Our American Israel 5 THE FUTURE HOLOCAUST

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CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
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5 

 

THE FUTURE HOLOCAUST 

 

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the horror of the Holocaust serves as the basis for their support of Israel. Others believe that the 

tragedy has been politicized in order to sustain that support. The clash between these views intensified during the 1982 Lebanon War, 

when advocates and opponents of the invasion argued over which combatants were acting like Nazis. The paradoxical view of Israel as 

an invincible victim never lost its allure in the United States, even in the face of Israel’s military dominance in Lebanon and in the occu- 

pied territories during the first intifada. Israel’s status as an eternal victim actually gained strength throughout the 1980s, as the Holo- 

caust became a more prominent feature of the American cultural landscape. 

Official commemorations, presidential speeches, mass culture, and school curricula taught Americans not only about the historical 

catastrophe that befell Jews in Europe, but also about the Holocaust as a chapter of their own history in World War II. A museum of the 

Holocaust was built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As the Holocaust was becoming part of America’s national heritage, its 

temporal significance in relation to Israel was changing as well. The Holocaust began to represent more than the horrific suffering of 

the Jewish people in the past—now it also signified an imminent threat to the future of the Jewish state. A past atrocity in Europe came 

to foreshadow an impending apocalypse in the Middle East. 

New narrative bonds were forged between America’s newfound past and Israel’s precarious future. Interest in Holocaust memory 

boomed at a time when both countries were facing crises of wars gone awry—indeed, Israel was said to have had its own Vietnam in 

Lebanon. These crises had created internal divisions and international opprobrium, and challenged the belief in the moral authority of 

military power, a bedrock of their shared exceptionalism. The birth of Israel might be understood as the redemption of Jewish suffering, 

but the discovery of Holocaust memory as an American national concern also confirmed American exceptionalism and renewed the 

bond between the two nations. 

 

Remembering the Future 

 

In 1978, two events propelled the Holocaust to the center of American consciousness. An NBC television miniseries called Holocaust 

was viewed by more than 100 million Americans in April. And a month later, President Jimmy Carter initiated plans for what would ulti- 

mately become the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

On May 1, 1978, Carter hosted a celebration for Israel’s thirtieth anniversary in the Rose Garden of the White House, where he wel- 

comed Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin along with six hundred leaders of American Jewish organizations. For a birthday party, 

the tone of the ceremony was notably somber, as was the “gift” Carter presented to his guests. He announced the formation of a presi- 

dential commission charged with planning an American memorial “to the six million who were killed in the Holocaust.” He soon ap- 

pointed noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as chairman, and the commission embarked on the process of designing a memorial to 

commemorate, on American soil, the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe.¹ 

Carter’s commission aimed to rescue the memory of genocide victims from the oblivion of the past. But the timing addressed a 

more immediate controversy over his Middle East policy. In 1977, Carter became the first American president to utter the phrase “Pales- 

tinian homeland.” He antagonized the Israeli government and its American supporters by proposing to include the Palestine Liberation 

Organization (PLO) in an international peace conference cosponsored by the Soviet Union. Begin expressed outrage at a press confer- 

ence, denouncing PLO members as “Huns,” its policy as “an Arab Mein Kampf,” and its diplomacy as a subterfuge for its true goal: “to 

destroy a people; to annihilate people. The method: genocide—to kill man, woman, and child.”² Negotiating over territory and recog- 

nition of Palestinian rights was, in Begin’s terms, tantamount to exposing Israel to a second Holocaust. In less inflammatory rhetoric, 

American supporters of Israel also criticized Carter for putting Israel at risk by proposing to negotiate with the PLO and planning to sell 

fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. 

In a bid to mollify Carter’s critics, his aides recommended that he propose the creation of a national memorial to the Holocaust. In 

his Rose Garden speech, he vowed that America’s “total absolute commitment to Israel’s security” would “ensure for all times that the 

Jewish people will not be condemned to repeat the Holocaust.” In response, Begin called Carter’s address “one of the greatest moral 

statements ever.”³ 

After Carter’s announcement, four different presidents pledged their commitment to the project during a period that witnessed the 

end of the Cold War. Democrats and Republicans alike vowed that the memory of the Holocaust would remind Americans of their 

enduring obligation to the State of Israel. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors to the public. The 

museum has deeply affected millions of visitors from all over the world. It serves to document the rise of Nazism and the ghastly meth- 

ods of slaughter, to memorialize the dead and preserve the traumatic memories of survivors, and to transmit the profound meanings of 

the Holocaust to communities across generations. But when we look back at the history of the memorial, it becomes clear that this na- 

tional institution of memory, dedicated to facing the ultimate evil of the past and to imparting universal values to the future, bears in- 

delible traces of its origins in America’s Middle East policies, especially its commitment to support Israel. 

At the 1978 White House ceremony announcing the formation of the presidential commission, Carter related a narrative of the ori- 

gins of the special relationship, claiming that it was born “out of the ashes of the Holocaust,” alongside the Jewish state. Moral outrage 

at Nazi atrocities, he claimed, led the United States to recognize the new state in 1948—before any other nation did. Penance as well as 

pride drove this allegiance, for Carter acknowledged that Americans had turned their backs on Jews seeking refuge from Nazi brutality. 

In founding a state, Jews valiantly created for themselves a home that the world had denied them. Celebrating Israel’s thirtieth anniver- 

sary, Carter focused not on its pioneering spirit or its modern accomplishments, but on its “indomitable will” to survive, and he equat- 

ed Israel’s survival with its capacity to avert a second Holocaust. Carter asserted that America’s commitment to establishing the nation 

of Israel and to protecting it from future threats arose spontaneously from the encounter with the death camps at the end of World War 

II and had continued unbroken into the present.⁴ 

Carter’s speech sounds so familiar today that it may be hard to believe how novel it was at the time. Carter was the first American 

president to place the Holocaust at the center of America’s commitment to Israel and to claim culpability for past inaction as a moral 

guide to present policy. His predecessors in the Oval Office rarely called attention to the Holocaust. As the first U.S. president to visit 

Israel, Richard Nixon only reluctantly agreed to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He understood the rearming of Israel 

during the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a strategic move against the Soviet Union and did not describe it as a mission to save Israel from 

destruction. President Lyndon Johnson, in his warmest professions of friendship, identified Israel as a frontier state like Texas, and in 

the lead-up to the Six-Day War, neither he nor his advisors referred to Israel as a potential victim of genocide. Only after Carter’s presi- 

dency did U.S. presidents routinely invoke the Holocaust as the ethical foundation of their relationship with Israel. This change re- 

flected a shift that was going on in American culture about how the Holocaust was viewed, a shift that began in the 1960s and accel- 

erated in the 1970s. In this way, American presidents have followed public discourse about the Holocaust as much as they have shaped 

it.⁵ 

“The Holocaust” as an overarching concept and a proper noun for the systematic Nazi extermination of European Jews did not come 

into general American circulation until the 1970s, as historian Peter Novick and others have shown. At the end of World War II, the 

American public did not single out the “Final Solution” as a Jewish catastrophe separate from the overall Nazi carnage that afflicted Eu- 

rope. Jews mourned their dead within their own communities, while the wider public incorporated Jewish suffering into a broader con- 

ception of Nazi barbarism and the universal horrors of war. According to this narrative, the United States and its allies soundly defeated 

the Nazi regime, brought its crimes to justice, and consigned its atrocities to the dark ages of the past. Postwar anxiety about the future 

focused on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which evoked fears of imminent catastrophe—that American cities 

could be subject to the same inferno. Although it is a common assumption that World War II led to the universal determination to pre- 

vent future genocides, in the United States at the time, victory over Nazism was regarded as representing the end of an era; it was Hi- 

roshima that had inaugurated a fearsome new age.⁶ 

Outrage at the Nazi slaughter of Jews was indeed central to postwar support for establishing a Jewish state and to the subsequent 

narrative about its founding, as we saw in previous chapters. But supporters of the Zionist movement and the early Israeli state did not 

express fear of a resurgent genocide. Liberal Zionist supporters in the 1940s did not rest their case for a state on the need to protect 

Jews from future extermination, nor did their accounts of the battles of 1948 raise the threat of annihilation. Leon Uris’s Exodus was not 

haunted by the specter of a new Holocaust. For supporters of Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, the Nazi genocide explained the historical 

origins of the Jewish state but did not represent a threat to its ongoing existence. 

