Cloud After Auschwitz

You have "little trace," exclaimed Gershom Scholem in a letter he sent to the great Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt, of "love for the Jewish people." It was the early 1960s, and Scholem, one of Israel's most prominent intellectuals, was responding to her analysis of Adolf Eichmann's trial. Scholem's attack was spurred by several assertions Arendt had made, including her allegation that the Jewish officials in the ghettos--the Judenrat--expedited the extermination machine; if they had not collaborated with the Nazis, Arendt wrote, fewer Jews would have been killed.

Scholem's criticism expressed the prevailing view held by Israel's elite. Not surprisingly, Arendt was censored in Israel, and it took thirty-six years before an Israeli press agreed to translate her writings. Although the recent appearance of Eichmann in Jerusalem in Hebrew has rekindled an age-old debate, it seems that Israelis can now relate to the Holocaust in a more mature way.

Corners of the Jewish establishment in the United States may not be ready to cope with similarly forceful criticism, though, judging from the response to Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry. A review put forth in the New York Times tossed it aside as "an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that 'The Holocaust' will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he otherwise discounts." There are two major problems with this line of criticism. First, it summarily dismisses Finkelstein's arguments without any attempt to engage his disturbing accusations. Second, instead of concentrating on the book, the reviewer goes after the author, implying that Finkelstein, the son of survivors, represents a neoteric breed of anti-Semite. In this way, it resembles the assault on Arendt.

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