Admissions against interest

Williams as ‘Jakob the Liar.’

By Debbie Schlussel

Jewish World Review / Oct. 12, 1999 /2 Mar-Cheshvan, 5760

I HAVE A CONFESSION to make. Recently, I experimented with the latest product of a shameful industry. No, not porn. Though the experience did involve pictures — moving pictures.

I saw the movie, “Jakob the Liar.”

Starring Robin Williams, the talkie is the most recent output in a multi-media industry that has consumed not just Holywood, but large portions of the legal industry, the publishing world, etc. I refer to what my cousin, Menasheh, a Holocaust survivor, has dubbed the “Holocaust Business.”

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Seriously, why did Williams participate in this farce? Because these days one can make any movie, whether it has redeeming artistic worth or not, if it’s about the Holocaust, it will be respected.

In Hollywood, it seems, you’ve really arrived when you’ve starred in a Holocaust movie.

Holocaust films are virtually guaranteed Oscar considerations.

Don’t believe me? Just ask Roberto Benigni and Liam Neeson. Did you ever hear of them before the hoopla surrounding “Life is Beautiful” and “Schindler’s List”? Didn’t think so.

“Schindler’s List” was moving, poignant, and a cinematic high point. It accurately and vividly depicted some of my grandfather’s own experiences during the Holocaust. But “Life is Beautiful”? It’s no surprise that before “Life is Beautiful,” Benigni’s biggest role was a rehash of the comedic, bumbling Inspector Clouseau in 1993’s “Son of the Pink Panther.” The Holocaust is not an Inspector Clouseau type of event, but Williams and Benigni have managed to turn it into one.

How many “clown” Holocaust movies must we endure? Even comedian Jerry Lewis has gotten in on the act. Actually, he pioneered this genre, starring in and producing the 1972 film, “The Day the Clown Cried,” in which an actual painted-face clown leads Jewish concentration camp kids into the gas chambers.

Oh, the movie was never released. In those days — way, way back in the 70s — you see, people would have been reviled — as they should be but aren’t these days — at such a prospect.

Reportedly, Lewis was on anti-depressant and not in his right mind when he made and funded his memorial to the Six Million.

Today, though, such a film is not an unfortunate, ill-advised mistake. It’s Academy Award material, and other than a sick obsession with the Holocaust, there can be no other reason why “Jakob” was produced.

Given this incessant obsession, you can’t help but be amused when comedians like Jerry Seinfeld poke fun at all of these Holocaust movies. He made an entire episode of his show mocking the outrage of others surrounding a romantic interlude he and a girlfriend had during a screening of “Schindler’s List.”

Sadly, the Holocaust preoccupation is not just an episode of “Seinfeld” or an interminable catalog of movies. Today, the Holocaust is big business with a complete product line. There are more people getting jobs based on the Holocaust. There are more lawyers filing lawsuits based on the Holocaust. And there are more films on the Holocaust. All of this while there are less and less Holocaust survivors still alive.

And let’s not forget the official U.S. National Holocaust Museum in Washington. Doesn’t this museum belong more appropriately in Germany, or in Austria — from where Hitler hailed and where, today, a fascist presidential candidate praised Hitler as a job provider and his S.S. Waffen as men of character.

Unfortunately, like some industries, the Holocaust has become a promising career path. There are people running a plethora of Holocaust organizations and foundations. They get grants and raise money in fundraising letters, so that “we will never forget.” There are a lot of careers built on this Holocaust Business.

Again, I have no problem with remembering history, including the great tragedies. But there is something really wrong about a people — the Jews — who, with such a rich religion, with such a rich history spanning thousands of years, when they replace that whole history with a few years in recent history, spanning less than a decade.

Today, while most Jews know little about their religion, and even less about the long-enduring history of the Jewish people, everyone knows about the Holocaust. And it seems that this event has not only become Jewish history — it has unfortunately become the Jewish religion.

There have been many other devastating tragedies in Jewish history — pogroms, Inquisitions, etc. In fact, most Jews don’t know about a Jewish tragedy equal to, if not worse than the Holocaust–the 12th Century wholesale massacre of the Oriental Jews of North Africa living in the Maghreb (now known as Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia). That massacre was committed by the Al-Mohad Arab Moslem dynasty, though, not the more politically correct far right-wing Nazi perpetrators. So the memory of those Jews is apparently not as important. The Holocaust Business is a politically correct industry.

It is a great shame when a few-year tragedy becomes our central focus, the central experience of a people with many achievements and positive events. But, again, it is even more lamentable, when the tragedy is pushed on others in the form of endless products.

Besides the movies, books, miniseries, etc., there are the trial lawyers and their class-action lawsuits. Again, though the numbers of Holocaust survivors who could benefit are growing very thin, every day there are more and more class-action lawsuits being filed against corporations who had any connections with the Holocaust, using slave labor, such as in the case of Ford Motor Company, or using the concentration camp inmates as human guinea pigs, such as in the case of Bayer.

