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April 29, 2011
Making the Holocaust the Lesson on All Evils
NYTimes
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
LOS ANGELES - Before you are submerged within the museum's
theatrically darkened central galleries, before you learn how the
cafes and intellectual life of the Weimar Republic gradually gave way
to the annihilationist racial fantasies Hitler outlined in `Mein
Kampf' - before, that is, you experience a variation of the Holocaust
narrative with its wrenching genocidal climax - there are other trials
a visitor to the Museum of Tolerance here must pass through.
You must first choose a door. One is invitingly labeled
`Unprejudiced'; the other, illuminated in red, screams `Prejudiced.'
No contest. But one door doesn't open; the other does. Here,
evidently, we must admit we are all prejudiced, not just the guards at
Auschwitz.
As proof, below a streaming news ticker (`Gay Basher Gets 12 Years')
are panels about `Confronting Hate in America': Two Latinos are beaten
on Long Island; a white supremacist shoots Jews in Los Angeles; a Sikh
is murdered in a post-9/11 `hate crime'; a homosexual student is
brutally murdered in Wyoming. On one panel is a description of the
Oklahoma City bombing; on another, the attacks of 9/11.
Walk a little farther and you come to a mock 1950s-style diner, where
a television monitor broadcasts a staged news video about a drunken
driver injuring his date on prom night. We are asked to record our
votes about who is most responsible: the liquor store owner who
illegally sold the booze, the parents of the drunk driver, the
teenager himself?
A case of cyber-bullying also solicits our careful assessments.
`Think,' we are urged by the signs: `Assume responsibility,' `Ask
questions,' `Speak up.'
Similar prescriptions are implied throughout this 80,000-square-foot
museum, which opened in 1993 as `the educational arm of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center,' the international organization associated with
that famed Holocaust survivor and `Nazi hunter' who died in 2005. The
museum's central exhibition about the Holocaust and the murder of six
million Jews is preceded by this `Tolerancenter,' as it is called,
which strains to tie together slavery, genocides, prejudice,
discrimination and hate crimes, while showing even elementary school
students (as the museum literature says) `the connection between these
large-scale events and the epidemic of bullying in today's schools.'
But as the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated on Sunday
- known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah - it is worth taking a closer look at
this approach to mass murder. The Museum of Tolerance is not
alone. Even a modest museum devoted to the Holocaust, like the one
that opened in 2009 at Queensborough Community College, offers
testimonials by students about how the Holocaust has taught them about
tolerance and the evils of discrimination. And no Holocaust museum, it
seems, can be complete without invoking other 20th-century genocides
in Rwanda, Darfur or Cambodia as proof that the lessons of the
Holocaust must be taught even more fervently. In the recently opened
Holocaust museum in Skokie, Ill., bullying also plays a cautionary
role.
Several years ago, too, the Anne Frank Haus in Amsterdam ended its
sober tour through the famed annex where that young diarist and her
family hid from the Nazis with a video-laden hortatory show about
nearly every social injustice that could be enumerated. The passion
may now be cooler, but the impulse remains. We learn from the
Amsterdam museum's Web site that an Anne Frank School - like those
being established all over the world - `obliges itself to stand up for
freedom, justice, tolerance and human dignity and to resolutely turn
against any form of aggression, discrimination, racism, political
extremism and excessive nationalism.'
Though Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington have remained relatively immune to such sweeping
moralizing, in most institutions and curriculums, the Holocaust's
lessons are clear: We should all get along, become politically active
and be very considerate of our neighbors. If not, well, the
differences between hate crimes and the Holocaust - between bullying
and Buchenwald - are just a matter of degree.
Perhaps, though, we should take the lesson even further. What if this
were the approach of every historical museum? The Imperial War Museum
in London might look at World War I as a result of intolerance and
hold out the promise of ending all wars if only its lessons were
properly learned; after all, didn't the French and Germans enjoy a
sociable Christmas holiday cease-fire in the trenches of the Western
Front?
The history of American slavery might explore the many ways people
have enslaved others or forced them to do things against their
will. An examination of the Soviet Gulag might emphasize the need to
permit greater diversity of opinion in society, or more adventurously,
it might attack the notion of imprisonment itself for being so
Gulag-like.
