Dr. Carol Rittner: I'm very happy to welcome you to the second of the semesters' lectures that
are part of the MA program in Holocaust and Genocide studies. Today we have the
pleasure of engaging Dr. Paul Lyons. And on November the 8th 2007, same time,
same place (that is here in, F226) we shall have Dr. Michael Hayes with us who
will speak to us on the topic "Carcasses of Memory: Ruins as Memorials to Wartime
Destruction and Persecution in Germany." I hope you also will join us for that
presentation and for another presentation later in the month of
November (November 29th), when we will have Dr. Paul Moises who will speak to us
about "Balkans: The Land of Genocides."Dr. Paul Lyons is a member of the faculty
teaching the MA program in Holocaust and Genocide studies. He has been
teaching about social movements, racism, and diversity for four decades. He has
published an essay about his approach to teaching about the Holocaust. I don't
know what he's going to say this afternoon but allow me, if you will, to
Ofer, who will be our spring 2008 Ida E. King Distinguished
Visiting Scholar in Holocaust. "The task of the university teacher," she says, "when
teaching about the Holocaust is twofold: the teacher of the Holocaust must help
young adults to accumulate knowledge and insight about a short but very complex
period, integrating an understanding of the crises of democracy with the racial
ideology and anti-semitism that accompanied the rise of Nazism. The other
task is to foster in the students a sense that, despite the ugliness,
cruelty, and desperation experienced in the Holocaus,t it is important to
struggle with issues raised by it. Another task is to help students to ask
the educational questions and use pedagogy to convey meaningful
conclusions about the Holocaust and to move students to act and be responsible
for their own society and to promote tolerance and human rights. Those of us
who teach about the Holocaust or about other genocides should not only teach
about facts and figures or about historical context and recent or age-old
ethnic, religious or national conflict, important as that may well be, what we
must do, I would suggest, is raise ethical questions, explore the human capacity for
selfishness as well as the human capacity for compassion in teaching
about the Holocaust. Whether it is the genocide of the Jews during World
War II or another genocide, it is imperative that we raise questions of a
more personal nature such as, for example, the human capacity to resist evil. In
doing so, we should help students to confront some of the most difficult
questions any of us can confront: how do human beings (people presumably raised to
distinguish right from wrong, people with families of their own people who say
they love their parents, spouses, children, friends, and relatives) how do such
ordinary people come to participate in the vicious slaughter of powerless men,
women and children? Why does the teaching of good and evil in organized societal
and religious institutions fail to prevent genocide?
Why do the structures of civil society, education, law, religion,
diplomacy, not stop such evil? Where does moral and religious education
flounder? Why do moral and religious education
fail to create more resistance to evil and not encourage more doings of good?
What kind of teaching, what kind of education, can help students to grapple
with these kinds of questions? What kind of teachings, what kind of
education, can prepare people in a democratic society to do more than
simply know about genocide but if, and when faced with genocide empower people
to act to stop genocide?" As I said at the beginning, I do not know what Professor
Paul Lyons will say to us this afternoon but whatever it is, I hope that his
presentation, "Teaching the Holocaust and Genocide: Uniqueness and Transferability,"
will help us to grapple with some of the questions I've raised. Dr. Lyons?
Dr. Lyons: Hi everybody, I know a lot of you which is nice. Let me turn on my mic.
I don't know if I can live up to Carol's
comments. This was actually hard for me. I had something I thought I was
prepared to do as of Sunday and I had one of those moments where I tore it in
pieces and decided to go back and reconfigure what I was going to say.
I'm usually very neat and everything, all written out and what-have-you and and
this is all over the map. I think it's going to be hopefully interesting and
challenging to you. but in some ways in my head. it's almost still a work in
progress. And as you hear me speak about it, I think you'll hear that. It's
necessarily (in many ways) a work in progress. Let me start by explaining what
I mean by "transferability" and how it connects to the issue of uniqueness. My
own perspective is that isolating historical and injustices experienced by a
particular group (Jews, African Americans, Africans, gays and lesbians - any group)
risks playing into what some people have called "a hierarchy of victimhood," a form
of identity politics in which one's own suffering counts and only one's own
suffering counts. Too often, educational institutions create group oriented study
programs like Jewish Studies, African American Studies, Women's Studies, gay and
lesbian studies in which students fixate on a particular group without stretching
their imagination and their ethical concerns to include the broader range of
those who have been mistreated. Instead, I want students to begin with the axiom
that all people (no exception) had histories which include glory and shame
and that all peoples have the capacity to regress toward intolerance, toward
ethnocentrism, toward discrimination, toward bigotry. Now the best story I can
give to illuminate (this is a wonderful story I discovered and that I used in my
Holocaust class on a number of occasions), it's by a Native American whose name is
Robert Allen Warrior and it's an essay called "Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians:
Deliverance, conquest, and Liberation Theology. Today, it's in a very
interesting volume called "Voices of the Religious Left," that Temple University put
out a few years ago. And this really blew me away actually when I first
encountered it, so I want to read Warrior and give you a sense of how he's
thinking. He says, "I believe that the story of the exodus is an inappropriate
way for Native Americans to think about liberation. No doubt the story is one
that has inspired people in many contexts to struggle against injustice.
Israel in the Exile, then diaspora, would remember the story and be reminded of
God's faithlessness. African Americans given Bibles to read by their masters
and mistresses would begin at the beginning of the book and find in the
pages the Bible of God. who was obviously on their side. even if that God was the
god of their oppressors. People in Latin America based
communities read the story and had been inspired to struggle against injustice.
