The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering - Essay Example

?Over a half century later, the nature of, and motivations behind, writing on the Holocaust were questioned in a similar tone. In his polemical The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Norman Finkelstein bemoaned “the shelves upon shelves of shlock that now line libraries and bookstores, ” 2 and claimed that “much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.” 3 However, while Finkelstein's criticism of contemporary writing on the Holocaust mirrored that leveled at Levai the late 1940s in both nature and tone, his critique in The Holocaust Industry was ultimately much wider in scope. It was not simply writing on the Holocaust that Finkelstein saw to be fraudulent, but an entire “Holocaust industry” pushing this particular past on the present for both ideological and financial gain. Finkelstein's criticisms of what were perceived to be misuses of the Holocaust were neither the first word nor the last on this subject. As the accusations leveled at Leai suggest, right from the outset, questions were raised about the mixed motives behind representing this particular past. With the increasing prominence of the Holocaust in popular discourse since the 1960s, those dissenting voices have gotten louder, reaching a deafening crescendo in Finkelstein's damning critique of the Holocaust industry. But Finkelstein's claims of the existence of a Holocaust industry drew on a much longer tradition of critical reflection on the popularization of the Holocaust. Much longer history of the criticism of Holocaust representation can be seen developing alongside the history of that representation. There are two broad strands in this disparate literature. One strand has questioned what has been seen as an overemphasis on the Holocaust in general, and by Jews in particular. Another strand has not questioned all contemporary concerns with the Holocaust per se, but has critiqued specific representations of the Holocaust—movies, museum exhibits, and books—in large part on the grounds of inauthenticity. What unifies these two broad strands—and such diverse writers as Norman Finkelstein and Elie Wiesel—is a refusal to accept any cultural product that draws on the history of the Holocaust as by definition a good thing, simply because it makes this past known. Within the more restricted criticism of someone like Wiesel, there can be, and have been, inappropriate Holocaust representations. From the more radical perspective of Finkelstein, all the products of the Holocaust industry are rejected as little more than attempts at “Jewish aggrandizement.” 4 While these two critical strands differ quite markedly, beneath both lies the deeper question of whether all the more recent talk about the Holocaust is a good thing in general, and whether it is a good thing for Jews and non-Jews in particular. However, such criticisms have recently been themselves subject to criticism. In the aftermath of the publication of Finkelstein's book in particular, voices were raised against the questioning of both specific Holocaust representations, and the perceived centrality of the Holocaust. The attack on the Holocaust industry by Finkelstein and others has been challenged and critiqued, perhaps most importantly, in an essay written by Alvin Rosenfeld in the American Jewish Year Book for 2001. There, Rosenfeld argued that the criticism of what was perceived to be a contemporary overemphasis on the Holocaust amounted, explicitly or implicitly, to calls for forgetting. If the Holocaust was to be increasingly forgotten, as critics of the Holocaust industry advocated, the result would be, Rosenfeld suggested, that Jews would “return to the kind of vulnerability that preceded Auschwitz and helped bring it about.” 27 However, before reflecting on the recent debate over the broader critique of the Holocaust industry, there are narrower criticisms of the specific products of the Holocaust industry. To some extent there are the divergent responses generated by Holocaust at the nature of that debate. But within the more recent writing of the literary scholars Alan Mintz and Hilene Flanzbaum, one can see a more coherent response to what has been perceived as misplaced criticism of cultural products that deal with the events of the Holocaust. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CRITICISM OF THE CRITICS OF HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION With the growing entry of the Holocaust as a subject matter of mainstream popular culture, the authenticity of those products was questioned by those who Flanzbaum sees adopting for themselves a kind of policing role. Critics of Holocaust such as Wiesel, as well as the many academic critics of Schindler's List, myself included, have been dubbed as self-appointed “caretakers” of Holocaust representation and memory. 28 There is surely much wisdom in suggesting that movies and museums should be treated on their own terms, and not subjected to the demands of the discipline of history. However, there is also surely a need to examine a museum such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the light of the kinds of truth claims that they make about themselves. With Spielberg's movie, the decision to shoot in black-and-white and thus ape wartime documentary footage clearly suggested that this was a movie that was meant to be read more as Holocaust truth than art. Kind of claims are picked up on by Kertesz, who questioned why “the American Spielberg, who incidentally wasn't even born until after the war, has and can have no idea of the authentic reality of a Nazi concentration camp, ” so obviously “struggle[d]so hard to make his representation of a world he does not know seem authentic in every detail?” 36 It was the very claims of authenticity that meant that far from being a sterile question whether this movie offered a falsification of the Holocaust past was a perfectly valid question for anyone—and certainly a survivor like Kertesz—to ask. Released to U.S. schools along with an education pack, this movie was clearly being seen by its producers as a historical source. And it was clearly being interpreted as such by at least some of its viewers. For one Californian congressman, watching this movie had reminded him that the problem faced by European Jews was one of not having the right to bear arms. He was clearly learning his lessons, not from the complex historical past, but from a streamlined movie that chose not to feature Jewish resistance (armed but ultimately unsuccessful) in the Warsaw Ghetto. 