As history, this is laughable. Yet we seem willing to accept that in
the case of the Holocaust, an exhibition must allude to all forms of
genocide, and must offer broad lessons about tolerance.
In part, this is because of the ways many of these museums began,
spurred into creation by survivors who were horrified by their own
experience, unable to make sense of it or of the hatred behind it.
Couldn't it all have been prevented had others been more tolerant?
That approach is reflected in the Museum of Tolerance, whose founder,
Rabbi Marvin Hier, understood Wiesenthal's own desire to generalize
the Holocaust to bring more attention to it. As Tom Segev suggests in
his new biography, `Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends'
(Doubleday), the museum was even conceived of as a West Coast rival to
the more sober Holocaust museum then being built in Washington.
The spirit of generalization has also been applied to the nature of
the Holocaust itself. In a 2005 lecture on `The Use and Abuse of
Holocaust Memory,' Walter Reich, a former director of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, points out that in 1979, after a
commission headed by Elie Wiesel was established to create a Holocaust
museum in Washington, President Jimmy Carter referred to `11 million
innocent victims exterminated - 6 million of them Jews.' The 11
million figure has since become an international touchstone. In some
cases it has expanded to 12, in effect diminishing Jewish centrality.
But, as Mr. Reich points out, the 11 million figure was pulled out of
thin air by Wiesenthal. The historian Yehuda Bauer wrote: `Wiesenthal,
as he admitted to me in private, invented the figure in order to
create sympathy for the Jews - in order to make the non-Jews feel like
they are part of us.' In fact, historians suggest that there were
perhaps a half million non-Jews who died in concentration camps.
The impulse to tell the Holocaust story only in the context of
elaborate generalizations has also helped justify its inclusion in
school curriculums and helped obtain public financing for museums: The
goal was not particular but general, not Judeocentric but
humanitarian. The Museum of Tolerance, for example, runs an extensive
series of education programs, including `Tools for Tolerance for
Professionals Programs': sensitivity training for educators, law
enforcement officers and corporate leaders.
But what kind of history emerges as a result of these generalizations?
History stripped of distinctions. To understand the Armenian genocide,
for example, it is insufficient to treat it simply in passing, as if
it resembled what happened to the Jews in Europe. Understanding it
would mean examining the Ottoman Empire in the early decades of the
20th century, chronicling the relationship between Muslims and
Christians on the borders of Europe, comprehending connections between
the fates of Greeks and Armenians, and analyzing the imminent
dissolution of that empire.
And the deeper one looks at the Holocaust itself, the more unusual its
historical circumstances become. The cause of these mass killings was
not `intolerance,' but something else, still scarcely
understood. Making sense of the Holocaust would mean first
comprehending the nature of hatred for Jews, surveying the place of
Jews in European societies and dissecting the blindness of many
Germans and most Europeans to the ambitions Hitler made so explicit.
These killings were not in the context of war over contested terrain;
they often took precedence over the very waging of war. And they were
accomplished not primarily through individual murders by sword or
rifle, as so many other ethnic massacres before and since have been,
but rather by harnessing the machinery of the era's most advanced
industrial society.
Intolerance is almost too easy an explanation, implying a comforting
moral message. Instead, why not look at how Hitler's powers might have
been undercut before he began to wage the war in Europe and the war
against the Jews? Wouldn't an examination of those possibilities offer
a more profound lesson about how to prevent genocide?
And how central is intolerance to genocide anyway? Many intolerant
societies don't set up bureaucratic offices to supervise efficient
mass murder. Many people who consider themselves very tolerant are
nonetheless blind to their own hatreds. There are even intolerant
people who would still find genocide unthinkable.
Finally, the homiletic approach to the Holocaust has broken down
almost all inhibitions in using the Holocaust as an analogy, even
though the eagerness to do so is a sure sign of misuse. And judging
from recent history, the analogies that have already been established,
far from making genocide unthinkable, have helped make it seem as
commonplace a possibility as schoolyard bullying.
The Museum of Tolerance is at 9786 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles;
(310) 553-8403; museumoftolerance.com.