The Exodus, with its picture of a God who takes the side of the oppressed and the
powerless, has been a beacon of hope for many and yet the liberationist picture
of Yahweh is not complete. A delivered people is not a free people, nor is it a
nation. People who have survived the nightmare of subjugation dream of escape.
Once the victims have been delivered, they seek a new dream (a new goal usually),
a place of safety away from their oppressors, a place that can be defended
against future subjugation. Israel's new dream became the land of Canaan
and Yahweh was still with them. Yahweh promised to go before the people and
give them canaan with its flowing milk and honey.
Bland, Yahweh decide,d belong to these former slaves from Egypt and Yahweh
planned on giving it to them. Using the same power used against the enslaving
Egyptians to defeat the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan, Yahweh the
deliverer became Yahweh the Conqueror. The obvious characters in the story for
Native Americans to identify with are the Canaanites," and when I read that for
the first time it totally blew me away because I'm a child of the 1960s,
of the civil rights revolution. I can't tell you how many moments I spent
in black churches listening to preachers,
almost indistinguishable except in degree of eloquence from Martin Luther
King Jr., use all the metaphors that moved all of us. We too will get to the
promised land and after all, King was self-consciously the Moses figure. In
that last sermon he gives in Memphis the night before he's assassinated, he says
"And we too shall get to the promised and I may not get there with you," almost
daring a mosaic comparison. And it's impossible not to resonate either (within
the Jewish tradition that I'm born into or the political tradition that I joined)
not to be moved by the notion of crossing the River Jordan and the entire
Exodus story and yet when Robert Warrior tells me he identifies with the
Canaanites, one has to stop and pause because in all stories, there are
these moral dilemmas. And when he says he sees the world within the
eyes of the Canaanites, that makes me stop and pause. And that's the first
story that I really want you to think about. I can relate that to the experience
I had in Vietnam. I went there as a scholar, not as a soldier and I went
there as an anti-war activist in awe of the Vietnamese
for their endurance in their resilience in the face of our firepower.
I think (like many people who were involved in peace movement), I tended to
romanticize them but one of the things I learned when I was there
with a group of scholars talking to Vietnamese scholars in the 80s was that
they had a similar history. The Vietnamese began in the Red River Valley
in the northern parts of North Vietnam and they migrated southward (as their
population increased as they migrated southward).
They pushed out and annihilated, killed, subjugated, indigenous populations. A
story that seems to be almost a constant in world history and part of the subtext
of what I'm talking about (and I realize that they too share the history of glory
and shame, they too shared a history in which there were heroic moments, in which
they were the underdog, they were the David) but just shifting over a little
bit looking, at it from a slightly different angle, they too were the
Goliath. The people who during those years the French called the mountain
yards or the mountain people were the survivors of that of that story. They had
moved up into the mountains because that was the only way they can manage
in the face of superior force. Now a third story involves a former student of
mine who I just missed in town this weekend, most of you, I don't think any of
you, know him. The only person who might know is Jose
Guadalupe and he was a student of mine about 20 years ago. Jose was a Puerto
Rican who came to the United States as a teen,
barely, I think, not speaking English. He was not literate in English. He came in
to Atlantic City, arrived at Stockton coming out of into our AOF program in
the summer. By the time Jose graduated Stockton, he was my tutor when I was
teaching freshman in the basic skills program. He grew that rapidly and he went
on to get an MSW in social work at University of South Carolina and a -excuse me-
MSW at Rutgers and PhD at University of South Carolina. He is presently an
associate professor of Social Work at Cal State Sacramento and wrote a book
where he actually asked me to do the preface, which was a wonderful experience
for me to be able to do that but Jose is an interesting guy. He was my
son's favorite babysitter. My son still remembers Jose. Whenever we had a party I
would invite Jose and he would bring his guitar and entertain the
four-year-olds or the three year olds or the six year old . Charismatic, beautiful
human being and he was very interested in Eastern religions and about five years ago
he told me that he had changed his name, which is very hard for me, I still had a
hard time not calling him Jose because he changed his name to Krishna.
His name is Krishna Guadalupe and what he told me was how much trouble this
created for him in the Latino community, to which he was devoted. This is a guy
whose entire adult life has been an activist in multiculturalism and
particularly in making the argument for for the dignity of the rights of people
of Latino descent, but what he found was a suspiciousness, a notion that he was
selling out, a notion that he was a self-hating Latino, if I can borrow a
phrase from other communities . And it actually gave him a wiser and broader
view of what multiculturalism meant and part of the issue that I'm interested in
is the way in which one's vision can be narrowed by forms of an epic identity.
