Newsweek
May 11 2005
Inhumanity to Jews
There are many reasons I hate discussing the Holocaust. To be forced
to defend its truth less than 70 years after it occurred is
spiritually nauseating.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Marc Gellman
Newsweek
I rarely speak about or write about the Holocaust. I don’t defend my
reticence, but I have my reasons. Mainly I don’t like the way the
Holocaust is never just remembered and mourned, but so often
manipulated and used.
I don’t like the way the Holocaust is used by some Jews as the
paradigm of Christian attitudes toward the Jewish people. They
actually believe that Christians go to bed thinking of new ways to
kill us, and some of them have told me straight out that my very
public friendship with a priest just deludes Jews into thinking that
something has changed.
I don’t like the way the Holocaust is used to try to strengthen
Jewish identity. The Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim once
suggested that in addition to the 613 commandments given by God to
the Jewish people, a 614th commandment ought to be added: `Do not
grant Hitler any posthumous victories.’ I despise that idea. I am
Jewish because my mother is Jewish, and, more importantly, because I
believe Judaism is loving, just, joyous, hopeful and true. I am not
Jewish, and I did not teach my children or my students to be Jewish,
just to spite Hitler.
I do not like the way the Holocaust is used either to defend or to
attack Israel’s right to exist. Obviously those who want to kill
Israel must first kill the memories and the truth of the Holocaust,
which produces so much sympathy for Israel. Many do not know that the
new prime minister of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote a
Holocaust-denying doctoral thesis. The engine of the Holocaust-denial
industry is not old fashioned anti-Semitism but modern anti-Zionism.
To be forced to defend the truth of the Holocaust less than 70 years
after it occurred is spiritually nauseating. It is also degrading
and demeaning to all supporters of Israel to be forced to connect the
Holocaust in any way to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
The Jewish people had and have a right to create and defend a Jewish
state, not because the world felt sorry for us after the Holocaust.
The state of Israel is not a condolence card from a guilt-ridden
world. Israel is the free and millennia-old expression of the Jewish
people’s ties to that land and a manifestation of the national
aspirations and self-determination that are the right of every
people, including the Palestinian people when and if they finally
decide to love Palestine more than they hate Israel.
I don’t like the way the word Holocaust has been used to describe
every instance of oppression that has ever existed. In this way, this
attack on the Jews is universalized to the point that its distinctly
and uniquely Jewish elements evaporate. I will not withhold a single
tear of compassion for every act of human cruelty. I do not want to
deny in any way that in the same concentration camps where 6 million
Jews were murdered, 5 million Christians and others were also
murdered. However, the camps were not built to exterminate the
others, they were built to exterminate Jews. It was only the excess
capacity of the killing machine that allowed non-Jews to be caught in
its maws. I reject the false choice of either demeaning the suffering
of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust and other genocides or
pretending that the Holocaust was about man’s inhumanity to man and
not man’s inhumanity to Jews. I mourn for the murder of each and
every innocent person of any faith and of no faith who perished in
what Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has called the Kingdom of Night,
or in other nights and other kingdoms. However, I will not accept,
and I do not believe, that the Holocaust was the same, either in size
or intent, as the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians, the janjaweed
slaughter of the Muslims of Darfur, the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsis
of Rwanda, the Serb slaughter of the Bosnian Muslims or, yes, this is
suggested, the AIDS pandemic. The Holocaust was a calculated attempt
to kill all the Jews in the world, and it very nearly succeeded.
And finally I don’t like the way people get impatient or frustrated
with what they see as a kind of Jewish obsession with the Holocaust.
These people have no idea of the sheer scope of the killing and the
depth of the wound. Let me say this simply. One out of every three
Jews who was alive in 1933 had been murdered by 1945. One out of
three. Imagine if one out of three Americans were murdered in four
years. That would be roughly 90 million Americans dead. We were
devastated by the death of 3,000 on 9/11; we were torn apart by the
death of 50,000 in Vietnam. Imagine if 90 million Americans were
murdered, and then imagine if less than 70 years later some foreign
diplomat chastised Americans for still being obsessed with their
murder. Or imagine if 333 million Chinese were murdered, or 400
million Muslims, or 200 million Hindus were murdered; or if 2 billion
people on earth were murdered. Could any other culture or could the
world recover from the death of one out of three in five years? In
1933, there were about 18 million Jews in the world. In 1945 there
were 12 million Jews in the world, and today, 60 years after the end
of World War II, there are still just 12 million Jews in the world.
One out of every three people on earth is Christian. One out of every
three Jews on earth is dead.
So these are all the reasons I hate writing about the Holocaust.
However, on this 60th-anniversary remembrance of the end of Kingdom
of Night, here is a story I can write about:
Two fathers met last week in Manhattan at their daughter’s Jewish
nursery school and discovered that their own fathers had both come
from the same village in Ukraine. They then discovered that both
their fathers had been loaded onto the same boxcar leading to the
same concentration camp on the same day. They then discovered that
one of their fathers escaped by ripping out a board over the window
and jumping out. He joined up with some partisans, and somehow
survived the war. They then discovered that before he jumped, he had
lifted up a younger, shorter boy and pushed him out of the boxcar
before him. That boy also wandered the forests of Ukraine and also
came to America after the war. Both fathers had recently died in New
York, and had no idea that their sons were sending their
granddaughters to the same nursery school. They did not know that
the little girls would have a play date in Manhattan because of what
happened in a boxcar in Ukraine some 63 years ago. That little hole
in that box car was big enough to have room for a play date and a
future. I love that story not because it explains anything or
justifies anything or is a compensation for anything. I love the
story because there is a Hebrew song I love called “Am Yisrael Hai”,
`The Jewish People Live.’ I love the story because it helps me
believe that the song is not merely a dream.
from So these are all the reasons I hate writing about the Holocaust.
