This distribution of the wages of Israeli-ness coincided with the eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the US. As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books and films touched on the subject. The film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) folded the mass murder of Jews into the larger category of the crimes of Nazism. In his essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.
Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish victims. They were scrambling to learn the new rules of the geopolitical game. In the chameleon-like shifts of the early Cold War, the Soviet Union moved from being a stalwart ally against Nazi Germany to a totalitarian evil; Germany moved from being a totalitarian evil to a stalwart democratic ally against totalitarian evil. Accordingly, the editor of Commentary urged American Jews to nurture a ‘realistic attitude rather than a punitive and recriminatory one’ towards Germany, which was now a pillar of ‘Western democratic civilisation’.
This extensive gaslighting by the free world’s political and intellectual leaders shocked and embittered many survivors of the Shoah. However, they weren’t then regarded as uniquely privileged witnesses of the modern world. Améry, who loathed the ‘obtrusive philosemitism’ of postwar Germany, was reduced to amplifying his private ‘resentments’ in essays aimed at ruffling the ‘miserable conscience’ of German readers. In one of these he describes travelling through Germany in the mid-1960s. While discussing Saul Bellow’s latest novel with the country’s new ‘refined’ intellectuals, he could not forget the ‘stony faces’ of ordinary Germans before a pile of corpses, and discovered that he bore a new ‘grudge’ against Germans and their exalted place in the ‘majestic halls of the West’. Améry’s experience of ‘absolute loneliness’ before his Gestapo torturers had destroyed his ‘trust in the world’. It was only after his liberation that he had again known ‘mutual understanding’ with the rest of humanity because ‘those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug’ seemed to provoke ‘contempt’. But his healing faith in the ‘equilibrium of world morality’ had quickly been shattered by the subsequent Western embrace of Germany, and the free world’s eager recruitment of former Nazis in its new ‘power game’.
Améry would have felt even more betrayed if he had seen the staff memorandum of the American Jewish Committee in 1951, which regretted the fact that ‘for most Jews reasoning about Germany and Germans is still beclouded by strong emotion.’ Novick explains that American Jews, like other ethnic groups, were anxious to avoid the charge of dual loyalty and to take advantage of the dramatically expanding opportunities offered by postwar America. They became more alert to Israel’s presence during the extensively publicised and controversy-haunted Eichmann trial, which made inescapable the fact that Jews had been Hitler’s primary targets and victims. But it was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Israel seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both Israel and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world. Jewish organisations started to deploy the motto ‘Never Again’ to lobby for American policies favourable to Israel. The US, facing humiliating defeat in East Asia, began to see an apparently invincible Israel as a valuable proxy in the Middle East, and began its lavish subvention of the Jewish state. In turn, the narrative, promoted by Israeli leaders and American Zionist groups, that the Shoah was a present and imminent danger to Jews began to serve as a basis for collective self-definition for many Jewish Americans in the 1970s.
Jewish Americans were by then the most educated and prosperous minority group in America, and were increasingly irreligious. Yet, in the rancorously polarised American society of the late 1960s and 1970s, where ethnic and racial sequestration became common amid a widespread sense of disorder and insecurity, and historical calamity turned into a badge of identity and moral rectitude, more and more assimilated Jewish Americans affiliated themselves with the memory of the Shoah and forged a personal connection with an Israel they saw as menaced by genocidal antisemites. A Jewish political tradition preoccupied with inequality, poverty, civil rights, environmentalism, nuclear disarmament and anti-imperialism mutated into one characterised by a hyper-attentiveness to the Middle East’s only democracy. In the journals he kept from the 1960s onwards, the literary critic Alfred Kazin alternates between bafflement and scorn in charting the psycho-dramas of personal identity that helped to create Israel’s most loyal constituency abroad:
The present period of Jewish ‘success’ will some day be remembered as one of the greatest irony
... The Jews caught in a trap, the Jews murdered, and bango! Out of ashes all this inescapable lament and exploitation of the Holocaust... Israel as the Jews’ ‘safeguard’; the Holocaust as our new Bible, more than a Book of Lamentations.
