Few, if any, events in human history have attracted the amount of attention as the so-called Jewish "Holocaust," capita

Few, if any, events in human history have attracted the amount of attention as the so-called Jewish "Holocaust," capital H as opposed to all other lower case genocides. "Scholarship on the Holocaust," wrote Theodore Ziolkowski, "whether accurate or not, is piling up at such a rate that some observers believe the end of the century will witness an accumulation of works exceeding the total number produced on any other subject in human history." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 593] Moral arguments, factual contentions, survivor's accounts, Nazi documents, Jewish polemics, and every other kind of angle about the Nazis' attempts to eliminate Jews have been the base of careers for a huge number of mostly Jewish scholars. There are over ten thousand existent publications just about the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. [MILLER, p. 35] In 1982 a conference in Israel about the Holocaust drew 650 scholars from around the world, many with presentations about the subject. [LIBOWITZ, p. 272] And what has been a common core to the Jewish discourse on the subject? Wounded pride, often expressed in torrents of irrationality and emotionalism. "The blow to the national and human pride of the Jewish nation inflicted by the extermination of one-third of its people," notes Israeli sociologist Chaim Schatzker, "hardened the remainder to any logical and rational argumentation on the subject of the Holocaust." [SCHATZKER, p. 95] Jewish author Philip Lopate notes that Jewish emotionalism on the subject "forces the mind to withdraw." And in the world of contesting ideas, "in its life as a rhetorical figure, the Holocaust is a bully." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 33]

Jewish obsession with the Holocaust knows few limits, and leaves no stone unturned in its quest for esoteric minutia. "Sometimes one is even tempted to ask whether historians working on the Holocaust are not stretching the bounds of common sense," says Evytat Friesel, "One example is the debate that took place in 1991 in Frankfurt, where a Study and Documentation Center is being planned, in which well-known historians participated in a learned discussion on whether the Holocaust had been rational, irrational, or anti-rational." [FRIESEL, p. 228-229] "In the Jewish community," complains Gabriel Schoenfeld, "well-meaning organizations and individuals are mindlessly sponsoring Internet sites offering a 'Holocaust cybrary' or a 'virtual tour' of [concentration camp] Dachau! Already, an academic conference has been scheduled in Washington on the subject of 'Deaf People in Hitler's Europe,' where for four days scholars in three separate victimological fields -- 'Holocaust Studies, Deaf Studies, and Deaf History' -- will have an opportunity to 'interact.' Do we need more of this?" [SCHOENFELD, p. 46]

By the end of the twentieth century the Holocaust is understood by Jews to be the tragically golden cap that proves the Jewish mythos of eternal victimization. "One lesson we [Jews] frequently derive from our history," says Steven Cohen, "a very powerful one -- is the lesson of victimization, whose paramount example is the Holocaust. Jews believe that we have been victimized over the years, that we have a unique history of persecution. The lesson gets pounded into us in a variety of ways. It starts with the central formative events in Jewish history, namely the enslavement in Egypt. It continues through to the Holocaust in Europe and is punctuated with invasions, expulsions, and pogroms in between. The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld has said that Jewish history is a series of Holocausts, with only some improvement in technology." [COHEN, Uses, p. 26]

The popular formation of a modern Jewish identity that is completely Holocaust-centric is cause for some dissent in the Jewish community. "Some Jews actively search out anti-Semitism," says Adam Garfinkle, "as a raison d'etre to be Jewish, along with the modern cult of martyrology -- the canonization of the Holocaust. This they do because positive motivation for Jewishness, flowing from their grasp of the value of the Jewish perspective, is all but absent in their lives." [GARFINKLE, p. 21] By 1981 Jacob Neusner was disturbed by the "puzzling frame of mind of people whose everyday vision of ordinary things is reshaped into a heightened, indeed mythic, mode of perception and being by reference to awful events they never witnessed, let alone experienced, and by the existence of a place which they surely do not plan to dwell in or even to visit." [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 2]

"I think there is absolutely no question, as I look at the American Jewish experience," says Jonathan Woocher, "that we have appropriated both the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel in a mythic fashion. The myth has even been given a name, though not by me, 'From Holocaust to redemption.' Israel is a resurrection and all the world's great religions have a resurrection myth." [WOOCHER, Discussion, p. 28]

As always in the Jewish collective understanding of itself, and reflecting the traditional Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism, victims of the Holocaust were all categorically "innocent." "Holocaust theology," notes Marc Ellis, declares that "the Jewish sense of purpose [is] that of an innocent, suffering people in search of their destiny." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 6] The innocence of the European Jews is thereby transferred categorically to the intrinsic innocence of Israelis fighting Arabs. "For Holocaust theologians," says Ellis,

"the victory in the [1967] Six Day War was a miracle, a sign that an

innocent people so recently victimized might be on the verge of

redemption. That is, a subtheme of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust

is the total innocence of the Jewish people and thus the innocence of

those who defend the lives of Jews in Israel. For Holocaust theologians,

the victory of Israel in 1967 is a victory of the innocent trying to forestall

another catastrophe, another holocaust, and the redemptive sign is that

this time Jews will prevail." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 3]

Rooted in the mythology of relentless victimization of Jewish innocence across the centuries, one of the most curious obsessions for most Jews today is the militantly avowed "uniqueness" of the Holocaust in comparison to all other atrocities in the human record. The Jewish Holocaust's declared outstanding "specialness," grotesque and horrible, inevitably echoes -- and is sometimes overtly theologically linked to -- the traditional tenets of self-asserted Judaic claims to distinction, exclusiveness, and chosenness. Over the years, notes Edward Linenthal, the Holocaust became to be understood by Jews as even a pseudo-religious event itself, "not only a transcendent event, it was unique, not to be compared to any other genocidal situations, and its victims were Jews. Any comparison of event or linkage to any other victim group could be, and often was, perceived as, if not the murder of memory, at least its dilution. Moreover, the story ended with a kind of redemption, the creation of the state of Israel." [LINENTHAL, p. 4] (This communal conviction has evolved over time, politically and socially, as it suited Jewish needs. As Peter Novick notes about earlier years: "After the war began, and after the main outlines of the Holcoaust had become known, it was common for Jewish writers to interpret Nazi atrocities in a univeralist fashion -- stressing that Jews were far from the only victims.") [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 38]

Irving Greenberg, Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Commission, "regarded comparison of the Holocaust with any other form of genocide as 'blasphemous, as well as dishonest.'" [LILENTHAL, p. 55] "The unique demands and inherent risks of teaching the Holocaust," says Richard Libowitz, "point to rejection of an instructor who merely instructs, in favor of the professor who will profess." [LIBOWITZ, p. 65] "The instrument of my return to [a Jewish identity] is not religion," says Jane Delynn, "but the Holocaust. It is where my identity as a Jew lies -- my chosen identification with an event in history that I have declared to be of significance as no other." [DELYNNE, p. 64]

A public school study guide about the Holocaust, sponsored by the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit, begins with a question: "How is the Holocaust different from other mass murders or 'genocides?'" The volume then champions to the student the "uniqueness" of Jewish suffering:

"Comparisons to determine which group suffered the worst tragedy

serve neither the past nor the present. The uniqueness of the Holocaust,

however, invites us to focus specific attention on it and its lessons for

modern society." [BOLKOSKY, 1987, p. 13]

