A Perversion of Memory

It is my firm belief that the transmission of the history and of the memory of the Holocaust has triggered a backlash against Jews and the Jewish state, at least in the West if not beyond, and at least throughout the last decade, although the phenomenon is arguably much older. In Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, Elhanan Yakira argues that in a broad philosophical, ideological, and journalistic corpus, including works by a certain, perhaps marginal, Israeli intelligentsia deeply influenced by European and American postmodern and postcolonial theory, Israel is portrayed as owing its legitimacy to the Holocaust, then as exploiting the memory and the history of the Holocaust, and finally as perpetrating a “new Holocaust,” this time on the Palestinians. The same phenomenon can be observed in France and, I would argue, in Europe in general.

A massive increase in Holocaust education, Holocaust awareness, and Holocaust commemoration has occurred concurrently with a rise in antisemitism, at least throughout the last fifteen years. Is this resurgence merely the sign of Holocaust fatigue—something that Alain Finkielkraut had a long time ago called “hypermnesia” or excess of memory, mnemonic bulimia? Are people simply tired of hearing about the Holocaust? Or should we not rather suggest that the Holocaust has been de-Judaized and universalized in a perverse way?

In France, although the narrative of the construction of the memory of the Holocaust has recently been thoughtfully nuanced and even shaken, the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust remained largely unacknowledged for nearly twenty years after the war; Jewish victims were often lumped into the same category as those in the Resistance and even as young Frenchmen forced to work in Germany; Jews were even sometimes treated with contempt because they had not all “earned” their martyrdom through positive acts, the way Resistance heroes had. However, once wartime Jewish victimhood finally was acknowledged, the claim of “uniqueness” bestowed upon it a coveted symbolic status. Indeed, who does not want his suffering to be recognized as unique? If the Holocaust is unique, then Jewish suffering is a most enviable moral commodity.