Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

So I understand if some might approach a collection of essays about anti-Semitism—more suffering! more despair! many Holocaust references!—with a certain reluctance or weariness. A reluctance or weariness probably equaled or exceeded by my own when I approached this project—and now, as I’m writing this, as I approach its conclusion.

  Finishing the Hitler book had left me in a black hole of despair: the historical record was too fragmentary to offer any certainty, the mysteries were unresolvable, the images unshakable. It was a hole I’d begun to crawl out of by beginning a book about Shakespearean scholars and directors.

  By early 2003 I had handed in half that book; as a writer I was having the time of my life, exploring challenging questions with brilliant Shakespeareans. I felt I’d earned these pleasures.

  But something happened. As Paul Berman put it, “something’s changed.” It was all the more shocking, coming at a moment, a brief, now lost moment at the end of the twentieth century when the signs seemed to point to normalization. In America a Jew had been nominated for the vice presidency with almost negligible backlash. That same summer, at Camp David, Israelis and Palestinians seemed close to a dramatic breakthrough to a two-state compromise that would allow both peoples, both in their own ways victims of history, to live in peace.

  Then everything began to unravel: the peace talks broke down, the Second Intifada with its terror tactic of “suicide bombings” began, European demonstrators, and increasingly many in the United States, began to turn against the Jewish state, denouncing its efforts at self-defense while “explaining” the acts of those who murdered its children.

  For a time I tried to ignore it and to look away, and then that became impossible. For me I guess it culminated with the March 27, 2002, Passover massacre in Netanya when twenty-nine worshippers were blown apart by a so-called suicide bomber (a misleading term; I’m not fond of the alternative “homicide bomber,” because of its redundancy. I prefer the simple term “mass murderer”).

  What made this mass murder different from other mass murders? The astonishing leap by much of the world to demonize the response, blame the victims. When the Israeli Army rolled into Jenin, in early April 2002, to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure responsible for the mass murder at Netanya, the world seemed to me shockingly eager to believe fraudulent claims of a “massacre” committed by Israelis while all too often ignoring the original massacre that prompted the self-defense measures.

  The obvious and unashamed longing to be able to accuse Israelis of “Nazi-like” crimes, of creating “an Auschwitz” in Jenin, was disturbing to me and many others. It was a phenomenon I have heard described before: “Europe killed the Jews and would never forgive them for it,” someone once observed bleakly. The Holocaust had become a kind of defining shame for European civilization that was intolerable to bear without some form of displacement, of “balancing” the scales: “See, the Jews commit mass murder too.” It was just too much, especially as objective inquiries soon discredited the “Jenin massacre” reports. And yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, Jenin remained, in the rhetoric of many “anti-Zionists,” their analogue for Auschwitz. It was like witnessing the very birth of a classic anti-Semitic myth with—who knows?—the potential destructive power of the Protocols.3

  About that time, I began to write about the subject, reluctantly at first. I’d written and spoken on Hitler questions for several years, but I’d always felt I was speaking about something safely in the past. This new rage of the world against the idea of Jews defending their children was something I was reluctant to engage; it was just so inhuman, so far beyond the pale, so to speak, that it made you want to look away or wish it away. But it kept getting worse. How much worse might it become? It was in asking that question that I touched off a debate about the potential for a “second Holocaust.”

  That moment, spring 2002, now seems like a turning point in many ways. Not just the resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the awareness of it, but the debate over how much to be concerned about it. Some chose to speak out; some chose to tell those who spoke out they were alarmists, panicky.

