Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide

The Holocaust and Historical Representation

David B. MacDonald

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134085712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In an era of globalization and identity politics, this book explores how Holocaust imagery and vocabulary have been appropriated and applied to other genocides.

The author examines how the Holocaust has impacted on other ethnic and social groups, asking whether the Holocaust as a symbol is a useful or destructive means of reading non-Jewish history. This volume:

• 
  
  

• explains the rise of the Holocaust as a gradual process, charting how its importance as a symbol has evolved, providing a theoretical framework to understand how and why non-Jewish groups choose to invoke 'holocausts' to apply to other events

• 
  
  

• explores the Holocaust in relation to colonialism and indigenous genocide, with case studies on America, Australia and New Zealand

• 
  
  

• analyzes the Holocaust in relation to war and genocide, with case studies on the Armenian genocide, the Rape of Nanking, Serbia and the Rwandan genocide

• 
  
  

• examines how the Holocaust has been used to promote animal rights.

Demonstrating both the opportunities and pitfalls the Holocaust provides to non-Jewish groups who seek to represent their collective histories, this book fills a much needed gap on the use of the Holocaust in contemporary identity politics and will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, the Holocaust and genocide.

Part I
The Holocaust in history and politics

1
Cosmopolitanizing the Holocaust
From the Eichmann trial to identity politics

When a few years ago I saw an episode of the hit science-fiction television show X-Files, in which the disappearance of amphibians from a rural lake was described as a ‘frog holocaust’, I realized a boundary had been crossed in American culture. From President Clinton’s justification for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to the pop culture of television, the Holocaust has become the benchmark for universal suffering and victimhood . . .

(Jonathan Tobin ‘From Silence to Cacophony’(1999))¹

[I]n an age of uncertainty and the absence of master ideological narratives . . . [the Holocaust] has become a moral certainty that now stretches across national borders and unites Europe and other parts of the world.

(Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’(2002))²

As his contribution to the Jewish Museum’s Mirroring Evil exhibition in 2002, Boaz Arad cut and remixed original film-clips of Adolph Hitler’s speeches, to produce a short Hebrew greeting: ‘Shalom, Jerusalem, I apologize’.³ Many victimized peoples dream of such apologies, if not from the actual perpetrators, then at least from their descendents. Acknowledgement, compensation, reconciliation – these are but some of the goals persecuted groups seek as they grapple with their histories. Few, however, have come as far as the Jewish people in gaining acknowledgement of and reparations for their collective suffering. Of course, token amounts of money and an official apology may mean little to those who suffered horrendous loss. Nevertheless, the Holocaust has become the pre-eminent symbol of evil in the modern world, encouraging other groups to copy its vocabulary and imagery, while sometimes contesting its significance.

In this chapter I examine how and why the Holocaust has come to attain its current status. I also aim to highlight some of the positive and negative aspects of this status on the Jewish people, while further charting its impact on identity politics generally. I divide this chapter into two sections. In the first, I present a historicized account of the rise of the Holocaust, with reference to events in Israel, America, and, to a lesser extent, Europe. While public discussion of the Final Solution was suppressed in both America and Israel in the 1950s, it came to the forefront of Jewish identity during the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of the Six Day War (1967) and the emerging conflict between Blacks and Jews in America, the Holocaust helped Jews make sense of a seemingly anti-Semitic climate. By the 1970s, the death of survivors, coupled with the assimilation of American Jews, gave the Holocaust an important role in reanimating Jewish identity.

The 1970s and 1980s also marked an era when the Holocaust became Americanized – a part of mainstream American culture. The creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the screening of Schindler’s List, exemplified the Holocaust’s growing significance not only in America, but also throughout the Western world. This process also fed into America’s own national ideal of being a liberator of and haven for oppressed peoples. Americanizing the Holocaust further buttressed America’s own feelings of uniqueness and exceptionalism.

