Saul Friedländer : A Fundamental Crime
While anti-Semitism is rampant throughout the world, the Holocaust memory is increasingly interrogated in the name of post-colonial ideas. The latest attack is signed by the Australian historian Dirk Moses. He argues that distinguishing the Holocaust from other violent crimes in human history is nothing more than a matter of faith. And that it is time to abandon this faith in the singularity of the Holocaust and the obligations that derive from it and replace it with a new truth: the Holocaust is only one crime among others. The great historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedländer, in an article originally published in Die Zeit, counters: “‘Auschwitz’ was something completely different from the colonial atrocities of the West. And postcolonial thought is currently taking on the risk of disassociating itself from the struggle against anti-Semitism that can sometimes simmer in its ranks.”Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander wins $815,000 Balzan Prize
There is one more element that Moses fails to mention, which is part of a long tradition: in 1985, forty years after the end of the war, President Richard von Weizsaecker declared German historical responsibility for the extermination. In fact, German responsibility to Jews and to Israel had already been accepted by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer when he signed the Reparations treaty with Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference in 1951. For Dirk Moses, it seems that these things only matter to the professional historian; in his eyes, in reality, this all is the past. For him, the German culture of memory, which developed over several decades after 1945, has done its job. Now it is urgent to make room for something new, for a comprehensive view of the history of violence in past centuries. And then, in his presentation of things, so-called postcolonial studies is a marginalized discipline that must be promoted in order to do historical justice to all victims of violence.
I cannot assess the importance or insignificance of postcolonial theory in Germany. In the US, post-colonial thinking, the kind represented by Dirk Moses and many others, has conquered university campuses and is well represented in Congress. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel movements have surged, BDS (boycott, divestments, sanctions) has become the common cause of an increasingly militant – and often violently so – coalition of “subaltern” communities, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) and sundry academics and politicians.
Sure, not everyone who gathers under the banner of postcolonial critique is an enemy of Israel, and those who are openly anti-Semitic may be only a minority. But anti-Semitism in the U.S. has taken on disturbing proportions in the wake of recent protests, particularly in Los Angeles, where I live: Jewish neighborhoods were the primary targets of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence after the murder of George Floyd last May. In Fairfax, home of one of the oldest Jewish communities in Los Angeles, the march was led by professor Melina Abdullah, one of the main organizers of Black Lives Matter; at the protest, rioters also vandalized synagogues and Jewish businesses. “It is no coincidence,” wrote a local rabbi, “that the riots escalated here in Fairfax, the symbol of the Jewish community. I witnessed the Watts riots and the riots following the acquittal of Rodney King’s murderer, in which no synagogue or house of worship was harmed. Today’s graffitis, even before the attacks, were a sign of open anti-Semitism.”
These massive violent outbursts of Jew-hatred are relatively new to the United States. Unfortunately, they now seem to accompany Black Lives Matter protests quite often. Those who criticize the memory of the Holocaust from a postcolonial perspective and murmur about “American and Israeli elites” should take note of this fact. Antisemitism was a destructive force then, and it is still a destructive force today, no matter which direction it comes from. Does Dirk Moses wish to see this new militancy and its unavoidable and unrestrainable sequels unleashed in Germany? I can hardly imagine that.
An Israeli-French-American Holocaust survivor and historian and a US scientist specializing in gut bacteria were among the recipients of this year’s Balzan Prizes, recognizing scholarly and scientific achievements, announced on Monday.A Writer Reckons With the Fact That ‘People Love Dead Jews’
Saul Friedlander, who has taught at both the University of California, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv University, was awarded the prize for Holocaust and Genocide Studies for his work broadening the perspective on the history of the Holocaust.
Friedlander, 88, was born in Prague in 1932 in a non-religious Jewish family, which fled to France after the German occupation in March 1939. His parents hid him in a Catholic boarding school near Vichy, where they were later captured and sent to Auschwitz.
With his parents’ agreement, Friedlander was baptized as a Catholic and later, out of his own conviction, considered becoming a priest. After he learned in 1946 that his parents had been killed at Auschwitz, Friedlander reclaimed his Jewish identity. He later said, “for the first time, I felt Jewish.”
Friedlander received the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction in 2008 for “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945,” the second volume in his history of Jews in Hitler’s Germany. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, after the publication of the first volume covering the period from 1933-39 and has also been awarded the Dan David Prize recognizing outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary research.
Friedlander was recognized for examining the persecution of all Jews in Europe, going beyond country-focused studies that had preceded him, and for making personal documents accepted in scholarly practice.
PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS Reports From a Haunted Present By Dara Horn
In three other essays, Horn deals with the upswell of anti-Semitism in the United States. Here it becomes clear that her concern about the ways we remember is inextricable from the way we relate to what is happening today. Horn claims that setting the Holocaust as the bar for anti-Semitism means that “anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.” According to Horn, this might explain the limited shelf life, so to speak, of current events like the gunning down of Jews in Pittsburgh, in San Diego, in New Jersey.
And then there’s the moment of relief that Jews feel when we arrive at the famous questions in Act III of “The Merchant of Venice”: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? … If you poison us, do we not die?” So Shakespeare was not really an antisemite, but rather, more benignly, a satirist when he limned Shylock’s stereotypical Jewish character. After all, he is Shakespeare, and we want him on our side.
Or how we recognize the Chinese government’s investment of $30 million to restore “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, a city that was built by Russian Jewish entrepreneurs, who flourished there until they were no longer required.
“People Love Dead Jews” is an outstanding book with a bold mission. It criticizes people, artworks and public institutions that few others dare to challenge. Reading this book, I started to find the words I should have said to that woman in Motal. I should have responded that maybe Eastern Europe has been left with a void, but I have been left with hardly any family.
But there is a rare moment in Horn’s book in which she admits the austerity of her own perspective. It’s in “Legends of Dead Jews.” The common family story that so many American Jews have heard about their surnames being changed at Ellis Island is a myth, she writes. The names weren’t changed by mistake. American Jews preferred to change their names to be able to fit in, to blend in, to assimilate.
I expected Horn to criticize the purveyors of this legend. After all, they distorted the past to avoid the discomfort of its truth. But she writes: “Our ancestors could have dwelled on the sordid facts, and passed down that psychological damage. Instead, they created a story that ennobled us, and made us confident in our role in this great country.” Perhaps revision of this sort does not always have to be about self-blinding. Perhaps, as Horn suggests, it is “an act of bravery and love.” Some things are just too painful to say.
Reading Horn’s beautiful words, I thought that maybe, after all, what this woman in Motal wanted, and needed, was a simple thank you, a handshake and a humble nod.