The End of the Holocaust

Epilogue A “Second Holocaust”?

Epilogue: A “Second Holocaust”? 271 Epilogue: A “Second Holocaust”? The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. . . . It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality. —Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani The second Holocaust. It’s a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate. A reality we may have to witness. —Ron Rosenbaum Shortly before the end of the last century, the political scientist Walter Truett Anderson published a brief article calling attention to a spate of books that struck him as constituting a new subgenre of literature. These works were all about “the end of” something— history, affluence, the nation-state, education, work, ideology, etc. Spotting over nine hundred titles that began with those portentous three words, Anderson realized that, with the approaching end of the twentieth century, a trend was in the making. In part, he decried it, labeling the easy recourse to the rhetoric of termination “promiscuous” and little more than a “literary device.” At the same time, he acknowledged that the emergence of a voluminous literature projecting “the end of” so much that was familiar and valued needed to be taken seriously. Were we moving not only nine 272 the end of the holocaust into a new century but a profoundly different world, marked by a “final shutdown of some piece of life as we have known it to be or hoped for it to become?”1 Anderson suspected we were. I share some of his suspicions, even as I realize that the present volume contributes still one more title to the growing corpus of books that concerned him. In the spirit of Anderson’s skeptical inquiry, one might properly ask if we are, in fact, witnessing a series of cultural and intellectual transformations of such reach that, if continued, they might lead to “the end of the Holocaust?” I maintain that we are. As I have sought to show, the course of change with respect to Holocaust representation and memory is widespread and accelerating. In writing The End of the Holocaust, I have aimed to chart some of the more salient dimensions and consequences of such change. Certain aspects of it are inevitable, for they are part of the natural processes that Jean Améry called the “silently erosive and transformative effects of time.”2 Change is also a function of national priorities and cultural pressures that lead to the reshaping of Holocaust history to satisfy a variety of present-day goals. These goals spring from circumstances that are vastly different from those that led to the Nazi program of genocide against the Jews, yet rooted as they are in the social needs and aspirations of particular groups of people, such appropriations of the Holocaust are also probably inevitable. But if Améry and others featured in these pages turned deeply pessimistic about the future prospects of Holocaust memory, it was because they were alert not only to these but also to more disturbing sources of transformation, which are neither natural nor inevitable. What especially troubled them were the uses and misuses of the past for clearly iniquitous ends, ranging from malign efforts to intentionally distort and diminish the Holocaust to expressions of Holocaust resentment, rejection, and denial. To Améry, these manipulations of the past were immoral, and he denounced them as such. What he and most other Holocaust writers of the twentieth century did not foresee, or caught only Epilogue: A “Second Holocaust”? 273 early glimpses of, is a development still more extreme: the emergence of voices that publicly affirm the Nazi slaughter of the Jews and promote it as a powerful and useful precedent. To regard the Holocaust in these terms, not as admonishment and warning but as encouragement and incitement, moves our subject beyond the inevitability of “endings” to the desirability of replications. Those who follow events in the Middle East know that fears of a Second Holocaust have shadowed the State of Israel ever since its beginning and became especially acute at the time of the SixDay War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Exhortations to “drive the Jews into the sea” were common then and, understandably , were not readily dismissed as merely extravagant examples of Arab political rhetoric. The military means to destroy the Jewish State may have been lacking, but the openly declared desire to put an end to Israel’s...