Anti-Semitism, Zionism and ‘the Americanization of the Holocaust’

How Hitler sneaked into American Bar Mitzvah rites, and more. (Also, how Pankaj Mishra helps us understand why a visit to the U.S. in 1985 left Primo Levi intractably depressed...)

It was in early 1981 that I discovered I’m an “anti-Semite”. It came as something of a surprise, I suppose, some seven years after my Barmitzvah, and barely a year after I had left the Zionist youth movement Habonim — and also, having grown up in apartheid South Africa where the ruling party had literally aligned with Nazi Germany and blocked Jewish immigration 50 years earlier, and where country-club anti-Semitism had been quite familiar. Still, there was no escaping it: My father, as a delegate of B’nai Brith, had attended a meeting of the Cape Jewish Board of Deputies on the topic of “Anti-Semitism at the University of Cape Town.” The Yiddish verb to “plotz” probably best described his reaction when Exhibit A in this specter of hatred that had exercised these custodians of our communal identity was a piece I had written in the student newspaper critiquing Israel’s apartheid occupation.

In many ways, apartheid South Africa had been a great environment in which to hone a Jewish identity detachable from the moral cesspool of Zionism. That’s because while we were ruled by literal Nazis and anti-Semitism was commonplace among the regime’s supporters, it would have been absurd to claim a Jewish victim status in our country’s grotesque settler-colonial tableau. The victims of these Nazis were the Black majority, subject to daily, extractive racist brutality. And we Jews, most of Greater Lithuanian extraction, were both beneficiaries of apartheid capitalism, and conscripted as allies in its defense — individually via service in its army, and collectively via Israel, the regime’s most important military ally.

As I wrote in the Forward some years ago

As my generation read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and learned about the Holocaust inside Jewish institutions in a society run by avowed Hitler acolytes, we could always see that their victims in South Africa were the black majority, whose daily violent subjugation enabled a system of white privilege of which we were beneficiaries.

But actually, those represented by the Jewish Board of Deputies did pretty well at enforcing quiet, complicity and collaboration, merrily singing “Avadim Hayinu…” (“once we were slaves”) at their annual Passover seders while Black women in apartheid domestic servitude carried in the steaming tureens of matzo-ball soup. The community’s leaders felt more threatened by the handful of Jewish radicals who had thrown in our lot with the Black-led liberation movement than by the apartheid regime.

And for most of us who had followed this path, it was blindingly obvious that Israel was an analogue (and, of course, ally) of the apartheid system against which we had elected to fight in South Africa. It would have been morally, intellectually and politically dishonest to deny the connection between freeing South Africa and freeing Palestine.

The purpose of that Forward Op Ed had been to urge Jewish-Americans to recognize that they are not victims in today’s USA; they are mostly a privileged community close to political power, but whose history shapes a moral imperative:

To borrow a conceit from the title of a Nathan Englander short story that perfectly captures the mindset of many American Jewish baby boomers: What do we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank? Well, for the most part, in Trump’s America — as in apartheid South Africa — Anne Frank is not Jewish. Here, she’s a Catholic Latina without papers; a Muslim woman in a hijab; a transgender evangelical kid in a rust-belt high school. And just as the characters in Englander’s story wonder which of their neighbors would protect them from the Nazis, so do the Anne Franks of the Trump era have every right to demand our active solidarity.

But the 22 months that followed October 7 have revealed a kind of bizarre transfiguration, in which the Jewish American establishment (although not the majority of its children and grandchildren) claim an almost preposterous mantle of victimhood, elevating an imagined specter of anti-Semitism to the center of the mainstream political conversation.

Of course, we recognize this for what it is, a shoddily manufactured defense of the genocidal apartheid regime by proclaiming it a survivor of the Holocaust and target of an imagined sequel ­– a transfiguration that equates the emotional discomfort of some young Jewish Americans upon being exposed to the racist, criminal reality of Israel with a threat to their physical safety.