The Holocaust gapes like a wound within the ongoing Jewish "particularist/universalist" tension: What's more important, a larger community of human beings in general, or Jews in particular? The traditional answer, and the renewed answer for many Jews today, is the latter. "It makes no sense," proclaims Alvin Rosenfeld, "to add up all the corpses [killed by the Nazis] without distinction and pile them on some abstract slaughter heap called 'mankind.' [ROSENFELD, p. 160] Rosenfeld, like most Jews, wants to wade through the dead and sort them out: Jews in the rays of light, the rest in shadows. (When Eric Yoffie observed the Muslim victims of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, he couldn't acknowledge the Muslims' own identity. He only saw Jews. "As Jews," he says, "we look at these slaughtered victims and see Jewish corpses. We look at the more than a million refugees and see Jewish faces." [YOFFIE, Military, p. 3] )

"To cheaply universalize the Holocaust would be a distortion of history," says Elie Wiesel, and then, in vintage Orwellian doublespeak, "The universality of the Holocaust lies in its [Jewish] uniqueness.' [RITTNER, Chap 8] Emil Fackenheim condemns those who "universalize the Holocaust," those who "avoid precisely what ought to arrest philosophical thought. It is escapism into universalism." [FACKENHEIM, Holo, p. 17] "The uniqueness of the Holocaust," insists Gershon Mamlak, "was manifested in a dual form: the way the victims experienced it, and the way the Gentile world performed and/or witnessed it." [MAMLAK, p. 12] "Of all he events in human history," declares Ivan Avisar, "none is more compelling and disturbing than the Holocaust ... The Holocaust was a unique or unprecedented historical experience ... Hitler's intent to exterminate an entire people is incomparable to any other episode of malice in the annals of human history." [AVISAR, p. vii]

There is even a post-Holocaust Jewish rationale that encourages guilt in those Jews who still insist upon a universalist approach to other people. Deborah Lipstadt, for instance, claims that

"The Holocaust ... poses ... fundamental questions for those [Jews]

who have shunned the particular in Judaism and have embraced the

universal. Those who have pursued in Judaism's name the causes of

others and who have denied the legitimacy of specific Jewish concerns

must recognize that the Holocaust calls many of the premises of their

belief into question." [LIPSTADT, p. 340]

Hence, for many Jews there is no space for reflection upon the commonality of human suffering in World War II. In popular Jewish opinion no other people are entitled, or allowed, to share Jewish center stage of Utmost Tragedy.

"Nothing annoys Jews so much as to be told that other people have suffered," says Liebman and Cohen. "Not a few American Jewish spokesmen have bristled at the use of the words holocaust and even genocide to describe tragedies that have befallen other minorities and nationalities." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 31]

This Jewish offense was evidenced, for instance, against Archbishop Desmund Tutu, the Black leader of the Anglican Church of South Africa and internationally known activist against that country's apartheid system. "There is a kind of Jewish arrogance," says Tutu, "one can only call it that ... I sometimes say that apartheid is as evil as Nazism and there have been Jews who say I am insulting them. Jews seem to think they have a corner on the market of suffering." [HOFFMAN, p. 10]

Many Protestant and Catholic theologians, says Yaakov Ariel, "[have] tried to ascribe a universal significance -- over and above nationality, or religion -- to [Hitler's] murder of millions of innocent people. Jewish spokesmen often denounced such an outlook." [ARIEL, p. 338] Jesse Jackson, during a visit to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in 1979, created a wake of Jewish anger and indignation when he made the unpardonable sin of stating that the Jewish Holocaust "was one of the greatest tragedies of all times," instead of saying it was "unique." [CARSON, p. 135] Even the pope's beatification of Edith Stein, a Jewish woman who became a Catholic nun and was murdered as a Jew at Auschwitz, has offended Jewish sensibilities as a symbolic Christian appropriation, and honing in, of Jewish special suffering. [VIVIANO, p. 354-355]

In 1982, an international conference in Israel on "The Holocaust and Genocide" drew attack from Jews "who feared the uniqueness of their tragedy would somehow be compromised by the conference's inclusion of other victims, including Armenians, Tibetans, Gypsies, and Cambodians." [LIBOWITZ, p. 272] A few years later, in giving a speech memorializing Holocaust victims, President Carter offended -- among many others -- a professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yehuda Baer, for daring to mention victims other than Jews. Carter was trying to "de-Judaize" the Holocaust, wrote Baer, which was "an unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes" based on "a certain paradoxical envy on the part of non-Jewish groups directed at the Jewish experience of the Holocaust." "To Baer," notes David Stannard, "the simple acknowledgement of the suffering of others constituted Jew-hating." [STANNARD, p. 168] Stannard, a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii, notes the preposterous position taken on the subject by Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish Studies at Emory University:

"Lipstadt regards as her enemy anyone who expressed doubts about the

utter singularity in all of human history of Jewish suffering and death

under Hitler ... In short, if you disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the

Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was unique, you are, by definition --

and like [former Ku Klux Klan member] David Duke -- a crypto-Nazi."

British scholar John Fox notes Lipstadt's position on the Holocaust subject to be "nothing less than intellectual fascism." [FOX, J., 3-19-2000, p. 47, 48]

Clinging tightly to the moral and political leverage afforded by the "uniqueness" of the Jewish experience in World War II, Christians are not welcome to search for parallel unity (in their own millions of dead) in the circle of suffering. "The Jewish community," Michael Berenbaum smugly notes, "has become ... deeply suspicious of Roman Catholic efforts to discover -- some would say invent -- a tradition of Roman Catholic martyrology in the Holocaust." [BERENBAUM, STRUGGLE, p. 85]

A chorus of Jewish critics led an attack upon a non-Jewish novelist, William Styron, for daring to write about the death camps in a novel from a non-Jewish perspective. Theodore Ziolkowski cites Alvin Rosenfeld as a typical complainant: "Rosenfeld's attack on ... Styron is based on two premises: an unwillingness to see the universal implications of the Holocaust and indignation at Styron's assumption that a Polish Catholic woman could be viewed as a representative victim of the camps." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 602]

"Some," says Jeffrey Shandler, "have come to regard the Holocaust as specifically, even exclusively, Jewish cultural property (literary scholar Edward Alexander describes it as the Jews' 'moral capital') that requires vigilant protection against misuse or misappropriation." [SHANDLER, p. 162] Alexander, a Jewish professor at the University of Washington, claims that the Holocaust serves "a Jewish claim to a specific suffering that was of the 'highest,' the most distinguished grade available." Those who dare to debunk such bizarrely elitist Jewish claims about their experience under Hitler, he says, are seeking "to plunder the moral capital which the Jewish people, through its unparalleled suffering in World War II, had unwittingly accumulated." [STANNARD, p. 193]

(In 1998 even the DC Comics company came under Jewish attack for robbing them of their unique "moral capital." In a new comic, Superman visits the concentration camps of World War II. The sin to Jews is that, although refugees wear yarmulkes and sport names like Moishe and Baruch in the comics, the word "Jew" (or, for that matter, Catholic or German) is never mentioned. Seeking to be politically correct and to avoid offence to anyone, the cartoon creators unwittingly exposed themselves to public attack by the Anti-Defamation League and others for "rob [bing] the [Jewish] victims of their identity." [NEWSDAY, p. A22]

