Efforts to apprehend the terrible event, and to commemorate the worlds that were destroyed, are a moral necessity. But much of what goes by the name of Holocaust remembrance today serves neither cause. Instead it drains thenightmare of its horror, treating the most shattering event in modern history as a banality, or worse, as entertainment. In Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance promotes itself like a theme park. Check us out for group discounts, special bonuses.
Matters are even worse in the academic world.
An older generation of scholars, many of them refugees from Hitler's Europe, wrote about the Holocaust in sorrow and awe, but also with a certain authorial dispassion. Today, with the emergence of a new discipline called Holocaust studies, the academicization of the subject is proceeding apace, complete with meaningless jargon and political agenda-setting. The answer to both questions undoubtedly lies at least in part in the rising culture of victimhood, visible in our society at large but particularly ensconced in the universities. As the ultimate in victimization, the Holocaust is simply assuming pride of place in a field that also comprises women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, disability studies and all the other victim disciplines that today constitute the cutting edge of the academic world. It is in the interest neither of American Jews, nor of the broader public, to turn the Holocaust into grist for the mill of academic trendiness or into a carnival.