As Nazi atrocities receded into the past, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness involved an important shift in its temporal 

meaning. The Holocaust entered public awareness not only as a horrific event in the past, but as an event that might be repeated in the 

imminent future. A related geographic shift from Europe to the Middle East made the Jewish state the locus of this threatening new 

catastrophe. This fear of a second Holocaust started in Israel in the 1960s after the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1962 and 

during the lead-up to the Six-Day War in 1967.⁷ The idea entered American public discourse along with the growth of Holocaust mem- 

ory in the following decade. According to this way of thinking, the Nazi extermination of Jews not only explained Israel’s historical ori- 

gins, but also signified an impending threat to its future survival. In 1948, Americans celebrated Israel’s creation as the death knell for 

Nazism, but three decades later, they treated the Holocaust as a timeless template for Israel’s existential vulnerability, with Arabs 

viewed as reincarnated Nazis. 

The Holocaust came to represent the precariousness of Israel’s survival at a time when the new country was becoming more mili- 

tarily secure in the region. Seeing Israel as the legacy of the Holocaust contributed to the sense of its vulnerability as a perpetual victim 

of Arab aggression. Novick contends that the Yom Kippur War awakened fears of Israel’s demise among American Jews because of the 

surprise attack, launched on the holiest day of the year, and the unexpectedly high number of Israeli casualties—despite the fact that 

Egyptian and Syrian troops never advanced beyond their own territories that had been captured in 1967, and that the United States came 

to Israel’s aid with a massive airlift of weapons. As in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, talk of annihilation increased in proportion to 

the decisiveness of Israel’s victory. As deeply felt as these fears were, pro-Israel organizations were equally alarmed by international crit- 

icism of Israel as an oppressive occupying power, and by the international consensus that Israel should relinquish to Palestinian rule 

the territories it had conquered in 1967. A representative publication is The New Anti-Semitism, written by Arnold Forster and Benjamin 

Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League and published in 1974, which argued that condemnation of Israel arose not from opposition to 

Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but from the world’s forgetting about Jewish victimization in the Holocaust. Forster and Ep- 

stein insisted that the world needed to be reminded of the Holocaust, for fear that failure to remember it would diminish support for Is- 

rael and thus threaten Jews with a new genocide in the Middle East.⁸ 

The idea that a second Holocaust threatened to destroy Israel did not abate with the massive increase in U.S. aid under Presidents 

Nixon and Reagan, or when the peace treaty with Egypt removed its military threat in 1979, or when the Israeli government annexed the 

Golan Heights in 1981, or when it invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. On the contrary, talk of a new Holocaust increased as Israeli mili- 

tary power grew, and Holocaust analogies often justified the exercise of that power. When Menachem Begin became prime minister in 

1977, his fiery rhetoric introduced this way of thinking to the American media. Begin’s worldview had been shaped profoundly by his 

personal losses in the Holocaust, and he saw any threat to Israel in the present through the lens of the Nazi genocide. Begin’s views of 

the Holocaust strongly influenced the basic doctrine of the Israeli government, and this doctrine also became central to American views 

of Israel.⁹ 

In 1979, Israel launched a surprise attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor and received widespread condemnation for violating 

international law. Begin justified the attack as a preemption of future genocide. The lesson he took from the Holocaust was not only 

that Jews were eternal victims, but also that it was impossible to trust anyone else to protect them. Israel alone had both the moral obli- 

gation and the right to defend itself by any means necessary. In this way of thinking, if total annihilation always imperiled Israel, then no 

military action could ever be judged as excessive. When the Reagan administration announced that Israel might have breached an arms 

agreement by using American fighter jets in the raid, Begin responded by claiming that Israel had a right to guard its children, since one 

million children had been killed with poison gas by the Germans and “radioactivity is also poison.” If Israel hadn’t bombed the plant, he 

argued, “another Holocaust would have happened to Israel and her people.”¹⁰ Even though the association between nuclear power 

plants and gas chambers may have seemed dubious, this way of framing Israel’s military ventures appealed to the moral clarity of a 

struggle against evil epitomized by the Holocaust. 

Begin made his most impassioned appeals to Holocaust memory during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, equating Palestinians with 

Nazis intent on committing genocide and identifying Israelis as the true victims in the war. In a widely publicized letter to President Rea- 

gan, Begin wrote, “I feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing ‘Berlin’ where, amongst innocent civilians, 

Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the altar of God that whoever 

proclaims his intent to destroy the Jewish state or the Jewish people seals his fate so what happened in Berlin … will never happen 

again.” In this intimate public address, Begin blamed civilian causalities on the current unnamed Hitler. World War II was more than a 

metaphor for Begin, more even than an example of the past illuminating the present. A potential Holocaust hid beneath the surface of 

the present, poised to rear up at any moment if Israel failed to stop it. At a time when Israeli forces faced international criticism for bru- 

tality, Begin deemed them “valiant” because they were battling Nazis to avert another Holocaust.¹¹ 

To claim exclusive possession of the Holocaust as a living analogy entailed policing its usage by others. In an August 1982 interview, 

Begin expressed outrage at Reagan for using the word “holocaust” to describe Israel’s day-long bombardment of West Beirut. Although 

one sense of the English word does mean massive destruction especially by fire, and would be a fitting description for the conflagration 

caused by the bombing that day, Begin claimed that the word should only be used in its more exclusive sense, to refer to the Nazi geno- 

cide of Jews. He accused Reagan of personally hurting him by using that word and asserted that only he knew “what is a holocaust.” As 

proof he displayed the iconic photograph of a frightened young boy, hands raised in the air, taken during the roundup of Jews in the 

Warsaw Ghetto. Begin explained that Israelis never intentionally targeted civilians, but that the PLO placed them in danger by hiding 

military installations among them. Israelis always mourned the killing of children, he asserted, in stark contrast to both Nazis and Pales- 

tinian terrorists, who celebrated the murder of Jewish children.¹² 

In 1982, Begin used the high moral ground of the Holocaust to deflect widespread criticism of Israel’s use of force against Pales- 

tinian and Lebanese civilians. He also drew on Nazi analogies to explain why he would not negotiate with the PLO leaders, even if they 

accepted Israel’s right to exist: “I wouldn’t believe Hitler, or Goering or Goebbels, and I will not believe Mr. Arafat, or Farouk Khad- 

doumi, or Abu Iyad.” For Begin and his Likud Party, which had every intention of keeping the occupied territories—land that they called 

Greater Israel—nothing was more threatening than the Palestinians’ willingness to compromise. Begin thus placed out of bounds any 

negotiations with a group of men who, he claimed, had no other aim than to exterminate Jews once again.¹³ 

Begin’s righteous deployment of the Holocaust provoked a backlash. Critics of the war used their own Holocaust references to 

undercut his high moral ground, particularly after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. “To a country that rose out of Hitler’s death 

camps,” wrote journalist David Shipler, “the answers ‘We did not do it’ and ‘We did not know’ are not enough.” But the focus on Be- 

gin’s rhetorical excess did not succeed in dislodging the narrative that Israel was threatened by a second Holocaust. It had taken hold 

before the invasion of Lebanon in distinctly American idioms that would continue to invest Begin’s strident nationalism with universal 

significance. That the first American president to endorse Palestinian rights tried to assuage Israeli and Jewish objections by proposing 

a Holocaust memorial suggests how the Holocaust would be used in portraying a Palestinian homeland as an existential threat to the 

Jewish homeland.¹⁴ 

In 1978, as we saw, the presidential commission established by Carter helped to impress upon the American public the idea that the 

Holocaust was not only a past event of immeasurable terror, but that it also inextricably linked the United States to the birth of Israel 

and to current threats to the country’s existence. The other major event that brought the Holocaust to the attention of Americans that 

year was the miniseries Holocaust, which tens of millions of Americans watched on TV for four consecutive nights in April 1978. For 

many viewers, the epic story of an upper-class, assimilated Jewish family from Berlin would have provided their first encounter with an 

overarching narrative of the Holocaust that tied together the different landmarks of the Nazis’ mass extermination of European Jews: 

Kristallnacht, Babi Yar, the Warsaw Ghetto, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz. Although the nine-and-a-half-hour series ends 

where Exodus begins, with the sole surviving Jewish character about to take a group of orphans to Palestine, Israel’s impending creation 

is foreshadowed throughout the series.¹⁵ 

In the final scene, a Mossad agent—someone much like Ari Ben Canaan—recruits the only remaining member of the Weiss family, 

Rudi, to escort the orphaned refugees on an illegal voyage to Palestine. The agent tells Rudi that the Jewish Agency in Palestine already 

knows his history and has singled him out for this role. The audience has similarly viewed Rudy as a proto-Israeli throughout the film 

because of his actions during the war. In contrast to the rest of his family, who remain naïvely loyal to German culture and are unable to 

resist their fate, Rudy’s independent fighting spirit spurs him to flee Germany and join a band of Ukrainian Jewish partisans, with whom 

he later leads an armed rebellion in Sobibór concentration camp. Rudy, however, knows little of the Zionist movement. When he teases 

his young Czech wife about her silly dreams of growing oranges in Palestine, viewers understand that these dreams will indeed come 

true. Rudi’s ignorance of Zionism lends an organic quality to the idea that he is emigrating to his true homeland. That Jewish fighters in 

Europe would naturally become Israelis is suggested by scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto, where leaders of the uprising unfurl an Israeli 

flag. Although the story ends three years before the founding of the state, its conclusion gestures to the birth of the nation as the 

inevitable redemption of immeasurable suffering. 

