I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Shoah Business

8 7 Shoah Business there’s no business like shoah business, to borrow the Jewish historian Yaffa Eliach’s mordant one-liner.1 In Selling the Holocaust, Tim Cole’s critique of the branding and blockbustering of the unspeakable, the historian argues that “at the end of the Twentieth Century, the ‘Holocaust’ is being consumed.”2 (No denier he, Cole frames the term in quotes to distinguish between the Holocaust as conjured for the mass market, in movies like Schindler’s List and museums like the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the historical reality of the Shoah—the assembly-line murder of millions at the hands of the Nazis, a horror so awful it beggars description, defies representation.) Evidence that the Holocaust is being trivialized, merchandised, and, through feel-good Hollywood confections and theme-parked museums, Americanized, is all around us. The revisionist happy endings of Roberto Benigni’s movie Life Is Beautiful and the Robin Williams vehicle Jakob the Liar domesticate the Holocaust, deodorize the memory of its poison gas and its open-pit graves. There are Holocaust -related toys, lit lite, postcards, and games. Holocaust museums do a brisk business, and death-camp tourism is a common feature of the Grand Tour for Jews and Gentiles alike.“Each year,” writes Cole, “tourists flock [to] Auschwitz, Anne Frank House, [the Israeli Holocaust museum and memorial] Yad Vashem,the museums in Washington , D.C., Dallas, Houston.”3 In museum gift shops, visitors can buy mementos, from pins trumpeting the trademark-ready catchphrase S H O A H B U S I N E S S 8 8 “Never Again” to postcards (to send to friends, Cole speculates,“with the message ‘Wish you were here’”).4 To the truly cynical, the “Holocaust”—again, the cultural icon, not the historical event—is, in the words of essayist Phillip Lopate, “a corporation headed by Elie Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the ‘Arts and Leisure’ section of the Sunday Times” while competing franchises like Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Memorial Museum fight for the remaining market share.5 Readers outraged by Lopate’s temerity in questioning Wiesel’s official role as brand manager of the Holocaust are well advised to give Norman G. Finkelstein’s controversial study The Holocaust Industry a wide berth. The son of Holocaust survivors and a pointed critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, Finkelstein excoriates Wiesel for “his silence on Palestinian suffering” and his “shameful record of apologetics on behalf of Israel.”6 Wiesel has been anointed “official interpreter of the Holocaust” not because he is the medium through which six million dead souls speak, as his devotees would have us believe, but because “he unerringly articulates the dogmas of, and accordingly sustains the interests underpinning,the Holocaust.”7 And what are those interests? “The Holocaust” is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust. . . . Its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, the Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment,one of the world’s most formidable military powers , with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a “victim” state,and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue from this specious victimhood—in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified. . . . . . . [The Holocaust] has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.8 Unsurprisingly, Finkelstein regards the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a critical eye. Questioning the ideological spin he believes it gives historical events,Finkelstein calls the museum to account for neglecting to mention the eagerness with which the 8 9 S H O A H B U S I N E S S United States absorbed Nazi war criminals into its military-industrial complex, after the war. As well, he interrogates the politics of the museum’s decision to focus overwhelmingly on the extermination of the Jews,making only passing mention of victims such as the Gypsies (who suffered “proportional losses roughly equal to the Jewish genocide ”) for fear that would mean “the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over the Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish ‘moral capital.’”9 Finally, he contends, the museum subtly argues Israel’s case in the Israel–Palestine conflict, using its exhibits to teach “the Zionist lesson that Israel was...