Unpacking Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry

Norman Finkelstein takes apart sacred cows of “the Holocaust” in his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. It is brilliant. Here are a few excerpts which will resonate today.

He analyzes and indicts what he terms the Holocaust industry. He explains that for him, “’The Holocaust’ is an ideological representation of the Nazi Holocaust… Its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, the Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a “victim” state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue from the specious victimhood—in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified.” (3)

Because of my age, I had no way of knowing that between World War II and 1967, the United States government and American Jews did not pay attention to the Holocaust or to Israel. The author dispels the standard explanation that Jews were traumatized by the Holocaust and therefore repressed their memory of it. “The real reason for public silence on the Nazi extermination was the conformist policies of the American Jewish leadership and the political climate of post-war America. In both domestic and international affairs. American Jewish elites hewed closely to official US policy…American Jewish elites ‘forgot’ the Nazi Holocaust because Germany—West Germany by 1949—became a crucial post-war American ally in the US confrontation with the Soviet Union…With minor reservations, major American Jewish organizations quickly fell into line with the United States’ support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany…The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for yet another reason. Leftist Jews, who were opposed to the Cold War alignment with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop harping on it. Remembrance of the Nazi Holocaust was tagged as a Communist cause. Strapped with the stereotype that conflated Jews with the Left—in fact, Jews did account for a third of the vote for progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948—American Jewish elites did not shrink from sacrificing fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish subversives to government agencies, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League actively collaborated in the McCarthy-era witch hunt…Fearful of association with the political Left abroad and at home, mainstream Jewish organizations opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi German Social Democrats as well as boycotts of German manufacturers and public demonstrations against ex-Nazis touring the United States.” (13-15)

“Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life. The standard explanation of this transformation is that Israel’s extreme isolation and vulnerability during the June war revived memories of the Nazi extermination. In fact, this analysis misrepresents both the reality of Mideast power relations at the time and the nature of the evolving relationship between American Jewish elites and Israel. Just as mainstream American Jewish organizations downplayed the Nazi Holocaust in the years after World War II to conform to the US government’s Cold War priorities, so their attitude to Israel kept in step with US policy…From its founding in 1948 through the June 1967 war, Israel did not figure centrally in American strategic planning…Impressed by Israel’s overwhelming display of force, the United States moved to incorporate it as a strategic asset…. Military and economic assistance began to pour in as Israel turned into a proxy for US power in the Middle East…Paradoxically…Israel facilitated assimilation in the United States: Jews now stood on the front lines defending America—indeed, ‘Western Civilization’—against the retrograde Arab hordes. Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the bogey of dual loyalty, it now connoted super-loyalty. After all, it was not Americans but Israelis fighting and dying to protect US interests…Accordingly, the American Jewish elite suddenly discovered Israel… After the June war, mainstream American Jewish organizations worked full-time to firm up the American-Israeli alliance…

Some argue that Israel’s subordination to US power and occupation of neighboring Arab states were not only wrong in principle but also harmful to its own interest. Israel would become increasingly militarized and alienated from the Arab world. For Israel’s new American Jewish ‘supporters,’ however, such talk bordered on heresy: an independent Israel at peace with its neighbors was worthless; an Israel aligned with currents in the Arab world seeking independence from the United States was a disaster. Only an Israeli Sparta beholden to American power would do, because only then could US Jewish leaders act as the spokesman for American imperial ambitions. Noam Chomsky has suggested that these ‘supporters of Israel’ should more probably be called ‘supporters of the moral degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel.’ To protect their strategic asset, American Jewish elites ‘remembered’ the Holocaust… The Holocaust industry sprung up only after Israel’s overwhelming display of military dominance and flourished amid extreme Israeli triumphalism…

Israel’s… increasing international isolation after…the war—conventional accounts maintain—exacerbated American Jewish fears of Israel’s vulnerability. Accordingly, Holocaust memory now moved center stage…

A more coherent, if less charitable, explanation is that American Jewish elites remembered the Nazi Holocaust before June 1967 only when it was politically expedient. Israel, their new patron, had capitalized on the Nazi Holocaust during the Eichmann trial. Given its proven utility, organized American Jewry exploited the Nazi Holocaust after the June war. Once ideologically recast, the Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel…

There are also domestic sources of the Holocaust industry. Mainstream interpretations point to the recent emergence of ‘identity politics,’ on the one hand, and the ‘culture of victimization,’ on the other. In effect, each identity was grounded in a particular history of oppression; Jews accordingly sought their own ethnic identity in the Holocaust. Yet, among groups decrying their victimization, including Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Jews alone are not disadvantaged in American society. In fact, identity politics and the Holocaust have taken hold among American Jews, not because of victim status, but because they are not victims. As anti-Semitic barriers quickly fell away after World War II, Jews rose to preeminence in the United States. According to Lippset and Raab, per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews; 16 of the 40 wealthiest Americans are Jews; 40% of American Nobel prize winners in science and economics are Jewish, as are 20% of professors at major universities; and 40% of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington….Far from constituting an obstacle to success, Jewish identity has become the crown of that success…Indeed, the secular success story of American Jewry validated a core—perhaps the sole— tenet of their newly acquired identity as Jews. Who could any longer dispute the Jews were a ‘chosen’ people?…