Kazin was allergic to the American cult of Elie Wiesel, who went around asserting that the Shoah was incomprehensible, incomparable and unrepresentable, and that Palestinians had no right to Jerusalem. In Kazin’s view, ‘the American Jewish middle class’ had found in Wiesel, a ‘Jesus of the Holocaust’, ‘a surrogate for their own religious vacancy’. The potent identity politics of an American minority was not lost on Primo Levi during his only visit to the country in 1985, two years before he killed himself. He had been profoundly disturbed by the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption around Wiesel (who claimed to have been Levi’s great friend in Auschwitz; Levi did not recall ever meeting him) and was puzzled by his American hosts’ voyeuristic obsession with his Jewishness. Writing to friends back in Turin he complained that Americans had ‘pinned a Star of David’ on him. At a talk in Brooklyn, Levi, asked for his opinion on Middle East politics, started to say that ‘Israel was a mistake in historical terms.’ An uproar ensued, and the moderator had to halt the meeting. Later that year, Commentary, raucously pro-Israel by now, commissioned a 24-year-old wannabe neocon to launch venomous attacks on Levi. By Levi’s own admission, this intellectual thuggery (bitterly regretted by its now anti-Zionist author) helped extinguish his ‘will to live’.
Recent American literature most clearly manifests the paradox that the more remote the Shoah grew in time the more fiercely its memory was possessed by later generations of Jewish Americans. I was shocked by the irreverence with which Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in 1904 in Poland and in many ways the 20th century’s quintessential Jewish writer, depicted Shoah survivors in his fiction, and derided both the state of Israel and the eager philosemitism of American gentiles. A novel like Shadows on the Hudson almost seems designed to prove that oppression doesn’t improve moral character. But much younger and more secularised Jewish writers than Singer seemed too submerged in what Gillian Rose in her scathing essay on Schindler’s Listcalled ‘Holocaust Piety’. In a review in the LRB (23 June 2005) of The History of Love, a novel by Nicole Krauss set in Israel, Europe and the US, James Wood pointed out that its author, born in 1974, ‘proceeds as if the Holocaust happened just yesterday’. The novel’s Jewishness had been, Wood wrote, ‘warped into fraudulence and histrionics by the force of Krauss’s identification with it’. Such ‘Jewish fervency’, bordering on ‘minstrelsy’, contrasted sharply with the work of Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who had ‘not shown a great interest in the shadow of the Shoah’.
A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel. More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the Shoah and the over-identification with Israel since the 1970s has fatally distorted the foreign policy of Israel’s main sponsor, the US. In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war
Along period of relative peace has made most of us oblivious to the calamities that preceded it. Only a few people alive today can recall the experience of total war that defined the first half of the 20th century, the imperial and national struggles inside and outside Europe, the ideological mass mobilisation, the eruptions of fascism and militarism. Nearly half a century of the most brutal conflicts and the biggest moral breakdowns in history exposed the dangers of a world where no religious or ethical constraint existed over what human beings could do or dared to do. Secular reason and modern science, which displaced and replaced traditional religion, had not only revealed their incapacity to legislate human conduct; they were implicated in the new and efficient modes of slaughter demonstrated by Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
In the decades of reconstruction after 1945, it slowly became possible to believe again in the concept of modern society, in its institutions as an unambiguously civilising force, in its laws as a defence against vicious passions. This tentative belief was enshrined and affirmed by a negative secular theology derived from the exposure of Nazi crimes: Never Again. The postwar’s own categorical imperative gradually acquired institutional form with the establishment of organisations like the ICJ and the International Criminal Court and vigilant human rights outfits like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. A major document of the postwar years, the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, is suffused with the fear of repeating Europe’s past of racial apocalypse. In recent decades, as utopian imaginings of a better socioeconomic order faded, the ideal of human rights drew even more authority from memories of the great evil committed during the Shoah.
From Spaniards fighting for reparative justice after long years of brutal dictatorships, Latin Americans agitating on behalf of their desaparecidos and Bosnians appealing for protection from Serbian ethnic-cleansers, to the Korean plea for redress for the ‘comfort women’ enslaved by the Japanese during the Second World War, memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built.
