|
|
|
Eye on Hollywood
The Holocaust in American Film
Edmund Connelly
August 14, 2008
Steven Spielberg’s now classic
Schindler’s List (1993) is
easily the most famous film about the most infamous instance of
anti-Semitism in history: the Holocaust. Why it took until 1993 to produce a
lasting film about one of the defining acts of our age makes for an
interesting story.
Most readers will be surprised to learn that
for the first two decades after World War II
Jewish communities around the world were relatively unperturbed by
the events of the Holocaust. For instance,
Peter
Novick,
professor emeritus of
history at the University of Chicago, wrote that in the late
1940s “the available evidence doesn't suggest that, overall, American Jews .
. . were traumatized by the Holocaust, in any worthwhile sense of that
term.”
For American Jews at the time, as he argued in his 2000 book
The Holocaust in American Life, the
Holocaust "barely existed as a singular event in its own right." For Novick,
"the Holocaust" as we understand it today "was largely a retrospective
construction, something that would not have been recognizable to most people
at the time. As evidence, Novick offered these three examples:
Three published symposia offer indirect evidence of how much of a role the
Holocaust played in the thought of young American Jews. In 1957
The New Leader ran a series of eighteen personal essays to see
"what's going on in the minds of the five million Americans who have
graduated college since Hiroshima." At least two thirds of the respondents
were Jewish. In writing of what had shaped their thinking they mentioned a
variety of historical events, from the Great Depression to the cold war. Not
a single contributor mentioned the Holocaust. Two other symposia, this time
restricted to Jews, were published in 1961, just after the period with which
we are concerned. Appearing at a time when there was a great upsurge in
discussion of the Holocaust, occasioned by the capture of Adolf Eichmann,
it's likely that they present an inflated index of how salient the Holocaust
was in the fifties. Thirty-one
people participated in a symposium in
Commentary, "Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals." A few referred
to the Holocaust in passing, but in only two cases did contributors speak of
it in a way that indicated it loomed large in their sense of their Jewish
identity. Later that year the quarterly
Judaism presented a symposium on
"My Jewish Affirmation," with twenty-one participants—most a bit older and
less secular in outlook than the
Commentary contributors. Only one, who had fled Austria after the
Anschluss, mentioned the Holocaust.
Moving beyond American borders, Novick found a similarly muted
response by Jews who explicitly did
think of their direct connection to European Jews. "The difficulty is that
the same marginalization of the Holocaust in consciousness took place in the
Yishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—more than half of whose members had
left Europe since 1933." Novick quotes a leading Israeli Holocaust scholar,
who explained that during the war, the Jewish press in Palestine would "go
into ecstasies about some local party-political affair, while the murder of
the Jews of Europe is reported only in the inside pages."
Novick also added that William Shirer, in his record-breaking 1960
bestseller
The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich “devoted 2 or 3 percent of
his 1,200-page book to the murder of European Jewry, a proportion that, to
the best of my knowledge, no critic commented on." (Similarly, Joseph
Heller's 1961
Catch-22,
though based in southern Europe in the latter stages of the war, ignored the
concentration camps and crematoria.)
Novick’s idea of a “retrospective construction” can be applied to
the way Hollywood filmmakers belatedly scripted the Holocaust. As Novick
points out, the motive was to defend the creation of modern Israel. Thus,
the first big Hollywood movie about Israel came in 1960 with
Exodus,
starring blue-eyed Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan. Interestingly, his love
interest was not even Jewish. Instead, she was blonde Presbyterian widow
Kitty Fremont (played by gentile Eva Marie Saint)—presumably an attempt to portray even Zionist Jews as
assimilated
and Judaism itself as having no biological implications.
A year later came Stanley Kramer’s
Judgment at Nuremberg, which confronted German war guilt. Nineteen
sixty-five saw The Pawnbroker, a
film which dramatized the inner trauma of a Holocaust survivor. Then Mel
Brooks famously changed the perspective on the war with his comedy
The
Producers
(1968), featuring the original musical “Springtime for Hitler.” (This film
was adapted for Broadway in 2001 and earned twelve Tony Awards.)
The biggest Hollywood representation of the Holocaust, however,
came with NBC's 1978 airing of the four-part miniseries
Holocaust, seen by up to 100 million Americans. By all accounts,
this was a coordinated campaign to dramatize that event, as Peter Novick
makes clear:
The
Anti-Defamation League, for instance, distributed ten million copies of its
sixteen-page tabloid The Record to promote the drama.. .. The American Jewish Committee,
in cooperation with NBC, distributed millions of copies of a study guide for
viewers; teachers' magazines carried other curricular material tied to the
program. Jewish organizations worked with the National Council of Churches
to prepare other promotional and educational materials, and organized
advance viewings for religious leaders. The day the series began was
designated "Holocaust Sunday"; various activities were scheduled in cities
across the country; the National Conference of Christians and Jews
distributed yellow stars to be worn on that day.
My point is that the depiction of the Holocaust was the result of a
complex narrative full of sudden stops, starts and dead ends. Further, this
depiction has been the cause of controversy over how the Holocaust is to be
used.
For example,
Norman Finkelstein in 2000
wrote a small book entitled
The
Holocaust Industry, where he
excoriated many of his fellow Jews for the way they misused the Holocaust.
Finkelstein made a useful distinction by noting that the phrase “Nazi
holocaust” signals the actual historical event, while “The Holocaust” stands
for its ideological representation.
As such, “The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable
ideological weapon,” not only, as Novick also argued, as a tool to defend
Israel, but one that has allowed “the most successful ethnic group in the
United States” to acquire victim status. The benefit, then, is that American
Jews gain immunity to any and all outside criticism.
Thus, the
Holocaust has been used as a sword and shield for Jews since the 1970s, both
justifying Israel’s “defensive” behavior (including
the
need to bomb Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons?) and the collective behavior of
American Jews through AIPAC, their leading role as neoconservatives, etc.
Such manipulation can be found in highbrow films such as
Schindler’s List and the many
other such Holocaust films, as documented in
Indelible
Shadows: Film and the Holocaust.
Possibly even more effective has been the casual insertion of the
Holocaust into standard TV fare. As Jeffrey Shandler writes in
American Media and the Holocaust, “the
appearance of the Holocaust as a ‘guest’ subject on episodes of a wide array
of American televisions series—including
The Defenders, Star Trek, The FBI, All
in the Family, Seventh Heaven, ER, The X-Files—has made the subject a
familiar element of the nation’s repertoire of moral issues.”
Shandler also notes that “no other event in modern history looms so large in our nation’s moral landscape that did not either take place in this country or involve large numbers of Americans abroad.”
One suspects that as long as the Holocaust maintains this privileged position, Israel and leading American Jews will continue to operate outside the bounds of normal moral considerations. But as Finkelstein himself warns, “Those enjoying this immunity have not escaped the moral corruptions that typically attend it.”
Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema
arts. He has previously written for
The Occidental Quarterly.
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-Holocaust.html