Should these companies be punished for their wrongdoing? Sure. But should today’s stockholders and consumers of products of those companies — they would be the ones to ultimately bear the burden of the multi-million dollar awards and settlements — be punished for something which occurred before most of them were born and with which most had nothing to do?

Should greedy trial lawyers get millions for suffering during the Holocaust, when they never even experienced the pain of the Holocaust, and most of its victims are now dead and will never benefit from the lawsuits? And why did they wait all of these years to file these suits which could have provided a decent life for many of these deceased survivors?

Is it a coincidence that a primary lawyer filing these lawsuits — who has transformed these Holocaust suits into a career — is named Ed Fagan? Charles Dickens would be proud.

Remember Fagan from his Oliver Twist? Sad to say, but for lawyers, the Holocaust has become the new tobacco, the latest Oliver Twist from which to make an easy buck. Most of the Holocaust victims and survivors — who, again, are also mostly dead — would not want their memories to live on in this way, and like my grandfather, they would not want the Germans’ or corporations’ money.

Besides the trial lawyers, settlement terms of some of these cases provide that most of the money will end up going to liberal social causes and groups, anyway — hardly victims of the Holocaust. To the lawyers, the Holocaust is just another product to exploit.

Maybe Jerry Lewis’ clown Holocaust movie was just a good product, a good business decision, but before its time. After all, when the film was shot, Lewis owned a chain of child-and family-oriented movie theaters. He probably figured that if he threw in kids, a clown, and the Holocaust, the movie would make big bucks in those theaters.

With the success of “Life is Beautiful,” with the success of the Holocaust lawsuits, movies, careers, with the success of the whole set of Holocaust products, he’s probably kicking himself. Though it’s rumored that a few years ago, he, too, used his ridiculous movie to make money, by reportedly showing snippets of it during a French telethon. Et tu, Jerry?

It’s sad that the Holocaust has become just another business, just another subsidiary of the whole civil rights conglomerate. But there is hope. On its debut weekend, “Jakob the Liar” came in at a very disappointing eighth in the ranks of box office showings, with only $2.2 million in ticket sales.

Maybe “Jakob” will be the last Holocaust comedy, and maybe the consumers of the Holocaust Business are letting the producers know they are now growing tired of the product. I’m not holding my breath, though. I’m bracing for the day when I turn on my T.V. to see an infomercial touting the latest silly Holocaust product, an abomination to all who suffered through the tragedy.

Some say politicizing event will trivialize it

By Douglas Belkin

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

In the past 14 months, the director of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was fired when he objected to the museum being used for political purposes.

The editor of an influential magazine on Jewish affairs was called “brainless when it comes to the Holocaust” for criticizing the growing field of Holocaust studies.

And scores of museum directors, curators and academics have been accused of commercializing the memory of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust to further political agendas and boost ticket sales for an increasing number of Holocaust exhibits and museums.

More than half a century after the Holocaust, defining, owning and placing it in context have become more complex and more contentious issues than ever. As the last generation of survivors enters their 70s and 80s, a debate within the Jewish community is intensifying: Who will speak for the victims after the last witnesses are gone? And what will they say?

The questions are not new, but as American colleges and universities study the Holocaust through a continually broader variety of lenses, the debate surrounding it is intensifying.

There are those who say the Holocaust should be treated as a sacred and distinctly Jewish event. Comparing the horror to anything else is demeaning to the legacy, the argument goes.

But others say for the Holocaust to be fully understood, it must be put into political context and interpreted through as many perspectives as possible. One result of that argument: Dozens of academic conventions pop up every year and hundreds of papers deconstructing the Holocaust through feminist, environmental and current geopolitical viewpoints are presented.

Last year, conservative columnist George Will slammed the growing industry of Holocaust studies in a column: “As the Holocaust becomes academicized, it becomes trivialized, reduced to just another instance of injustice.”

And in an opinion piece that ran in newspapers across the country last month, Gabriel Schoenfeld, the senior editor of Commentary Magazine, accused many Holocaust museum and exhibit curators and academics of “treating the most shattering event in modern history as a banality, or worse, as entertainment.”

Trivializing tragedy

“As the generation of survivors passes from the scene, this tragedy is up for grabs,” Schoenfeld said last week from New York. “There is a wide-scale trivialization being committed by people who purport to be the custodians of their memory. In a way, the Holocaust is being pigeonholed into the general trend of victimization.”

Stephen Feinstein, the acting director of the Center of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the man who called Schoenfeld “brainless,” said that deconstructing the Holocaust through secular or feminist or even environmentalist lenses is inevitable. The Holocaust did not just happen to Jews, Feinstein said, it happened to the world.

“There are some people out there who want to make (the Holocaust) a sacramental, pseudo-religious event to remember the victims,” Feinstein said.

“But whether we like it or not … the words `Holocaust’ and `genocide’ have come to intersect.”