However, on this 60th-anniversary remembrance of the end of Kingdom
of Night, here is a story I can write about:
Two fathers met last week in Manhattan at their daughter’s Jewish
nursery school and discovered that their own fathers had both come
from the same village in Ukraine. They then discovered that both
their fathers had been loaded onto the same boxcar leading to the
same concentration camp on the same day. They then discovered that
one of their fathers escaped by ripping out a board over the window
and jumping out. He joined up with some partisans, and somehow
survived the war. They then discovered that before he jumped, he had
lifted up a younger, shorter boy and pushed him out of the boxcar
before him. That boy also wandered the forests of Ukraine and also
came to America after the war. Both fathers had recently died in New
York, and had no idea that their sons were sending their
granddaughters to the same nursery school. They did not know that
the little girls would have a play date in Manhattan because of what
happened in a boxcar in Ukraine some 63 years ago. That little hole
in that box car was big enough to have room for a play date and a
future. I love that story not because it explains anything or
justifies anything or is a compensation for anything. I love the
story because there is a Hebrew song I love called “Am Yisrael Hai”,
`The Jewish People Live.’ I love the story because it helps me
believe that the song is not merely a dream.
from So these are all the reasons I hate writing about the Holocaust.
However, on this 60th-anniversary remembrance of the end of Kingdom
of Night, here is a story I can write about:
Two fathers met last week in Manhattan at their daughter’s Jewish
nursery school and discovered that their own fathers had both come
from the same village in Ukraine. They then discovered that both
their fathers had been loaded onto the same boxcar leading to the
same concentration camp on the same day. They then discovered that
one of their fathers escaped by ripping out a board over the window
and jumping out. He joined up with some partisans, and somehow
survived the war. They then discovered that before he jumped, he had
lifted up a younger, shorter boy and pushed him out of the boxcar
before him. That boy also wandered the forests of Ukraine and also
came to America after the war. Both fathers had recently died in New
York, and had no idea that their sons were sending their
granddaughters to the same nursery school. They did not know that
the little girls would have a play date in Manhattan because of what
happened in a boxcar in Ukraine some 63 years ago. That little hole
in that box car was big enough to have room for a play date and a
future. I love that story not because it explains anything or
justifies anything or is a compensation for anything. I love the
story because there is a Hebrew song I love called “Am Yisrael Hai”,
`The Jewish People Live.’ I love the story because it helps me
believe that the song is not merely a dream.
So these are all the reasons I hate writing about the Holocaust.
However, on this 60th-anniversary remembrance of the end of Kingdom
of Night, here is a story I can write about:
Two fathers met last week in Manhattan at their daughter’s Jewish
nursery school and discovered that their own fathers had both come
from the same village in Ukraine. They then discovered that both
their fathers had been loaded onto the same boxcar leading to the
same concentration camp on the same day. They then discovered that
one of their fathers escaped by ripping out a board over the window
and jumping out. He joined up with some partisans, and somehow
survived the war. They then discovered that before he jumped, he had
lifted up a younger, shorter boy and pushed him out of the boxcar
before him. That boy also wandered the forests of Ukraine and also
came to America after the war. Both fathers had recently died in New
York, and had no idea that their sons were sending their
granddaughters to the same nursery school. They did not know that
the little girls would have a play date in Manhattan because of what
happened in a boxcar in Ukraine some 63 years ago. That little hole
in that box car was big enough to have room for a play date and a
future. I love that story not because it explains anything or
justifies anything or is a compensation for anything. I love the
story because there is a Hebrew song I love called “Am Yisrael Hai”,
`The Jewish People Live.’ I love the story because it helps me
believe that the song is not merely a dream.
So these are all the reasons I hate writing about the Holocaust.
However, on this 60th-anniversary remembrance of the end of Kingdom
of Night, here is a story I can write about:
Two fathers met last week in Manhattan at their daughter’s Jewish
nursery school and discovered that their own fathers had both come
from the same village in Ukraine. They then discovered that both
their fathers had been loaded onto the same boxcar leading to the
same concentration camp on the same day. They then discovered that
one of their fathers escaped by ripping out a board over the window
and jumping out. He joined up with some partisans, and somehow
survived the war. They then discovered that before he jumped, he had
lifted up a younger, shorter boy and pushed him out of the boxcar
before him. That boy also wandered the forests of Ukraine and also
came to America after the war. Both fathers had recently died in New
York, and had no idea that their sons were sending their
granddaughters to the same nursery school. They did not know that
the little girls would have a play date in Manhattan because of what
happened in a boxcar in Ukraine some 63 years ago. That little hole
in that box car was big enough to have room for a play date and a
future. I love that story not because it explains anything or
justifies anything or is a compensation for anything. I love the
story because there is a Hebrew song I love called “Am Yisrael Hai”,
`The Jewish People Live.’ I love the story because it helps me
believe that the song is not merely a dream.
from