The miniseries linked the Holocaust to Israel’s founding as a historical and moral necessity. It was accompanied by a torrent of 

promotional publicity, guides for schools and churches, and follow-up polls, and much of the pedagogical material included infor- 

mation about the significance of present-day Israel. The playwright of the miniseries, Gerald Green, wrote a novelized version, serialized 

by many newspapers, with over a million paperback copies sent to bookstores two weeks in advance of the broadcast. The novel em- 

phatically connects the Holocaust to Israel’s current danger. It begins in Israel with an older Rudi Weiss teaching guerrilla warfare to his 

sons, who are defending their kibbutz from Syrian bombardment. The American Jewish Committee commissioned a nationwide survey 

on the viewing experience of the miniseries. In addition to questions on what viewers had learned about history and how the series af- 

fected their attitudes toward Jews, it included questions about how the series affected viewers’ attitudes toward the current situation in 

the Middle East. Results of the survey showed that “viewers are more sympathetic to Israel than nonviewers” and that viewers “see 

some sense in American Jewish support of Israel.” In another informal survey, a Lutheran magazine asked its readers the question: 

“How has Holocaust affected or focused your faith?” To “many Christians and non-Christians the answer was simple”: now they “under- 

stand the passion behind the Jewish sentiment behind Israel.” Recognition of the Holocaust as a traumatic memory did more than ex- 

plain the psychology of American Jews—why, for instance, they might fear attacks on Israel. It also explained how the Holocaust signi- 

fied a living threat to Israel’s existence and why non-Jews should feel obligated to support Israel.¹⁶ 

This was the message promulgated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which sent a copy of the novel to every 

member of Congress as part of an intense lobbying campaign against a plan to sell aircraft to Saudi Arabia. An editorial in AIPAC’s bi- 

weekly journal stated that Green’s novel and the miniseries “should make all Americans more aware of the moral imperative of Amer- 

ica’s commitment to Israel’s capacity to defend its citizens.”¹⁷ For AIPAC, the Holocaust was a new item in its promotional repertoire. 

The word first appeared in the index of its biweekly Near East Report in 1979. Not until 1983 did the “AIPAC Policy Statement” include a 

reference to the Holocaust. To earlier assertions about shared ideals and strategic assets, the 1983 statement added that “the United 

States recognized Israel’s role in providing a safe home for victims of the Holocaust and for Jews persecuted everywhere.” As popular 

culture was becoming more widely acquainted with the Holocaust, AIPAC mustered these associations to identify Israel with the sur- 

vivors of the Holocaust, the same year it was countering pro-Palestinian views on American campuses in the wake of the Lebanon 

War.¹⁸ 

 

Never Again 

 

Elie Wiesel was the public figure who most forcefully conveyed to the American public the living presence of the Holocaust and the 

continuing threat that it posed to the existence of Israel. He drew on the authority of his personal trauma as a young prisoner at 

Auschwitz and Buchenwald and on his life’s commitment to bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities inflicted on Jews. With his numi- 

nous presence, his expression of moral angst, his haunted voice, and the anguish etched in the lines of his face, he personified the au- 

thenticity of the Holocaust survivor. His own rise to public prominence was inseparable from the rise of Holocaust memory in Amer- 

ican public awareness. Millions of schoolchildren read his autobiographical book, Night; he advised American presidents and in 1985 

famously chastised President Reagan for planning a state visit to a German military cemetery. He accompanied world leaders and cele- 

brities on pilgrimages to the sites of concentration camps, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Wiesel insisted on the uniquely Jewish nature of the Holocaust. He often stated that the Holocaust should transcend politics and 

that its representation in popular culture, such as in the TV miniseries, trivialized its significance. He spoke of the Holocaust in semire- 

ligious terms as an ineffable and timeless catastrophe that eternally threatened to recur. Wiesel related the exceptional evil of the Holo- 

caust to Israel’s exceptional morality and to the unique threats to its existence. He shared Begin’s vigorous nationalism and right-wing 

views, but at the same time, he translated Jewish nationalism into the language of universal humanism. By attributing both uniqueness 

and exemplarity to the Holocaust, he turned it into a historical yardstick by which to measure other human suffering. 

The first National Civil Holocaust Commemoration Ceremony was held on April 24, 1979, at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Both Wiesel 

and President Carter addressed the gathering. Wiesel’s speech was entitled “The Holocaust: Beginning or End?” His questions implied 

the answer: “Was it the final convulsion of demonic forces in history? A paroxysm of centuries-old bigotry and hatred? Or, on the con- 

trary, a momentous warning of things to come?” Wiesel pointed to violence against Israel as primary evidence of the beginning of a new 

horror. Thirty years after the liberation of the camps, he said, we witness “more wars, new racial hostilities, and an awakening of Nazism 

on all five continents. Little did we know that, in our lifetime, books would appear in many languages offering so-called ‘proof’ that the 

Holocaust never occurred, that our parents, our friends did not die there. Little did we know that Jewish children would again be mur- 

dered, in cold blood, by killers in Israel.” Wiesel implied that acts of terrorism against Israel, in addition to Holocaust denial, were signs 

that the Holocaust had not fully ended.¹⁹ 

 

 

Elie Wiesel (right), chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, presents President Jimmy Carter (left) with the panel’s 

final report, September 27, 1979. 

 

At this same ceremony, President Carter took a more universal approach than Wiesel, who emphasized the uniqueness of Jewish suf- 

fering and the culpability of those who had abandoned the Jews to the slaughter. For Carter, the memory of this same failure taught that 

“human rights and human dignity are indivisible. America must, and always will, speak out in the defense of human rights not only in 

our own country, but around the world.” Carter agreed with Wiesel about the looming risk of a new genocide—but not only to Jews in 

Israel. Carter urged the Senate to “take a long overdue step” and ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, 

which had been adopted by the United Nations in 1948. “Without concrete action,” he stated, “our words are hollow. Let us signify by 

deed as well as by word that the American people will never forget.”²⁰ 

In these founding speeches and documents for the national memorial, Carter and Wiesel wove together a powerful public idiom of 

Holocaust awareness that would resonate for years to come. They conjoined the particularity of the mass slaughter of Jews under the 

Nazis with the ongoing threat to Israel, and they tied the universal imperative to prevent future genocides with an American obligation 

to lead an international movement for human rights. As Carter declared at the presentation of the commission’s final report, “Out of 

our memory and understanding of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakeable oath with all civilized people that never again will the 

world stand silent, never again will the world look the other way or fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide.”²¹ 

The slogan “Never Again” resounded for many who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s as a stirring ethical imperative to fight for 

human rights and to prevent future genocides, and young human rights activists denounced their governments’ hypocrisy for failing to 

uphold this imperative in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.²² “Never Again,” however, did not originate in this universalist milieu; it 

was invented in 1970 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a right-wing Jewish nationalist from Brooklyn, to serve as the motto of the militant Jewish 

Defense League (JDL). The phrase, which was often used by the Save Soviet Jewry movement, expressed the JDL’s confrontational spir- 

it, urging combative retaliation rather than powerless capitulation. When Kahane emigrated to Israel, his views were deemed so extreme 

that Israel banned the political party he founded there for its “Nazi-like,” “racist,” and “undemocratic positions.”²³ 

In the transformation of its use from advocating Jewish self-defense to preventing genocide anywhere on earth, the inspiring refrain 

“Never Again” made a conceptual leap that showed its ability to conform to different political meanings. What the nationalist and univ- 

ersalist paradigms do share is the characterization of the Holocaust both as a historical catastrophe that is never quite past, and as a 

portent of evil that is ever imminent. In the JDL’s original nationalist meaning, the heritage of the Nazi genocide as the culmination of 

centuries of persecution demanded vigilance and justified violence to defend Jews everywhere and to avert the annihilation of the Jewish 

state. In its adaptation by human rights advocates, knowledge of the Holocaust as the universal paradigm of evil required international 

vigilance and intervention—diplomatic or military—to prevent the occurrence of future genocides worldwide. The nationalism that 

spawned this phrase, however, would never be completely purged from it, even when used in a universalist sense. This strange geneal- 

ogy of “Never Again” points to certain tensions that came into play in the political mobilization of Holocaust memory as a harbinger of 

the future. One is the contradiction between nationalist and universalist applications; another is that between viewing Jewish victim- 

hood as the universal standard for measuring genocide and exempting Israel from those universal standards that it deems threaten its 

survival.²⁴ 

Elie Wiesel played a key role in propagating the different meanings of “Never Again” among various religious and human rights or- 

ganizations and political contexts. He skillfully managed—or juggled—the tension between the universal and the particular by espous- 

ing the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and privileging Israeli vulnerability, even as he expanded the Holocaust’s lessons to other human 

rights causes and made “Never Again” a slogan for the worldwide prevention of genocide. 

