"The Holocaust Industry" by Norman G. Finkelstein

Is this indictment of Jewish lobby groups a righteous battle cry or something more sinister?

By Andrew Ross

Aug 30, 2000 |

How Norman Finkelstein must have groaned when he read the words of Hadassah Lieberman, wife of the Democratic vice presidential nominee, as she addressed a crowd of Democratic Party supporters at the War Memorial in Tennessee earlier this month. The memorial, she told the audience, with her husband, Joseph, and Vice President Al Gore standing by, commemorates "the American heroes, the soldiers who actually liberated my mother in Dachau and Auschwitz."

As the New York Times gently pointed out, the memorial actually commemorates the 3,400 Tennesseans who died in World War I; and it was the Russians, not the Americans, who liberated Auschwitz. Even more enraging to Finkelstein, no doubt, was this comment from Hadassah Lieberman's friend, Mindy Weisel, who told the Times: "I think her background as a [Holocaust] survivor's daughter has given her a humanity that a lot of people don't have."

For Finkelstein, such cavalier inaccuracies and holier-than-thou allusions are classic outgrowths of a phenomenon that has transformed the Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Europe into a largely American-driven myth designed to serve the narrow interests of homegrown Jewish elites. The avalanche of books, movies, Holocaust memorials, university chairs, high school courses -- and most recently the "shakedown" of Swiss banks and German insurance companies on the issue of reparations for Jewish wartime victims -- is all part of a corrupt "Holocaust industry" that needs to be exposed and put out of business so that the dead of Auschwitz and Treblinka can finally rest in peace.

Finkelstein is not the first to explore this theme. American, British and Israeli scholars and critics have been saying something similar over the past few years, most notably Peter Novick of the University of Chicago, whose highly regarded 1999 book, "The Holocaust in American Life," is about to be reissued in paperback. But where Novick and others bring substance, reason and some empathy to the discomforting issue, Finkelstein brings rage, dogma and ultimately a deep unpleasantness.

Finkelstein's argument goes like this: Postwar Americans, including American Jews, appeared to know little and care even less about the Nazi Holocaust. Echoing points made by Novick, Finkelstein argues that Jews were more concerned about integrating fully into American life than about harping on a dreadful historical episode that would set them apart both as an ethnic group outside the mainstream and, worse, as victims.

What changed? According to Finkelstein, U.S. foreign policy interests in the Middle East, beginning in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, made a pronounced tilt toward Israel, a tilt cheered by powerful Jewish lobby groups always on the lookout for fresh fundraising angles. And what better way to lash Jews (and non-Jews) to the mast of a pro-Israel foreign policy -- encouraged in the 1970s by right-wing Israeli governments seeking to deflect attention from their own egregious treatment of the Palestinians -- than to warn darkly that Arab hostility to Israel threatened to explode into a second Final Solution? And what better way to effect that than with an avalanche of Holocaust propaganda and liberal doses of moral blackmail, foisted upon Jew and non-Jew alike by such Holocaust self-dramatizers as Elie Wiesel, reminding us everywhere of the uniqueness, unforgivability and ever-possible reappearance of the death camps of decades ago?

The Holocaust industry's latest frontier, says Finkelstein, is cold cash. The drive for reparations, headed up by organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Material Claims Conference, constitutes nothing less than a "double shakedown" under the guise of recovering assets belonging to and otherwise compensating Jewish victims and survivors of the Nazis. Employing the services of politically connected lawyers like former Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, these organizations, charges Finkelstein, have grossly exaggerated the number of Jewish survivors while using outright political threats against European governments and institutions. The money itself has gone not to the victims (who include Finkelstein's mother, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, who received a paltry $3,500) but to various "institutes," "memorials" and "Holocaust education" projects and to assist Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe.

Next Page: Have reparations gone to true survivors?

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