One can be put into a box and not allowed to step out of it. If
you use this stereotypical language a black kid who doesn't like basketball, a
black kid who love Chopin, the Jewish kid who isn't a great student, an
Asian kid that wasn't a great student. I mean all the stereotypical things that
that we tend to box people into. The last story is more pointed. Last story, a
friend of mine told me he was at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. I've
been there several times, a most moving experience. I'm sure almost all of you
have been there and have had that experience. You walk out and you want to be in that
room where you can just commune with yourself for a little
while, decompress. You don't want to go outside right away, it's too hard, it's
too much. He does that. He leaves the building and there are two or
three couples chatting and they're chatting about how moving the experience
is, but they're also talking about getting dinner and in their conversation
about getting dinner (they're old Jewish, by the way) they're talking about where
to go for dinner and one person mentioned a particular restaurant and
another respondent that it was in a bad neighborhood and used what I would call
the Yiddish n-word, Schwarzer, and I thought when my friend
told me the story, how is it that the knowledge, the deep penetrating knowledge
of the Holocaust Museum, the study of the Holocaust, Holocaust education, didn't
transfer? That's what I mean by transferability. It didn't transfer to other
forms of bigotry and that's an essential theme that I'm raising. Now, let
me say at this point that I do not share Peter Novak's questioning of the value
of the Holocaust Museum. I think he takes his argument much too far in the book I use
in my class, "the Holocaust and an American life," but I do share with this
very noted historian a concern with a variety of other questions regarding the
value of teaching about the Holocaust. I would add that we here at Stockton and this
particularly for those of you who are here at attendance on Sunday for the
10th anniversary celebration of this program's history honoring Doug Survey
and Steve Marcus, who is right out there, I think we'll understand that we do a
better job in this regard than many others.
I mean it's thrilling to hear Steve and Doug get up there and talk about Darfur
and talk about Nanjing and talk about the ways in which their their
integration of a Holocaust and genocide program has stretched them in those
kinds of ways, but the question I have is, is that typical here? And
is that typical in the Holocaust educational community at large? And
honestly, my answer is no. My answer is no. Now indeed the raising of these issues,
which now necessarily include, for example, the controversy over the new
book by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, "The Israel lobby and US foreign Policy."
Those issues it seems to me are producing much more heat than light and
it's not as if "the other side" on these issues (for example, those
people who are deeply partisan, in favor of Palestinian rights for example and
very critical of Israel) are any more open-minded or tolerant then those who
are partisan for a particular version of Israeli policy and in fact I would say
whichever group dominates in the college environment tends to deny the other
group legitimacy. If it's a campus somewhere where a third world kind of
perspective that thinks the Palestinian issue was the top of the moral agenda of
the world dominates, they will prevent a person from speaking or being hired or
promoted who takes a position that's empathetic or sympathetic or in line
with that of official Israeli policy or anything close to that. And at the same
time, if there is anybody who speaks in a way that is in any substance of way critical
of what has been Israeli policy and Israeli history (these would be the
Palestinians) there will be people in the organized Jewish community and their
allies (including the Holocaust educational community who will turn
their back on academic freedom) and demand that the person not be hired, the
person not be promoted, and so on and so forth. And that bothers me a great deal.
The most recent case we have in this regard is Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize
winner who was recently denied a lecture at Saint Thomas, a
catholic college in Minneapolis on the allegation that he's anti-Israel,
anti-semitic. And not only was Desmond Tutu denied speaking at the
College of St. Thomas but the director of the justice and peace
studies program at that college had lost his directorship of the
program on the basis of the successful protests of Tutu speaking on
that college campus. We had the case of Norman Finkelstein, a scholar in the
Chicago area whose tenure has been put into question from protests mostly
coming from Alan Dershowitz. We had the case of Tony Judt, one of our most
distinguished scholars at New York University, a political scientist, who was
supposed to speak at the Polish consulate in New York City. The speech
was canceled when there were protests because the argument was that he was
anti-Israel. Tutu by the way is Jewish and by any stretch of my definition is
anything but anti-Israel. So we have a number of instances like that.
Now at the same time (and this is why this is difficult) one can play down the
genuinely scary revival of anti-Semitism, which seems to be happening certainly
in the Middle East in the Arab and Muslim communities and perhaps even more
tellingly in the European community. I have to tell you just that the behavior
of British academics in boycotting Israeli academics to me is just shameful
and utterly selective and cowardly. I don't know how else to describe it. So
what I'm trying to communicate is that the problem crosses many boundaries and I'm
deeply concerned about the loss of discourse that results from (what seems to
me) to be two very well-organized bodies, neither of which wants to talk to the
other; neither of which wants to give legitimacy to the other side. I am very
worried that too often those who defend the State of Israel use the charge of
anti-semitism to silence critics. The case of Jimmy Carter is an obvious case
in point in his intentionally provocative book, "Palestine Peace: Not
Apartheid."The case of Mernshern Walt, the case of Tony Jud...t so I think what we
need to be thinking about is how does Holocaust Education address these
matters? Does it, should it, is it complicit in these threats to free
speech and Liberty? Is it merely silent and is that a form of complicity? It's
very difficult to be self-critical and to subject one's own family
and if somebody (my dad) gets in trouble and somebody says, "your dad's a bum," I'm
going to punch out his legs because the first value in that regard is not truth,
it's loyalty. It's really love. Love trumps. It is something middle-class people
don't usually understand. Working-class people understand it very well: if you're
not loyal, you're nothing. But as a general
principle, that's high-risk. That puts you with the number of moral dilemmas,
particularly for dad is Tony Soprano or something along those lines.
Whether it's one's family, one's tribe, one's religion, one's nation, one's race,
it's difficult to apply the same standards. We ask others to apply, to think
of the exemplary behavior of Henry Louis Gates, the
African-American scholar who (several years ago) was vilified in the black
community for participating in the creation of a TV series on Africa that
openly talked about African complicity in the slave trade and slaver. He was
vilified. Washing one's dirty laundry in public in front of the other is deeply
and consistently resisted. This is especially the case (and even
understandably the case) if the group who's worried about its dirty linen has
been historically oppressed, has been bruised, has good reason to be restricted,
termed paranoid. It was paranoia - often there are real
enemies and you don't want to put that in the hands of other people. That's the
issue and that's the issue that Jews have historically oppressed people and
Italians and Catholics and we can go on and on in terms of the groups.