37 Novick gives numerous examples of the rewriting of these famous words in contemporary America. These range from Jews being given first, rather than last, place on the list to the inclusion of homosexuals and Catholics to the roll call of victims of Nazism. Now within Mintz's preferred approach of constructivism, such changes make complete sense. Within a city such as Boston with a large Catholic population, the addition of Catholics to the words etched on the Holocaust memorial can be seen as meeting the needs of the intended audience. The same can be said for other additions and deletions. For Mintz, multiple tellings of the Holocaust are inevitable and should not be policed. However, Novick sees such rewriting not as simply examples of multiple renderings for multiple audiences, but acts of “deliberate misrepresentation.” 41 With his talk of deliberate misrepresentation, Novick invites us to examine contemporary representations of the Holocaust not simply as essentially neutral multiple tellings, but as ideologically laden narratives. Central to the broader criticism of the Holocaust industry in the work of writers such as Novick and Finkelstein is a highlighting and questioning of the ideological purposes to which the Holocaust past has been put in the present. For Finkelstein, the Holocaust has been used to garner support for Israel, and for Novick the Holocaust has been used to further Jewish American ethnic interests. Reading Finkelstein and Novick, it seems that both, to varying degrees, tend to see the instrumental use of the Holocaust in rather monolithic and conspiratorial terms. This is something noted by Rosenfeld in his 2001 attack on those, particularly Finkelstein, whom he sees as launching an assault on Holocaust memory. For Rosenfeld: One would never know, from the work of Finkelstein and some other critics of Holocaust consciousness, that people might feel compelled to think about the Jewish catastrophe under Hitler for other, less cynical reasons. One would never suspect that there might be historical, religious, moral, or ethical claims on consciousness as legitimate prods to remember the Nazi crimes. 42 This highlights perhaps the major weakness in the work of Finkelstein and Novick. Both tend toward monolithic and top-down approaches, and yet to see a single overriding motive lying behind the remarkable upturn in interest in the Holocaust is overly simplistic. This is surely the case when the focus is on the United States, let alone when the focus is cast much wider to include Europe and Israel. There were multiple motives behind the increased centrality given to the Holocaust in the United States from the late 1960s onward. These no doubt included Jewish American concerns with ethnic identity and strengthening identification with, and support for, the State of Israel. However, writing autobiographically, Mintz suggests that of more significance for an American Jew like himself, growing up in the relative safety and affluence of postwar America, there was “a desire to touch the turbulence of modern Jewish history.” 43 For others, memorialization could be an act of religious duty, an expunging of survivor guilt, or nothing more and nothing less than a desire for social prominence. These very mixed motives can be amplified much more widely when it is the American public, and not just American Jews, who are considered. There is surely not only a place for questioning the authenticity of individual tellings of the Holocaust that make claims of authenticity for themselves. There is also a place for questioning broader contemporary concerns with the Holocaust that reduce its complexity to a number of simplistic moral lessons. To do so is not to suggest that the Holocaust is unimportant, but rather that it is too important to be reduced to the sentimental and moralistic. It has become increasingly common of late to situate critics of the Holocaust industry alongside Holocaust deniers as threats to the memory of this event. Such a strategy can be seen in Rosenfeld's attack on critics of the contemporary centrality of the Holocaust, in which he suggests that the work of the Holocaust deniers, whose manifest malevolence and dishonesty…puts them beyond the pale, should be less a cause for concern than the work of the critics of what is coming to be called, pejoratively, “Holocaust consciousness.” These are writers who question not the facts but the prominence of the Holocaust in public consciousness and the motives of those who seek to perpetuate its memory. 48 To mention critics of “Holocaust consciousness” in the same breath as Holocaust deniers is to level the ultimate charge against those engaged in an “assault on Holocaust memory.” It seems to me that asking questions of how and why the Holocaust has been represented and assumed a position of such centrality may actually be an important element of prompting just such self-reflection on the part of those engaged in representing this history. If that is the case, then the critics of both the specific cultural products relaying the Holocaust within popular culture, as well as the critics of the broader contemporary emphasis on the Holocaust, may be offering a significant and timely corrective. It is necessary for commentators on negation to get the terminology right not only because this is part of the negation arsenal, but failure to do so will leave the antidenial movement open to criticism, as seen by Norman Finkelstein's attempt to discredit the “Holocaust industry” for describing relativists as deniers. 