As a universal symbol, the Holocaust garnered what Alan Mintz has called “moral prestige,” becoming the standard for all other 

mass suffering. For Wiesel, this moral prestige related to his view of Israel as both exceptionally vulnerable and morally superior. For 

him, the exemplary evil of the Holocaust could be redeemed by the exemplary morality of the State of Israel. Wiesel made this linkage 

less jarring than Begin had by speaking in the idiom of universal humanism rather than aggressive nationalism. The uniqueness of Jew- 

ish victimization in the Holocaust, Wiesel taught, had universal significance, and the redemption of humankind after the war was insep- 

arable from the specific deliverance of the Jewish people in Israel. As he stated when he presented the report of the president’s commis- 

sion to President Carter in 1979, “Birkenau arouses man’s most secret anguish. Jerusalem symbolizes our most fervent hope, and, 

therefore, we are attached to Jerusalem in such love and admiration.” Avoiding the political conflict over Israel’s plans to annex East 

Jerusalem, he implied that universal “anguish” sanctioned attachment to a particular place. Wiesel saw no contradiction between the 

particular and the universal, between “Never Again” as a vow to protect Israel from existential threats and as an imperative to prevent 

genocide around the world.²⁵ 

Wiesel used his moral authority to support victims of contemporary atrocities: he spoke out on behalf of starving Biafrans, the mil- 

lions of Cambodians murdered by the Pol Pot regime, Vietnamese refugees, the indigenous Aché people being exterminated in 

Paraguay, and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia. But when it came to the situation in the Middle East, he prevaricated. 

Wiesel’s commitment to the paradigmatic nature of the Holocaust put him in a double bind: he would have to acknowledge Pales- 

tinian suffering, even as he disavowed it. In his 1978 essay “To a Young Palestinian Arab,” Wiesel draws on his own losses in the Holo- 

caust to express sympathy for the Palestinian tragedy of displacement and homelessness. In striving for balance, he faults Arabs for not 

recognizing that the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust gave them the right to a sovereign state. His essay professes an aversion to 

“scorekeeping” for comparative pain, but he nonetheless constructs a moral hierarchy in which Palestinian suffering has devolved into 

vengeful violence, while Israelis have transformed their traumatic past into a higher spiritual calling. Jewish virtue, he claims, lies in the 

survivors’ refusing to take vengeance on their oppressors in Europe and in the special Jewish capacity to turn their own trauma into 

empathy for the suffering of others. Wiesel exemplifies this sentiment himself: “I do feel responsible for what happened to you, but not 

for what you chose to do as a result of what happened to you. I feel responsible for your sorrow, but not for the way you use it, for in its 

name you have massacred innocent people, slaughtered children.” Ignoring Israeli violence against innocent people and Palestinian 

children, Wiesel claims that the Holocaust taught Israelis to respect the sanctity of life, while the Palestinians’ tragedy debased them 

into supporting the murder of innocents.²⁶ 

Wiesel chose not to speak out against the invasion of Lebanon or the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Instead, he mobilized the excep- 

tionalism of the Holocaust to defend Israel as the victim of anti-Semitism. In an interview with People magazine in November 1982, he 

said that that year had been the hardest one in his life since 1945, not because of the war, but because of the global resurgence of anti- 

Semitism that it had unleashed. When asked how he felt about Begin using the Holocaust to justify Israeli actions, he responded that he 

objected to anyone using the Holocaust for political reasons, and that the word had become too “fashionable” and thus too widely 

available. He believed that only people who loved Israel had the right to criticize it, while all others condemned it with suspicious “rel- 

ish.” Wiesel never mentioned Begin; rather, he condemned the PLO observer to the UN for “speaking about ‘Judeo-Nazis’—my God, 

the blasphemy, the obscenity of putting these words together.” He did not mention that this term had first been used by an Israeli 

scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who created a stir by describing the war as a “Judeo-Nazi policy.”²⁷ For Wiesel, the worst sin in using 

Nazi analogies was the attempt, in his words, to “demystify the Holocaust. Meaning, in a way, to take it away from the Jewish people.” 

Indeed, the Holocaust could provide the basis for empathy with the suffering of others; but “paradoxically,” as he said, “only when we 

tell the story of what happened to the Jewish people can we save other people.” Thus, he believed that using Holocaust analogies to de- 

pict Palestinian and Lebanese suffering at the hands of the Israeli military amounted to a kind of theft and was evidence of a resurgence 

of anti-Semitism.²⁸ 

Wiesel’s moral authority derived from his status as a Holocaust survivor, an identity that was gaining prestige in American society 

with the spread of Holocaust awareness. In the People interview, Wiesel backed up his own observations by noting that friends of his 

who were also survivors were having nervous breakdowns, and even committing suicide, “all reacting to the anti-Semitism that was a 

reaction to Lebanon and the massacre.” The image of the survivor played an important role in rehabilitating Israel’s moral image in the 

wake of Lebanon, as the country became no longer primarily identified with its youthful pioneers, or idealistic soldiers, but with the 

noble survivors who had rebuilt their lives along with the country. Indeed, the Report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust iden- 

tified the United States along with Israel as a site of rebirth for Holocaust survivors, and it cited the need to preserve their memories as 

a primary reason for creating an American memorial to the Holocaust. 

In April 1983, at the first American meeting of the Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, Vice President 

George H. W. Bush presented to Elie Wiesel a symbolic key to the proposed new Holocaust museum. The conveners cautiously as- 

serted that the event was “strictly a nonpolitical affair” in relation to Israel. But they nonetheless underlined Israel’s vulnerability as the 

key message. An organizer told the Washington Post that the Holocaust was “a lesson to the world that it can happen again if we will not 

be watchful. If we will not pay attention to small incidents.” He explained that “years ago they used to call it anti-Semitism; today they 

call it anti-Zionism, but actually it’s the same thing.”²⁹ 

In the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer wrote of this gathering as though the Holocaust had always formed the basis for American attach- 

ment to Israel, support that transcended all strategic and political considerations. Although he had recently called the Sabra and Shatila 

massacre a disaster for Israel’s “high moral image in Washington,” which would take years to repair, he clearly saw the rejuvenating po- 

tency of this reunion of Holocaust survivors. The organizers “did not have to use a sledgehammer to press their point for strong U.S. 

backing for Israel,” he wrote. In the closing ceremony at the Washington Monument, President Reagan linked America and Israel as 

sites of redemption, promising the survivors that “the security of your safe havens, here and in Israel, will never be compromised.” The 

mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, condemned the PLO as terrorists “attempting to finish what Hitler had started.” Though thousands 

of attendees had other concerns—to share their traumatic stories, to locate lost friends and relatives—the public face of this “nonpo- 

litical” event placed Israel at the top of the agenda. As the figure of the survivor gained public visibility and social esteem, the aura of the 

survivor amplified Israel’s existential peril. Any danger faced by the country was rendered as threatening its very existence rather than as 

threatening the kinds of losses that any people would dread as a result of armed conflict: loss of lives and territory, damage to its army, 

its cities, or its economy. In Israel’s case, evocation of the Holocaust transformed the fear of loss into the prospect of extinction.³⁰ 

The equation of criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and Nazism intensified with the temporal shift in the signif- 

icance of the Holocaust. In the context of an imminent threat, anti-Semitism started to be viewed less as a prejudice that education and 

awareness could undo, or as a form of discrimination that could be legally challenged, and more as an ever-present genocidal urge to 

kill Jews and destroy their state. 