Unfortunately, when you refuse to wash your dirty linen in public, when you act
protectively, you become corrupted because it's signals to your group that
they're not held accountable. I can tell
you from my experience as a lefty, as a longtime 60s, SDS in a neo Marxist
revolutionary, and somebody who wrote his first book on the Communist Party, that
one of the most corrupting things on the Left (including Communist Party at the
outset) is precisely this issue: keep it inside, don't know what the others
know about nothing. It corrupts you worse than keeping silent on a truth. I hold
very seriously to the viewpoint that the truth. if there's
anything that's revolutionary. it's the truth
and maybe the only thing that's revolutionary. So that what Gates was
trying to do, was recognizing the inherently complex, over-determined
mentions of human behavior, the essentially tragic nature of all of our
histories and to me it's kind of analogous to what we all as children
grow up doing with our parents in many ways. It's maybe my Freudian training
coming into play, but I think the analogy holds. You know when we're real little,
our parents are gods. First of all they're gigantic.
I mean you will remember. I still. in my mind. I try to remember what it was like
when I wanted my feet to reach the ground, when I sat in the chair. And
when everybody was there, I'm not. Yet I always had to look up to whoever it
was. And somewhere, depending on who you are, and what situation you go through,
(usually teenage years)you discover your parents are not gods.
In fact, he discovered that they're worse than gods: they're total bums. They're
insensitive louts, they don't understand you at all. They're ignoran,t they're
irrational right down the line now. You know there's some people who stay in
that status for the rest of their life and I would say (generally speaking), the
people who stay in that situation never grow up. They never grow up because they
never recognize that viewing their parents as gods or viewing their parents
as Devils is the same thing. It's not a nuanced, complicated, mature response and
those of us who are lucky enough to grow up and get past that come to embrace our
parents with the full knowledge of their frailties. You know if you have brothers
and sisters and all those reunions (both when they're alive and then even more
when they passed, my parents have passed) or those chuckling moments when I turn
to my sister and we just remember some inanity or some moment, some clash we had,
and we've absorbed it because we accepted the humanists that our parents were.
They did the best they could. They were frail; they were not perfect. I
think it's analogous to what we need to do with our larger identities. We in the
United States suffer from this terrible - we're the greatest
country in the world. You got to wear a flag
on your lapel. God forbid Barack Obama doesn't have a flag on his lapel. People are
ready to string them up and yet when people move away from that, when they
discover that maybe Vietnam is not a good war or maybe we're racist or all the
other kind of stuff that people like I discovered in the 60s, you flip over in
the other side. All of a sudden America's the worst country in the
history of the world and it's evil and nothing that does is any good. It's the
same process. It's adolescent, it's understandable, but
it doesn't solve anything. Now let me add another dimension to the problem we face
and it relates to the issue of uniqueness. Peter Novick raises it in his
book and there's two dimensions to it. I think for Novick, the first dimension is
what do you mean when you say something "unique?"
Of course it's unique (almost all historical events are unique). The issue
is whether that means it's not comparable or equally. The philosopher
Beryl Lang puts it in very direct ways: so what if it's unique? Where do we go
from there once we say it's unique? And I think Novik is correct to charge and I
am going to read his way of putting it, if I can. That would be
probably a good idea. Let's see if I can find it.
Let me save on that. What Novick
says is that, is the claim of uniqueness anything more than a claim of greater
suffering, of playing into what we see apparently in other bruised people?
Our suffering is greater than yours: that that's what uniqueness comes down to.
We've suffered more than you have. Is that finally what it means? As Novick
concludes, does anybody really believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything
other than a claim for preeminence? Now the other aspect of uniqueness that
Novick raises has to do with moral challenge. Now here Novick suggests that
it's relatively easy for Americans to embrace Holocaust education and
Holocaust awareness because it makes few demands on them within this particular
environment. Basically as how hard is it for Americans to affirm the
horrors of the Holocaust to, "For most Americans, deploring the
Holocaust is a rather ritualistic albiet (undoubtedly well-meant) gesture
toward the Jews, who ask them to do so? A cost-free vow that has decent people that
are moved by the murder of the Jews. The member of the Holocaust is so banal,
so inconsequential, no memory at all precisely because it is so controversial,
so unrelated to real divisions in American society." So apolitical. And in
that sense, I think what he raises and I raised and this is where I agree with
him totally. It's less demanding on an individual than coming to grips with
the legacy of slavery and racism, than the legacy of Native American genocide.
Those are issues that force Americans to consider issues of remedy, consider
issues of your responsibilities. Whether it's affirmative action, whether it's
wars on poverty, whether it's taxes to pay for wars on poverty and other kinds
of efforts to remediate and repair, whether it's issues of reparations. Not
to speak of what it means in one's own community about issues of driving while
black, or real-estate racism. I mean every community that we live in (particularly
the middle-class white communities), this happens regularly. Black folks will tell
you -my black colleagues will tell you regularly- that if there's a
get-together or a conversation (and it could be in Margate and it's at eight
o'clock on a Wednesday night) they're nervous in a way I'm not nervous.
They think there's a reasonable possibility or probability that a cop's
going to stop them and ask, "what are you doing in this neighborhood?" These are
real things. I can tell you from having been married for
many years to a woman who taught 18 years in Pleasantville. I can't tell
you how many social events I went to where we would engage in the
the classic conversation with people you don't know, such as "where you from? What do you do?