The second section examines the Americanization and potential ‘cosmopolitanization’ of the Holocaust during the post-Cold War era. I argue that the institutionalization and nationalization of Holocaust memory helped reinforce Jewish loyalty to America. However, in an age of identity politics and globalization, other groups sought to undermine idealized narratives of the state, when national sovereignty seemed less salient than before. If, as Jeffrey Olick argues, ‘we are all Germans now’⁴ – every state needs to face up to its past transgressions and attempt to make amends. Adopting this model, however, requires not just apologizing for past crimes and compensating disadvantaged groups. It also requires assuming a level of national guilt that most countries are manifestly unwilling to do.

1 The Holocaust as emergent

Throughout this book, I adopt the stance that the Holocaust evolved over several decades and was hardly seen in the 1940s as the seminal event we now perceive it to be. Peter Novick, in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), gives clear voice to this argument:

The murderous actions of the Nazi regime which killed between five and six million European Jews were all too real. But ‘the Holocaust’, as we speak of it today, was largely a retrospective construction, something which would not have been recognisable to most people at the time. To speak of ‘the Holocaust’ as a distinct entity . . . is to introduce an anachronism that stands in the way of understanding contemporary responses.⁵

Mary Lagerwey, in Reading Auschwitz (1998), charts the progression of memory, from ‘fragments of experience, perception and information’ to today’s current view of the Holocaust as ‘a historically bounded phenomenon . . . [a] coherent story’.⁶ For Levi and Rothberg, too, the Holocaust ‘took years to be perceived as distinctive and significant’, going through a ‘latency period’ or ‘cultural lag’ before a ‘broad, public Holocaust consciousness’ arose in later decades.⁷ Milchman and Rosenberg similarly describe a process of ‘eventing’, where the Holocaust was not a fixed ‘event’, and to term it as such, as with any other ‘event’, ‘seems to belie the social construction of reality and its processual character’.⁸

These authors aim to account for both the lack of public discussion about the Final Solution during the 1950s, and its rapid emergence in public consciousness thereafter. Younger academics like myself, who grew up during the 1970s and 80s, take the Holocaust for granted as one of the twentieth century’s most horrific events. Yet, the Holocaust took time to be seen as a separate and unique crime against the Jewish people. The ‘special consciousness of the Holocaust’ we now take for granted only emerged decades after the War was over.⁹

The Holocaust’s Americanization has given hope to other groups, especially since the 1990s, that they too might achieve the same level of recognition and respect if they can provide solid proof of similar events in their collective past. If, however, such proof is unavailable, cloaking or framing their history in the vestments of the Holocaust has also proven to be effective. As I asserted in the Introduction, identity politics often makes use of ‘trump cards’ to advance group interests. As Joseph Nye wisely cautions, while ‘morality is a powerful reality’ that can shape conduct in positive ways, one needs also to be wary. Moral arguments ‘can also be used rhetorically as propaganda to disguise less elevated motives, and those with more power are often able to ignore moral considerations’.¹⁰ We also have to pay close attention to what Laslo Sekelj has dubbed the ‘functionalization’ of Jewish imagery, with ‘the use of Jews, Jewish symbols, and the Holocaust for political manipulation’.¹¹ Occasionally, as in the former Yugoslavia, the rhetoric of victimization can disguise ethnic cleansing and genocide.

America, Israel, and the Holocaust

Scholarship on the Final Solution took several decades to develop. In the years following the War, two notable memoirs emerged from survivors: Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (1946), and Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (1947).¹² Leon Poliakov’s Breviaire de la haine (1951) was perhaps the first general history of the Holocaust.¹³ The forty-two volumes of the Nuremberg Trial also resulted in a number of books – such as Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution (1953) and Raul Hilberg’s classic The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).¹⁴ Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit (1958), abridged from a longer Yiddish semi-autobiographical story, was a landmark contribution which helped cement his own iconic status. However, while discussion and commemoration of the Final Solution did take place in the 1950s and early 60s, these decades are more notable for their silence, for the inability or unwillingness of survivors to talk publicly about their experiences, a problem which Irving Louis Horowitz has ably documented.¹⁵