In the 1980s, as Palestinians became visible to more Americans as victims of Israeli aggression and as a people struggling for human 

rights and a national homeland, Israel’s staunchest supporters pushed back to portray them as Nazis intent on committing a second 

genocide. During the groundbreaking ceremony for the Holocaust Museum in 1985, for instance, Wiesel invoked the Holocaust to 

decry the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish American who was shot and thrown off the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille 

Lauro by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. A Washington Post story on Klinghoffer’s funeral bore the headline “Holocaust of 

One.” Equating terrorist acts committed by Palestinians with the Nazi Holocaust mustered great emotional power through the shared 

focus on innocent Jewish victims.³¹ 

Terrorist violence by nonstate actors, no matter how heinous, lacks the powerful state organization behind the systematic industri- 

alized violence that characterized the Nazi slaughter of millions. Nonetheless, the repeated analogy between terrorism and the Holo- 

caust had the powerful effect of tarring the entire Palestinian cause as a hateful reincarnation of the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews. 

At a time when the Carter and Reagan administrations continued Kissinger’s pledge to Israel not to speak directly to the PLO, the confla- 

tion of Palestinians with terrorism and Nazism contributed to the public perception of the illegitimacy of the PLO and the cause it 

represented.³² 

In a universalist mode, Wiesel pulled back from this equation when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 as a “messenger to 

mankind,” one of the world’s “most important spiritual leaders and guides.”³³ He interwove a plea for Israel into his most passionate 

appeal for universal human rights. In his acceptance speech, he stated that having endured the world’s indifference to the Nazi geno- 

cide, he “swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” His particular trauma as a 

Jewish survivor of the death camps made him abhor the abuse of human rights across the political spectrum, from apartheid in South 

Africa to the repression of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, to the situation of the Palestinians. Yet he qualified his sympathy for the Pales- 

tinians, “to whose plight I am sensitive, but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.” Though he expressed sorrow for the 

losses on both sides and advocated peace between the two peoples, he condemned Palestinian terrorism alone for prolonging the con- 

flict, and defended Israel with reference to the threat of a future Holocaust: “Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be re- 

moved from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land. Please understand my deep and total commitment to 

Israel: if you could remember what I remember, you would understand. Israel is the only nation in the world whose very existence is 

threatened.” In this speech devoted to the universal message of the Jewish catastrophe, Wiesel evoked Holocaust memory as evidence 

of Israel’s future vulnerability, and he portrayed Israel, under the eternal shadow of the Holocaust, as the exemplar of universal 

suffering.³⁴ 

Two years later Wiesel found himself in a sticky moral dilemma, in the face of Israel’s aggression toward Palestinians during the first 

intifada. Substituting “feeling” for the real danger he had insisted upon in 1986, he wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “Israel is the 

only country that feels its existence threatened.” Describing his visit to Gaza during the uprising, Wiesel acknowledged the Palestinian 

right to fight for self-determination and criticized what he saw as the occasional excesses of Israeli violence. But his essay defends the 

essential morality of Israel against doubters. He writes, “Israel has not ‘lost its soul.’ Its soldiers are not sadists. They do not enjoy 

fighting stone-throwing adolescents. But confronted by them, what should a soldier do? Retreat? How far? Run away? Where?” The 

implication is that the soldiers are fighting for their existence. They have nowhere else to go. Although Wiesel contends that Israel 

should not be above criticism, he roundly criticizes its critics for describing the state as a colonial power, like France in Algeria or the 

United States in Vietnam. Even worse are those who compare Israeli’s policies to Hitler’s in Nazi Germany: “How are we to convince Is- 

rael’s political adversaries that the Holocaust is beyond politics and beyond analogies?” he asks. For Wiesel, to see Israel as being 

under the existential threat of a new Holocaust was not a political analogy, but a truth that united feeling and reality. By disavowing the 

political uses of the Holocaust, he deployed the Holocaust politically to exempt Israel from censure and to police legitimate Holocaust 

references. Wiesel found the desire to annihilate Jews lurking in every form of Palestinian resistance, including not only terrorism and 

stone-throwing, but even poetry. He read Mahmoud Darwish’s impassioned poem “Those Who Pass between Fleeting Words,” which 

calls for Israelis to abandon Palestine to its people, as akin to violence and murder. Israel remained morally heroic to Wiesel because of 

its willingness to sue for peace despite the looming specter of the Holocaust that Palestinians represented.³⁵ 

Many Americans saw through Wiesel’s defense of Israel’s policies, and some accused him of hypocrisy. On the same page of the 

New York Times on which Wiesel’s editorial appeared, Anthony Lewis blamed Israel for intransigence and urged it to negotiate with the 

PLO. In a letter published in the New York Review of Books, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg challenged Wiesel to apply to Israel the moral stric- 

tures he had gleaned from the Holocaust. The Holocaust taught Wiesel that one should never again remain silent in the face of human 

suffering, but Wiesel remained silent in the face of Israelis beating and shooting unarmed youth, and in the face of racist character- 

izations of Palestinians by a chief of staff of the IDF as “drugged cockroaches.” Hertzberg implored him to break a silence that consti- 

tuted a defense of Israel’s right-wing policies, and to speak out against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Where Wiesel mobilized Holo- 

caust memory to defend Israel from its critics, Hertzberg joined other Jews who advocated that the memory of their own traumatic past 

should guide them toward empathy and acceptance of responsibility for the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli rule.³⁶ 

Some American Jews went even further and called for separating the Holocaust altogether from the politics of the Middle East. In 

spite of the origins of the proposal for a national Holocaust memorial, some of its planners wanted to divorce its mission from overt 

partisanship for Israel. One proponent of this separation was Michael Berenbaum, who drafted the original report of the President’s 

Commission on the Holocaust, served as project director from 1988 to 1993, and played a vocal role in interpreting its purpose to the 

public. Berenbaum had a strong attachment to Israel: he volunteered there during the Six-Day War, and he was the Jewish community 

representative in Washington, D.C., who observed the foreign desk of the Washington Post during the Lebanon War in 1982. Later in the 

1980s, however, he witnessed Israel losing its mystique among American Jews and becoming a controversial issue filled with moral 

ambiguity. The Holocaust, he believed, could take Israel’s place as the moral center that unified American Jews. The planning and con- 

struction of the Holocaust Museum, wrote Berenbaum, accompanied “the events of the 1980’s [which] will slowly bring to an end the 

Israeli-centered period for American Jews.” For his generation, those events included the Lebanon fiasco, the Palestinian uprising, and 

the espionage scandal of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life in prison for spying on the 

United States for Israel. With Israel having become a divisive subject among American Jews, Holocaust memory appeared to supply a 

more secure anchor point for bringing the Jewish community together around a shared traumatic past.³⁷ 

 

Liberation or Abandonment? 

 

To raise a memorial to a European genocide on the secular but sacred space of the National Mall required enormous cultural work— 

nothing less than the transformation of the Holocaust into an element of American heritage. Berenbaum, for one, believed that the 

Holocaust could provide a center of moral unity not only for Jews, but for all Americans. He made the case that a national museum 

would transform the history of a uniquely Jewish catastrophe into a universal civics lesson. The story of the Holocaust, he wrote, “had 

to be told in such a way that it would resonate not only with the survivor in New York and his children in Houston or San Francisco, but 

with a black leader from Atlanta, a midwestern farmer, or a northeastern industrialist.” Americans from different social spheres with di- 

verse values could unite against a common enemy in their recognition of the Holocaust as the paradigm of ultimate evil. Instruction in 

the Holocaust could teach the American values of “democracy, pluralism, respect for differences, individual responsibility, freedom 

from prejudice, and an abhorrence of racism.” It could also help recalibrate America’s moral compass, fractured by the social upheavals 

of the 1960s and 1970s and the depredations of the powerful in the Vietnam War and Watergate.³⁸ 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is the concrete symbol of the Americanization of the Holocaust, where visitors can 

see enlightened American values represented in stark contrast with the evil darkness of the Nazis. The Americanization process had two 

strands: a national narrative framed Americanism, with its values of democracy and tolerance, as the antithesis of Nazism, and a uni- 

versal narrative framed the Holocaust as a paradigm of absolute evil, bearing lessons for protecting human rights and preventing future 

genocides. These narratives came together in a redemptive vision of the United States as the global guarantor of human rights and the 

protector of the Jewish state from future Holocausts.³⁹ 

Many of the members of the president’s commission tasked with planning the memorial wanted to keep it free from overt parti- 

sanship for Israel, and some even objected to having the president of Israel speak at the opening ceremonies in 1993.⁴⁰ America’s spe- 

cial relationship with Israel, however, was inseparable from the conception of the memorial and was woven into the framework of the 

exhibits. The idea of the Holocaust’s unique relation to Israel—as the condition of its birth and the threat of its apocalyptic end—was 

not superseded by Americanization or universalization. By presenting Nazism as the antithesis of American values, the museum paired 

Israel and America as sites of redemption, democratic havens where survivors were reborn and memory was revered. The U.S. commit- 

ment to Israel proved essential to two basic themes of the museum: America’s opposition to Nazism, and vigilance against future geno- 

cide. 