  LET ME SEEK to put that moment in the perspective of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism—the nearly sixty years since Hitler’s death camps were shut down. Chronological divisions, like just about every other aspect of anti-Semitism, are a subject of contention (including how one spells it. There is a school of thought that believes the compound word “anti-Semitism” is unsatisfactory to one degree or another because it was a term invented by an anti-Semite, the nineteenth-century German “racial theorist” Wilhelm Marr. Some argue for other terms, such as “Judeophobia” or just plain “Jew-hatred,” because it’s not about all Semitic people (Arabs, for instance) but about all Jews. Even the hyphenation of the word “anti-Semitism” is argued over, with some believing that a hyphen and a capital S mimic Wilhelm Marr too closely and that “antisemitism” is to be preferred. The Random House style has long been to spell it “anti-Semitism,” and “antisemitism” doesn’t entirely escape the shadow of Marr, so I’ve gone with the more familiar form.4

  In any case, one of the key contentions involves chronology. I’d suggest there is not just one new anti-Semitism in the post-Holocaust period, but that there are two. The Israeli scholar Yehuda Bauer makes a case for four postwar waves, and no doubt his typology offers greater specificity, but I’d suggest that there are roughly two qualitatively different periods: the post-Holocaust period and the post–9/11 period.

  The passage of nearly six decades since 1945 makes post-Holocaust anti-Semitism not exactly new but new in the scale of centuries. One minor but telling way in which post-Holocaust anti-Semitism differs from the pre–1939 variety is the way the fact of the Holocaust shadows and stains what might have been, before World War II, “casual” anti-Semitic remarks, slurs, jokes. All of which now, alas, must be construed as part of the culture of prejudice and persecution that permitted the execution of the Final Solution—and the world’s indifference to it.

  After such knowledge, for one thing, “casual” is not casual anymore. What do I mean by “casual anti-Semitism”? Well, there was the phrase that the president of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used in July 2003 when he reacted to disclosures of anti-Jewish comments in Harry Truman’s private diary. He called them “the typical sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at the time.”

  That’s something of a stretch, since Truman was writing in 1947—I think he meant “common at the time Truman was growing up.” But the phrase “the typical sort of cultural anti-Semitism” is useful when distinguishing pre-Holocaust country-club anti-Semitism from what I’d call “post-Holocaust anti-Semitism of the first type.” The events of 1939–1945 can’t help but give a different gravity to what had once been casual.

  Here’s a relatively trivial but, I think, useful example of the change, which I experienced myself at an upscale Upper East Side book party in the mid-1990s. In the crush of conviviality I was approached by a colleague who had suffered some criticism for what some had seen as anti-Semitic stereotypes in his fiction. He was a writer who specialized in preening rants against “New Money” types—preening in the sense that he customarily implied that people from his circle of exquisitely well-bred Old Money types would not be guilty of the supposedly vulgar and unscrupulous practices of New Money.

  If many of his New Money characters were Jews, he’d insist his animus was not that they were Jews, but that they were new. The most charitable interpretation of his attitude was not prejudice but condescension: he looked down at people who hadn’t the time to attain the stainless ethical gentility of those in his circle.

  There is a vast historical naïveté and double standard in this view—the idea that Old Money in America was somehow cleaner, when in fact many Old Money fortunes came from plunder and murder (of Native Americans), from enslavement and murder (of black people), and from the merciless exploitation of generations of wage slaves of all colors, who in effect paid with their imm
iseration for the self-congratulatory gentility that allowed certain Old Money types to sneer at the New and the Jew.

  Still, I had always felt this fellow was basically a good-natured sort, not a hater. Despite what was, to me, his irritating, almost willfully ahistorical ingenuousness about the superior moral status of Old Money, I’d been willing to accept his word that when he portrayed a stereotyped Jew behaving badly, he didn’t necessarily believe “the Jews” were to be despised as a people. It’s an important distinction, as Berel Lang argues herein. Jews, like others, needless to say, are capable of all manner of wrongdoing. One definition of an anti-Semite is someone who insists that when Jews do wrong, it’s because they are Jews, not because they are human.

  But I’ll never forget the moment he approached me at this book party with a glow in his cheeks, a glass in his hand, and, if not a slur in his voice, a slur in a joke. He proceeded to single me out, with no preliminaries, for a hugely self-entertaining rendition of a joke in his idea of a Yiddish accent. It was about two small-time Jewish businessmen, I forget the names, something like Abie and Mendy, and basically it was about how they wanted to cheat their creditors out of what they owed.