5 There will always be inadequacies in defining negation because sometimes denial, relativisim, minimalization, and selective negation are espoused simultaneously, while some groups and individuals espouse some or all of them at different times. However, negation defines them as a whole because they are interrelated to and move between each other and usually have two factors in common. First, all forms of negation have similar outcomes, albeit with variances in scope and intent. They are designed to exculpate Hitler; to rehabilitate Nazism or other wartime leaders, or the reputation of countries and communities complicit in the Holocaust, including the Catholic Church; or to justify contemporary anti-Semitism. Second, all forms of negation are predicated on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Either Jews created the Holocaust “myth, ” which they are seen as doing through their control of the media—they are perceived as greedily exploiting the Holocaust for political and financial purposes—or they are believed to be pursuing it because they are vengeful. Often these various elements are represented in different degrees in the various forms of negation and in most cases there is a degree of Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust or other suffering, which is seen as “justified” in the historical context. Norman Finkelstein's view of the Holocaust industry reflects his own anti-Zionism, with his thesis that Jews have created the Holocaust industry to forge Israeli power, a core negation argument. 59 5. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000). 59. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry. 1. Dr. Gyorgy Gergely cited in T.D. Kramer, From Emancipation to Catastrophe: The Rise and Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 269n228. 2. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000), 5. 3. Ibid., 55. See also the criticisms of Gabriel Schoenfeld of academic writing on the Holocaust in his “Auschwitz and the Professors, ” Commentary (June 1998) and the responses to his article in “Controversy: Holo-caust Studies—Gabriel Schoenfeld and Critics, ” Commentary (August 1998). 4. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, 8. 5. Dorothy Rabinowitz, New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America (New York: Avon Books, 1976), 196. 6. Cited in M. Pearlman, The Capture and Trial of Adolf Eichmann (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), 146. 7. Deborah E. Lipstadt, “The Holocaust: Symbol and 'Myth' in Amer-ican Jewish Life, ” Forum 40 (1980-1981): 78. 8. Jacob Neusner, Death and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Chris-tianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 279. 9. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, 7-8. 10. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 155. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Ibid., 144. 13. Ibid., 171. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Cited in M. Berenbaum, After Tragedy and Triumph: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1990), 44-45. 16. Cited in T. Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 399. 17. Cited in G. Cromer, “Negotiating the Meaning of the Holocaust: An Observation on the Debate about Kahanism in Israeli Society, ” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, no. 2 (1987): 290. 18. Yehuda Elkana, “A Plea for Forgetting, ” Ha'aretz, March 2, 1988, cited in M. Zuckermann, “The Curse of Forgetting: Israel and the Holocaust, ” Telos 78 (Winter 1988-1989), 43. 19. S. Friedlander, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xi-xii. 20. Cited in J. Shandler, “Schindler's Discourse: America Discusses the Holocaust and its Mediation, from NBC's Mini-Series to Spielberg's Film, ” in Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List, ed. Y. Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 154. 21. I. Avisar, “Holocaust Movies and the Politics of Collective Memory, ” in Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. A.H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 44. 22. Elie Wiesel, “Trivializing the Holocaust, ” New York Times, April 16, 1978, cited in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 211. 23. John Gross, “Hollywood and the Holocaust, ” New York Review of Books, February 3, 1994, cited in Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 131. 24. Imre Kertesz, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001):269. 25. Ibid. 26. S. Horowitz, “But Is It Good for the Jews? Spielberg's Schindler and the Aesthetics of Atrocity, ” in Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspection on Schindler's List, ed. Y. Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 125-126. 27. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory, ” American Jewish Year Book, 101 (2001):20. 28. Hilene Flanzbaum, “'But Wasn't It Terrific?' A Defense of Life is Beautiful, ” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001):274. 29. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory, 39. 30. Ibid. 31. Flanzbaum, “'But Wasn't It Terrific?'” 274. 32. Ibid., 283. 33. Ibid., 284-285. 34. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory, 83. 35. Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler—How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999), 75. 36. Kertesz, “Who Owns Auschwitz?”, 269-270. 37. For more on this, see Tim Cole's comments in the new introduc-tion to the paperback edition of his Selling the Holocaust (New York: Rout-ledge, 2000), xi-xii. 38. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum brochure “You Can Help Shape the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: A Call for Artifacts” (1989), cited in A. Liss, Trespassing through Shadows. Memory: Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 81-82. 39. Cole, Selling the Holocaust (1999), 161-164. 40. Cited in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 221. 41. Ibid. 42. Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory, ” 20. 43. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory, 170. 44. David Cesarani, “History on Trial, ” Guardian, January 18, 2000, sec. 2, p. 3. 45. Ibid. 46. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 261. 47. Cited in H. Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 44-45. 48. Rosenfeld, “The Assault on Holocaust Memory, ” 3. 49. Cole, Selling the Holocaust (1999), 108-110, 187-188. 50. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory, 174. Read More