What do you work?" And my wife would say, I'm a teacher. Where do you teach? I teach
in Pleasantville." I wanted a camera
to take shots. Usually we got looks of sympathy, you know, "oh you poor dear" or
a roll of the eyes or something that wasn't said but it was obvious and was
apparently okay. Now I don't want to ride that horse too extensively. Actually I
think on the issue of racism there's been progress. It's not oblique but by no
means do I want to go in that direction. There's demagogy, there's the
ubiquitous Al Sharpton who seems to show up
anywhere and everywhere where there's an issue pertaining to race as long as you
can get his face on a camera. There's the Duke case which I use in class because
it's a wonderful example of how our predisposition to believe something
needs to be held a little bit more skeptically until the evidence comes in.
It's a very good lesson when I teach ethnic minority relations. You think
this is true, you want this to be true, is it true, how do you know it's true other
than your gut feeling that it's true, etc, We live in an environment where we can't
make assumptions. We can't make the assumption that just because it's black,
it's right or just because a black person says that it's true, any more than we
make the assumption that just because a Jew says something that it's true or a
woman or a gay person. Part of respecting that person is subjecting them to the
same criteria you subject anybody else to. That's the only way you really
respect the person. I think I can be French so we have students here, that's
okay...It is very important to tell people that they're full of shit when they're full of shit.
It's the only way you can show respect and that's just literally the case. So
the question is, do we do enough to address the story of those couples
leaving the Holocaust Museum and are we confident that our study of the
Holocaust transfers to other directly experienced oppressions that our sense
of the uniqueness of the Holocaust doesn't at least (at times) play into the
kind of moral, one-upsmanship which inevitably denigrates the suffering of
others? Perhaps most particularly, those whose situations require us to take some
risks and all of this tends to make me very nervous,
so please don't think of this intentionally provocative as this
provocation is binary in which it's in either/or. I don't think that's true. Or
as a denunciation or refutation for all that we do was (it's
decidedly not) I deeply believe in the value of Holocaust and genocide
education as I believe in women's studies and africana studies and
on and on. I think Novick is actually wrong to suggest that Holocaust studies
are irrelevant to Americans because Americans are Westerners and we're part
of a nation of Christians. If I can chastise John McCain for a moment, we're a
part of a nation of Christians - not a Christian nation. And as a nation built
on Christian foundations (and as a nation that's part of the West) we do bear
responsibility. We do need to know about the Holocaust. It is part of our
experience and I think Novick pushes that argument further than I would.
I would say that I I get very nervous when Holocaust related events
are plugged into one-sided views of Israeli politics and I've been in those
situations myself on a number of occasions. I know from talking to people
who have been on what I think are basically extraordinary tours of sites
in Eastern Europe that there is almost inevitably a selling of policy. I
think that's a problem. I think it's a moral problem within Holocaust education.
I don't know how to solve it. My only way to solve it is to open it up, so we
talk about it. I mean if I can challenge you in
the broadest sense, I don't think there's been an honest discussion about
Palestinian rights on this campus since I've been here. The closest we came was
last year when I brought a theater troop here of Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs
(Palestinians) who engaged in the issue on stage. And and it was wonderful that it
went through and there was no protest and it was successful, but I can't think
of another instance where that happened. The closest case I have (which to me was
depressing) was the number of years ago there was a student organization that
attempted to organize a pro Palestinian meeting or rally and they put up posters
on the kiosks. And the posters, I thought, were ill-advised. They did what often
happens in those situations. They compared Israel to Nazi
Germany and did things like that which were stupid, foolish, insensitive. But the
solution to that was to talk to them and to engage with them and to allow them to
voice their view. That didn't happen, instead there was kind of a huggy kissy,
you know, "We are the world, we're part of the rainbow" and nobody said anything
about Palestinians which avoided the issue completely. One of my colleagues
wrote an article about that that to me was was just dreadful. I've told you
that. We have never engaged in that issue and I think haven't engaged because we're
uncomfortable with engaging in the issue. We're afraid of dealing with the
Canaanites. Now there were upsides. There are models for us, there are
examples for us. The best example honestly is our own dear friend Dan
Barone who has spent his entire latter life (just had a birthday, right?)
trying to address the issue of the Other; trying to construct public school
textbooks that tell the story of Jews and tell the story of Palestinians and
give them each legitimacy; trying to sell that within the Israeli schools but
try to bring people together as he brought together Protestants and
Catholics and whites and blacks in South Africa and the descendants of
Nazi perpetrators with the descendants of those victimized by
the Holocaust. I mean, that seems to me a model for what we need to do.
Another model for what we need to do is the wonderful African-American
playwright and writer, Anna Deavere Smith. Some of you (if you had my classes), I
showed some of her stuff. I'm not sure how much you know about it.
The theater professor (last at Stanford, I am not sure if she's still there).
These were originally one-act plays. She did them on Broadway.
First was called "Fires in the Mirror" and it dealt with Crown Heights riots in New
York City in Brooklyn. That probably led to Rudy Giuliani being elected mayor,
among other things. And she also did another one called "Twilight: Los Angeles"
which was about the Los Angeles riots. A little bit later in 1992 -and let me
just read you a little bit off of that. "In Fires in the Mirror, her
one-person show about Crown Heights clashes between Hasidic Jews and
African-Americans, Smith listened to, taped, and then performed multiple voices
(maybe 30) from Al Sharpton to the Lubavitcher Reeb Seeds from housewives to
street toughs: young, old, black, Jewish, rich, poor, the enraged and the saddened.
