The Holocaust in American Life.

Brenner, Lenni

The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. 320 pages. $27.00, hardcover.

Peter Novick primarily discusses how the Holocaust has been dealt with in the post-war period, particularly at present. He collects over-the-top Holocaust quotes: vegetarian Isaac Bashevis Singer's "in their behavior towards creatures, all men are Nazis," and George Bush's proclamation that Saddam Hussein was "worse than" Hitler are two such grotesqueries. He describes the dumbing down of the slaughter, the reduction of profound political issues to theme--park, tear-jerker memorials. He is legitimately troubled by the consonant public historical ignorance. Nevertheless, he is part of the problem, not the solution. The start of an in-depth critique must be a clinical description of the actual roles of all the major players in the horror.

Perhaps the most fanatic statement made by a Jew in the pre-Holocaust period was the December 7, 1938, declaration by David Ben-Gurion, later Israel's founding prime minister: "If I were to know that it was possible to save all of the [Jewish] children of Germany by sending them to England and only half by transferring them to Palestine, I would still choose the latter. Because before us is not only a responsibility to those children, but a historic responsibility to the Jewish people."

That's a hard sell today, but Novick cleans up for the Zionist: "Before 1941, and surely before ... September 1939, it appeared to be a matter of Jews escaping from likely persecution, not certain death. The Holocaust ... was then in the unimagined future."

Really? On November 19, 1938, New York's Socialist Appeal reported that "the Brown-shifted monsters do not even bother to conceal their aim: the physical extermination of every Jew in Great Germany." On December 22, Leon Trotsky warned American Jews: "It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews." The Jewish revolutionary's famous prediction is constantly quoted in the scholarly literature. Is it possible that a professor of Jewish studies never stumbled upon it?

Novick admits that during the Holocaust, "The leading Jewish organizations" in America "boycotted and sought to discredit the one group that worked most energetically for rescue, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe." True, this looks like "ideological zealotry blind to desperate human need. But was it.... the decision to `write off' European Jewry and concentrate on building for the future was based on a thoughtful, if chilling appraisal of what was and was not possible." This is being more Jewish than the rabbi. Nahum Goldmann, post-war president of the World Zionist Organization, confessed that "we all failed.... Our failure was in our lack of unwavering determination and readiness to take the proper measures commensurate with the terrible events.... We refrained from doing this because most of the Jewish leadership was then of the opinion that we must not disturb the war effort ... by stormy protests."

Leftists, International Ladies Garment Workers Union leaders, reformist socialists turned pro-Roosevelt New York Liberal party founders, the Communist party, and then its front, the Progressive party, were the most influential ideological elements in Jewish '30s and '40s America. They denounced pre-war Zionism for collaborating with Hitler via the Ha Avara or "transfer" trade agreement. On the right, the rich and religious were also non-Zionist.

The immediate impact of the Holocaust was the conversion of Zionism from an obscure rightist political movement into the overwhelming emotional fantasy-cult of the vast majority of American Jews of that generation. They knew what Hitler did to the Jews, but most knew absolutely nothing about Zionism's past. The conversion of its more realistic opponents into advocates was required for this rapid transition. The CP's youth group, thousands of Jews and gentiles., dancing the hora around The New York Times building as the news-zipper flashed the establishment of the Israeli state, is a most extraordinary visual of its time and place. But of this, or of Jewish life in America, beyond the printed page, there is next to nothing.

Novick continues his labyrinthian evasions. President Harry Truman needed Palestine's British overlords as an ally in the anti-Stalinist Cold War. The Arabs had the oil. A miniscule Zionist state had nothing economic or military to offer American business. But the Jewish emotional tidal wave created an immense electoral problem for the Democrats, then a federation of corrupt city machines. "On October 6, 1947, Bob Hannegan (the Democratic national chairman) almost made a speech pointing out how many Jews were major contributors to the Democratic party's campaign fund and were expecting the United States to support the Zionists' position on Palestine." This remark from Margaret Truman's Harry S. Truman isn't a state secret, except apparently to Novick. In the event, Truman, the former front man for the Kansas City machine, recognized and funded Israel, and the Palestinians became the victims of America and the WZO, each with its inglorious record of failure to rescue European Jewry.

On December 4, 1948, the Times ran a letter by Albert Einstein and others, denouncing "the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the `Freedom Party,' ... a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.... [I]t is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country." Einstein on Menachem Begin as a Jewish Nazi belongs in any book on how America related Zionism to the Holocaust. But readers will not be shocked to know that there is nothing here on it.

Similarly, Ben Hecht is still famous for The Front Page, his play (and movie) about Chicago journalism. But Novick, a University of Chicago professor, has nothing about Hecht's 1939 Book of Miracles, which predicted "some five hundred thousand Jews ... murdered in Germany, Italy, Rumania, and Poland," nor his 1961 book, Perfidy. Could that be because Hecht, a former leader of the Emergency Committee, documented how the Israeli government defended Reszo Kasztner, a Hungarian Zionist who collaborated with Adolf Eichmann and perjured himself at Nurnberg on behalf of Eichmann's aide?

In 1984, in the furor after Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" remark, Chicago's Louis Farrakhan cited how "the Zionists made a deal with Adolf Hitler according to a book called The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black." Black is another Chicago Jewish writer missed by Chicago's Novick.

What we do find in this book are eccentric connections, combined images that don't make a picture. "Rabbi Avi Weiss, scaling the wall of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz to provoke a confrontation with the nuns, was a direct descendant of the Free Speech Movement activists at Berkeley's Sproul Plaza in 1964 provoking the police." Weiss is barely a footnote, even in the annals of fanaticism, and the FSM provoked nothing. The authorities tried to kill free speech because activists used the university to organize off-campus civil-rights sit-ins. Virtually every student, right to left, walked out. They won. Today the university honors the FSM.

Since the facts are "well known," Novick allows himself some candor regarding Washington's Holocaust Memorial: "Carter's initiative was an attempt to placate American Jews ... alienated by what they saw as the president's `excessive even handedness' in dealing with Israelis and Palestinians.... It could be devastating for Carter's prospects for reelection, in part because of Jewish votes ... and even more because Jews traditionally contributed a substantial portion of national Democratic campaign funds."

Still, given his propensity for sidestepping, these blatantly demagogic motivations point him nowhere. That administration's alleged even handedness consisted in brokering the Sinai accord, i.e., the continued U.S. subsidizing of Zionist ethnoreligious discrimination, and picking up the corrupt Egyptian regime's bills. If we add Carter's bringing the shah here after his overthrow, funding Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, and defending Poi Pot's U.N. seat after the mass murderer was overthrown in Cambodia, perhaps what is urgently needed is a next door memorial to victims of holocausts sponsored by politicians patronizing Holocaust memorials.

It is a contemporary truism that the Middle East can only progress via democracy and equality for all nationalities and religions. But the most powerful argument against the possibility of democracy there is its failure here, particularly concerning foreign affairs, during the Holocaust and to this day.

Nevertheless, there is some hope for better from the people, if not from this professor, with his hostility towards activism. "(B)etween 80 and 90 percent of those surveyed agreed that the need to protect the rights of minorities, and not `go along with everybody else,' were lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust." It is up to us Middle Eastern specialists, who understand that absolute ethnic and religious equality before the law is both the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust and the only basis for lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to take our knowledge to the people, to sharpen their vague egalitarianism into a democratic sword against the bipartisan establishment, whose deeds in support of inequality in the Middle East mock the memory of the millions they profess to honor.

Lenni Brenner Author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators