itourist?

© Paul Antick, ‘Auschwitz: who goes there?’ in (ed.) A. Kiendl, Informal Architectures (forthcoming 2007)

Holocaust ideologies and Jewish Identity

In many ways the anxieties that Griselda Pollock articulates with regards the occupation of the subject of mass tourism by an alien and alienating ideology, one that alienates the subject from its ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ sense of self is mirrored by the articulation, in a variety of contexts and moments, of anxieties related to the question of Jewish assimilation. Certainly from a conservative perspective it is precisely that yearning for a kind of golden age of unmediated subjectivity that transcends the vicissitudes of history, historical necessity and ideology that appears to characterise such utterances. In other words, the figure of the ‘impure’ or assimilated Jew has come to resemble, for commentators like Bertram Gold for instance, former head of the American Jewish Committee, as great a threat to Jewish identity as the tourist – Pollock’s own assimilation metaphor – is to the sanctity of places like Auschwitz…

It may be true that many Jewish visitors do not come to Auschwitz ‘to be informed’. It may be true that for many Jewish visitors, the Holocaust (which is to say the ‘facts’, what actually happened) is ‘overknown’. But this is not to say that such visits take place in a social, cultural and ideological vacuum and, moreover, that contemporary ‘needs’, political and ideological, do not serve to partially determine the ways in which the Holocaust, as both spectacle and memorial, might be engaged with. In The Holocaust in American Life Peter Novick draws on the work of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, to examine the ways in which, ‘present concerns determine what of the past we remember and how we remember it.” In doing so, Novick points to the fact that collective American memory of the Holocaust – both Jewish and non-Jewish – is to a large extent an effect of the various politically and ideologically motivated ways in which the Holocaust has been deployed in American life. A phenomenon that Dominic Lacapra describes as ‘transference in the most traumatic form conceivable’. It is in adopting this approach that Novick refuses the kind of essentialist preoccupations with notions of race and subjectivity that implicitly motivate the approaches of conservative writers like Pollock, in favour, that is, of an approach that foregrounds instead the reciprocal nature of the relationship between ideology and subjectivity.

For Novick, a raft of issues including Jewish assimilation, something marked by a rapid increase in inter-marriages and an accompanying ‘dilution’ of Jewish culture; and, most pertinent perhaps, the ideological uses (and abuses) of the Holocaust itself, specifically to shore up support for the State of Israel, particularly after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, have all contributed to the various ways in which some representatives of the Jewish community in the US have deployed the Holocaust and Israel – ‘ the twin pillars of American ‘civil religion’ – to precipitate a series of shifts in the ways in which it has sought to represent itself both to itself and the culture at large. As Novick asserts, since the mid-1970s the ‘American Jewish leadership, in response to a perception that needs had changed, has chosen to center the Holocaust – to combat what they saw as a ‘new anti-semitism’; in support of an embattled Israel; as the basis of revived ethnic consciousness.’ In this way Novick persuades the reader that responses to the Holocaust by the Jewish establishment are both historically contingent and, in the late twentieth century, largely motivated by concerns over the degenerative effects of assimilation, what Sheldon Engelmayer provocatively refers to as a ‘bloodless’ or ‘spiritual’ Holocaust’. Moreover, in this context, the figure of the ‘authentic’ Jew is cast as a redemptive figure. Fuelled by the memory of the Holocaust, it is intended to propel the latterday Children of Israel back to Zion, the mythic and spatial cradle of an ‘authentic’ Jewish civilisation (a space that invariably includes the contested areas of so-called ‘Samaria’ and ‘Judea’ – the West Bank).

Thus, for example, Novick demonstrates how the March of the Living, an annual ‘Holocaust redemption pageant’ in which thousands of Jewish teenagers visit Polish death camps to commemorate Yom Hashoah (Holocaust memorial day), immediately after which they are flown en masse to Israel to celebrate Independence Day, clearly reinforces both a sense of ‘present threat’, in America as well as Europe, as well as demonstrating the only way in which such a threat might be ameliorated. Novick quotes one Californian student as follows: ‘We are leaving this awful place (Poland) tonight and tomorrow we will be in Israel. All I want to do is go home, and I realize now that tomorrow I will be home, my real home, Israel.’ ‘‘Do we think we can scare kids into Zionism?’ asks one Yad Vashem official, ‘the tentative answer, based on surveys of March of the Living participants, appears to be yes.’

In a similar vein Jack Kugelmass argues that far from entering into an unmediated intercourse with the Holocaust itself, the Holocaust pilgrim is, amongst other things, endeavouring to ‘make past time present.’ And, ‘in so doing they are symbolically reversing reality: they are transposing themselves from what they are currently perceived as – in America as highly privileged, and in Israel as oppressive – and presenting themselves as the diametric opposite – as what they in fact were.’ But for Kugelmass and Novick in particular, although this compulsive reproduction of a ‘defensive self’, a self under threat, might well ‘remain central to the Jewish world view ‘ it potentially brings with it a whole host of problems that are especially pertinent to the Holocaust’s mythic place in the collective Jewish psyche . First, for example, the socio-cultural consequences of allowing one’s identity as a Jew to become so utterly bound up with an event as fundamentally negative as the Holocaust, to such a depressing extent that, ‘pain becomes a tradition’ and thus represents, as Leon Wieseltier suggests, ‘ a posthumous victory for the oppressors.’ And second, how placing Israel’s situation in a Holocaust framework is to fallaciously invest ‘the tangled Middle East conflict with the moral clarity of the Nazi period.’ (sent) If Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of mass culture was in part intended to explain how mass culture impacted upon the German masses’ ability to resist the onset of Nazism during the 1930s – through a ‘withering away of their critical faculties’ (something that Pollock implicitly references in relation to the tourist) – what it surely also implies is a need, on the part of the masses, to turn away from something immensely confusing and complex. Specifically, the social, economic and cultural upheavals in Weimar Germany immediately following the 1st world war. That is, to turn away from such mayhem in favour of what, for Adorno, represented the neatly packaged world of mass culture, with its easily digested narratives, its unambiguous cast of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ and its predictably happy endings. This was a world that represented not a threat to the political and cultural status quo –something that characterized the nature of social life during the Weimar period – but a sublimated longing for stability and predictability on the part of the German consumer. To paraphrase Kugelmass, mass culture, for many Germans, perhaps represented ‘a journey to a much simpler present’ in the same way that the Holocaust pilgrimage, for many Jews today, represents ‘a journey to a much simpler past .