But it’s worth trying to figure out how it’s possible that so many Jewish Americans still believe that challenges to Israel — a settler colonial state which has violently displaced and subjugated millions of the indigenous people on whose land it was built, and where none of them has any intention of living — are threats to themselves.

Why were they so willing to claim an objectively unearned victim status for themselves and for one of the most powerful militaries in the world, enforcing an apartheid regime founded and maintained through practices they would find unconscionable in any circumstance not involving Jews?

Was Hitler at your Bar Mitzvah?

A moment during the first Bar Mitzvah I attended in New York decades ago left me profoundly unsettled — but also hinted at an answer to my question above. It was in a small-p progressive synagogue, I’ll spare you the details, but the moment that shocked me came was when Josh (not his real name), haftara completed, was presented with gifts from the congregation, which echoed those I’d received in Maitland Shul 20 years earlier:
A siddur (quotidian prayerbook)… Check.
A mahzor (festival prayerbook)… Check.
A chumash (the torah in book form, i.e. the five books of Moses)… Check.

A photo book about the Holocaust… Wait, WTAF?!!!

I’m not at all religious, but I could not fathom this invocation of Hitler in a synagogue, invited by the congregation to help introduce young Josh into Jewish-American adulthood. It was an invitation to the Nazis to live rent-free in the mind of a young boy. The message: To be a Jew is to be eternally persecuted and victimized, traumatized by an experience you’ll never have and which it’s quite possible even your grandparents avoided, but which will be burned into your consciousness as if you had personally survived Auschwitz. Because Auschwitz is always just around the corner (and these days, according to this twisted theology, its guards speak Arabic and wear keffiyeh).

Many of Josh’s American peers would later be taken on immersive trips to Israel, where at Yad Vashem they’d be subjected to a powerful emotional manipulation designed to convince them that they might be rich, comfortable and mostly white in America, but as Jews they’d always be history’s priority victims. They’d be persuaded that what happened in Auschwitz grants Israel a “right” to unrestrained violence in defense of its grotesque apartheid social order, a.k.a. it’s “right to exist”. And that those Palestinians who dare challenge or resist dispossession and subjugation by Israel are the ones lighting up the ovens of the next Auschwitz.

In the cultivated Zionist imaginary hegemonic among many older Jews in the West, and which mechanically manufactures in the minds of younger Israelis, to be a Jew is to live in the shadow of eternal catastrophe.

It must be remembered that for the Zionist pioneers who actually created the State of Israel, the violent resistance directed against that project was not viewed as anti-Semitism at all, but as the natural response of a colonized people to their dispossession. Read Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall”

it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority… Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."

or Moshe Dayan’s 1956 funeral oration for Roy Rutenberg, where he noted that the young kibbutznik’s death at the hands of “infiltrators” from Gaza ought to have been expected, because it was natural for the Palestinians living there to hate Israel:

For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.

Dayan could see that Israel was not a “normal” state, and could never expect to be left in peace by those it had dispossessed. He warned that it would have to live perpetually at war. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Dayan’s response to October 7 might have been some version of a grim told-you-so.

Like Jabotinsky, Dayan warned Israelis to expect violent resistance, not because of anti-Semitism as the feckless and ignorant leaders of the West imagine, but because Israel had forcibly taken the land that had belonged to indigenous Palestinians and claimed it as a Jewish State. If those who had violently colonized Palestine and displaced its inhabitants had been Catholic, Hindu, Baptist or Buddhist, they would have encountered the same resistance. Despite the lies their descendants disseminate, the Zionist founders knew that resistance to their project was natural and inevitable.

