Jerusalem — This past month, Simon Wiesenthal turned 94. Still residing in Vienna, Wiesenthal continues his quest to bring Nazis to justice and track contemporary hate groups around the world.
Along with Elie Wiesel and a precious few others, he stands as an example of that generation’s determination to prevent the escape, from justice and memory, of the murderers of the one-third of the Jewish people.
We see the fruits of Wiesenthal’s labor not only in the capture and punishment of former Nazi officers, but also in institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which seek to document and present to the public the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Yet, while the past few decades have witnessed an upsurge in scholarship and educational activities devoted to the Holocaust, a chorus of contemporary Jewish scholars and communal leaders have questioned what they deem an overemphasis on the Holocaust in Jewish education and identity-building.
One book in particular, University of Chicago Professor Peter Novick’s “The Holocaust in American Life” (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), sent ripples through the Jewish community with its well-researched and skillfully argued criticism of the tendency of American Jews to use the Holocaust as an emblem of Jewish identity and a bulwark against assimilation.
Those sympathetic to Novick’s thesis contend that Jewish self-definition has become so tied to the role of victim that it clouds the reality of Jews’ success and influence in American life.
This conception translates into a misguided emphasizing of the “oy” rather than the “joy” of Jewish living that contributes to assimilation by imparting to many young Jews the idea that Judaism is about remembering the Holocaust, not living an active and meaningful Jewish life.
Short-sighted
While sympathetic to the argument that Jewish identity must encompass much more than defining oneself as a victim, I find critics of the so-called “Holocaust obsession” to be woefully inconsiderate and short-sighted.
In my experience, Holocaust education has not come at the expense of learning about Jewish ritual, values and texts. The growing number of Jewish day schools, adult Jewish learning programs, and university Jewish studies programs suggest that my experience may be more broadly shared.
I also question those who say that the Holocaust should not be a critical component of Jewish self-definition and contend that an official Holocaust memorial day — Yom HaShoah, created by the Israeli government in 1951 — is superfluous because the collective Jewish tragedies are commemorated on Tisha B’Av.
It seems contrived and inauthentic to lament the destruction of the Second Temple while marginalizing a calamity that occurred in the lifetime of many living Jews and decimated Europe’s Jewish population.
To argue that the Holocaust is not a turning point in Jewish history expresses, I think, a desire to reconcile history with faith rather than a genuine confrontation with an event that unequivocally threatened the existence of Jewish life.
As Jewish thinker and current U.S. Holocaust Memorial President Rabbi Irving Greenberg starkly put it, “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”
Remembering and teaching about the Holocaust surely cannot serve as the sole basis of Jewish identity. It behooves us to remember that the Jewish calendar contains one Holocaust Memorial Day and 52 Sabbaths.
Judaism, however, is grounded in a collective history and memory. Remembering the past may demand a high price in pain and struggle, but, as British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes, “the price of forgetfulness is infinitely higher.”
Evan Moffic, a graduate of Nicolet High School and Stanford University, is in his first year of rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, which serves the Reform Jewish movement.
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