"The world owes Jews," demands Alan Dershowitz, "and the Jewish state [of Israel], which was built on the ashes of the Holocaust, a special understanding." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 136] Eliezer Berkovits claims the Holocaust and the subsequent creation of modern Israel renders the Jews "as the point for the crystallization of moral direction in history. That is the ultimate significance of being the chosen people of God." [BRESLAUER, p. 10] "[The] Holocaust stands alone in time," decreed Menachem Rosensaft, "as an aberration within history." [LOPATE, p. 290] "The uniqueness of Jewish destiny," suggests Jacob Agus, "consists principally in the fact that the Jew is the litmus test of civilized humanity." [AGUS, p. 363]

Lawrence Langer calls the Holocaust "an episode without parallel in history or eschatology." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 683] Alvin Rosenfeld calls it "a major turning point in history and in the history of consciousness." [ROSENFELD, p. 10] For Emil Fackenheim, the word "Holocaust" is so sacred that "it has seemed to me that this word should be used sparingly lest it be used in vain." [FACKENHEIM, p. 16] George Kren and Leon Rappoport "hold that the Holocaust was unique because no other event of the modern era has so undercut the moral/humanitarian credibility of western civilization." [KREN, Was, p. 22] Irving Greenberg and Rosenfeld declared that "the Holocaust is an event of such magnitude that it creates a historical force field of its own.' [BRESLAUER, p. 6]

"This curious elitism," argues Theodore Ziolkowski, "reduces a tragedy of humanity to an episode in Jewish mythology ... [Such elitist commentators] unwittingly evade history by mythifying it." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 683] And what's worse, says Jewish author Philip Lopate, "is the degree to which such an apocalyptic religious-mythological rendering of historical events has come to be accepted by the culture at large." [LOPATE, p. 290]

Sociologist John Murray Cuddihy is particularly insightful, and damning, in unearthing the latent -- and classically Jewish -- meaning behind the Jewish dictate of incomparable Jewish suffering in World War II:

"This [Jewish Holocaust] exemption from comparison is a heady

privilege ... Among the many items selected by culture to symbolize

status, incomparability alone is inimitable." [CUDDIHY, p. 77]

"In Jewish discourse on the Holocaust," says Peter Novick, in an unusual Jewish perspective, "we have not just a competition [among other alleged "victims"] for recognition but a competition for primacy. This takes many forms. Among the most widespread and pervasive is an angry insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust ... The assertion that the Holocaust is unique -- like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable -- is, in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours is comprehensible; unilike ours is representable." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 9]

In other words, classical Judaism's insistent self-heralding as a "nation apart" from others and its innate class-conscious self-image of all-encompassing uniqueness and exceptionality, is the conceptual master for Jewish understanding of their holy Holocaust, a latent religious-based encoding of their role in the World War II disaster, a perspective that is actually militantly enforced upon non-Jews from a position of Jewish "prestige as a control system." [CUDDIHY, Holo, p. 72] Cuddihy underscores the racist undercurrent to the "Holocaust uniqueness" claim as a latent expression of the Chosen People paradigm, noting that Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim even calls the non-Jewish dead at the Nazi concentration camps "quasi-Jews," [CUDDIHY, p. 67] marginalized stand-ins for those really worth counting. "The 'Holocaust' is the Jews' special thing," says Rabbi Jacob Neusner, "It is what sets them apart from others while giving them a claim upon others. That is why Jews insist on the 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust." [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978] "Let us be frank," says Cuddihy, "National priority and national uniquity (uniqueness) are both covert claims to superiority, parallel paths to the same summit, and that summit is what [Robert] Merton calls 'ethnocentric glory.'" [CUDDIHY, Holo, p. 74] ... Like social class symbols, cultural symbols serve 'to influence in a desired direction other persons' judgments' of the group that is the symbol's carrier." [CUDDIHY, p. 75]

Uniqueness linked to incomparable suffering makes deep demands upon others. "Beyond moral privileges," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "the Jews feel that their suffering entitles them to a special consideration from the non-Jewish world. Groups (and individuals) often make much of their history of suffering as a way of strengthening their claims to certain rewards." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 44] "Out of this peculiar [Jewish] emphasis on suffering," noted Rabbi Richard Singer in 1960 when the post-Holocaust political dimensions of this had hardly begun to take shape, " there has developed an attitude, a new attitude of vicarious suffering -- a feeling among numbers of Jews today that because other Jews suffered and died they, the living, are somehow entitled to special consideration." [ZUKERMAN, p. 66] "One of the characteristics of nationalist Jews," said William Zukerman (noting, also in 1960, the commentary of Rabbi Singer), "is to look upon the Jewish group as isolated from the rest of humanity, particularly when it comes to suffering. They see only Jewish suffering and do not see the context of the entire world scene. The result is a distorted historical picture, showing Jews as the only sufferers, while the rest of the world presumably basks in happiness. As compensation for their suffering, it is assumed that Jews, as a group, are somehow entitled to special privileges which other people do not deserve (for instance, special immigration facilities, special fund raising, emigration from communist countries, etc.). [ZUKERMAN, p. 66]

There are few Jewish voices like those of Singer and Zukerman today. On the contrary. The "unique" suffering of Jews affords the possibility to make even this preposterously manipulative declaration by Jewish journalist-novelist Ann Roiphe: "The scale and terror of the Holocaust makes it clear that Jews are innocent and a wronged people, murdered and abandoned to their fate. This makes Christians, even Christians who were not in Europe at the time, a guilty people." [ROIPHE, CHANES, p. 461] Among those many who have succumbed to Jewish Holocaust mythology demands in the name of "interfaith dialogue" include the Catholic Church of France which in 1997 formally "asked for forgiveness" from Jews for Church "silence" when the Nazis were routinely slaughtering all who opened their mouths in protest of anything, and the Pope himself who entertained a historic first by hosting a menorah, symbolic candles of Jewish victims, and "7500 spectators" in the Vatican to "commemorate the Holocaust." [LA TIMES, 4-8-94, p. A10]