She offered no solutions, only questions within a framework of empathy and a
sense of our responsibility (individual and collective) to bridge the kinds of
differences which can yield such insularity hatreds and indeed, crimes."
Gates, who I talked about earlier, and Smith "stand as African-Americans boldly
stating that their people are strong enough, mature enough, and proud enough to
present the fullness of their historical legacy." And just as an almost
a trivial aside, the movie "Barbershop" is another wonderful example of that
because it's a point where black people say, "We can do our dirty linen in public.
We can kid about ourselves." It was a big to-do. Jesse Jackson criticized them
because they made fun of Martin Luther King. Well come on, it is time to make fun
of Martin Luther King just as Mel Brooks embodies the confidence in the Jewish
community to make fun of the Nazis. And know Brooks is very specific about that. He's
a very intently, deadly serious man who served in World War II and has the most
ferocious view of anti-Semitism and of fascism, but his view is very clear: the
best way to defang something is to really kill it, to make fun of it and
it takes a confident people to be able to do that. So let me end with what I
consider exemplary and maximizing transferability and ensuring that our
sense of uniqueness is not used as an instrument of smug self-satisfaction and
blindness to the just claims of others. We are appropriately a Holocaust and
genocide program at our best. We balance uniqueness with what is shared in the
human condition. We work very, very hard in the master's program in the Holocaust
Resource Center in Jewish Studies and then all the other ethnic, religiou,s and
gendered study groups on campus (most of which I admire) to ensure transferability,
to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust or of any other injustice
don't reinforce insularity. In some ways, we all need to embrace both the story of
the Exodus, the notion of a promised land, without making the Canaanites invisible.
Michael Lerner (who I actually went to high
school with) is a fairly controversial figure. He's the publisher
of Tikkun. He argues in the metaphor that I think makes the most sense that what
happened was the Jews of Europe were in a burning building and they went to
to the roof of the burning building and there was nothing else they could do but
jump off the burning building, otherwise they were gone. And when they jumped off
the building they landed on another group of people called Palestinians.
Whose to blame? I think that's a useful metaphor to keep
in mind when we try to make sense of what is very hard to make sense. We
need to ensure that our work both makes for a world with fewer victims and one
into which we help victims recognize their own capacity to become victimizers.
That's it, so thank you
Do you have time to engage in questions, agreements, disagreements?
I wanted to provoke you so I hope I do but don't be shy.
I don't feel so much provoked, I am in agreement with watching what you
said but I find quite interesting because on one subject of Holocaust
studies here in United States, the Novak right - I agree
with your take on that one. Stephan off the deep end in many regards but he makes some
really interesting points along the way. There's this historical nexus that takes
place in the United States, I think, in the post-World War II decades, that we
have fought the good war in World War II for reasons that are very different
than the reasons we used to justify those ways today. That is, in 1945, the suffering
of the Jews wasn't the reason for getting into the war, it wasn't the reason that we
fought the war. But it does help
to justify this view. It is the "good war" and it's largely for this
reason that we find it possible to create the Holocaust Museum in Washington, then
really centralize that issue and that suffering, that one is very important.
Before we dealt in any type of civil way with the African-American experience of slavery and
various victimizations that occurred along the way of making the United States.
Also, one of the main lines of the story is the timing of it. I mean, Novick is
very much influenced by Tom Sagan, the Israeli journalist, in several of his
books. One of Sagan's books, if you hadn't read him, which I think is called
"The Seventh Million," is an account of how the dps, the survivors of the Holocaust
(Jews who are in displacement camps) in Europe were regarded by the Saba's in
Israel. Not the Saba's necessarily necessarily but the Israelis
Zionists and there's some extraordinary quotations (for examoke, Ben Gurion) who
at one point said, "You know, all the good Jews died. The only ones who lived were
the scoundrels. You can only survive if you were a scoundrel." And that was
perhaps an exaggerated take but it was a piece of the take of how the Zionists
were viewing those who from their view had refused to leave Europe,
hadn't understood back in the 20s that they had to build the new country had,
been fooled into the notion that they could become part of Germany or part of
France or part of any other Society who were weak or inferior and then in fact,
the initial research was about the issue of wartime behavior and what we
would call today PTSD, in which (if I remember correctly) there was one
particular battle in the '48 War for Independence where the troops
didn't fight as valiantly as legend has it and the Israeli establishment
basically said that's because they would be peace.
You know, they're not real Israelis. Real Israelis fight. They don't run.
They go up to the ovens, that kind of
notion. So we had a comparable pattern, though I think Novick exaggerates it a
bit. I think there was ambivalence about the Holocaust in American Jewish culture
in the 40s and the 50s and I think his storyline is relatively true, but I think
it needs some revision because I'm born in 1942. I'm growing up in a virtually
all Jewish section in Newark, New Jersey (Philip Ross's neighborhood)
that Philip Ross writes about this. He writes about the embarrassment. One of
the stories he writes about the embarrassment of their being Hasidics in
the neighborhood and I can remember that as a kid. It proceeds to embarrass me. I was
Jewish. I was American. They couldn't be Jewish.
