Israeli Society, the Holocaust and its Survivors (review)

Over the past two or three decades, Israeli public discourse has been dominated by a number of historiographical debates. These controversies have become foundational questions in Israeli identity-formation and self-perception. The Holocaust stands at the heart of a number of these debates, with the question of the pre-state Yishuv's reaction to the destruction of European Jewry taking center stage. Israeli Society, the Holocaust and its Survivors brings together many of Dina Porat's contributions to this ongoing historiographical discussion.

Debate regarding the Zionist leadership's response to the Holocaust—as well as accusations and mutual recriminations—began during the war itself, when it seems to have emerged (as some of Porat's work suggests) as a partial reaction to the Yishuv's acute sense of helplessness. Under the twin influences of a new body of scholarship on the Allies' record on rescue and a changing Israeli self-image, the issue of Jewish responses to the Holocaust emerged in the 1980s as a central question for a new generation of historians. The picture of the Zionist leadership presented in some of this scholarship has been an unflattering one. The Yishuv and its leadership have been portrayed as shockingly indifferent to the fate of European Jewry, focused on narrow interests and desensitized by a negative view of Diaspora Jewry. The pieces collected in this volume reflect Porat's efforts over two decades to counter these views.

The author tackles a broad range of topics in this volume, including the question of knowledge—when the Yishuv learned about the Holocaust and what the connection was between mere information and actual understanding; including the question of knowledge—when the Yishuv learned about the Holocaust and what the connection was between mere information and actual understanding; the attitudes of David Ben-Gurion, the towering figure of Yishuv leadership, whose conduct during these years has been a target for especially harsh criticism; the Yishuv's relationship with Diaspora Jewry—particularly in terms of how the conception of the "negation of exile" shaped (or did not shape) policy toward the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. In what amounts to a chronological and thematic progression at once, the final section of the book focuses both on Israeli public attitudes toward Holocaust survivors and on representations of Holocaust memory in Israeli culture.

As a collection of previously published essays, the book does not offer new information on any of these questions. The volume's strength, however, is in bringing together these disparate pieces to present a detailed historiographical picture of a tragically complicated historical reality. The author makes a clear (if somewhat implicit) argument: whatever their failings, the Yishuv leadership did not ultimately fail the Jews of Europe. Rather, she suggests, the historical circumstances in which they operated rendered them largely helpless to carry out any effective rescue; the constraints were their lack of military power and their consequent dependence on the Allies (who, for their own complicated reasons, were reluctant to pursue rescue); the simmering conflict in Palestine; and, above all, the Nazis' determination to exterminate European Jewry. The thesis is a compelling one, and is part of an important re-evaluation of others' sometimes damning critiques of Zionism and the Yishuv.

Writing against the backdrop of an often polemical historiographical debate, Porat at times strikes what seems to me to be an overly apologetic tone. In her discussion of the dilemmas facing Ben-Gurion, for example, she points to the challenges that the historian faces in trying to decode both the words and the silences of this enigmatic leader. Ben-Gurion's silences may indeed have been based not in indifference, but in a "penetrating and sober comprehension of the enormity of the national catastrophe," as Porat argues (p. 34). But the strength of her claim for this and her assertion that the picture is "clear-cut" do not seem to be fully supported by the somewhat equivocal body of evidence or by...