Such Christian requests to Jews for "foregiveness" are the results of a long Jewish lobbying and pressure effort, heavily leaning on guilt-based non-Jewish associates who seek to bask in the Christian tenets of compassion and religious tolerance. In the late 1970s, for example, the largely Jewish "National Conference of Christians and Jews" (with branches in 77 major U. S. cities) published "A Holocaust Memorial Service for Christians." The volume appeals to a grandiose universalistic morality, and suggests that Christians incorporate, on a yearly basis, "a special day" (April 22) in their religious services to pay homage to the Holocaust, [NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, p. 3] particularly underscoring that righteous Christians are morally bound to protect Jews from anti-Jewish hostility. [p.4] Likewise, "Christianity's role in the Holocaust must not remain hidden or unstated. It must be faced, no matter how painful an undertaking it may be." [p. 4] A section even tries to diffuse the obvious question, which is given a bold-type heading: "Are You Asking Us to Lay a 'Guilt Trip' on Our People?" [p. 5] For those who might wonder why the Holocaust is so suddenly relevant, "more than thirty years" after the fact, a small chapter explains that, through the prism of the Holocaust, we all "can better prepare ourselves to meet the chalenges of the day," [p. 6] (i.e., the consequences of Jewish particularism may be used to explore generalized principles of human universalism, even though the Holocaust must be held to be separate, distinct, from all other historic atrocities). In subsuming Christian identity beneath that of Jewish martyrs, "Many Christians have wished to have a Christian symbol attached to the yellow Star of David when they wear it ... If you choose to use the Yellow Star as a symbol, and wish to have some Christian identification on it, it is recommended that you use the Sign of the Fish, the oldest Christian symbol. This is preferable to using the Cross." [p. 11] (And why can't Christians wear the cross? Because Jews hate the cross, and from time immemorial have understood it -- rival religion -- as a sign of evil. Spitting at the Christian symbol is an old Jewish tradition, long before the Holocaust). [See citations elsewhere] The National Conference of Christians and Jews have even provided a page-long prayer for Christian penance for the Holocaust, with the recurring refrain: "For the sin which we have committed before You" -- 14 times. [p. 15]

Joel Epstein, a professor of history in Michigan, in an overview of "world civilization" textbooks, uses in-depth addressment of the Holocaust and its alleged "uniqueness" as his criteria for recommending them or not. "The uniqueness of the Holocaust in history needs to be explained," he says. One textbook which "recognize [d] the fact that the extermination of the Jews was the most shocking aspect of the war, an attempt at genocide on an unprecedented scale," falls short of Epstein's standards. "If the centrality of the Holocaust to this process had been emphasized," he advises, "this text would be noteworthy. As it is, however, such emphasis is lacking and the uniqueness of the event is not articulated clearly." [EPSTEIN, p. 65, 70]

In discussing classroom methodologies to teach the Holocaust, Richard Libowitz observes that

"The Holocaust is a unique event in human history ... Efforts to

constrain knowledge within standard lines will conceal the uniqueness,

effecting diminishing student perceptions ... Students must be taken ...

to the edge of the abyss and made to look down ... Traditional

pedagogical norms caution educators against subjective involvement

with their materials; the Holocaust, on the contrary, demands entry

into the event." [LIBOWITZ, Asking, p. 63]

A Jewish professor of twentieth century history at Miami University in Ohio, Allan Winkler, noted in 1996 that

"thanks to [and experience teaching about the Holocaust at a Jewish high

school], to my more open acceptance of my own Jewish identity, the

Holocaust is now a logical part of my university teaching ... When I

address the American role in World War II ... I hope to show my

students how American policy was made, and to help them understand

its limitations. Examining our response to the Holocaust is one way of

identifying shortcomings in the American approach." [WINKLER,

In the proliferation of college courses about the Holocaust, some Jewish overseers feel that there are not enough qualified teachers to teach the subject from the right ideological perspective. "It was argued," says Richard Libowitz, "that the Holocaust was so unique an act within human history that to approach it within the classrooms as one more historical occurrence, one more instance of 'man's inhumanity to man' would be to miss its message and implications alike." [LIBOWTIZ, p. 280] One way to enforce Holocaust uniqueness in academe is "Holocaust endowed chairs," special faculty appointments funded by wealthy Jewish philanthropists interested in maintaining a special emphasis on the subject at American universities. So prevalent are these special teacher/researcher positions in the United States the New York Times devoted an entire article to them in 1995. "Advocates for the special chairs," reported the Times, "argue that the Nazi genocide is of transcendent importance in modern history and demands the constant and focused attention that only a specialized chair can provide." [NY TIMES] Saul Friedlander, holder of the Holocaust chair at UCLA, told the Times that "the chairs have made the Holocaust a special domain, but there is no choice because otherwise it is not taught in a significant way." [NY TIMES] (In 1998, Jewish financier Kenneth Lippet pulled his $3 million Holocaust chair endowment from Harvard University after the position went unfilled for three years: the academic search committee couldn't agree on who was best qualified for the job). [SCHOENFELD, G., p. 42]

This elitist view of supreme Jewish suffering, distinct from all others, has become profoundly politicized and attempts to systematically disenfranchise dissenters to the "uniqueness line" are widespread. "There is a disquieting pattern of claims," says Israel Charmy, "of the 'incomparable uniqueness' of the Holocaust and a good deal of political power in many places in academia, museums, and communities to boost up these claims by pushing down and out nonadherents." [CHARMY, p. x]

John Fox, a non-Jewish college teacher of the Holocaust, notes, from first-hand experience, the same disturbing problem:

"Some historians or writers are deemed acceptable for entry into

the fold of the chosen: if you accept the totally absurd uniqueness

theory (which refuses to acknowledge in the same breath as the

Holocaust the millions of other victims of genocide in the 20th

century), not only are you home dry but if you are non-Jewish

you are actually feted. If you don't you are excluded and damned

to hell in terms of your profession." [FOX, J., 3-19-2000, p. 47-48]

Elie Wiesel, a kind of semi-official guru of the Holocaust, invariably seeks to mystify the tragedy, elevating Jewish suffering (beyond others' suffering) into a specially transcendent, holy, and sacred realm. "[The death camp of] Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized," he says, "Whether culmination or abbreviation of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about the Holocaust is inspired by fear and despair: the [Jewish] dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering." [MARTIN, p. 45-46] Elsewhere, Wiesel even declared that, "Remove the Jews from the Holocaust, and the Event loses its mystery." [PAPAZIAN, p. 17] ("For the many Jews who, like me, have experienced nothing of the horrors," wrote Alfred Kazin, "Elie Wiesel became the embodiment of the Holocaust ... [Yet] Isaac Bashevis Singer scoffed at his novels; Hannah Arendt put him down as a publicity seeker; an Israeli novelist said bitterly of him: 'The Holocaust -- and me.' ... I thought synthetic the hysterically 'religious' atmosphere he built up in his books.'" [KAZIN, p. 122]

Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew whose own parents perished at the hands of the Nazis, alludes to the undercurrent of Jewish ethnocentrism and racism in their Holocaust mythology:

"Contempt for or massacre of white Jews by white Europeans is not

looked at the same way as the massacre of Armenians by Turks, of

Blacks by slave traders, or of Gypsies, of Chinese in Indonesia, and

so on. Auschwitz is elevated to a metaphysical phenomena, but not

the butchery other peoples have suffered." [RODINSON, p. 9]

David Stannard, author of a number of books about Native American "Holocausts" resulting from contact with European civilization, follows suit with a poignant condemnation of the racist origin of all such Jewish claims of exceptional suffering:

"The Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish

experience ... are zealots who believe literally that they and their religious

fellows are, in the words of Deuteronomy 7:1, 'a special people ... above

all people that are on the face of the earth,' interpreting in the only way

thus possible their own community's recent encounter with mass death ...