By the 1970s, anti-Semitism was no longer a salient feature of American life. Nonetheless, Jewish leaders started sounding alarm bells that American Jewry was threatened by a virulent ‘new anti-Semitism.’…For organized American Jewry, this contrived hysteria over a new anti-Semitism served multiple purposes. It boosted Israel’s stock as the refuge of last resort if and when American Jews needed one. The fundraising appeals of Jewish organizations purportedly combating anti-Semitism fell on more receptive years…The main ulterior motive for sounding the anti-Semitism alarm bells, however, lay elsewhere. As American Jews enjoyed greater secular success, they moved steadily to the right politically. Although still left of center on cultural questions such as sexual morality and abortion, Jews grew increasingly conservative on politics and the economy. Complimenting the rightward churn was an inward turn, as Jews, no longer mindful of past allies among the have-nots, increasingly earmarked their resources for Jewish concerns only. This reorientation of American Jewry was clearly evident in growing tensions between Jews and Blacks. Traditionally aligned with Black people against caste discrimination in the United States, many Jews broke with the Civil Rights alliance in the late 1960s. When, as Jonathan Kaufman reports, ‘the goals of the Civil Rights movement were shifting—from demands for political and legal equality to demands for economic equality.’ ‘When the Civil Rights Movement moved North, into the neighborhoods of these liberal Jews,’ Cheryl Greenberg recalls, ‘the question of integration took on a different tone. With concerns now couched in class rather than racial terms, Jews fled to the suburbs almost as quickly as white Christians to avoid what they perceived as the deterioration of their schools and neighborhoods.’…. More recently, Jewish publicists and organizations have figured prominently in efforts to dismantle Affirmative Action programs…Moving aggressively to defend their corporate and class interests, Jewish elites branded all opposition to their new conservative policies anti-Semitic…In this ideological offensive, The Holocaust came to play a critical role. Most obviously, evoking historic persecution deflected present-day criticism. Jews could even gesture to the ‘quota system’ from which they suffered in the past as a pretext for opposing Affirmative Action programs…

Beyond this, however, The Holocaust framework comprehended anti-Semitism as a strictly irrational Gentile loathing of Jews. It precluded the possibility that animus toward Jews might be grounded in a real conflict of interests. Invoking The Holocaust was therefore a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews: such criticism could only spring from pathological hatred. Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered the Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked. The pretense, however, was that, there and here, Jews faced an imminent ‘Second Holocaust.’ Thus, American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying… Just as Israelis, armed to the teeth by the United States, courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place. Lording it over those less able to defend themselves: that is the real content of organized American Jews’ reclaimed courage.” (16-38)

Finkelstein takes apart two central dogmas that underpin the Holocaust framework, that the Holocaust was a unique historical event, and that the Holocaust was the climax of irrational Gentile hatred of Jews. He explains how The Holocaust serves as “moral capital.” “In effect, Holocaust uniqueness—this ‘claim’ upon others, this ‘moral capital’—serves as Israel’s prize alibi. The singularity of Jewish suffering,” historian Peter Baldwin suggests, ‘adds to the moral and emotional claims that Israel can make…on other nations.’ Thus, according to Nathan Glazer, the Holocaust, which pointed to the ‘peculiar distinctiveness of the Jews,’ gave Jews ‘the right to consider themselves specially threatened, especially worthy of whatever efforts were necessary for survival.’…There is another factor at work. The claim of Holocaust uniqueness is a claim of Jewish uniqueness. Not the suffering of Jews but that Jews suffered is what made the Holocaust unique. Or: The Holocaust is special because Jews are special…Appropriating a Zionist tenant, The Holocaust framework cast Hitler’s Final Solution as the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews. The world abandoned the Jews…The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next inevitable outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state…If all the world wants the Jews dead, truly, the wonder is that they are still alive—and, unlike much of humanity, not exactly starving. This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense… By confirming total blamelessness on Jews, The Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure. Arab hostility, African American hostility: they are ‘fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action.’…” (48-54)

He also critiques the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. “The first question is why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the nation’s capital. Its presence on the Washington mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the accusations of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide, but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans.” (72)

“The museum’s overarching message is that ‘we’ couldn’t even conceive, let alone commit, such evil deeds. ‘The Holocaust’ cuts against the grain of the ‘American ethos,’ Michael Barenbaum observes in the companion book to the museum…’We see in its perpetration a violation of every essential American value.’ The Holocaust Museum signals the Zionist lesson that Israel was the ‘appropriate answer to Nazism’ with the closing scenes of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine.” (74)

He discusses the controversy around the museum’s marginalizing the genocide of the Romani. “Acknowledging the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over the Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish ‘moral capital.’…If the Nazis persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that the Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the Gypsy genocide? In the museum’s permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of Nazism receive only token recognition…(77)

Apart from Holocaust memorials, fully 17 states mandate or recommend Holocaust programs in their schools, and many colleges and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies. Hardly a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in The New York Times. The number of scholarly studies devoted to the Nazi Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000. Consider by comparison scholarship on the hecatomb in the Congo. Between 1891 and 1911, some 10 million Africans perished in the course of Europe’s exploitation of Congolese ivory and rubber resources. Yet, the first and only scholarly volume in English directly devoted to this topic was published 2 years ago…The Holocaust is by now firmly entrenched in American life…To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more revealing point, however, is when the US invokes the Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies…recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not…Organized American jewelry has exploited the Nazi Holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel’s and its own morally indefensible policies.” (143-149)