At the grand opening of the museum in 1993, speakers articulated its contradictory and complementary meanings. President Clinton 

made explicit an organic connection between the Holocaust’s nationalist and universalist implications. “The Holocaust gave rise to the 

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter of our common humanity,” he asserted; “and it contributed, indeed made certain, 

the long overdue creation of the nation of Israel.”⁴¹ In this double myth of origins, the birth of an individual nation was imbued with the 

same lofty value as the creation of a global community that transcends national boundaries. 

Clinton and the other international dignitaries spoke before a backdrop of fifteen brightly colored flags representing the units of the 

American armed forces that had liberated the concentration camps in 1945. The flags, which would become part of the permanent ex- 

hibit, represented a central narrative in the Americanization of the Holocaust. “Our military forces,” stated Clinton, “alongside the allied 

armies, played the decisive role in bringing the Holocaust to an end. Overcoming the shock of discovery, they walked survivors from 

those dark, dark places into the sweet sunlight of redemption, soldiers and survivors being forever joined in history and humanity.”⁴² 

On the same stage, Elie Wiesel presented a darker version of America’s role in the war. He castigated the U.S. government for having 

failed to liberate Jews by refusing to bomb the concentration camps in Poland. “Why weren’t the railways leading to [Auschwitz- 

]Birkenau bombed by Allied bombers?” he asked. “As long as I live I will not understand that. And why was there no public outcry of 

indignation and outrage?” According to this equally resonant narrative, the United States was not a liberator, but a guilty bystander that 

abetted the Nazi genocide by abandoning the Jews. Both narratives were part of the museum’s rationale from the start.⁴³ 

Liberator or failed rescuer? Which best describes America’s role in the Holocaust? These two stories describe different historical mo- 

ments with different actors, and they rely on different ways of thinking about history. “Liberation” might describe what ordinary soldiers 

witnessed at the war’s end, and it offered a coherent framework for making sense of the brutal scenes that the soldiers and journalists 

first encountered in the death camps.⁴⁴ The decision not to bomb Auschwitz describes a government decision made at the highest ech- 

elon during the war. Both stories contributed retrospectively to making the Holocaust central to the American memory of World War II 

by giving Americans major roles to play in ending the slaughter—in one case a role that they carried out, and in the other a role that they 

failed to fulfill. Together, both narratives convey the same message not only about the past but also about the present and future: Amer- 

ican military might is a virtuous force for liberating the oppressed from tyranny. 

For the United States as well as Israel, Holocaust memory could restore an honorable picture of military force, which was suffering 

from disillusionment in both countries. For Israel, its identity as a community of Holocaust victims—in the past and potential future— 

justified its righteous exercise of violence during the Lebanon War and the first intifada. For the United States, the role of liberator and 

the imperative to rescue contributed to the idealization of World War II as the “good war” and its soldiers as the “Greatest Generation,” 

to counteract deep cynicism about the overwhelming abuse of military power in Southeast Asia and to burnish the tarnished images of 

both the American soldier and the nation’s military command. 

The commemoration of American soldiers as liberators of concentration camps was made official in 1979, just as the president’s 

commission presented its plans for the memorial. To mark the thirty-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Dachau by American troops, 

Congress designated April 28 and 29 as Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust. President Carter asked Americans to 

“observe this solemn anniversary of the liberation of Dachau with appropriate study, prayers and commemoration as a tribute to the 

spirit of freedom, justice and compassion which Americans fought to preserve.”⁴⁵ Americans were being asked to remember not only 

the victims of the Nazis’ murderous regime, but also the nobility of American opposition to that regime. 

In actuality, Americans were not the only, or even the primary, liberators of the death camps, and the operation was more haphazard 

than the word “liberation” implies. The Soviet Army was the first to reach a major extermination camp, Madjanek, and then to enter 

Auschwitz and other sites in the east, months before U.S. troops reached Buchenwald and Dachau. The U.S. Army command initially 

had no plans to free camp inmates, and soldiers who stumbled across the death camps reported feeling overcome, dazed, and even re- 

pulsed by the survivors they found there. At first, the army continued to use some of the camps as displaced persons camps. Retro- 

spectively, the idea of liberation allows Americans to imagine their own intimate presence in history, to touch an unspeakable but 

monumental reality, and it offers glorification of the nation’s altruistic purpose in fighting the war. 

This idealization of the American soldier had great appeal during the Reagan era. As a presidential nominee, Reagan rejected the 

“Vietnam syndrome” and called that war a “noble cause.” In his Days of Remembrance speech, Reagan proudly referred to the liberation 

of the camps as evidence of America’s exceptional “genius for great and unselfish deeds,” and he proclaimed that “into the hands of 

America, God has placed an afflicted mankind.”⁴⁶ Reagan never failed to link America’s magnanimity to its contemporary defense of Is- 

rael from the threat of a new Holocaust. Having rescued the Jews from the horrors of Nazism, America had an ongoing obligation to “a 

people whose country was reborn from the ashes of the Holocaust—a country that rightfully never takes its security or its survival for 

granted.”⁴⁷ In the rhetoric of the Cold War, Reagan tied the American liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps to the current 

movement to free Soviet Jews from communist tyranny. In his speech at the ceremony laying the cornerstone of the Holocaust Mu- 

seum, he called on the Soviet Union to “let these people go!”⁴⁸ 

This theme is most dramatically embodied in the monument Liberation, created by sculptor Natan Rapoport and dedicated in May 

1985 in Liberty State Park, New Jersey. The larger-than-life bronze sculpture depicts a young American soldier trudging with his head 

bowed and carrying a gaunt concentration camp victim in his arms, cradling him in a pieta-like position. The soldier’s youthful chest 

merges with the emaciated ribs of the victim, “as if sharing one heart,” according to the Department of Defense’s Guide to Days of 

Remembrance. With the Statue of Liberty on its cover, this guide explains that the monument is “a symbol of the strong helping the 

weak, not persecuting them. It is a tribute to the best of America’s dreams, freedom, compassion, bravery.”⁴⁹ The official state reso- 

lution dedicating the monument explains that its purpose is “to recognize that our servicemen fought, not to conquer nor to be aggres- 

sors, but rather to rescue and restore freedom to those persecuted and oppressed.”⁵⁰ This monument to the liberators of Holocaust 

victims displaces still-vivid memories of American war-making in Southeast Asia with an idealized model of the American GI from 

World War II as a strong and caring savior.⁵¹ 

Celebrating the liberation of Jewish survivors enhanced the belief in the good war as the standard of American virtue. George W. 

Bush, campaigning for president in 1999, claimed: “No one during World War II questioned what it meant to be ‘American’ ”—it meant 

that “we were liberators, not conquerors. And when American soldiers hugged the survivors of death camps, and shared their tears, and 

welcomed them back from a nightmare world, our country was confirmed in its calling.”⁵² The theme of liberation accompanied a geo- 

graphic shift in the focus of popular history and fiction about World War II from the Pacific to the European theater. At a time when the 

Greatest Generation was rediscovered as a national legend, one could imagine from such statements that liberating the death camps 

had actually provided the motivation to enter World War II. 

 

 

Liberation, statue by Natan Rapoport, depicting a soldier carrying a World War II concentration camp survivor, at Liberty State Park in 

Jersey City, NJ. 

 

The union of American soldiers and Jewish survivors provides an overarching framework for the United States Holocaust Memorial 

Museum. The permanent exhibition starts with American GIs encountering Buchenwald and ends with concentration camp survivors 

rebuilding their lives in Israel and the United States. In the architecture of the building itself, the narrative of liberation offers a stable 

reference point for the visitor’s unsettling encounter with the history of Nazi atrocities. One entrance is flanked by the flags of the liber- 

ating troops, and presidential statements about the arrival of American soldiers at the camps are engraved on the other side. The van- 

tage point of American GIs provides the opening image: visitors encounter shocking, wall-sized photographs of charred corpses in 

Buchenwald through the horrified eyes and bewildered commentaries of American soldiers. The museum represents American troops 

as paradigmatic witnesses to history, and witnessing becomes a heroic and morally imperative act. The story of liberation concludes 

with the survivors’ deliverance to the twin havens of America and Israel. At the end of the exhibit, the story of liberation takes on an inti- 

mate domestic dimension through a touching interview with a middle-class American couple who met when his army unit liberated the 

camp where his future wife was being held. A video of the interview is shown in a small amphitheater lined with Jerusalem stone. This 

personal story takes place against the background of historical markers that unite America and Israel as welcoming sites of redemption. 