With its spiritual emphasis on the maintenance of blood purity (e.g.,

Deuteronomy 7:3; Joshua 23:12-13), and on the either tacit or expressed

pollution fear of corrupting that purity with the defiling blood of others,

the ideology of the covenant intrinsically is but a step away from full-

blown racism and, if the means are available, often violent oppression

of the purportedly threatening non-chosen." [STANNARD, p. 193]

John Fox, a non-Jewish college teacher about the Holocaust in Great Britain, in a review of a book about the Holocaust by Jewish author Peter Novick, notes the undercurrent of Jewish racism in Jewry's myths about the Holocaust:

"Since the early Sixties it has clearly not been the purpose of many

American and Israeli Jews to over-concern themselves with objectivity

about [the Holocaust] ... Novick meticulously details the political

and cultural purposes which lay behind the American and Israeli

Jewish 'management' of the Holocaust over the past 40 years. In

addition, he presents sickening example after example of the racism

that dare not speak its name: Jewish racism." [FOX, J., 3-19-2000,

As Novick notes about the claim of Holocaust uniqueness:

"To single out those aspects of the Holocaust that were distinctive

(there certainly were such), and to ignore those aspects that it

shared with other atrocities, and on the basis of this gerrymandering

to declare the Holocaust is unique, is intellectual sleight of hand."

[FOX, J., 3-19-2000, p. 47-48]

In some Jewish quarters there is even a sacred literature about the Holocaust, rivaling any Holy Book, likewise beyond criticism or questioning. Jewish survivors' accounts are among the most hallowed testimonies and Elie Wiesel is one of the sacred authors. "The only completely decent 'review,'" says George Steiner, "of the Warsaw Diary or [Wiesel's] Night would be to re-copy the book, line by line, pausing at the names of the dead and the names of the children as the Orthodox scribe pauses, when recopying the bible, at the hallowed name of God." [ROSENFELD, p. 9] Another Jewish critic, A. Alvarez, wrote in Commentary that "as a human document ... Night is ... certainly beyond criticism." [WIESEL, first page]

This sacred book, Night, which -- due to its painful origin -- is so much considered to be flawless and beyond reproach, is an autobiographical account of Wiesel's hellious experience in Nazi concentration camps, environments where human beings were reduced to their most basic, primitive, animalistic instincts to survive. But innocent suffering and Nazi tormenters are not the book's main themes. Night's central current is really about guilt, specifically the guilt engendered by the moral costs of personal survival.

Wiesel turns again and again with shame to the profoundly disturbing feelings that his own weakening father's existence is a burden to Elie's own chances for survival in the camps. This self-preservative mood -- survival at all costs -- is echoed by other fellow prisoners, including even the son of a rabbi who hurries to distance himself away from his father.

Adoring commentators of Night as sacred vestige lose sight of the fact that the book is only peripherally about the slaughter of innocents; it is more poignantly about the very human psychological wounds of survival, i.e., what does it cost -- morally and spiritually -- to survive, in this particular case, when rendered by Nazis to be subhuman? "Everyone who survived [the concentration camps]," another Jewish survivor, Natan Gierowitz has noted, "was indirectly involved with the extermination of other people." [BOROSON, p. 17] Or as Polish Auschwitz survivor Wieslaw Kielar notes:

"Those who were best off [in concentration camps] were the people

who had no scruples at all. They advanced [in the survival system]

rapidly. They came to power, not squeamish about the means they

chose, at the cost of human suffering and even of human life. The

important thing was that, in this way, one made sure of one's own

position, one filled one's stomach with the stolen rations of one's

hungry fellows." [KIELAR, 1980, p. 70]

Such truisms of concentration camp survival is not only relevant to Wiesel's concentration camp experience, it is also core to Jewish self-identity in the collective sense throughout the ages -- in the sense that there is always attendant guilt to be paid for historic survival. In any context, for anybody, any people, what is the cost, ultimately, of "survival?" This cost -- what the Jews had to do in their long history to survive, and prosper, at others' expense -- i.e., their double moral standards, et al, as usurers, profiteers, and exploiters of all sorts -- is not part of their own popularly understood moral history of themselves. It is suppressed and denied. It had been, however, for many, very much part of the Jewish self-conception ("self-hatred") in the century leading up to the Holocaust, as seen even in the vehement Zionist disdain for the galut (exilic) Jewish identity. [See later chapters]

"Climaxing ... all previous persecutions in the history of Jewish exclusion and suffering," says George Steiner, "the Shoah has given to [Jewish] history a particularity of darkness, a seeming logic in which the sole categorical imperative is that of survival." [STEINER, Lowl, p. 159] What kind of morality, we might well ask, attends the "sole categorical imperative" of survival?

Ultimately, the Jewish enforcement of the Holocaust as a unique and sacred Jewish catastrophe of victimization at the hands of -- not just Nazis -- but the generic Gentiles, in a conceptual straight line for literally thousands of years, affirms their self-conceived status as a caste of people beyond (for others) moral reproach and criticism. "One of the major effects of the ... Holocaust," wrote Irving Howe, "... [is that] it dissolves any impulse to judge what the victims did or did not do, since there are situations so extreme that it seems immoral to make judgments about those who must endure them." [HOWE, p. 432] This "dissolvement of judgment" is polemically and politically wielded by Jews today as a veil of sacred atrocity and victimization that is draped across the whole of Jewish history, thus completely nullifying and erasing Jewish responsibility, culpability, and blame for not only their actions -- or inactions -- in the Holocaust epoch, but for Jewish activities -- or inactivities -- in the whole of human history. Because of the overwhelmingly evil gravity of Hitler's response to alleged Jewish social, economic, and political abuses of non-Jewish communities, the veritable mountains of complaints and criticism about Jews across the ages by Gentiles has been completely neglected. The Jewish Holocaust ideology -- which accuses and blackens all non-Jews as complacent sinners in the Crime of crimes -- functions as a methodological tool by which Jews do not need to atone to their fellow man for their own sins.

Even before the Holocaust experience begins for the author of Night, Wiesel was psychologically/religiously primed for it by the victim tradition of Judaism. At twelve years old, he writes, "during the day I studied the Talmud and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple." The Temple was of course destroyed in the year 70 AD, 1,871 years before Wiesel ran to the synagogue to weep about it.

The alleged unique sanctity of the Jewish experience in World War II is approached by Jews from other angles. Shortly after the war, T. W. Adorno made a famous comment in which he suggested that the Holocaust was so sacred in its misery that it would be immoral to write poetry about it, to lyricize such horror, "to squeeze aesthetic pleasure out of artistic representation of the naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked down by rifle butts." [HOWE, p. 427] Years later, Michael Wyschogrod followed up with:

"Art takes the sting out of suffering ... It is therefore forbidden to make

fiction of the Holocaust ... Any attempt to transform the Holocaust into

art demeans the Holocaust and must result in poor art."

Wyschogrod's efforts to forbid art making from spilling into the Holocaust and profaning the sacred have been, of course, to no avail. There has been an avalanche of "poor art" about the Holocaust, almost entirely by Jews who try to connect more deeply to it victimhood symbology and to propagandize the "uniqueness" idea to others via sculpture, paintings, novels, poems, and monuments of all sorts and sizes.

And, of course, whatever else the art itself is about the Holocaust, it too is "unique," "special," "different," apart from other art. Sara Horowitz, in a book about a whole genre of fiction about the Holocaust, declares "Holocaust fiction suggests the need for an expansion of categories, for new classifications, new 'taxonomies.'" [HOROWITZ, p. 13]

Intrinsic to the Jewish insistence that the sacred Jewish Holocaust was unique is a desperate search for an explanation of the unfathomable horrors of their people under European fascism, and that the millions of Jewish lives lost were not piteously wasted. The incessant Jewish search -- whether religiously or secularly based -- is still towards a confirmation, or reconstruction, of their battered tradition of choseness: humankind's transcendent sufferers.