They wore the hats and the pass and the coats and I didn't want any of my
friends to think that they were me at that point and he captured that piece of
it, except on the other hand, I remember obsessing on... We didn't call it the
Holocaust. It was just the war and the killing of 6 million. That language
didn't really happen until the 60s but as a 7, 8, 9, 10 year old when
TV happened in my house in 1951 (just in time for Bobby Thomson's home run to
beat the Dodgers) that was the first TV I ever watched but I obsessed with all the
documentary shows. "Victory at Sea," there were these series that would be on TV in
the 50s with Richard Rogers music soaring and I watched every single one
of them. I was not an academic kid at that time. I was a jock but I knew that
my parents were just this close to have been murdered and I knew that
I needed to know more about that. I know that's why I became a historian. It's
absolutely why. When I was 7, 8, 9 years old:
how did this happen? Why are my parents here? It was kinda Joe Greenberg (who was
a grocer in the store where my father worked with others)
had a number on his arm. It was the first guy I ever knew that had a number. Wonderfully
kind, meek, quiet guy -gentleman- and that always stayed in mind. I can remember first
seeing if we're talking and asking about it, so I don't think people avoided it
but I think there was some ambivalence. Two comments: One, I
thought it was interesting that you specifically talked about Dan Brolone's
programs and you didn't mention Sammie Adwon. Probably takes more of
a risk and Dan is Israeli and Sammie is Palestinian so I think that's a very
conservatory... No, you're absolutely right. Second comment I would make is that
first of all, I like a lot what you said as well and this issue of transferability
in my view also has to do with ethical and moral questions. I mean when one
asks these kinds of deep, ethical, and moral questions, one cannot help but also
ask about other events. But I would like to point out to you
that from it's very beginning, the United
States Holocaust Memorial Council and Washington, which is the precursor to the
museum, all we said as a part of its growth from the very problems of the
1978 report we sell to President Carter, the Committee
on Conscience. And it has always been the Committee on Consciousness, which
was to deal with other genocides. So who drew attention to Darfur? It wasn't the
black community in this country, it was the Jews in this country.
It was the Museum in Washington which had its online exhibition. Who
drew attention to Chechnya?It wasn't the the Catholics who drew attention
attention, it was the U.S.. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington DC that called a genocide watch on Chechnya. Who has
drawn attention to Rwanda? You think it was the Roman Catholic Church? No, it wasn't the
Roman Catholic Church. The Museum in Washington DC did. I only say that because I
think that even in your recitation that you push the question a
bit too far. You end up with this quotation about who jumped on the
Palestinians, which I think is a little much as an ending comment.
They weren't blame for jumping they didn't intend to be funny. I know but
it makes it sound (It was a burning building) like those poor defenseless people. It isn't the
Palestinian. First of all, I'm extremely sensitive and empathetic to the
notion of a two-state solution but I mean it's really left-wing that (and not
even the left-wing) that is calling attention to the Palestinians. It's not the
Palestinians calling attention to the Holocaust into what happened to the
Jews you know. I think you raise very interesting questions but if
I might be a bit bold, I think, let me know if I am wrong, (I'm not gonna hit a nun!)
And I am not a noncritical supporter, I should know it. I take folks to Israel. I mean they see the works of Israel
and I let them do it because they say, listen, Israel is...despite the fact there's a lot I don't
like about their government policy, they are a democracy and you can fight with them
and all the rest of it even I wasn't aware about Tutu
but even the Finkelstein issue, as DePaul University, another Catholic University,
but I mean I think it's more
complicated than the line. I feel somewhat like when people ask questions
about why I'm critical of Iraq or why I was critical Vietnam. I consider myself a
deep lover of this country. I have many many fights with my friends on the Left
In 1968 when I was in Berkeley, the epicenter
of student radicalism, I was at a meeting where we were planning a July 4th
demonstration against the war and I got up there in front of all these Black
Panthers and SDS at that point was out somewhere in Marxist Leninist
Maoist lands and and I said, "Well let's let's march with American flags," and I
was the only one in the room. I was just pushed out, "boo," "hiss," "who the
hell are you? You must be a narc or a Fed" or whatever. So
that issue matters a great deal to me somewhat differently in terms of Israel.
I consider myself a defender of Israel and a lover of Israel, so that if
anything I could be charged with, maybe that I expect more from my
own than from others. I expect more from the United States than I do from other
countries because it's the place where I can do something about it and it's a
country that, for better or worse, has a glorious set of values and expectations
that make us special and I hold us to it. There's a reason why Tiananmen
Square, they simulate the Statue of Liberty. There's a reason why
whenever people rebelled the world they evoke Thomas Jefferson (who is a slave
owner) and all the rest of that stuff but it's like with parents,
he's also this inspirational figure. It's more than one thing in that regard and I
think this case of Israel is the same thing. Yes, the American Jewish community
as a whole is the only white group in America that votes for black candidates.
There's not a single other white group in America that will consistently vote
for blacks when they run for office historically despite all predictions
that Jews were moving to the right and going to be neocon conservatives, they
still vote next to blacks (more for Democrats, more for liberals) than any other
any other ethnic group in the United States. On the other hand, I
think there is an oppressive, organized effort to minimize conversation and
dissent on the issue of Israel in the organized Jewish community. I think it is
made very, very clear to people that if they cross certain lines, they are at
risk in a variety of ways and I think the Holocaust educational community is
part of that and that worries me because they think it puts at risk many of
the very good things we all do and I don't want to underestimate the good
things at all. They are invaluable. I certainly don't share.... I would
never call Israel a fascist country or the kind of language that we'll hear
sometimes from other folks. I don't want to be put in the
situation of because Israel is doing something bad that therefore everything
the Palestinians is doing is right. I mean, you want me to talk
about Arafat for a while, you know, I mean, he's not not my ideal of a figure and
the issue is very difficult to work through but I think these forces are
preventing a solution just to be
blunt about it. I think it's almost impossible for a candidate in the
Democratic Party to take an honest, useful position on the solution in the
Middle East because of their concern precisely about the Israel lobby that
Mearsheimer and Walt talk about. And Mearsheimer and Walt are not completely right.