Part of this may be explained by tracing the motivations and experiences of Holocaust survivor immigrants in the United States. For many survivors, a key goal after leaving Europe was to suppress painful memories of the past, to merge into mainstream America and ‘belong’, abandoning overt displays of difference (especially victimization).¹⁶ This was further encouraged by West Germany’s transformation to America’s newfound ally in the fight against Communism.¹⁷

Memory of Jewish suffering was certainly vividly discussed within the American Jewish community, as Hasia Diner reveals through a wide-ranging exploration of primary sources from that period.¹⁸ However, 1950s America was hardly ready to listen. Henry Greenspan describes how survivors rarely felt comfortable speaking about their experiences. Seen in America as ‘the refugees’, the ‘greenhorns’, or ‘the ones who were there’, survivors encountered a mixture of ‘pity, fear, revulsion and guilt’. Most were ‘isolated and avoided’, to the extent that one can speak of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ suppressing survivor testimonies and discussion.¹⁹ Even when the Final Solution was discussed, representations tended to be diluted and universalized during a time when American Jews were afraid to publicize their experiences too loudly. An obvious example was the popularity of Anne Frank’s Diary, whose widespread success can be explained ironically by its very distance from the actual horrors of the events themselves. The Holocaust was always present, but never in the foreground.²⁰

As in America, Israel was marked by a period of avoidance. Survivors, building a new country, often looked forward, as Flora Lewis recalled in 1961:

People speak of the present and the future, and only when pressed, do they turn to the past. For Israel now is a self-assured, self-absorbed country, proud and expectant, too busy and eager for growth to feed on the bitter herbs of tragedy.²¹

Zvi Sternhell too recalls the need for survivors to transform themselves after reaching Israel, to become ‘ “new” people . . . to become Israelis’.²²

The period from 1948 to the late 1950s has commonly been referred to as the ‘statist’ era. Here, nation-building necessitated a focus on values such as the Yishuv (or ‘the settlement’), heroic resistance, and toiling on the land.²³ Joseph Trumpeldor’s heroic stand against invading Arabs (at the Tel Hai settlement in 1920) was celebrated,²⁴ alongside the collective suicide of Zealots and Sicarii at Masada in AD 70,²⁵ and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.²⁶ Positive myths of bravery and resistance were privileged; victimization was rejected as counterproductive to the new nationalism. As Yael Zerubavel cogently observed, Israel wanted to own the ‘heroic’ aspects of the Holocaust, while disowning the ‘nonheroic’ aspects. Ghetto fighters were thus praised as ‘Zionists’ and ‘Hebrew youth’, Holocaust victims more amorphously as ‘Jews’.²⁷ There was a sharp contrast between the victimized European Jews and the hardy and brave ‘Zionists’ who emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust’s emergence in the 1960s

It was only during what Liebman and Don-Yehiya call the ‘second phase’, beginning in the early 1960s, that the Holocaust assumed a central position within ‘Israel’s civil religion’.²⁸ The phase began with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Held in Jerusalem, the trial brought together over 100 witnesses, vividly testifying on national television to the horrors they had endured.²⁹ Eichmann’s conviction and execution inspired such works as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died (1967). A key objective of the trial, as Arendt argued in 1963, was to force Israelis to confront their own past. The trial would also, however, reify Israel’s confrontation with a ‘hostile world’, exemplified by the ‘daily incidents on Israel’s unhappy borders’.³⁰ Holocaust memory and defense of the homeland were clo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Holocaust and Identity Politics
• Part I: The Holocaust In History and Politics
• Part II: Colonialism and Indigenous Identity
• Part III: War, Genocide, and Nationalism
• Conclusions
• Notes