"The expressions 'one nation' and 'one people,' implying uniqueness, have become catchwords of traditional religious parlance," notes Yeshayahu Leibowitz, "In literary sources of Jewish thought and in various pronouncements of Jewish thinkers to this day, these expressions have come to represent basic tenets of faith. 'Uniqueness' is interwoven with other concepts such as 'election,' 'being cherished,' and even with 'holiness' in usages made obscure by the ambiguity of these expressions. Adherence to this idea of uniqueness may lead to great religious exaltation. But its indefiniteness invites perversion, distortion and corruption." [LEIBOWITZ, p. 79] "The presumed uniqueness of the Shoah [Holocaust] has become vital to Judaism now," says George Steiner, ".... In numerous complex ways it underlies and underwrites certain essential aspects of the 'recreation of nationhood in Israel.'" [STEINER, Long, p. 159]

"The [Jewish] hostility towards anything that questions the uniqueness of the Holocaust," notes Philip Lopate, "can now be seen as part of a deeper tendency to view all of Jewish history as 'unique,' to read that history selectively, and to use it only insofar as it promotes a redemptive script. Thus the Holocaust 'mystery' must be asserted over and over again, in the same way as was the 'mystery' of Jewish survival through the ages, in order to yield the explanation that God 'wants' the Jewish people to live and is protecting them. Being a secular, fallen Jew with a taste for rationalism and history, I cannot but regard such providential interpretations as superstition." [LOPATE, p. 307]

This Jewish demand for Holocaust-Chosen People "uniqueness" resounds everywhere throughout the Jewish world, a self-conception that nestles -- long before the Holocaust-- at the very heart of Jewish identity. "This difficulty in categorizing the Jewish people," says Hayem Donin, "may well be their uniqueness. It is a uniqueness which according to the believer was given its permanent stamp by the Divine command." [DONIN, p. 9] Gail Shulman notes the flavor of being raised as a Jew in America:

"A child in a family with any Jewish consciousness cannot avoid

growing up with a sense of uniqueness ... The message was conveyed

to me that I was not like everyone else: Living in a kosher household,

staying out of school on the High Holy Days, eating special foods on

special dishes at Passover, making Hannukah cards instead of Christmas

decorations ... -- all were powerful expressions of the specialness of

being Jewish ... I thought I understood what it meant to be a member

of the chosen people." [SHULMAN, G., 1983]

Again and again, this ideological current of exceptionality is the bedrock of Jewish discourse about themselves. "We have surveyed the mutations of hatred against the Jews through thousands of years," says Erich Kahler, "We have seen how it began and how it developed. Yet none of this can furnish a completely satisfactory explanation of a phenomenon unique in history ... [What accounts for it is] only the composite character, the unique social structure of the people to which it attaches." [GLATZER, p. 547] "I can't help feeling in some way," says famed Jewish historian Barbara Tuchman, "that the history of the Jews has revealed a kind of specialness, a uniqueness, in which they represented the tragedy of the human race, or humanity." [TUCHMAN, p. 14] American scholars, declares Edward Shapiro, "[have] provide [d] both a greater role for ideas in the origins of American anti-Semitism and a greater appreciation of the uniqueness of American Jewish history." [SHAPIRO, E., 1986, p. 213] "Israel," says Michael Rosenberg, "cannot ever be a 'state like any other state.'" [ROSENBERG, M., 1971, p. 81] "In Europe," wrote James Sleeper and Alan Mintz, "the uniqueness and development of Judaism had been due in part to persecution." [SLEEPER/MINTZ, 1971, p. 11] "American Jewish intellectuals," says Michael Galchinsky, "have tended to assert that their diaspora is 'exceptional.'" [GALCHINSKY, M., 1998, p. 185] "Since the early 1970's," says Allon Gal, "scholars have shown a great interest in the uniqueness of American Zionism." [GAL, 1986, p. 363] "The meaning of the idea of the Chosen People," proclaims Eric Kahler, "can be properly understood only in its connection with another, much more fundamental Jewish concept, a concept that is unique in the whole world ... [the Covenant between God and Abraham]." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 14]

"The Jewish people," declares Will Herberg, citing fellow Jew Carl Mayer, "represent a sociologically unique phenomenon and defy all attempts at general definition." "The mystery of Israel," adds Herberg, "is one that defies all categories of nature and society." [HERBERG, W., 1970, FROM MARXISM ..., p. 110] J. L. Talmon even turns a common ploy, somehow reconciling polar opposites: Jewish "uniqueness" with Jewish universality, in an article entitled Uniqueness and Universality of Jewish History. [TALMON, J.L., 1970, p. 116] "We are not comparable. We are unique ..., " declared Abba Hillel Silver, "This fact is the one key to an understanding of Jewish experience. To attempt to fit us into the framework of the commonly-held conceptions of race and culture, to liken us to other nations, is to miss the very quintesence of Jewish culture, to overlook the essential text and thesis of our life." [GITTELSOHN, R., 1964, p. 25-26] (-- Which, of course, is a claim, merely due to Jewish "Chosen People" definition, to extraordinary specialness). "The Jewish people is a unique phenomenon," wrote Nahum Goldmann, "and therefore no formula acceptable to all can be found to cover all the aspects of this phenomenon and to define it in a way satisfactory to the different shades of opinion within Jewish life." [GITTLESOHN, R., 1964, p. 26]

In the influential Zionist journal Midstream titles of articles over the last decade and a half have included The Ineluctable Uniqueness of Judaism, A Unique Feminism (about early Jewish pioneers in Israel), and Is Polish Anti-Semitism Special? Joel Carmichael began another article with the declaration that "Xenophobia is commonplace, anti-Semitism unique." [MAMLAK, GRYNBERG, FURSTENBERG] Later, he overlooked the millions of Russian dead in World War II to amazingly comment that "Hitler ... utilized ... the war in Russia for the sole purpose of destroying the Jews." [CARMICHAEL, J., p. 16] Monford Harris entitled an article Israel: The Uniqueness of Jewish History. [HARRIS, M., 1965, p. 77]

World Zionist Organization president Nahum Goldmann noted his own thoughts about the Judaism's "chosen people" concept, the origin of where declared Jewish "uniqueness" always comes from: "In spite of my attachment to the Jewish religion I do not like to talk about 'the chosen people' ... Rather than 'chosen' I prefer the notion of a 'unique people.'" [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 14] Elsewhere he argued that "the Zionist political idea is absolutely unique and fantastic. You may claim that it is senseless or that it is magnificent, but in either case it remains unique." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 89] Holocaust theologians, notes Marc Ellis, "argue that the 1967 [Israeli-Arab] war represents a 'unique' type of victory. This uniqueness is seen in a number of factors, beginning with the particularity of Jewish existence and history, a return to the land of Jewish ancestry, and, especially, renewed access to the old city of Jerusalem and the Temple Wall." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 4] "It's hard to compare anything to the horror of the Holocaust," says "America's best-known commentator on religious life," Martin Marty, "It is a unique event, in so many ways." Marty's comments were in consequence of members of the Religious Newswriter Association of America voting for the Holocaust as the "major religious event" of the century. [MATTINGLY, T., 12-18-99]

