Genocide, universalism and the degradation of memory

The attempt to de-Judaize the Holocaust is quite shocking


Seth Frantzman
Opinion/JPost
20 April '10

Every Holocaust Remembrance Day and every Independence Day the public and the world Jewish community is subjected to a soft barrage of messages. The central thread in them is that the Holocaust is not a unique event, that Jews are exploiting their genocide in some way and that the Palestinian Nakba (“tragedy” of 1948) is somehow linked or equivalent to the Holocaust.

This degradation has at its core a supposedly positive message: The Holocaust was a universal event from which all humanity must learn and the Palestinians can better understand the Jews if they think their Nakba is like the Holocaust and if the Jews also accept this. Last year one of the messengers was Bradford Pilcher who titled his article in the on-line magazine Jewcy: “The Holocaust... not just for the Jews.”

Pilcher tells us that the Jews practice “one-upsmanship” by daring to think of the Holocaust as an event that affected them and did not equally affect others such as homosexuals and Roma. He writes, “We shouldn’t be drawing up borders between Jewish suffering and others’” because otherwise the Holocaust will reflect merely our “bitterness.”

This year the message began on March 23 with the revelation that Hanna Yablonka of Ben-Gurion University and head of the Education Ministry’s advisory committee on history studies had claimed “studying details of the Shoah has no educational value” and merely constitutes a “pornography of evil.” There is no use in people learning “how Jews were murdered, the stages of the final solution.”

The next day she was one-upped by an unnamed senior figure in one of the institutes for Holocaust studies who claimed “there was too much emphasis on the Jewish aspects of the Holocaust.” Haaretz writer Anshel Pfeffer followed with an editorial entitled “The Holocaust isn’t just about the Jews.” Pfeffer asked if “Jews [can] honestly demand to reserve sole usage rights of the Holocaust for political purposes?” The Holocaust “has an immense universal meaning as well.”

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