The exhibit of the postwar rebirth includes artifacts related to the founding of Israel—including photographs of the SS Exodus and a six- 

foot facsimile of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The journey through the darkened exhibit space concludes as visitors ascend 

into the Hall of Remembrance. There an eternal light burns over buried soil from Holocaust sites and Arlington Cemetery, comingling 

for eternity the memory of the victims and the American troops who liberated the camps.⁵³ 

The Holocaust Museum does not unreservedly celebrate the American role as liberator. It also indicts the United States for failing to 

rescue Jews by refusing to bomb Auschwitz. The question of whether bombing the gas chambers and railroad lines in 1944 was mili- 

tarily feasible or could have saved lives is controversial among historians. No one, after all, can evaluate with certainty the effects of an 

event that did not occur. In honor of the opening of the Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Mu- 

seum cosponsored a conference on the topic, where the debates were intense and the participants divided.⁵⁴ When the museum 

opened, it nonetheless enshrined the counterfactual narrative that lives would have been saved if the United States had bombed 

Auschwitz. It displayed an enlarged copy of a U.S. Air Force intelligence photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau from May 1944 and a letter 

from Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCoy rejecting a “request by the World Jewish Congress to bomb the Auschwitz concentration 

camp.” Rather than referring to the historians’ debate, the caption asserted as fact that “although bombing Auschwitz would have killed 

many prisoners, it would also have halted the operation of the gas chambers and, ultimately, saved the lives of many more.”⁵⁵ 

The belief that the Roosevelt administration knowingly abandoned Jews by refusing to bomb Auschwitz operates as a kind of folk his- 

tory with great emotional power.⁵⁶ The museum exhibit also criticizes the Allies for not taking in more refugees in the 1930s and 1940s. 

But outrage about the failure to bomb has had greater endurance than has indignation at restrictive immigration laws. The conviction 

that bombing Auschwitz would have rescued Jews draws on the moral clarity of hindsight and a magical belief in the efficacy of air- 

power. The assumption that the United States bears responsibility for not bombing Auschwitz gives added significance to the phrase 

“Never Again,” and it has been mobilized for different political purposes. In the opening ceremonies for the museum, Wiesel raised this 

failure in order to exhort Clinton to “do something” in Kosovo. And when NATO carried out its controversial air strikes in 1999, Wiesel 

praised the United States for taking the kind of action in Kosovo that it had failed to take during World War II.⁵⁷ In a speech before 

AIPAC in 2012, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, held up copies of the 1944 letters in which the War Department re- 

buffed the request to bomb Auschwitz, to warn of the dangers of negotiating with Iran instead of using force.⁵⁸ 

Liberating the death camps and failing to bomb Auschwitz may evoke starkly conflicting emotions of pride and guilt. But these narra- 

tives worked together to create a shared vision of American military power as a force for salvation—whether cradling the weak or blast- 

ing the strong. Mobilizing the memory of inaction during the 1940s reminded Americans in later decades that the United States has the 

obligation to redeem its past failure by wielding military power to protect the innocent and to defy tyrants. This argument has appealed 

to people across a range of political positions, from neoconservatives dedicated to restoring American imperial might to humanitarian 

interventionists committed to the “responsibility to protect.” 

American presidents have ritually accepted guilt for not doing more to rescue Jews during World War II. They have, however, refused 

to accept guilt for destruction caused by U.S. military action. President Carter, as we have seen, was the first president to express a 

sense of guilt for abandoning the Jews. He presented Wiesel with copies of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau when asking 

him to serve as chair of the commission. Yet Carter rejected American culpability for the devastating bombing of Vietnam and neigh- 

boring countries. He not only opposed monetary reparations, but rejected any moral obligation. “The destruction was mutual,” he 

avowed. “We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people.… I don’t feel we ought to 

apologize or castigate ourselves or assume the status of culpability.” George McGovern and his supporters opposed Carter’s position 

during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but their willingness to accept guilt about Vietnam was criticized as a 

symptom of national weakness and divisiveness. Carter claimed to represent a party seeking national renewal and unity.⁵⁹ 

Why would Carter, and many Americans, reject guilt for the damage inflicted by American power in Southeast Asia but accept guilt 

for not wielding that power to stop the Holocaust? An obvious answer is that the latter is cost-free, though it has morally underwritten 

costly obligations to Israel. Historian Barbara Keys has argued that some Americans in the Carter era championed the cause of human 

rights abroad to revive a sense of national virtue that had been tarnished in the Vietnam War.⁶⁰ The American embrace of the Holocaust 

as their own history, with both guilt and pride, may have had a similar effect, allowing Americans to oppose atrocities that others com- 

mitted in the past. A Holocaust Museum on the National Mall provided a painless way to both acknowledge American guilt and redeem 

American virtue. 

The tension between failure and liberation in the story of the Holocaust was part of a bigger controversy about American history dur- 

ing the “culture wars” of the 1990s. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to mostly reverent reviews at a time when 

other major exhibits of American history were generating fierce controversy. The museum was not free from criticism—some ques- 

tioned the priority of memorializing a European genocide when there were no national memorials to the genocide of Native Americans 

or the enslavement of African Americans. Others raised questions about whether the museum was turning the Holocaust into a spec- 

tacle. But these questions were mild compared with the criticism that erupted around the same time about two Smithsonian exhibitions, 

one on the western United States, and one on the use of the atomic bomb in World War II. 

In 1991, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art mounted an exhibit titled The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of 

the Frontier, 1820–1920. Conservative critics blasted the exhibit for undercutting the noble myth of Manifest Destiny, and, instead, point- 

ing to the way traditional images veiled the violence and dispossession of Native Americans in the march of westward expansion. The 

suggestion that familiar frontier images included racist depictions and glorified a history of displacement, pillage, and atrocity was an 

anathema to conservatives, who had no trouble accepting a national museum memorializing the victims of genocide committed by 

Nazis in Europe.⁶¹ 

The same year the Holocaust Museum opened, a greater controversy enveloped a Smithsonian announcement to organize an exhibit 

around the display of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The curators planned an exhibit that would 

have explored the multiple causes and ramifications of the bomb, including the political and military reasons for using it, the unprece- 

dented destruction it caused, and its role in ending the war. Veterans’ groups and politicians raised such an outcry that they succeeded 

in shutting down the exhibit before it opened. Their argument, too, relied on a narrative of rescue with a speculative dimension asserted 

as fact: that bombing Hiroshima had saved the lives of thousands, perhaps even a million, American servicemen from dying in what 

would have been a bloody land invasion. These critics believed that to explore the damage wrought by the bomb and raise the question 

of its morality would be an affront to veterans and would desecrate the memory of all those American soldiers who had sacrificed their 

lives during the war.⁶² 

These exhibits generated outrage because they challenged a core belief of American exceptionalism, that the country exercises mili- 

tary force only for righteous ends. No public outcries were raised against exhibits at the Holocaust Museum that criticized the United 

States for failing to bomb Auschwitz or to rescue Jews. On the contrary, this failure became an item of received wisdom about the war, 

and public officials ritually admitted American culpability at Holocaust commemorations. Guilt for not bombing Auschwitz did not de- 

tract from the mythic narrative about American virtue; instead, it contributed to the idea that America has the power and the moral obli- 

gation to exercise force for humanitarian ends. The United States ought to behave as its better self—to act out its essential identity as 

liberator. Since the Holocaust was not only a catastrophe from the past, but an ever-threatening possibility in the future, this narrative 

implied that the United States could get it right this time—by supporting Israel and deploying its firepower to save innocents and pre- 

vent new Holocausts. 

In American popular culture, the best-known savior of Jews from the Nazis is not an American GI but a German businessman, Oskar 

Schindler. Based on a historical novel about a real German entrepreneur and Nazi party member, Schindler’s List (1993), directed by 

Steven Spielberg, tells the story of Schindler’s change of heart and his successful effort to protect the Jewish workers at his factory in 

Krakow, Poland, from being taken to the death camps.⁶³ Two months after the Holocaust Museum opened its doors to the public, 

Spielberg’s film was released to reverential critical acclaim. The media treated the film, the first big-budget Hollywood film about the 

Holocaust, as more of an event than a movie, a “document of witnessing,” as Spielberg told Newsweek. Public officials, including Pres- 

ident Clinton, personally attested to its impact and implored the public to see it. Free public screenings were offered to high school stu- 

dents all over the country, and it has remained a centerpiece of school curricula ever since. As James Young noted, “There are a couple 

of gigantic institutions now, Spielberg being one and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum being another, which are defining a kind of 

public consciousness of the Holocaust.”⁶⁴ Both institutions contributed to a view of the Holocaust as bonding the United States to Is- 

rael. 

