Respecting the Holocaust
by Howard Zinn
The Progressive magazine, November 1999
Fifteen years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University,
I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust.
I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War
II, the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-eighties,
and the U.S. government was supporting death squads in Central
America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy.
My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should
not be circled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated
from other atrocities in history. To remember what happened to
the six million Jews, I said, served no important purpose unless
it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities,
anywhere in the world.
A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter
from a faculty member who had heard me speak. He was a Jewish
refugee who had left Europe for Argentina and then the United
States. He objected strenuously to my extending the moral issue
from Jews in Europe during the war to people in other parts of
the world in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred memory, a unique
event, he said. And he was outraged that, invited to speak on
the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to speak about other matters.
I was reminded of this experience when I recently read a book
by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin,
1999). Novick's starting point is the following question: Why,
fifty years after the event, does the Holocaust play a more prominent
role in this country-the Holocaust Museum in Washington, hundreds
of Holocaust programs in schools-than it did in the first decades
after World War II?
Surely at the core of the memory of the Holocaust is a horror
that should not be forgotten. But around that core, whose integrity
needs no enhancement, there has grown up an industry of memorialists
who have labored to keep that memory alive for purposes of their
own, Novick points out.
Some Jews have used the Holocaust as a way of preserving a
unique identity, which they see threatened by intermarriage and
Zionists have used the Holocaust, since the 1967 war, to justify
further Israeli expansion into Palestinian land and to build support
for a beleaguered Israel (more beleaguered-as David Ben-Gurion,
Israel's first prime minister, predicted-once it occupied the
West Bank and Gaza).
And non-Jewish politicians have used the Holocaust to curry
favor with the numerically small but influential Jewish voters-note
the solemn pronouncements of Presidents wearing yarmulkes to accentuate
their anguished sympathy.
All who have taken seriously the admonition "Never Again"
must ask ourselves-as we observe the horrors around us in the
world-if we have used that phrase as a beginning or as an end
to our moral concern.
I would not have become a historian if I thought that it would
become my professional duty to never emerge from the past, to
study long-gone events and remember them only for their uniqueness,
not connecting them to events going on in my time.
If the Holocaust is to have any meaning, we must transfer
our anger to today's brutalities. We must respect the memory of
the Jewish Holocaust by refusing to allow atrocities to take place
When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history
and look away from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible
irony, doing exactly what the rest of the world did in allowing
the genocide to happen.
There have been shameful moments, travesties of Jewish humanism,
as when Jewish organizations lobbied against Congressional recognition
of the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 on the ground that it diluted
the memory of the Jewish Holocaust. The designers of the Holocaust
Museum dropped the idea of mentioning the Armenian genocide after
lobbying by the Israeli government, among others.
Another such moment came when Elie Wiesel, chair of President
Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, refused to include in a
description of the Holocaust Hitler's killing of millions of non-Jews.
That would be, he said, to "falsify" the reality "in
the name of misguided universalism," Novick quotes Wiesel
as saying, "They are stealing the Holocaust from us."
As a result, the Holocaust Museum gave only passing mention to
the five million or more non-Jews who died in the Nazi camps.
To build a wall around the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust
is to abandon the idea that humankind is all one, that we are
all-of whatever color, nationality, religion-deserving of equal
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What happened
to the Jews under Hitler is unique in its details, but it shares
universal characteristics with many other events in human history:
the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide against Native Americans,
and the injuries and deaths to millions of working people who
were victims of the capitalist ethos that put profit before human
In recent years, while paying more and more homage to the
Holocaust as a central symbol of man's cruelty to man, we have,
by silence and inaction, collaborated in an endless chain of cruelties.
There have been the massacres of Rwanda, and the starvation
in Somalia, with our government watching and doing nothing.
There were the death squads in Latin America and the decimation
of the population of East Timor, with our government actively
collaborating. Our churchgoing Christian Presidents, so pious
in their references to the genocide against the Jews, kept supplying
the instruments of death to the perpetrators of these atrocities.
I am reminded of the last stanza of the poem "Scottsboro,
Too, Is Worth Its Song," by Countee Cullen: "Surely,
I said/now will the poets sing./But they have raised no cry./I
Then there are horrors that are not state-sponsored but still
take a biblical toll, horrors that are within our power to end.
Paul Farmer describes these in detail in his remarkable new book,
Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (University of
California, 1999). He notes the deaths of ten million children
all over the world who die every year of malnutrition and preventable
diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that three million
people died last year of tuberculosis, which is preventable and
curable, as Farmer has proved in his medical work in Haiti. With
a small portion of our military budget we could wipe out that
My point is not to diminish the experience of the Jewish Holocaust,
but to enlarge upon it.
For Jews, it means to reclaim the tradition of Jewish universal
humanism against an Israel-centered nationalism. Or, as Novick
puts it, to go back to "that larger social consciousness
that was the hallmark of the American Jewry of my youth."
That larger consciousness was displayed in recent years by those
Israelis who protested the beating of Palestinians in the Intifada
and who demonstrated against the invasion of Lebanon.
For others, whether Armenians or Native Americans or Africans
or Bosnians, it means to use their own bloody histories not to
set themselves against others but to create a larger solidarity
against the holders of wealth and power, the perpetrators and
collaborators of the ongoing horrors of our time.
The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us
to think of the world today as wartime Germany-where millions
die while the rest of the population obediently goes about its
business. It is a frightening thought that the Nazis, in defeat,
were victorious: today Germany, tomorrow the world. That is, until
we withdraw our obedience.
Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United
States: 1492-Present" (HarperPerennial, 1995), is a columnist
for The Progressive.
Zinn On History