Not Just Another Holocaust Story, 2022
The annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day came and went January 27, but I noticed more attention paid to the event in mainstream media this year than in many previous ones. The nightly network news programs all covered the event, and online and print stories also were easily available.
Earlier, on January 20, the UN General Assembly even approved a resolution condemning Holocaust denial that included, among other items, the following three paragraphs:
Reaffirming that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of nearly six million Jews, 1.5 million of whom were children, comprising one third of the Jewish people, in addition to the killing of millions of members of other nationalities, minorities and other targeted groups and individuals, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice,
Noting that Holocaust denial refers to discourse and propaganda that deny the historical reality and the extent of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War II, known as the Holocaust or Shoah,
Noting further that Holocaust denial refers specifically to any attempt to claim that the Holocaust did not take place, and may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation, and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people,
You can read the entire text of the resolution here.
I would only add two things about news coverage of the resolution: some media outlets reported that the resolution was adopted “unanimously,” which implies there was a vote, but in fact it was adopted by “consensus,” whatever that really means. Presumably, this was done by the UN to spare certain countries from having to go on record as supporting it. Furthermore, Iran criticized it outright, saying the “Zionist entity,” or State of Israel, “exploits” the Holocaust. This latter charge – exploitation – is one I’ve seen before from other of Israel’s interlocutors and critics, but I have to ask why Israel should not exploit the Holocaust. No one in respectable circles accuses the Civil Rights community of “exploiting” Jim Crow or historic lynchings to get what it needs, or accuses Native Americans of “exploiting” the Trail of Tears to get its legitimate recognition.
I can’t help but think it is the attention being paid to hate crimes directed against Jews that is resented in some circles, though. According to FBI hate crime statistics, 54.9 percent of all religious bias crimes in Calendar Year 2020 were directed at Jews, who make up only about 2 percent of the entire population (and about half of whom are not practicing Jews anyway). The raw data was down from the previous year, but nonetheless continued a trend that has seen Jews disproportionately targeted for religious hate crimes in America compared to other religious groups in recent years.
Resentment is big factor here. I’ve not infrequently heard academics and writers claim there are more pressing needs today that must be addressed to save millions of lives at risk right now, as if there is some kind of false dichotomy or zero sum game at play here – either we remember the slaughtered millions in the past or we help the millions who are being slaughtered now and are at risk going forward. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Peter Novick’s “The Holocaust in American Life” was one of the more presumably temperate books that seemed to explore whether some Jews were clinging too closely to the memory of the Holocaust, which may then have possibly affected American foreign policy.
I have heard, more than a few times in my life, academics question the title “Holocaust” as it applies to the Jews, as if Jews get special consideration over all other peoples who have suffered horrible fates. These are not Holocaust deniers per se; they just don’t think it was worse than other mass deaths in history. There is no doubt others have suffered – at least 50 million overall died in World War 2 itself, including 1-2 million Red Army prisoners of war who died after they were captured, sometimes in the same concentration camps and death camps as Jews, Roma and prisoners of conscience. But almost all mass murders in modern history are tactical – the perpetrator wants to conquer land, or eliminate foes, but the genocide against the Jews was an end in itself that served no tactical function. Killing Jews was an end in itself – that is the difference.
Having said that, most Jews in Israel don’t use the word “Holocaust,” which has roots in the Greek language meaning burnt offered to God, and instead prefer the Hebrew word, sho’ah, which simply means “catastrophe.” The latter term also is more commonly used in France today.
Hitting Home
The most highly publicized anti-Jewish act in recent years was the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 in which 11 worshippers were murdered, and the most recent high-profile incident occurred earlier this month at a synagogue near Dallas, Texas when Malik Faisal Akram took three worshipers hostage before he was killed. According to one report, Akram wanted the local rabbi to demand a New York rabbi get a Pakistani jihadist released from a federal prison in Texas, i.e., he thought the Jews had that much power. (But of course, Jewish “power” has long been part and parcel of the most invidious anti-Jewish conspiracy theories going at least back to the fictional “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” through Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and up up to numerous statements by Lewis Farrakhan against the Jews. Individual success stories should never be dismissed as power, however, and I doubt a Dallas-area Rabbi has much power anyway.)
A less threatening but also revealing story concerns the recent arrest of a New York woman who allegedly spat on an 8-year-old Jewish boy while yelling slurs at him. While not stated in the reports I’ve seen, the boy presumably was dressed in traditional European-style Jewish clothing, possibly including having “side curls” dangling from his ears such that he would be easily recognizable as one of “them.”
The alleged attack reflects an ingrained, simmering hate, all right, but it was the CNN reporting in particular that raised a higher alarm. The reporter, Nicole Chavez, dutifully detailed the probable charges against the suspected perpetrator, which included details beyond merely spitting on the body, but then added this paragraph in the middle of the story:
“Several Jewish people have been targeted across the United States over the past year, some linked to the violent confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinians outside Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque in May.”
Think about this: “Several Jewish people” can only be interpreted as an effort to minimize what is happening. You don’t see the word “several” used when discussing anti-Asian hate crimes, and you will never see the word used, for example, to say Police kill “several” unarmed Black men every year. The word clearly trivializes events. In any case, FBI data show there are many hundreds of cases every year, and I think we all know that relatively minor hate crimes or verbal assaults are rarely reported to police anyway by any targeted minority, whether Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ and so on.
Furthermore, there is a completely gratuitous reference to continuing violence between Israelis and Palestinians – was this 8-year-old a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces? It may be true that anti-Jewish hate crimes sometimes increase after spikes in violence between Israelis and Palestinians, but I ask you to think if the CNN reporting was fair on this one point, in this one story.