Reflections on "The Holocaust as an Identity Marker"

"What [Fackenheim] claims all [self-affirming] Jews hear is a 'commanding voice' from Auschwitz that tells them they must persist as Jews, lest they grant Hitler a post-humous victory. … In the face of all those terrible murders, many Jews, whatever their ideological commitments, have been moved by a strong resolution to continue as Jews..." (Alter, Feb 1981, p.55)

"American Jews, [Novick] argues, may have given Hitler a posthumous victory by tacitly endorsing his definition of the Jew as despised pariah." (Penkower, Mar 2000, p.129)

" 'What we have done is to make the murder of the Jews of Europe into one of the principal components of the civil religion of American Jews' " (Neusner, Aug 1979, quoted in Alter, Feb 1981, p.55)

"Serious problems do arise with the near fixation of American Jews on the Holocaust. … can the destiny of Jews be joined decisively to victimization? … the Holocaust, while vital to understanding Jewry's past, must be transcended …" (Penkower, Mar 2000, p.132)

"...a new generation of American Jews may view the question of … the Holocaust differently than did their predecessors. For many of these newly disassimilated Jews … their particularism is expressed through the universal, not the other way around." (Magid, Winter 2012, p. 106)

I want to reflect on this week's readings in three different ways. 

First, is our current way of remembering the Holocaust -- as a (perhaps the) watershed event in modern Jewish history and as a (again, perhaps the) formative origin story for postmodern Judaism -- good for Judaism, or not? 

I know one woman who was, about a decade ago, profoundly out-of-touch with the Judaism in which she had been born and raised. It took a visit (with her gentile husband) to Houston's Holocaust Museum to jolt her into realizing that she wanted to get back in touch with "her people." A decade later, she is active in her synagogue, her husband has not only converted to Judaism but enthusiastically embraced a Jewish identity, and her son is highly involved in a Jewish summer camp. Score one for Holocaust remembrance growing the Tribe and sticking it to Hitler, no?

And yet...my congregation seems to live in fear. We have code locks on our religious school doors, security cameras all around, and police call buttons around every teacher's and staff member's neck -- despite the fact that the worst things that have actually happened in recent memory were a papering of our parking lot with "white nationalist" flyers and a deranged (but unarmed) Christian wandering in during Shabbat services trying to "save" us all. We are not alone in this: many times that I have visited larger in-town synagogues I have had to pass a security guard and convince him that I was not there for nefarious purposes. If this sounds like standard procedure to you, dear readers, consider that at no Christian church I have ever been to was there any barrier to entering the religious school hallway, and that the person I am first greeted by at such places always wears a friendly face and offers me directions instead of questioning my motives for being there. 

What accounts for the difference? While Jews certainly get slighted in public school holiday sing-alongs all the time, there is actually very little deliberate anti-Semitism in my part of the country and in fact most gentile Texans who notice my kippah give me a hearty "keep up the good work" for reasons that I honestly cannot fathom. Is it possible that all of this emphasis on remembering the Holocaust has really given us a self-identity that we are "despised pariahs" and perpetual victims, even when the culture we live in is, by and large, quite willing for us not to be? Is our insistence on remembering the atrocities of the real Nazis making us see potential neo-Nazis everywhere we look, convincing us to hide behind locked gates when we could be opening our doors wide to a world in need of what Judaism has to offer?

Second, I am quite taken with Shaul Magid's portrayal of today's young Jews as "disassimilated." The implication is that the Jewish assimilation into American culture that synagogue leaders make much ado about fearing is actually a fait accompli, and that the continued survival of Judaism in the 21st century will not be a matter of preventing assimilation from happening, but of convincing assimilated Jews to dis-assimilate, to reclaim some of their Jewish "particularism" (in Magid's words), but to do so in such a way as to retain their utter involvement in secular, multicultural American life while simultaneously expressing their Judaism. Not boycotting the office Christmas party, as it were, but bringing dreidels and gelt to share with all the goyim. Our approach to the Holocaust in this context becomes one of balancing particular and universal: yes, the main target of the Holocaust was the Jews, but we remember that while also remembering the thousands of gypsies and LGBT folks and other Nazi-hated minorities who got "holocausted" right alongside us, and we use that memory not to insulate ourselves further from society but as a prod to go out and join hands with our gentile bretheren to stop all of the "holocausting" that is going on in our world right this very moment. 

Third, I want to bring up the white elephant in the Holocaust-remembrance room: converts, who have no ancestors to trace back to Holocaust survivorship, no relatives to remember who perished in the Shoah, no ancestral European community whose loss can be mourned. Also, for that matter, born-Jews whose ancestors are not from Holocaust-affected regions or whose ancestors left Europe long before the Holocaust was a dream in someone's mind. Victims of Russian pogroms whose experiences were just as horrifying as the victims of the Nazis but who get so much less attention today, or Jews who fled anti-Semitic violence in any other part of the world for that matter.

By focusing so much of our attention on the Holocaust, on its victims and its survivors, we run the risk of making those who have no relationship to the Shoah feel like second-class Jews. Converts in particular can feel a sense of outsider-ness, even of guilt, as we ponder the fact that our ancestors were never affected by the Holocaust. And, again, there are those many Jews from other parts of the world who may still have suffered persecution, but it wasn't the Holocaust, so it doesn't get remembered. I'm not saying it should never come up, but if the Holocaust is in fact to be a "principal component" of American Jewish religion, it leaves a lot of people out of the story who may in fact have very interesting stories of their own to tell.