A View From The U - University of Washington
One Professor's Take on Contemporary Jewish Life
Martin Jaffee is professor of religious studies and comparative religion at the university of washington. His comments in no way represent official views of the University of Washington. And, in accordance with the intellectual standards celebrated by Shmooze Radio, his comments may not even represent his own views. Sometimes he just likes to stir the pot.
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THE HOLOCAUST: “NEVER AGAIN” OR “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”?
It so happens that I can sing about a half dozen Christmas carols in German. How many of you out there know the lines that follow “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deiner Blatter”? Not many, I bet. Don’t worry, I won’t disclose them here. As the Talmud reminds us: some topics are best taught only to a single student—provided that he already possesses the knowledge! That’s why the Talmud is full of stories about sages who “entered the Paradise” of mystical visions, yet tells us next to nothing about what they saw. So I’ll guard the secret of the magic words. At the very least, however, I can tell the story of how a Jewish boy from Long Island came to master such mysteries.
The year is 1960. I am beginning the 7th grade. At Valley Stream North High, everyone has to take at least 4 years of German, French, or Spanish in order to get their diploma. I choose German and find myself in a class of 30 other kids of whom about 28 are Jews. Why the high Jewish enrollment? Some of you will have guessed the answer. Our parents, mostly American-born children of Jewish immigrants from Europe, spoke at least some Yiddish in the home—especially when they needed to discuss things they didn’t want the kids to know about. To us, the sound of hushed Yiddish conversation meant that tantalizing mysteries of the adult world were being revealed—and we remained shrouded in ignorance! Now if you know that Yiddish descends from medieval German, you’ll immediately grasp why so many Jewish kids were so curious about the German language. We wanted to scout out the Promised Land of adult knowledge, whose cities were guarded by the watch towers of Mamaloshn!
Linguistic spy school, unfortunately, wasn’t much of a success. If today I can read Yiddish passably, that comes from my graduate student days. In High School, what I really learned to do was translate “Casey at the Bat” and “I Saw Her Standing There” into ridiculous German versions. And, as I said, I learned all those carols. Each year at the school Christmas pageant, our class—represented by kids with names like Andrea Talmud, Karen Siegel, Ira Hecht, Jimmy Zucker, and Lisa Rosenberg (and the token Gentile, Carl Fortunato)—would ascend the school stage and belt out “O Tannenbaum,” “Stille Nacht, Ruhige Nacht” and other favorites accompanied by the elegant piano stylings of our teacher, Mrs. Bragelli.
Let me now redraw this picture in order to highlight how odd it is. Not 15 years after the murder of 6 million European Jews, we see a group of American Jewish children gamely performing Christmas songs in the language spoken by Storm Troopers and the Obersturmbahnfuhrers of Auschwitz and Maideneck. And not even a wink of irony from the kids, nor a whiff of outraged protest from the families of these children, many of whom had lost European relatives to the Nazi rampage. Could you imagine such a scene in any American public school with a large Jewish population today?
Of course not. And why not? Why have time and distance made Jews more aware—rather than less—of our victimization by the Nazis? Part of the answer is best summed up in a word so common today that we barely recognize its novelty. But it is a word virtually unheard in 1960. That word is “Holocaust.” It is a Greek word that means something totally consumed by fire. It actually entered Jewish culture by around 250 BCE, when the translators of the Torah into Greek chose it as their preferred rendering of the Hebrew term, olah. The olah was a sacrificial offering in which the slaughtered animal was wholly burned to ash on an altar. An olah is what Abraham believed God wanted him to make of Isaac on Mt. Moriah. An olah is what Aaron offered at dawn and dusk in the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness. These were the original “holocausts.”
It’s hard to retrace the logic by which the murder of Jews in Europe came to be symbolized as a sacrifice to the God of Israel. Holocausts on the altar brought God’s life-giving power into the world for a blessing. What blessing was achieved by the obliteration of 1000 years of Jewish civilization in Europe? If the Jews were the sacrificial beast, was Hitler—yimakh shmo--the High Priest at the altar doing God’s work? The logic may be hard to grasp, but the symbol took off. By the 1970s, perhaps a decade after my classmates and I offered our final “O Tannenbaum,” the term Holocaust was everywhere in the Jewish world. True, Israelis still preferred a much more appropriate Hebrew term, Sho’ah (“catastrophe”), which had been used since the 1940s to describe the Hitler period. But certainly in the States, the Holocaust became more than a name for an event. It became a mandatory touchstone of Jewish identity.
Who was a Jew? Anyone whom Hitler would have murdered as a Jew! Who was a good Jew? Anyone who did what he or she could to make sure that the Holocaust would never be re-enacted. “Never Again!” became the organizing formula of American Jewish fundraising for Israel. Lectures and reminiscences by survivors became the sure-fire topic to attract a crowd to a Jewish communal event. Viewing a TV series on the Holocaust came to represent an act of Jewish identification for many who, in all other ways, were on the margins of Jewish communal life. The Holocaust had become such a routine part of American public discourse that it was memorialized in a museum in the Nation’s capitol.
But then the problems started. Our success in fostering “Holocaust Awareness” turned our unique catastrophe into an infinitely adaptable symbol for political oppression and even misguided social policy. You’re the descendant of African slaves still suffering from centuries of persecution in racist American society? Then you’ve suffered a Holocaust! You’re opposed to abortion on demand? Then you’re a virtuous saint trying to prevent a Holocaust of the Unborn. You’re a Palestinian Arab whose family orchard has been appropriated for the purpose of Jewish State building? Then the Jews are committing against you the Holocaust which they themselves suffered! And, in fact, if you’re a thoroughly warped antisemite, the Holocaust is nothing but a Jewish hoax!
The events symbolized as the Holocaust were among the most horrible in human history. But we do the memory of its victims no honor by playing the game of “our Holocaust is worse than your Holocaust.” There is no virtue in victimhood. “The Holocaust” has exhausted its power to inspire collective Jewish action. Maybe it’s time to immerse ourselves in the rich life of Jewish religion and culture rather than an obsession with its near destruction. Anybody out there know the Yiddish version of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”?
Martin S. Jaffee