The film presents both sides of the American liberation narrative: pride for what was done, and guilt for what was not. The plot re- 

volves around Schindler’s rescue of 1,100 Jews on his celebrated list. As the character that viewers most identity with, Schindler is 

recognizable as a Hollywood protagonist: a heroic individual, a lusty can-do capitalist with a mind of his own, who, upon witnessing the 

suffering of others, rises above political ideology to do the right thing. Viewers also witness his moral growth and awakening, as he 

painfully begins to realize the limits of his efforts to oppose the evil power of the Nazis. Although Schindler saves “his Jews,” he comes 

to recognize his failure to rescue more. In a moving scene at the war’s end, Schindler sinks to his knees under the weight of overpow- 

ering guilt, and he repeats the words expressing his terrible remorse: “I could have saved more. I could have saved more.” 

The film’s narrative of liberation requires Israel as a haven for deliverance. Schindler’s List concludes in Jerusalem as the site of re- 

demption for both Schindler and his Jews. Like the ending of the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Spielberg’s film culminates in the memory 

of Israel’s rebirth out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Yet it ends in a Jerusalem cemetery where the real Schindler is buried. 

Israel may be a conventional destination for popular Holocaust narratives, but Spielberg arrives there by breaking from the docu- 

mentary quality of the rest of the film to transport his characters to Jerusalem through a cinematic feat of magical realism. Unlike the 

end of the Holocaust miniseries, or the beginning of Exodus, no Mossad agent from Palestine leads the survivors to the Promised Land. 

Instead, as they sit listlessly along the railroad tracks, a Russian soldier on horseback tells them that they are not wanted in the East or 

the West, and he points over a hill where they can find food. The group then links arms and marches as a phalanx up the hill, with the 

Israeli song “Jerusalem of Gold” playing in the background, making a contrast with the plaintive violin theme played throughout the 

film. The camera focuses on the weathered yet hopeful faces until they reach the crest of the hill, and then everything changes in one 

frozen shot. The film switches from black and white to color, from past to present, from fiction to reality. The young actors are replaced 

by the actual, now elderly Jews whom Schindler saved, and at the same time, the landscape changes under their feet from the grass- 

covered hill of Poland to the dry stony ground of Jerusalem. The scene then shifts to Schindler’s gravesite in a Christian cemetery on a 

Jerusalem hillside, bathed in bright Mediterranean light. The aging survivors walk haltingly down an incline to place a stone on 

Schindler’s tombstone, which is engraved with a cross and Hebrew writing. They are accompanied by the actors who have played their 

younger selves. 

Israeli previews of the film criticized Spielberg’s choice of “Jerusalem of Gold,” for its historical anachronism and political 

implications.⁶⁵ The song became hugely popular during the Six-Day War and has endured as a national anthem celebrating military con- 

quest and messianic longing. The question of anachronism, however, is moot. The film’s ending posits an ahistorical timeless connec- 

tion between the Holocaust and Israel, with Jerusalem as its mystical uncontested center. The history of 1948 disappears, and the vic- 

tory song magically transports survivors from Poland to Jerusalem. Even though the individuals actually saved by Schindler dispersed 

to many countries, the film brings them all to Jerusalem to memorialize their liberator, as though it were their final destination. What 

links the Holocaust and Israel in the movie is the timeless obligation to honor the dead. The universal message of the film, about 

Schindler overcoming indifference to rescue the weak, merges with the nationalist message, epitomized by “Jerusalem of Gold.” The 

only part of Israel shown in the film is the graveyard visited by elderly survivors. No nation of refugees, pioneers, or fighters appears— 

only a memorial site that unites the liberator and the liberated in a ritual of commemoration. Spielberg’s cinematic magic projects a 

timeless bond between the liberator, the survivor, and the land of Israel. 

5

THE FUTURE HOLOCAUST

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the horror of the Holocaust serves as the basis for their support of Israel. Others believe that the tragedy has been politicized in order to sustain that support. The clash between these views intensified during the 1982 Lebanon War, when advocates and opponents of the invasion argued over which combatants were acting like Nazis. The paradoxical view of Israel as an invincible victim never lost its allure in the United States, even in the face of Israel’s military dominance in Lebanon and in the occupied territories during the first intifada. Israel’s status as an eternal victim actually gained strength throughout the 1980s, as the Holocaust became a more prominent feature of the American cultural landscape.

Official commemorations, presidential speeches, mass culture, and school curricula taught Americans not only about the historical catastrophe that befell Jews in Europe, but also about the Holocaust as a chapter of their own history in World War II. A museum of the Holocaust was built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As the Holocaust was becoming part of America’s national heritage, its temporal significance in relation to Israel was changing as well. The Holocaust began to represent more than the horrific suffering of the Jewish people in the past—now it also signified an imminent threat to the future of the Jewish state. A past atrocity in Europe came to foreshadow an impending apocalypse in the Middle East.

New narrative bonds were forged between America’s newfound past and Israel’s precarious future. Interest in Holocaust memory boomed at a time when both countries were facing crises of wars gone awry—indeed, Israel was said to have had its own Vietnam in Lebanon. These crises had created internal divisions and international opprobrium, and challenged the belief in the moral authority of military power, a bedrock of their shared exceptionalism. The birth of Israel might be understood as the redemption of Jewish suffering, but the discovery of Holocaust memory as an American national concern also confirmed American exceptionalism and renewed the bond between the two nations.

Remembering the Future

In 1978, two events propelled the Holocaust to the center of American consciousness. An NBC television miniseries called Holocaust was viewed by more than 100 million Americans in April. And a month later, President Jimmy Carter initiated plans for what would ultimately become the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

On May 1, 1978, Carter hosted a celebration for Israel’s thirtieth anniversary in the Rose Garden of the White House, where he welcomed Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin along with six hundred leaders of American Jewish organizations. For a birthday party, the tone of the ceremony was notably somber, as was the gift Carter presented to his guests. He announced the formation of a presidential commission charged with planning an American memorial to the six million who were killed in the Holocaust. He soon appointed noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as chairman, and the commission embarked on the process of designing a memorial to commemorate, on American soil, the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe.¹

Carter’s commission aimed to rescue the memory of genocide victims from the oblivion of the past. But the timing addressed a more immediate controversy over his Middle East policy. In 1977, Carter became the first American president to utter the phrase Palestinian homeland. He antagonized the Israeli government and its American supporters by proposing to include the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in an international peace conference cosponsored by the Soviet Union. Begin expressed outrage at a press conference, denouncing PLO members as Huns, its policy as an Arab Mein Kampf, and its diplomacy as a subterfuge for its true goal: to destroy a people; to annihilate people. The method: genocide—to kill man, woman, and child.² Negotiating over territory and recognition of Palestinian rights was, in Begin’s terms, tantamount to exposing Israel to a second Holocaust. In less inflammatory rhetoric, American supporters of Israel also criticized Carter for putting Israel at risk by proposing to negotiate with the PLO and planning to sell fighter jets to Saudi Arabia.

In a bid to mollify Carter’s critics, his aides recommended that he propose the creation of a national memorial to the Holocaust. In his Rose Garden speech, he vowed that America’s total absolute commitment to Israel’s security would ensure for all times that the Jewish people will not be condemned to repeat the Holocaust. In response, Begin called Carter’s address one of the greatest moral statements ever.³

After Carter’s announcement, four different presidents pledged their commitment to the project during a period that witnessed the end of the Cold War. Democrats and Republicans alike vowed that the memory of the Holocaust would remind Americans of their enduring obligation to the State of Israel. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors to the public. The museum has deeply affected millions of visitors from all over the world. It serves to document the rise of Nazism and the ghastly methods of slaughter, to memorialize the dead and preserve the traumatic memories of survivors, and to transmit the profound meanings of the Holocaust to communities across generations. But when we look back at the history of the memorial, it becomes clear that this national institution of memory, dedicated to facing the ultimate evil of the past and to imparting universal values to the future, bears indelible traces of its origins in America’s Middle East policies, especially its commitment to support Israel.

At the 1978 White House ceremony announcing the formation of the presidential commission, Carter related a narrative of the origins of the special relationship, claiming that it was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, alongside the Jewish state. Moral outrage at Nazi atrocities, he claimed, led the United States to recognize the new state in 1948—before any other nation did. Penance as well as pride drove this allegiance, for Carter acknowledged that Americans had turned their backs on Jews seeking refuge from Nazi brutality. In founding a state, Jews valiantly created for themselves a home that the world had denied them. Celebrating Israel’s thirtieth anniversary, Carter focused not on its pioneering spirit or its modern accomplishments, but on its indomitable will to survive, and he equated Israel’s survival with its capacity to avert a second Holocaust. Carter asserted that America’s commitment to establishing the nation

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