Departments:
Surprising and distressing
Responding
to an article by Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust
in American Life, an excerpt from which appeared in the June-August/99
Magazine, two readers have provided a letter to the editor
carried in the October issue with the head "Holocaust as political
industry." Their assertion that "perhaps what is truly unique
about the Holocaust is the ability of its exploiters to preemptively
silence their critics" is belied by the very appearance of their
own letter in the Magazine. What is really surprising,
and distressing, is that these graduates of the University are
not embarrassed and ashamed even to have sent in such correspondence.
Full
of cracks about "wealthy and influential American Jews," "Israel-firsters,"
and a so-called "Holocaust industry," their letter is permeated
with bigotry-laden stereotypes and seethes with hostility. Though
they may claim that views like theirs rarely see the light of
day, such notions are common in the publications and Internet
sites produced by conspiracy-driven anti-Semitic hate groups scattered
through the land.
Apparently
limiting themselves to Professor Novick's article, the writers
say that he "stops short of asking who invented the Holocaust
in the first place. Who decided to...transform genocide into a
political weapon and fund-raising tool?" As it happens, Novick's
book implicitly does ask questions of that sort, if in a less
gross fashion. And at least in its subtext it answers them in
a way that anticipates the letter writers' objectionable view
that the American public has been manipulated by people with a
parochial agenda.
In
the post-cold war environment, with more and more information
available to scholars, journalists, and governmental investigators,
increasing attention is being given to the Holocaust as a central
event of the waning century. Sadly, as the efforts to better understand
that event and to come to grips with its moral implications accelerate,
there are those like the writers of the October letter who seem
compelled to use the occasion to malign the motives and principles
of the very group that was a particular target of Hitler and his
henchmen. Unintentionally, they prove, pace Professor Novick,
that there are indeed lessons to be learned from the Holocaust.
Michael
C. Kotzin, AB'62
Highland
Park, Illinois