  “I found the solution to our problems,” Abie tells Mendy, or Mendy tells Abie, in this joke. “It’s in da Bible.”

  “In da Bible? Vut in da Bible?”

  “Chapter Eleven! ”

  As the Old Money writer brayed in my ear at his own joke, I felt I was being somehow challenged to show I could rise above harmless ethnic humor and join him in a laugh. But I must admit I couldn’t find this brilliant joke funny. Jews chortling about the Bible and bankruptcy to cheat people out of money: I couldn’t help thinking how easily it could have been a comic strip from Julius Streicher’s odious Der Stürmer, circa 1934.

  It was about as funny as if he had donned blackface and told an Uncle Remus story to one of the black writers in the room. Ah yes, the exquisite manners of Old Money. I’ve never felt the same about him again.

  Still there was a sense, before September 11, that post-Holocaust anti-Semitism—because of the revulsion that this kind of heedlessness usually has attached to it—was, more than anything, a bad joke, a halitosis of the soul, a breach of decorum, but essentially harmless. It seemed to lack consequence— Jews in America were never more secure (witness the Lieberman nomination). Even Jews in Israel had the illusion that a “peace process” offered the promise of security in the future. And Jews in Europe were, well, just Jews in Europe, not yet victims of violence again—there didn’t seem to be a threat of consequence; there wasn’t a threatening context . So, in most cases—when they did not involve murder, as in the case of Alan Berg, the outspoken talk show host murdered by neo-Nazis, or Yankel Rosenbaum (no relation), murdered by a Brooklyn mob that chanted, “Kill the Jew!”—most expressions of anti-Semitism could be regarded as exceptions that proved a rule.

  Let us conjecture, then, that one thing that distinguished post-Holocaust anti-Semitism of the first kind from post-Holocaust anti-Semitism of the post–9/11, or post-millennial, kind is the return of a threatening context for anti-Semitism: the return to what Yehuda Bauer, who served as head of Yad Vashem Holocaust Center in Jerusalem, has called a “genocidal” threat, to the five million Jews of the State of Israel. Indeed, one thing I’ve noted in reading the post–9/11 literature about Jews and Israel and anti-Semitism is the recurrence of a phrase, rarely seen before: “existential threat.”

  In a way it’s a euphemism. The more commonly used sense of “existential” is, of course, as shorthand for a French philosophic tendency, and it’s hard, when one hears “existential threat,” to avoid conjuring up the image of Sartre and de Beauvoir shaking puny fists at the universe.

  But “existential threat” as it is used these days, alas, goes back to a more primal meaning of the word: an existential threat means a threat to a state’s, or a people’s, very existence. And so when people speak of an “existential threat” to the Jewish state or the people of Israel, they are speaking of nothing less than annihilation.

  The existential threat was given shocking immediacy by the September 11 radical Islamist attacks on the United States, by the escalating suicide attacks on Israeli citizens, a proliferation of exterminationist, often Hitler-worshipping rhetoric in the media of the Middle East, and the procurement of nuclear capability and delivery systems by Islamic states surrounding Israel. A capability easily transferrable to terrorist groups.

  There could be little doubt that those capable of committing mass murder by suicide in the United States would not hesitate, given the chance, to carry out an attack on an even larger scale on their other declared enemy, the Jewish state— and that it would be far easier to essentially end the existence of the Jewish state than it would be to do such profound damage to the far vaster realm of the United States.

  What September 11 demonstrated also was that Israel’s possession of a nuclear deterrent—like that of the United States—while it might still deter other states, would no longer protect it from a suicidal terrorist cell in possession of a suitcase nuclear weapon, or a nuclear-tipped missile launched from the Bekaa Valley. In August 2002, when the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces explicitly used the phrase, conceded the presence of an “existential threat” to the State of Israel, it was the realism of an experienced military man speaking.

  Indeed, the terrorist forces behind individual “suicide bombers” in Israel and their supporters among radical Islamists in the Arab world spoke openly of their desire to eliminate the State of Israel and, increasingly, its people as well.

