God bless the Jewish tradition in journalism and the
Would you define yourself as a Jew?
JL: "Not at all."
"Does your father [also a writer] define himself as a Jew?"
JL: "More than I do. I never went to synagogue regularly. In fact, I
think I have been in more churches than synagogues. For me, Judaism is
more a historical background. My father says you are a Jew because the
people who want to murder you define you as such. Well, if someone
wants to slit my throat because I am a Jew he is a raving idiot – that
will not turn me into a Jew."
In the period your book covers, that approach definitely turned many people into Jews. [I.e., the Nazi indifference to whether Jews were assimilated] How does that affect your views?
JL: “My reading of what you call ‘Holocaust’ is also less Jewish and
Judeo-centric than that of my father. I think that what happened was
far broader than a narrow issue of ‘Germans killing Jews.’ The English
word ‘holocaust’ is certainly the wrong term to describe what happened.
It is a religious term, rife with non-historical meaning. I don’t think
the word ‘shoah’ is any better. It’s a controversy among historians.
Raul Hilberg described it as ‘the destruction of European Jewry,’ but
he encountered criticism because that was also the Nazi terminology…
JL: Ulrich Herbert calls it the ‘National-Socialist extermination
policy,’ and I find that a far more accurate description because it
also includes the extermination of the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the
disabled and other minorities.”
Indeed, according to Littell, the “National-Socialist extermination
policy” was “only one of the several big genocides that have happened
in human history.” But doesn’t the unprovoked nature of the destruction of the Jews,
the underlying ideology, the apparatus that was created to implement
it, its scale, make it exceptional in human history?
JL: “I personally understand the arguments for the exceptionality of
the Holocaust, but I don’t agree with them. The basic argument is that
the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews, but I don’t see the difference
between that and an extermination policy that was aimed – and
implemented on a large scale – at groups such as the peasants in the
Soviet Union or in Cambodia. Every genocide is exceptional.”
Littell says that one of his aims is to show “how it happened.” But
he also wants to show that it is not just a problem between Germans and
Jews. “If you reduce it to that, then everyone else can say, why should
we care about it? That’s what I find dangerous in the whole Jewish
centeredness of the commemoration. It leaves many other victims outside
the equation.”
But the Nazi ideology was aimed explicitly at the Jews as a race.
“I think the extermination of the Jews is a universal problem, I
think it concerns everyone. Beyond that, I think that today the issue
is being used for political purposes in Israel.” There was one event
that “shocked me horribly,” he relates. “I went to Birkenau and spent a
couple of days there for the research. One day I was up in the tower
over the entrance. Just then a few buses of Israeli kids – around 16, I
think, schoolkids – arrived. I watched the whole thing and it was
amazing. First they entered under the arch at the camp entrance. Then
they unfold these huge Israeli flags. They march down to the end, where
the gas chambers were, and stay there for three minutes – the teacher
probably explained something about the place. Then they march back,
waving their flags, and fold them again under the arch. The boys start
smoking cigarettes and slapping the girls’ asses, and then they leave.
That ceremony has nothing to do with what actually happened in
Auschwitz. It is more like, you know, ‘Listen up, young future Israeli
soldiers, this is why you are going to fight.’ It is political, a
mechanism. It has no connection to what actually happened. The
Holocaust, I think, is being exploited politically, in a way that the
Nazi extermination policy against other groups – Russians, homosexuals,
Gypsies – is not.”
A few quick comments. Out of deference to Richard Witty I did not title this offering, “Flirting at Birkenau: The Political Use of the Holocaust in Israel.” I am trying to use non-provocative titles, though provocative titles are used everywhere by bloggers to build traffic. Elie Wiesel was against including gypsies in the Holocaust Memorial, as Isabel Fonseca states in her beautiful book, Bury Me Standing. The Bronfman study last year stated what we all know, the Holocaust is having less and less hold on young Jews in the States. This conversation will not end until Mike Desch is invited to the Center for Jewish History to talk about the uses of the Holocaust in American policymaking. I don’t even know if I agree entirely with Desch, or Littell for that matter; I’m not well-enough-informed, and my friend Larry Zuckerman disagrees with Desch–a dialogue I promise to post soon. But the most important thing about Littell and Desch is that intelligent people must discuss these things openly if the U.S. is to deal honestly with Middle East policy, and the rage in the Palestinian world at being made to pay the price for the devastations of the Holocaust. This is not just a European story, or an Israeli one. The Israel lobby (and the silence that surrounds it) is licensed by Jews in America out of Holocaust feelings, including the belief that American gentiles didn’t do enough to stop Hitler….
