actually used slave labor that will be punished, but people from the present who are just trying to feed their families today.

I mean, the AMOUNT of money the HI gets is ridiculous, and the way that every claim (by Jews, that is) gets accepted is also ridiculous, but I figure that some money is due to various groups.

Instead of promoting an entitlement mentality, how about everyone just move on?

But an attempt to get money there is impossible. If the groups persecuted by the Nazis can get a bit of money, which is possible, since the companies that benefitted still exist, than I have no objections.

The money will be paid by the current shareholders, employees and customers of those companies, none of whom are to blame for the Holoco$t. Further, it is impossible as a matter of accountancy to determine how the companies' present financial condition relates to their use of slave labor or perfectly legal contracts with the Nazi government 60+ years ago.

The longer this drags on the more ludicrous it gets, with Jews living into their 80's and 90's and who would have been seven years old at the time receiving compensation for the "death camps." Eventually, it will be Jews who were born in a "death camp." Then it will be Jews whose health was permanently broken by being conceived in a "death camp."

The statistics are getting ever more strained and, in the next few years, people will wonder why they're still paying for something that did not occur in the adult life of anyone living.