From: A. Papazian
Making the Holocaust the Lesson on All Evils
NYTimes
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
LOS ANGELES - Before you are submerged within the museum's
theatrically darkened central galleries, before you learn how the
cafes and intellectual life of the Weimar Republic gradually gave way
to the annihilationist racial fantasies Hitler outlined in `Mein
Kampf' - before, that is, you experience a variation of the Holocaust
narrative with its wrenching genocidal climax - there are other trials
a visitor to the Museum of Tolerance here must pass through.
You must first choose a door. One is invitingly labeled
`Unprejudiced'; the other, illuminated in red, screams `Prejudiced.'
No contest. But one door doesn't open; the other does. Here,
evidently, we must admit we are all prejudiced, not just the guards at
Auschwitz.
As proof, below a streaming news ticker (`Gay Basher Gets 12 Years')
are panels about `Confronting Hate in America': Two Latinos are beaten
on Long Island; a white supremacist shoots Jews in Los Angeles; a Sikh
is murdered in a post-9/11 `hate crime'; a homosexual student is
brutally murdered in Wyoming. On one panel is a description of the
Oklahoma City bombing; on another, the attacks of 9/11.
Walk a little farther and you come to a mock 1950s-style diner, where
a television monitor broadcasts a staged news video about a drunken
driver injuring his date on prom night. We are asked to record our
votes about who is most responsible: the liquor store owner who
illegally sold the booze, the parents of the drunk driver, the
teenager himself?
A case of cyber-bullying also solicits our careful assessments.
`Think,' we are urged by the signs: `Assume responsibility,' `Ask
questions,' `Speak up.'
Similar prescriptions are implied throughout this 80,000-square-foot
museum, which opened in 1993 as `the educational arm of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center,' the international organization associated with
that famed Holocaust survivor and `Nazi hunter' who died in 2005. The
museum's central exhibition about the Holocaust and the murder of six
million Jews is preceded by this `Tolerancenter,' as it is called,
which strains to tie together slavery, genocides, prejudice,
discrimination and hate crimes, while showing even elementary school
students (as the museum literature says) `the connection between these
large-scale events and the epidemic of bullying in today's schools.'
But as the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day is commemorated on Sunday
- known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah - it is worth taking a closer look at
this approach to mass murder. The Museum of Tolerance is not
alone. Even a modest museum devoted to the Holocaust, like the one
that opened in 2009 at Queensborough Community College, offers
testimonials by students about how the Holocaust has taught them about
tolerance and the evils of discrimination. And no Holocaust museum, it
seems, can be complete without invoking other 20th-century genocides
in Rwanda, Darfur or Cambodia as proof that the lessons of the
Holocaust must be taught even more fervently. In the recently opened
Holocaust museum in Skokie, Ill., bullying also plays a cautionary
role.
Several years ago, too, the Anne Frank Haus in Amsterdam ended its
sober tour through the famed annex where that young diarist and her
family hid from the Nazis with a video-laden hortatory show about
nearly every social injustice that could be enumerated. The passion
may now be cooler, but the impulse remains. We learn from the
Amsterdam museum's Web site that an Anne Frank School - like those
being established all over the world - `obliges itself to stand up for
freedom, justice, tolerance and human dignity and to resolutely turn
against any form of aggression, discrimination, racism, political
extremism and excessive nationalism.'
Though Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington have remained relatively immune to such sweeping
moralizing, in most institutions and curriculums, the Holocaust's
lessons are clear: We should all get along, become politically active
and be very considerate of our neighbors. If not, well, the
differences between hate crimes and the Holocaust - between bullying
and Buchenwald - are just a matter of degree.
Perhaps, though, we should take the lesson even further. What if this
were the approach of every historical museum? The Imperial War Museum
in London might look at World War I as a result of intolerance and
hold out the promise of ending all wars if only its lessons were
properly learned; after all, didn't the French and Germans enjoy a
sociable Christmas holiday cease-fire in the trenches of the Western
Front?
The history of American slavery might explore the many ways people
have enslaved others or forced them to do things against their
will. An examination of the Soviet Gulag might emphasize the need to
permit greater diversity of opinion in society, or more adventurously,
it might attack the notion of imprisonment itself for being so
Gulag-like.