"Christians must regard Jews as special," says Richard L. Rubenstein, "and, at least in areas pertaining to God's salvation, apart from humanity in general." [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 12] "All other revolts, both past and future," proclaimed Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion, "were uprisings against a system, against a political, social, or economic structure. Our [Zionist] revolution is directed not against a system, but against destiny, against the unique destiny of a unique people." [GURION, in BIALE, Power, p. 4-5] "It has often been observed," asserts Etan Levine, "that in all the annals of recorded history, there is no chapter more romantic, more inspiring, yet more complex and more inexplicable than the 2,000 year episode of the Jewish people in exile." [LEVINE, E., 1983, p. 1-11] "I accept the idea," says Marie Syrkin, "that their special experience has given Jews a unique understanding of the role of a minority in a given society." [SYRIN, M., 1967, p. 118] "Hatred of the Jews has many parallels," adds Bernard Lewis, "and yet is unique ... The special and peculiar hatred of the Jews ... derives its unique power from the historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity." [LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 21-22] Teachers, argues a textbook about the Holocaust, must "recognize and confront the unique and complex history of antisemitism." [STROM/PARSONS, 1982, p. 47]

"The Bible typically goes to great lengths," says Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, "to point out that the disasters in ancient times were a consequence of the peoples' inability to keep the covenant promises made at Sinai or to their incapacity to hold to the idealistic standards of justice demanded by the prophets. These demands are also seen as Israel's special burden -- a standard required of no other nation and to which no other nation could ever hope to aspire." [GARBER, p. 204]

Ultimately, at root in all this polemic masked as history, if the horrors of the Holocaust can somehow be established (not proven) to be absolutely unique in human history, so profoundly special, so painfully inconceivable -- either quantitatively or qualitatively -- to all other sufferings, it implicitly usurps in a secular manner the rival claims of the Christian religious tradition, that a special individual, Jesus Christ, died for the sins of mankind. In the new Jewish Holocaust view, religiously or otherwise, the latent inference is always that Jews as a group have lit the way for humanity (something which they have been heralding about themselves -- in one form or another -- for centuries), now with their self-asserted communal martyrdom in the Holocaust.

S. Daniel Breslauer notes Eliezer Berkovits' messianic views on the subject:

"The Holocaust, together with all other catastrophes in the Jewish past,

represents one arena in which Jews can perform their chosen duty.

All of history, even its tragic moments, presents opportunities for Jews

to 'fulfill their particular mission ... The Jew demonstrated how to

create values, how to realize the ideal. By so demonstrating, Jews

give value to being human ... 'Only when the chosen ones accept the

'decree' does the world acquire the moral right to exist.'"

     "The Holocaust, I fear," says Rabbi Jame Lebeau, "has come to fill the same need, to play the same role for some Jews as Jesus' death on the cross does for Christians." [LEBAU, p. 4] "The Golgotha [site of Christ's crucifixion] of modern mankind," declared British Rabbi Ignaz Manbaum in 1966, "is Auschwitz. The cross, the Roman gallows, was replaced by the gas chamber." [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 164] "It is strange that the Jewish stories [of persecution]," says Ann Roiphe, "read in a sense like a communal crucifixion stretched out in time with a resurrection [modern Israel]." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 194] "One of the things I find most striking about much of recent Jewish Holocaust commemoration," says Peter Novick,

     "is how 'un-Jewish' -- how Christian -- it is. I am thinking of the ritual of reverently
    following the structured pathways of the Holocaust in the major museums, which
    resembles nothing so much as the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa;
    the fetishized objects on display like so many fragments of the True Cross or shin
    bones of saints; the symbolic respresentations of the Holocaust -- notably in the
    climax of Elie Wiesel's Night -- that employ crucifixion imagery. Perhaps most
    significantly, there is the way that suffering is sacralized and portrayed as the
    path to wisdom -- the cult of the [Holocaust] survivor as secular saint." [NOVICK, P.,     1999, p. 11]

      The word 'holocaust' actually has sacrificial connotations; in Jewish religious tradition a holocaust is an offering to God, set afire. Sometimes animals were sacrificed. The Jews of Israel, however, seeking to distance themselves from the Nazis massacres of largely passive Jews, originally used the term "shoah," meaning "destruction, catastrophe, devastation, ruin, waste." [PETUCHOWSKI, p. 1-2] "Use of the word [Holocaust]," notes Richard L. Rubenstein, "to denote the destruction of Europe's Jews assimilates genocide to the world of religious faith and implies that the victims offered themselves up in the tradition of Israel's ancient martyrs al kiddush ha-shem (for the sanctification of the divine Name)." [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 83]

In the West, modern Jewish secular convictions about the "Holocaust" is, hence, pseudo-religious in content. The word "holocaust,' observes Wolfgang Sofsky,

"designates ritual martyrdom that Jews took upon themselves because

they refused to renounce their faith. The expression thus forges a link,

totally inadmissible, between the genocidal murder of the Jews and the

fate of Jewish martyrs ... By distortion of the term's core meaning, the

impression is generated that the mass murder of the Jews had some

deeper religious impact -- as if the victims had, in a sense, offered

themselves up for the slaughter." [SOFSKY, W., 1993, p. 6]

If, however, despite all the Jewish lobbying, "the" Holocaust is not unique in human history, it has nothing specially to teach us. Humankind just again repeats its pathetic follies and perversions, the same brutal viciousness manifest in new guises, in new eras, this time reflecting mankind's most horrible baseness via the rationalist, scientific, technological, and corporate forms of brutality.

"To see God as having a role in the destruction of the Jews," says Garber and Zuckerman, "is difficult -- nearly intolerable -- but to divorce God from this most horrific of events would be far worse. For without the God of the Bible, who established the special relationship with the Chosen People, the genocide ceases to be a Jewish event." [GARBER, p. 206]

"I cannot help but see this extermination pride as another variant of the Covenant," argues Jewish critic Philip Lopate, "This time the Chosen People have been chosen for extraordinary suffering. As such, the Holocaust seems simply another opportunity for Jewish chauvinism. I grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, surrounded by this chauvinist tendency, which expresses itself in an insecure need to boast about Jewish achievement in every field, the other side which was a contempt for non-Jews, the gentile." [LOPATE, p. 299]

A number of Jewish scholars and organizations have doggedly persisted in a bizarre, arrogant game of victimhood one-upmanship over others' dead, searching for any angle to prove their claim of Jewish exceptionality: Jews were murdered faster than anybody else in history, Jews died more horribly, etc. Richard Rubenstein, a professor of religion, even digs up the old Chosen People hatred of Christianity paradigm to argue that "the religious element makes the Holocaust unique." In this view, "the Holocaust was a Holy War in which post-Enlightenment European Christendum's goal of eliminating Jews and Judaism from its midst was fulfilled by Hitler albeit by means other than most religious authorities would have preferred." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 16-17]

No one can successfully argue that the Holocaust was unique as a genocide purely on quantitative terms, using the (commonly claimed) number of six million Jews who died under Nazi rule. In a bizarre book about the subject, author Steven Katz laboriously undertakes to quantify, qualify, and otherwise dispassionately measure by numbers and statistics the history of human suffering at the hands of others ("We must," notes Katz, "distinguish between the percentage of Jews lost and the percentage killed.") Ironically, the author's scholarly zeal for objective academic rhetoric in addressing the tortured and murdered totally dehumanizes -- not unlike the Nazis' own culture of detached scientism -- his subject matter:

"Seeking to kill all of a group is descriptively, even ontologically,

different from seeking to kill part of a group, but is not necessarily

morally worse. For example, the killing of some X may be a

greater evil (assuming one could measure such things) than

killing all of Y, where there are more X than Y and the absolute

number of X killed exceeds the total number of Y even though the

killing of X (using a form of Bauer's nomenclature) is not Holocaustal.