Anti-Semitism targets Jews because of our existence; anti-Zionism targets Israel because of its actions, and the abusive conditions of its existence on the Jewish-supremacist terms it has chosen. The Zionist camp cynically invokes the fate of Europe’s Jews in WW2 to demand a waiver for behaving in ways deemed unacceptable for all countries since WW2. But the Gaza genocide has accelerated the collapse of the Holocaust license claimed by Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Former B’Tselem head Hagai El-Ad warned Israelis two years ago: “We're approaching the moment, and perhaps it's already here, when the memory of the Holocaust won't stop the world from seeing Israel as it is. The moment when the historic crimes committed against our people will stop serving as our Iron Dome, protecting us from being held to account for crimes we are committing in the present against the nation with which we share the historical homeland.”

The savagery Israel has unleashed in Gaza will have created a profound cognitive dissonance among some of those, like young Josh, who grew up seeing pictures of European Jews starved and brutalized by the Nazis. Because the starved and brutalized images today are from Gaza, and it is the perpetrators rather than the victims who are Jewish.

The Americanization of the Holocaust, and of Zionism

The Holocaust-as-Barmitzvah present ritual feeds into a deeper narrative construct, explored by Pankaj Mishra’s excellent new book The World After Gaza. He describes an “Americanization of the Holocaust”, in which today’s mainstream white American collective memory of the Nazi extermination of up to 6 million European Jews is not an organic shared cultural memory of the event itself, nor did it emerge organically in the years after 1945; instead, it’s mostly an engineered and even selective memorialization (as are all official collective memories) that was generalized in the U.S. some three decades after the war, in the 1970s, and like the entire American ‘national’ imaginary, is rooted in popular culture.

As Mishra told Amy Goodman, “We are looking at a very deliberate construction of the memory of the Holocaust, then, of course, its weaponization, its instrumentalization, at the service of Israeli expansionism. And that process, you know, I think, has not been clear for many people. You know, most people assume that the memory of the Holocaust or the collective memory of the Holocaust flowed organically out of the experience. But that’s not how collective memories work. Collective memories are always a construction, often a very deliberate construction, always meant to service certain ideological projects and ends. And that is what has happened.”

Indeed, Western indifference to the Holocaust in its immediate wake was plain to see in the refusal of the U.S. and Britain to open their doors to most of its survivors. And even in Israel, as Tom Segev documents in his excellent The Seventh Million: Israeli Jews and the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors were marginalized and treated with contempt (referred to in popular slang as “sabonim”, meaning pieces of soap) throughout the 1950s.

I’ve always wondered at the silence in the contemporary Jewish-American mainstream narrative when it comes to reckoning with official U.S. anti-Semitism of a century ago that condemned hundreds of thousands of European Jews to die at Hitler’s hand, or else to be conscripted into the violent colonization of Palestine as their only option for survival. Immigration laws passed with bipartisan support in 1924 barred the vast majority of European Jews fleeing pogroms and later, even genocide, from landing on these shores. Yes, shocking as it may sound to a contemporary American culture that from the late 1970s began to quite bizarrely make the Nazi Holocaust a central feature of the national memory, the immigration policies that barred most Jewish survivors of the camps from immigrating here continued to apply even after World War 2.

It is fair to ask, I think, based on simple demographics, whether the State of Israel would even exist were it not for official U.S. anti-Semitism?

Consider: Between 1881 and 1925, the number of Jews who migrated from the Yiddish speaking heim of Eastern Europe to Palestine, was less than 100,000. In the same period, the number of Jewish immigrants fleeing Yiddish Eastern Europe to settle in the United States was between 2.3m and 2.5m. America was the overwhelming preference of Jews seeking a safe home away from the pogroms and violent anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe.

But things changed in 1925, when the U.S. Immigration Act sharply restricted Jewish immigration in line with the white-nationalist preference for Northern European settlement. Before World War 1, America’s average annual intake of Jewish immigrants had been 115,000; from 1925 to 1934, it slowed to just 9,200 per year — and consciously anti-Semitic visa policies reduced it even further after the Nazis came to power in Germany.

