Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics Behind New York City's Holocaust Museum (review)

This account of how the effort to create a Holocaust museum in New York City has been repeatedly sabotaged by personal agendas is motivated by the author’s belief that only a museum in Jewish New York can “present the story of the Holocaust from a different, more Jewish and less American, viewpoint” (236). Nevertheless, through an analysis of the fifteen-year life of the New York Holocaust Commission, Saidel explains how even the New York project has become ensnared in “the politics of memory,” resulting in endless delays in the construction of a world-class Holocaust museum. The book reflects tireless research with primary sources and interviews, and is valuable as a description of how the organized Jewish community interfaces with state and local government. However, Saidel’s insistence that this historical episode be viewed through the lens of her particular brand of reform politics detracts from the overall quality of the work.

Saidel provides an excellent discussion of the early attempts to create a Holocaust memorial in New York City, including the one in 1947 which resulted in an engraved stone in Riverside Park, and the one in the 1960s which fell victim to the distractions of the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars. But the focus of the book is on the creation by Mayor Koch in 1981 of a task force for the commemoration of the Holocaust, three years after President Jimmy Carter announced the creation of the United States Holocaust Commission. In a politically expedient move, Koch asked real estate developer and political ally George Klein to take the helm of the task force and in July of that year twenty-eight other individuals were named as members. In 1983 this task force became the New York City Holocaust Memorial Commission, and in 1986 the word “City” was dropped from the commission’s title when Governor Cuomo became, retroactively, co-chairman and formed a city/state partnership. It is Saidel’s contention that this commission, which ultimately established the legal entity “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust—Museum of Jewish Heritage,” was not representative of the Jewish community, contained few Holocaust survivors or scholars, and consisted mostly of leaders of the organized Jewish community, powerful figures in real estate and high finance, and elected officials. In short, the commission was dominated by people who hoped to use it to widen their circle of influence. The primary culprits of the book are Mayor Koch and George Klein, the former who allegedly used the commission, and his appointments to it, to secure Jewish votes and augment his campaign fund, and the latter who used it to gain favors from the city, including millions of urban renewal dollars for his Times Square Redevelopment project. But there is plenty of blame to go around. Even Jewish communal leaders like the Holocaust survivor Ben Meed and Malcolm Hoenlein, the leader of the Jewish Communal Relations Council, used their membership on the commission to expand their influence in Jewish communal life. When Governor Cuomo expressed an interest in joining the project, he too was motivated by his selfish wish to steal some of the glory from Koch, to ingratiate himself to the Jewish community, and to keep with his plan for finding a suitable museum for the redevelopment of state-owned Battery Park City, which was ultimately offered as a cite. “The leaders and the Mayor could pretend that the idea of the Holocaust memorial museum was pure, noble, and above politics,” Saidel writes, “whereas in fact . . . [t]he structure of this political alliance . . . was . . . a mutual admiration society, or a reciprocal two-way street” (133).

At the point when the state got involved, conflicts arose. Cuomo’s concern over the separation between Church and State while considering a run for the Presidency, the 1987 stock market crash, the investigation for payroll abuses of State Senator and commission co-chair Manfred...