Katz notes that in this century alone there were far worse man-made catastrophes that have befallen people other than Jews. Joseph Stalin, for example, "willfully" killed up to twenty million people in Russia between 1929-39. In the 1940's another twenty million more Soviets lost their lives as a consequence of World War II. Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that between 1929 and 1959 sixty-six million Russians were killed by "manmade famines and related forms of violence and war."

In China, Katz figures between 34-64 million people died during the Chinese communist revolution in the 1930's and 1940's. In Turkey, between 35 and 60% of the Armenian population was killed by Turks in 1915-1917. Aborigines in Tasmania were entirely wiped out by the European conquest in the nineteenth century. [All KATZ, p. 97] In Central America, with the invasion of the Conquistadors, some fifty million indigenous peoples were reduced to three and a half million in less than a century. [TRAVERSO, p. 106]

Katz, who goes as far back into antiquity as 731 BCE to count and qualify Jewish deaths at the hands of others, neglects -- not surprisingly -- to mention the seminal Biblical record of the Jews themselves as genocidal perpetrators. Having reviewed a range of other historical atrocities that might be termed "genocidal," the author argues that "the Holocaust is phenomenologically unique by virtue of the fact that never before has a state set out, as a matter of principle, and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people." [KATZ, p. 98]

Katz, of course, is wrong. As we have already seen, the ancient Jews articulated, "actualized," and even celebrated in the Old Testament the precedential policy of a Holocaust upon the Canaanites, and others. This genocide is even, however horrific, part of Jewish -- and others' -- religious belief. And while it was quantitatively smaller (tiny in comparison) to the 1940's Holocaust, it was equal in genocidal intention to the Nazis of modern Europe. Katz and other Jewish scholars might quibble over the semantic technicalities of what a "state" means, as we know the word today. But certainly the ancient Israelites understood themselves as a nation, certainly a well-defined ''state" of its own era, which is still part of Orthodox Judaic -- and Zionist -- belief today. That not all Canaanites and others were successfully wiped out is besides the point. Not all European -- or even Polish -- Jews were murdered either. As Katz notes, it was the intention to actualize a complete atrocity that counts, and the physical initiation of that process. Here the Jews themselves as violators take precedent, in religious and legendary form that has in no small way influenced the rest of human history.

This tendency by Jewish scholars to completely overlook their own people's history of genocidal perpetration (such an attitude of genocidal "intent" even endures today among Orthodox (and many other) Jews to "wipe out" even the "memory" of Amalek) -- yet minimize all other mass murders towards heralding their own victimization as consummate -- is noted with impatience by Jasper Griffin. In a review of a book by a Jewish scholar, Peter Schafer, that explores the deplorable "anti-Semitism" of ancient Greece and Rome, Griffin notes that "it might be thought, in the present instance, that here are some other parallels in ancient texts to this zeal for the complete destruction of a people. We might find them, not in Greek or Roman sources, but in the biblical accounts of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites ... The prophet Ezekiel had a similar fate in mind for the city of Tyre (Ezekiel 26), and so on; the ferocious author of the Revelation, a Jew and a Christian, who gloats over the prospect of earthly destruction followed by eternal torment for most of mankind, only twelve thousand from each of the twelve tribes of Israel being saved, perhaps represents the logical end of this line of thought. None of this is mentioned by Schafer." [GRIFFIN, p. 57]

What can be said with certainty about the massacre of Jewry by the Nazis is that it is, thanks to Jewish publicity efforts, the most widely known atrocity -- or historical event, for that matter -- in history. (And the gigantic context for it -- World War II -- has been completely marginalized in a profound historical revisionism). Amidst decades of hand wringing and soul searching, the question surfaces again and again in Jewish discourse: Why did their God desert them like that? Fifty years later, this horrible experience is so much part of the modern Jewish psyche that it transcends all other self-conceptions. Beyond religion, beyond race, a Jew is someone who was sent to Nazi gas chambers. A Jew is someone whose life, whose history, is persecution. In our time the worldwide Jewish community has taken this bit of recent history, crystallized it as a beacon for Jewish insecurity and uncertainty in the Diaspora, and transformed the murder of millions into a formidable ideological weapon. Although the Holocaust is the consummate modern symbol for man's inhumanity to man, and Hitler had distinctly genocidal aims upon others, most Jews -- distinctly separate from others in self-conception -- claim it completely, and only, as inhumanity against their own. Says Moshem Leshem:

"Israeli and American Jews fully agree that the memory of the

Holocaust (as they carefully shape it) is an indispensable weapon --

one that must be used relentlessly against their common enemy, no

matter how high the cost to Jewish psyche. Jewish organizations

and individuals thus labor continuously to remind the world of it."

For Jews like Jane Delynn, the hallowed fixation on Jewish Holocaust dead obscures all other catastrophes and miseries in human history:

"It is irrelevant to me whether Stalin's victims surpass the number of Jews

killed by Hitler. The number -- six million -- numbs me. All comparisons

(again except perhaps for Stalin) are found wanting: 6 million is 5 million

more than 1 million Cambodians; 5 and three-quarters more than a

quarter of a million starved Bangladeshis; 5,975,000 more than 25,000

Armenians killed in the recent earthquake; 5,999, 668 more than 332

Palestinians Jews killed in the intifada 5,999,999 more than one

American murdered on the Achille Lauro." [DELYNN, p. 73]

The numbers of Jews lost is not the only numbing fact in Jewish commentary. It is the way in which Jews died en masse which so disturbs, and ultimately enrages, their modern counterparts (despite the fact that many non-Jews died in the concentration camps in the same manner). If most Jews had died in a blaze of returned gunfire -- however hopelessly out- manned by Nazis -- it would, it appears, have been far more palatable to Jewish conceptions of themselves as a noble community. In this context, even the horrible demise of non-Jews who were machine-gunned as they begged for their lives in cornfields or on street corners, slowly starved or frozen to death, are preferable to the impersonal murder factory which so many Jews submitted to so feebly. Inevitably, such modern Jewish reflection evokes a picking through the piles of the dead to speculate on their last moment pedigrees of humiliation, indignity, and dehumanization. And, most importantly, the sorting of who was Jewish, and who was not. That Jews did little, and usually nothing, to forcibly resist their fate (and in fact actually aided their own demise, [ARENDT] at the hands of the Nazis has created a psychological backlash amongst Jews in our own day, epitomized by overwhelming support and allegiance for an angry, militant, brutal, and defiant Israel.