Some 210,000 Jews settled in Palestine between the wars, not because they were necessarily imbued with Zionist ideology, but because the preferred U.S. option was now closed for most. (It remained closed, or sharply restricted, for two decades after the Holocaust.) The historic impact of American anti-Semitism is rarely discussed, but would the Zionists have built a viable Yishuv without it? That’s a question for another day. (And not one that’s asked in the mainstream Holocaust/Anti-Semitism narrative.)

But to Mishra’s point, in the 1950s and early '60s, U.S. geopolitics militated against making a domestic public issue of the Holocaust. That’s because West Germany, whose leadership was still riddled with Nazis all the way to the highest echelons, had to be speedily rehabilitated as an ally against “Communist Totalitarianism”. Bob Dylan noticed, in his song about the moral cynicism of the U.S. state:

The Second World War came to an end
We forgave the Germans, and then we were friends
Though they murdered six million, in the ovens they fried
The Germans now too have God on their side

Of course there were Americans talking about the Holocaust in the 1950s, but they were mostly Communists (Julius Rosenberg brought it up in his trial in explaining his loyalty to the Soviet Union, which had shouldered most of the military burden of defeating Hitler) and others of the left, opposed to the NATO project. Even America’s Zionists – like the authorities in Israel – chose to largely ignore it, fearing that highlighting the issue would associate them with the left, and that it projected an image of Jewish weakness at odds with the “muscular Judaism” gender aspirations of the Zionist project. I remember being shocked reading in Peter Novick’s “The Holocaust in American Life” about how this reasoning lay behind Zionist and Jewish communal organizations in New York City vociferously opposing the construction of a major Holocaust memorial in Riverside Park.

This was before Ben Gurion had decided to begin recentering Israeli identity around the Holocaust — and educating Israel’s Arab-Jewish majority about an event that their communities had not experienced — by staging the show trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. (Israel’s cynicism towards the Holocaust is well documented in Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million, also well worth rereading).

It’s much later, of course, that the Holocaust becomes a centerpiece in the American collective memory. It’s only the late 1970s that “The Diary of Anne Frank” becomes a standard text in many U.S. high school curricula, attaining its almost canonical status in that realm by the 1990s. Television, rather than the written word, is the home of the American national imaginary, and it’s the NBC series “Holocaust” aired in 1978, bringing the term “Holocaust” into mainstream U.S. vernacular. It followed the televising of a series the previous year based on Alex Haley’s “Roots”, focusing on the horror of U.S. plantation slavery and the violence of race, starting a national conversation about one of America’s founding sins. Not hard to see why and how those in denial (or by today’s absurd measure, simply uncomfortable) about America’s foundational crimes against indigenous people and enslaved Africans preferred to see the impact of Roots eclipsed by that of Holocaust.

The Holocaust in the 1980s becomes the preferred, institutionalized and centered memory of historical trauma in the United States, a safe terrain for America’s rulers because it’s not a trauma for which they can be held in any way accountable — up to one quarter of Americans believe Auschwitz was liberated by U.S. troops, and President Ronald Reagan more than once claimed (falsely) to have been present when U.S. troops arrived in concentration camps! America’s massive national Holocaust museum is inaugurated in Washington, DC in 1993, 11 years before the National Museum of the American Indian and 23 years before the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

America’s white establishment had little difficulty incorporating the Holocaust into official national memory compared with a real reckoning with the genocides on which America was founded. (The $20 bill still carries the image of Andrew Jackson, remembered by Native Americans as perhaps the supreme architect of their deadly ethnic cleansing.) In some ways, it’s an ugly extension of what Cesaire had noted about the impact of the Nazi Holocaust on the European imagination: The West had ignored decades, centuries even of its own colonial genocides whose victims were not white, and had recognized the phenomenon only when it was unleashed on a European population.

The Nazi genocide in its American telling has to stand unique as a peerless, unprecedented benchmark of inhumanity, in line with a view of anti-Semitism existing outside of history, as a fixed hatred that endures and prevails completely independent of historical context. The quibbling today by Israel’s enablers over the use of the very term “genocide” for its war on Gaza is a reflection of this ideological device that erases or marginalizes Western genocides, appealing to a popular U.S. and wider Western imagination in which the Nazi Holocaust is the only real genocide, and if there are no ovens burning bodies in Gaza, then it’s not a genocide.