These memories have helped define the notions of responsibility, collective guilt and crimes against humanity. It is true that they have been continually abused by the exponents of military humanitarianism, who reduce human rights to the right not to be brutally murdered. And cynicism breeds faster when formulaic modes of Shoah commemoration – solemn-faced trips to Auschwitz, followed by effusive camaraderie with Netanyahu in Jerusalem – become the cheap price of the ticket to respectability for antisemitic politicians, Islamophobic agitators and Elon Musk. Or when Netanyahu grants moral absolution in exchange for support to frankly antisemitic politicians in Eastern Europe who continually seek to rehabilitate the fervent local executioners of Jews during the Shoah. Yet, in the absence of anything more effective, the Shoah remains indispensable as a standard for gauging the political and moral health of societies; its memory, though prone to abuse, can still be used to uncover more insidious iniquities. When I look at my own writings about the anti-Muslim admirers of Hitler and their malign influence over India today, I am struck by how often I have cited the Jewish experience of prejudice to warn against the barbarism that becomes possible when certain taboos are broken.
All these universalist reference points – the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.
There are more earthquakes ahead. Israeli politicians have resolved to prevent a Palestinian state. According to a recent poll, an absolute majority (88 per cent) of Israeli Jews believe the extent of Palestinian casualties is justifiable. The Israeli government is blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. Biden now admits that his Israeli dependants are guilty of ‘indiscriminate bombing’, but compulsively hands out more and more military hardware to them. On 20 February, the US scorned for the third time at the UN most of the world’s desperate wish to end the bloodbath in Gaza. On 26 February, while licking an ice-cream cone, Biden floated his own fantasy, quickly shot down by both Israel and Hamas, of a temporary ceasefire. In the United Kingdom, Labour as well as Tory politicians search for verbal formulas that can appease public opinion while providing moral cover to the carnage in Gaza. It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of collapse in the free world.
At the same time, Gaza has become for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the 21st century – just as the First World War was for a generation in the West. And, increasingly, it seems that only those jolted into consciousness by the calamity of Gaza can rescue the Shoah from Netanyahu, Biden, Scholz and Sunak and re-universalise its moral significance; only they can be trusted to restore what Améry called the equilibrium of world morality. Many of the protesters who fill the streets of their cities week after week have no immediate relation to the European past of the Shoah. They judge Israel by its actions in Gaza rather than its Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent security. Whether or not they know about the Shoah, they reject the crude social-Darwinist lesson Israel draws from it – the survival of one group of people at the expense of another. They are motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted. These men and women know that if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is ‘Never Again for Anyone’: the slogan of the brave young activists of Jewish Voice for Peace.
It is possible that they will lose. Perhaps Israel, with its survivalist psychosis, is not the ‘bitter relic’ George Steiner called it – rather, it is the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world. The full-throated endorsement of Israel by far-right figures like Javier Milei of Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and its patronage by countries where white nationalists have infected political life – the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy – suggests that the world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law is receding. It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught.
The fear of catastrophic defeat weighs on the minds of the protesters who disrupt Biden’s campaign speeches and are expelled from his presence to a chorus of ‘four more years’. Disbelief over what they see every day in videos from Gaza and the fear of more unbridled brutality hounds those online dissenters who daily excoriate the pillars of the Western fourth estate for their intimacy with brute power. Accusing Israel of committing genocide, they seem deliberately to violate the ‘moderate’ and ‘sensible’ opinion that places the country as well as the Shoah outside the modern history of racist expansionism. And they probably persuade no one in a hardened Western political mainstream.
But then Améry himself, when he addressed his resentments to the miserable conscience of his time, was ‘not at all speaking with the intention to convince; I just blindly throw my word onto the scale, whatever it may weigh.’ Feeling deceived and abandoned by the free world, he aired his resentments ‘in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity’. Israel’s clamorous accusers today seem to aim at little more. Against the acts of savagery, and the propaganda by omission and obfuscation, countless millions now proclaim, in public spaces and on digital media, their furious resentments. In the process, they risk permanently embittering their lives. But, perhaps, their outrage alone will alleviate, for now, the Palestinian feeling of absolute loneliness, and go some way towards redeeming the memory of the Shoah.
28 February
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