As far as the academic debate on the Holocaust, Feinstein sees no basis for criticism: “Anything that gives rise to a rational discourse is good,” he said.

But it also can lead to charges that the memory of the 6 million is being exploited. That’s what Walter Reich accused state department officials of doing when they invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to visit Washington’s United States Holocaust Museum last year during stalled Middle East peace talks. Arafat would have been the first Arab leader to acknowledge the Holocaust, but Reich did not want the museum to be used as a political tool to jump-start the negotiations. Reich ultimately lost his job as the museum’s director.

Both Nazis and Soviets killed prisoners there

MARTA BARBER

Miami Herald Staff Writer

BUCHENWALD, Germany — Its name can be translated as Beechwood Forest, and many majestic trees of this species still stand on the surrounding areas. But its history can’t be told without revulsion.

A visit to this notorious concentration camp is a must for anyone taking a trip to nearby Weimar, Europe’s Cultural Capital for 1999. Buchenwald not only was one of Hitler’s camps […] but from 1945 to 1950 it was Special Camp 2, used by Soviet police and occupation forces for the internment and ultimate death of Germans. The use of Buchenwald as a part of the Soviet gulag system was not publicly known until 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of both Germanys.

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Though rumors of Special Camp 2 had circulated through the years, its existence was largely unknown to the West until the collapse of East Germany in 1990. Between 1945 to 1950, more than 28,450 people were interned here. In February 1947, the Soviets started sending large convoys of prisoners to camps in the Soviet Union; their fate is unknown. But another 7,113 people died in Special Camp 2, according to Soviet data. Their bodies were buried in mass graves marked only with steel tubes intermingled among the beechwood trees.

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London, Friday, April 9, 1999

Jewish Chronicle

JC REPORTER

MILL HILL minister Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet criticised what he called “the Holocaust-obsessed” generation in a Passover sermon, suggesting that money would be better spent on Jewish education.

He said for many the Holocaust had become “a fixation”, central to their whole Jewish identity.

“But how can such a devastating experience infuse enthusiasm and vitality?

“We must temper our obsession with the past and concentrate more on the present,” he declared. “Over a billion dollars has been spent on Holocaust museums while the living are quietly exiting the stage of Jewish history.”

He continued: “It has become all the rage to take trips to concentration camps, as though standing in the valley of the shadow of death will inject inspiration to pursue a course of religious consciousness.”

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By STEVEN ERLANGER

New York Times

www.nytimes.com/library/world/
europe/040999kosovo-jews.html

BELGRADE, Apr. 9

Aca Singer, who lost 65 members of his family in the Holocaust, says he didn’t survive Auschwitz to die from an American bomb.

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“When the Americans bombed the death camps at the end of World War II, I was very happy,” he said, sitting in the library of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia, which he heads. “Then I thought, ‘Kill me if necessary, but kill the Nazis.’ And a lot of Jews died at the end from U.S. bombers, and we were not unhappy to see the bombs.”

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Letters | Canadian Jewish News | March 31, 1999

www.cjnews.com/editorial/letters.htm

I agree with D.M. Schonberger (CJN, Dec. 24) that the remarks of Irving Abella were deeply offensive. To refer to the Holocaust as a “metaphor” in education (CJN, Dec. 3), whatever his meaning, is an insult to all of us who lost members of our family.

Unfortunately his insensitive words reflect the attitude of an elite group of Jewish leaders, who for many years avoided Holocaust education, as if it had never happened, and later appeared to use it as a bargaining position.

For this reason, many of us who returned from the services in 1945, remained ignorant of the mass killings in Nazi death camps until years later.

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Samuel Levy, Ph.D.

Montreal

Tracing Fates of 907 Jews on Liner Turned Away in 1939

March 31, 1999

By JOSEPH BERGER

In June 1939, Ilse Marcus was so tantalizingly close to the saving shores of the United States that she could see the palm trees of Miami.

But the American Government refused to provide a refuge for her and the 906 other German Jews aboard the St. Louis who were fleeing their homeland’s Nazi terror. The ocean liner, which had already been turned away from Cuba, was forced to return to Europe, where the passengers were dispersed to Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Britain.

Until recently, the fate of passengers like Mrs. Marcus was lost in a murky ether, with the passengers used as a collective symbol for the world’s indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews, but bleached of their individual human stories. It was assumed, incorrectly it has turned out, that nearly all of them died after Western Europe came under the murderous sway of the Nazis.

But for three years, two research historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have been tracing what happened to every single passenger and fleshing out their stories as well as they can. They have learned that about half the passengers, Mrs. Marcus among them, managed through pluck, endurance and the whims of fortune to survive the war.

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Mrs. Marcus, they found out last fall, did not die in Auschwitz, where the Nazi records said she had been sent. For the last 50 years, she has been living in a tidy apartment in Washington Heights in Manhattan and working as a bookkeeper for the New York office of the Jesuits.

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