(Oh, and here’s a little wager: The current Florida white-nationalist book purge has seen poor Anne Frank taken off the shelves in some school districts by over-zealous interpreters of the goals of whitewashing American memory, but I’d bet all the cassette mix-tapes in my collection that she will be restored by a state that also aggressively targets any restraints on Israeli apartheid.)

Genocide memorialization in the West, now assisted by the centering of the Nazi Holocaust, remains silent on the genocides on which the West was built – America’s destruction of its indigenous population, Spain’s elimination of indigenous Caribbean populations, Britain’s genocide of indigenous Tasmanians and horrors unleashed on other colonized populations, Germany’s Herero and Nama genocides in Namibia, Belgium’s rape of Congo, France and Portugal’s crimes against humanity in suppressing indigenous resistance and so much more.

This Americanized Shoah also tracks with a peculiarly American version of Zionism: When I was an adolescent in South Africa, Zionist ideology was still premised on the “negation of the Galut”, i.e. a belief (fallacy, actually) that Jews of the Diaspora were living in an imposed exile and could only be safe and free to live as Jews by “returning” to Israel. So, the point of Zionism was Aliyah, the Diaspora was doomed. Obviously, though, the vast majority of Jewish Americans had no desire nor intention ever to “return”, because they were safe, prosperous, and increasingly welcome into the corridors of power in America.

So Israel was not a personal refuge for them, instead it was an identitarian totem that reflected the way Jewish Americans wanted to imagine themselves, a schizophrenic combination of history’s eternal, primary victims, and also armed-and-dangerous macho badasses. (Strongly recommend Mishra’s review of Jewish American writers such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth on this dimension.)

Israel, of course, manifests the same combination, Little Goliath…

The response of the Zionist establishment to the outbreak of campus and popular solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide is rooted in this schema, in which the feelings of discomfort felt by privileged, safe, and mostly white Jews by being confronted with the grotesque moral reality of lived Zionism, are cited, preposterously, as instances of anti-Semitism that threaten their safety.

But if you’ve raised children with images of emaciated bodies in ghettoes and concentration camps under the slogan “Never Again”, it should surprise no one that those children recoil in disgust and revulsion when they see those same images out of Gaza today. The fact that perpetrators of the Gaza genocide are Jewish and that the twisted mass psychology engineered by the Israeli state over decades (and by the Zionist establishment among Jewish Americans) may even cast those perpetrators as victims in their own minds does nothing to temper the revulsion felt by many younger Jewish New Yorkers at Israel’s actions; if anything, it exacerbates that revulsion.

(Note how despite that establishment’s efforts to smear mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani with the bogus claim that his opposition to Israel’s apartheid system and genocide make him an anti-Semite, polls show that he’s supported by 67% of Jewish New Yorkers aged 18-44)

That revulsion harkens back to what Primo Levi called “the incurable nature of the offense”, referring to the impact of the Nazis dehumanization and attempted destruction of Europe’s Jews not only on the victims and survivors, but on broader humanity. But today’s “incurable”, unforgivable offense is the Gaza genocide. The State of Israel, now so overtly, deeply and broadly Nazified as the likes of Yehashayu Liebowitz had warned it would be, has made itself morally and politically untenable and intolerable in its own region, and beyond — even for young Jews in America who identify with basic Jewish ethics and a more universal social justice ethos.

Zionism has over the past two years revealed its essence to many who’d never thought about the issue. And having committed an incurable offense in its Gaza genocide, Israel may have finally negated power of the Nazi genocide to secure it license to kill in the eyes even of the citizenry of its Western enablers.

So, does this distinctly American Zionism have any kind of parallel or analog in Palestinian resistance efforts on these shores? We’ll go there in a follow-up post!