As history, this is laughable. Yet we seem willing to accept that in
the case of the Holocaust, an exhibition must allude to all forms of
genocide, and must offer broad lessons about tolerance.
In part, this is because of the ways many of these museums began,
spurred into creation by survivors who were horrified by their own
experience, unable to make sense of it or of the hatred behind it.
Couldn't it all have been prevented had others been more tolerant?
That approach is reflected in the Museum of Tolerance, whose founder,
Rabbi Marvin Hier, understood Wiesenthal's own desire to generalize
the Holocaust to bring more attention to it. As Tom Segev suggests in
his new biography, `Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends'
(Doubleday), the museum was even conceived of as a West Coast rival to
the more sober Holocaust museum then being built in Washington.
The spirit of generalization has also been applied to the nature of
the Holocaust itself. In a 2005 lecture on `The Use and Abuse of
Holocaust Memory,' Walter Reich, a former director of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, points out that in 1979, after a
commission headed by Elie Wiesel was established to create a Holocaust
museum in Washington, President Jimmy Carter referred to `11 million
innocent victims exterminated - 6 million of them Jews.' The 11
million figure has since become an international touchstone. In some
cases it has expanded to 12, in effect diminishing Jewish centrality.
But, as Mr. Reich points out, the 11 million figure was pulled out of
thin air by Wiesenthal. The historian Yehuda Bauer wrote: `Wiesenthal,
as he admitted to me in private, invented the figure in order to
create sympathy for the Jews - in order to make the non-Jews feel like
they are part of us.' In fact, historians suggest that there were
perhaps a half million non-Jews who died in concentration camps.
The impulse to tell the Holocaust story only in the context of
elaborate generalizations has also helped justify its inclusion in
school curriculums and helped obtain public financing for museums: The
goal was not particular but general, not Judeocentric but
humanitarian. The Museum of Tolerance, for example, runs an extensive
series of education programs, including `Tools for Tolerance for
Professionals Programs': sensitivity training for educators, law
enforcement officers and corporate leaders.
But what kind of history emerges as a result of these generalizations?
History stripped of distinctions. To understand the Armenian genocide,
for example, it is insufficient to treat it simply in passing, as if
it resembled what happened to the Jews in Europe. Understanding it
would mean examining the Ottoman Empire in the early decades of the
20th century, chronicling the relationship between Muslims and
Christians on the borders of Europe, comprehending connections between
the fates of Greeks and Armenians, and analyzing the imminent
dissolution of that empire.
And the deeper one looks at the Holocaust itself, the more unusual its
historical circumstances become. The cause of these mass killings was
not `intolerance,' but something else, still scarcely
understood. Making sense of the Holocaust would mean first
comprehending the nature of hatred for Jews, surveying the place of
Jews in European societies and dissecting the blindness of many
Germans and most Europeans to the ambitions Hitler made so explicit.
These killings were not in the context of war over contested terrain;
they often took precedence over the very waging of war. And they were
accomplished not primarily through individual murders by sword or
rifle, as so many other ethnic massacres before and since have been,
but rather by harnessing the machinery of the era's most advanced
industrial society.
Intolerance is almost too easy an explanation, implying a comforting
moral message. Instead, why not look at how Hitler's powers might have
been undercut before he began to wage the war in Europe and the war
against the Jews? Wouldn't an examination of those possibilities offer
a more profound lesson about how to prevent genocide?
And how central is intolerance to genocide anyway? Many intolerant
societies don't set up bureaucratic offices to supervise efficient
mass murder. Many people who consider themselves very tolerant are
nonetheless blind to their own hatreds. There are even intolerant
people who would still find genocide unthinkable.
Finally, the homiletic approach to the Holocaust has broken down
almost all inhibitions in using the Holocaust as an analogy, even
though the eagerness to do so is a sure sign of misuse. And judging
from recent history, the analogies that have already been established,
far from making genocide unthinkable, have helped make it seem as
commonplace a possibility as schoolyard bullying.
The Museum of Tolerance is at 9786 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles;
(310) 553-8403; museumoftolerance.com.
From: A. Papazian