Battle for the Holocaust

Peter Novick

Gulie Ne'eman Arad

Norman Finkelstein

Peter Novick is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. His most recent book, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: the American experience explores the reasons why, more than 50 years after the liberation of the concentration camps, the Holocaust has such a prominent place in American consciousness and culture.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he says, the Nazis' systematic murder of Jews and other groups was little talked about. Novick attributes this reticence to the Cold War, with its imperative to maintain a united front among western states, including Germany, against the Soviet bloc.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, followed by the Six Day War in 1967 and then the Yom Kippur War in 1973 shifted perceptions of the Holocaust, linking it more centrally to Jewish identity. A strong Israel was portrayed as 'redemption', the phoenix rising from the ashes of the concentration camps, and the only possible future for Jews.

Since Jewish tradition, unlike Christianity, has never valued or promoted suffering, Novick interprets the modern veneration of victimhood as a kind of Christianisation, an acceptable way of presenting Jewish identity to the non-Jewish world. This is dangerous, he argues, because it tacitly endorses the definition of the Jew as an eternal pariah.

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Gulie Ne'eman Arad was born in the Yishuv — the Jewish settlement in Palestine before the founding of the State of Israel — and spent a number of years in the United States. In the early 1970s she returned to Israel where she now teaches American and European History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

She believes that the Holocaust has been politicised: how it is portrayed and perceived have changed depending on the interests and agenda of those who have the power to define those events and shape the narrative.

Her newly published book, America, its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism looks back to the period leading up to the Nazis' 'Final Solution', to ask why the American Jews did not do more to help the persecuted Jewish communities of Europe. She argues that part of the reason was that, despite pressure from the grassroots of the Jewish community, the leadership were afraid of appearing less than patriotic by asking the USA to open its doors to refugees.

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Norman G Finkelstein's parents survived the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps, and he was born in 1953. He teaches political theory at Hunter College, City University of New York and has written articles and books, about Israel/Palestine and about the Holocaust.

In his latest book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering he argues, controversially, that Jewish institutions are protecting their power base by diverting restitution funds that should rightfully go to the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination. He accuses community leaders of exploiting the history for their own benefit and calls Nobel Prizewinner and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel, a hypocrite for accepting huge fees for giving speeches on the Holocaust.

Finkelstein also contends that since 1967, at the behest of the United States, the State of Israel has exploited the Holocaust in order to bolster its own moral status while committing immoral acts against the Palestinians. By claiming the status of victimhood, he says, Israel is attempting to put itself beyond criticism.

Some critics have questioned the accuracy of Finkelstein's assertions, and the Jewish communal establishment has responded with fury, accusing him of antisemitism and branding him a self-hater. In other quarters, though, while being criticised for his emotional style, he has been credited with raising difficult but crucial questions.

After Auschwitz

The misuse of memory

Where they stand

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