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8 rethinking the Holocaust after Post-Holocaust Theology: Uniqueness, exceptionalism, and the renewal of American Judaism Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason only do we suffer now. —Anne Frank, diary entry, April 11, 1944 There are few things in contemporary American Judaism that are as significant, and as confusing, as the Holocaust. By the “Holocaust” I do not only mean the historical event that took place in europe from 1939–1945 that resulted in the genocide of six million Jews and untold millions of others.1 rather, I mean the cataclysmic phenomenon, including the reception and memorialization of that historical event that reshaped Jewish identity and recalibrated the place of the Jew in American society. The Holocaust became a lens, in emil Fackenheim’s assessment , an “epoch-making event” a “commanding voice” (the voice of Auschwitz ) refracting all that came before it (the voice of Sinai).2 Thus any reflection on Judaism in the present or future must address the Holocaust as a historical event and its place in the American Jewish consciousness. The multi-faceted enterprise of post-Holocaust theology argues that the Holocaust was more than the merciless murder of six million Jews, if that were not enough. It also presented a rupture in Jewish theology that required a serious and systemic rethinking of God’s covenant with Israel. As opposed to theologians , many Jewish historians, more interested in giving as accurate a depiction of the event as possible, examine the facts of the event so traumatic, so unfathomable , and so significant, that the very notion of its historicity is a matter of scholarly debate.3 For both theologians and historians the Holocaust constitutes what Kant called “radical evil” and what emile durkheim called “sacred evil,” an evil arguably so heinous that it is categorically set apart from all other tragic historical events.4 yet whether this means the Holocaust “transcends history” (eli Weisel’s locution) is another matter. to think about contemporary Judaism without the Holocaust is impossible. to think about it with the Holocaust is Rethinking the Holocaust after Post-Holocaust Theology 187 almost impossible.5 Why? First, because as an event in history the Holocaust seems to make no (historical) sense even as its reception must make sense for it to be useful as a tool to (re)construct Judaism in its wake. Second, whatever renewal will occur in Jewish life after the Holocaust it can only occur through a serious engagement with it.6 Third, the Jews as a people not only survived the Holocaust but the Holocaust was arguably partly responsible for the international recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, the significant diminishing of anti-Semitism in America, and the emergence of America as one of the freest and most robust diasporas in Jewish history. This is obviously not to suggest any of this was worth the price of the murder of six million innocent people. It is to say rather, with both humility and trepidation, that what contemporary Jews do with the Holocaust must take into account not only nazism’s (failed) mission to eradicate the Jews but the fact that Jews and Judaism have flourished despite that demonic program. This chapter is about the Americanization of the Holocaust from a limited perspective. I am interested in the various ways American Jewry, and Judaism, has absorbed, remembered, and refracted the Holocaust through specifically American lenses.7 Others make a stronger claim that, in fact, it was America that “invented” the “Holocaust,” or at least what Jacob neusner and later norman Finkelstein call the “Holocaust myth,” a myth that includes the nazi attempt to eradicate the Jews, but also the American defeat of nazism and the establishment of the State of Israel. By invention I simply refer to an interpretive scheme, what sociologist Jeffrey Alexander calls “symbolic production.”8 yet America subsequently lost control over some of its original story to other equally compelling narratives.9 Whatever we think about the Holocaust and what is being done to it in America, the fact is that in the next generation the Holocaust will no longer occupy the realm of the “real.” Survivors of the event will no longer be able to give living testimony to the atrocity. And it will likely become an event and not the lens through which all events in Jewish history are refracted. Throughout this book I argued that the increasingly multiethnic constitution of...

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