  The sense of a new dimension to the existential threat is what makes post–September 11 anti-Semitism a phenomenon of a different order of magnitude from what came before. And yet there is one distinctive invention of post–1945 antiSemitism that persists in curious ways in the post–September 11 period, one that has mutated just as anti-Semitism itself has mutated in that period: Holocaust denial. Old-fashioned Holocaust denial certainly persists, but one could almost say there is a denial of a new type: the one that takes the form of equanimity. It is not technically Holocaust denial; it is the denial of Holocaust consequences. Let me explain.

  2) AGAINST EQUANIMITY

  I wish I could regard Holocaust denial as merely a bad joke, a parody of an anti-Semitic theory. One of the most interesting discussions I had on this question was with the philosopher Berel Lang, author of an extremely thoughtful consideration of the nature of Nazi evil, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. In the course of interviewing him for Explaining Hitler I brought up the question of whether one could posit an evolution of evil. Professor Lang had recently published a journal article on that question in which he proposed the notion that human evil, like other aspects of human culture, may have undergone a kind of evolution, or at least a changing history, from a theoretical first murder to mass murder. Should we consider Hitler’s genocidal Final Solution the final step on a ladder down into the abyss, or just the latest step? And if the latter, what might the next step be?

  I had posited to Lang that Holocaust denial was the next step, because of what you might call its demonic ingenuity, the cruel sophistry of those who propagate it. For the most part, they know it happened (the testimony of apostate neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers confirms this); they’re glad it happened; they take sick satisfaction in denying it happened only because it offers a novel way to add insult to injury: to murder not just the body but the soul, the memory, of the dead. To become, in effect, accessories after the fact, by the very act of denying the fact.5

  But Lang countered with another, more subtle and persuasive argument about the next step in post-Holocaust evil: the evil of equanimity. He cited a monograph he was researching on the postwar writings of Martin Heidegger, the preeminent German philosopher of the twentieth century (subsequently published as Heidegger’s Silence).

  Essentially, Lang said, the Holocaust didn’t exist for Heidegger. He didn’t deny it, but he might as well
have: it wasn’t a factor in his thought; it did not affect his view of history and human nature, despite the Hitler-friendly spin he gave to his philosophy in order to advance his academic career in the 1930s. After the war, Heidegger was more outspoken about the depredations of mechanized agriculture than he was about the mechanized mass murder that had happened under his nose. It was this . . . knowing equanimity that incensed the ordinarily mild-mannered Lang.

  “Heidegger knew it happened and he didn’t care,” Lang said. “His silence—it wasn’t even denial. For him, it wasn’t important!

  “It wasn’t important,” Lang repeated. And then again, “It wasn’t important.”

  His silence wasn’t even denial. . . . Already, even in the pre– September 11 period, one could sense a curious kind of backlash, one might call it, against speaking of the Holocaust. It took various forms. While hard-core Holocaust denial was itself off the grid for most minimally educated people, it was clear that there were some who were tired of being reminded it had happened, some who resented references to it. Some consigned all memorializing to the derisive phrase “Holocaust industry” to deny there could be any good-faith reason for seeking to remember the Holocaust: It was all part of the Zionist agenda to exploit Hitler’s crime for the supposedly Nazi-like crimes of the State of Israel.

  But even among those who didn’t use that particular noxious phrase “Holocaust industry” (with a not-so-subtle anti-Semitic stereotype of “mercenary Jews” embedded in it) there had evolved a new, more sophisticated way of seeking to banish the Holocaust from contemporary discourse or relevance: the attempt to delegitimize and silence any attempt to assert that there are historical consequences to the Final Solution. Consequences the Jewish state should take into account in assessing the dangers it faces today. The past indifference—if not complicity—of much of the world to Hitler’s genocide might for instance be a factor in assessing how much to rely on “international guarantees” of the Jewish state’s safety as opposed to its reliance on active self-defense.