They also exaggerate. Oil, money there's lots of lobbies in the United States and
there's nothing wrong with having lobbies so they exaggerate because it's
been so often off the table as a source of conversation and I worry
about kind of the Pat Buchanan forms of populist anti-Semitism that are
out there that this can feed into. I feel like you're off the track here, can you
go back to how Holocaust education is...
We don't talk about Palestinian issues except from one
perspective. I think that is the record yeah.
Support for Holocaust education is strong because it is an easy way out. It doesn't
involve as much engagement and personal reflection as looking at
things now and I agree with that but I just have a question.
I find it very plausible. You mentioned Dan Vermont, our good friend. Dan has this
construct of the monolithic identity where we are reluctant to look at
ourselves until the evidence to the contrary becomes so overwhelming that we
have to do something about it and then that works beautifully. It worked
for the Germans, it certainly worked for Austrian's (it is my line of inquiry) where
something like Kartvietam in the 1980s coming under the scene. There was
the catalyst that we have to look at ourselves, that image we had
constructed was no longer tenable but in the United States, why is
it that we are not getting any further when looking at issues such as the genocide of the Native Americans?
We have looked at the evidence for a long time. There is no more monolithic charade
on that when we know what happened but still, not that much is done about it.
Do you see that changing and will there eever be a, catalyst something like (a lifetime in
Austria) where that will bring them this to the forefront?
I don't know. I'm hoping that the changing demographics forces some questions as we
become less of a nation of Christians and less of a nation of people of
European descent (which is the direction we're moving). I have no guarantees about
that. Honestly I'm fairly skeptical. I think the capacity people to fool
themselves is often greater than their capacity to face truths. I think the
stuff we work on and fight on is lifetime and we lose more than we win
and right now I'm terrified that we're going to go into Iran
and I feel helpless and frustrated and I worry about the links precisely in terms
of the issues that I've been raising. I
think people are easily prone to tribalism. The front page in the New York
Times talked about the Democrats taking a hike on protecting our civil
liberties in terms of legislation (Patriot Act related legislation)
because they're afraid that the Republicans can use it in the election.
Those kinds of situations, the Pin situation, and that ability to
ring that tribal bell .... and let's be also clear
that the discourse in Israel is infinitely healthier, more vibrant, it's
much easier to criticize Israeli policy in Israel than it is in the American
Jewish community. Israelis are just, you know, its the classic, "2 Jews, 3
opinions." I mean taxi cab drivers yelling and screaming and everybody argues all
the time. Not just the America Jewish community but the American-Christian community,
You mentioned Democrats, then you look at the other radical side. I think they're
probably more pro-Israel than Jews. I don't think so. You mean in the American-Christian community?
I think we're in a moment where we don't know where we're going. I just finished a book
on conservatism, happy with what I have out. I think it may contribute to some of
the conversation. I think conservatism is in crisis that's going to work to the
benefit of Democrats and liberals but I don't think Democrats and liberals
necessarily have a vision or a strategy that will sustain them in power
comparable to, let's say, the New Deal coalition. They have an opportunity
because honestly this is the most incompetent administration in my lifetime.
I mean their ability to misstep is unbelievable. I mean since technically
since the 2004 election. I mean from privatizing Social Security to Schiavo
to the S chip issue going on presently and you run into real
problems when you don't believe in science and you don't believe in experts
and eventually it kicks you in the ass. What's that got to do with genocide and transparency?
Probably nothing, just check my name. Can I ask a
question about that issue with your teaching genocide? I struggle with this.
You teach an event (a genocide, not holocaust specific)
so teach a lot of human rights and I use genocide as example as more
than examples but teaching events to demonstrate the needs, to get people
interested in social justice issues and human rights, which are dogmatically genocide.
"Time against humanity" etc. but then there's another part of the
genocide teaching that, it seems to me, has to do it nothing more than not to demean it:
pure witness. In other words, I am telling you what happened, I'm doing my best in the
scholarship mode to find out what might have happened and to present it in the most
honest way possible for no other reason than just a witness.
No agenda, okay. And I wonder whether there's other reasons other than
those two that come to mind for you. I want to get to Karen's question for a second but
let me just... I don't know if I'm responding to what you want. I always
worry about playing into students fatalism. I can't do anything, can't
change anything. I work hard not to do that and on that
basis, just telling them what happened is almost never sufficient, partly because
of their questions and their comments so I don't have a bleak view of the
historical process in the sense that... I mean I've grown up and seen the collapse
of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism. Tremendous liberation I never
anticipated doesn't mean what's replaced it is wonderful but it's better than
what it was. I grew up with segregated facilities in the United States,
astounding what the African American community has been able to accomplish
and what this society has made available with all the downsides
since then in terms of the creation of black middle-class and black empowerment and
the reality... I mean people talk about it but I really believe Colin Powell would
have been elected president if he had run and I think, well let me
not stretch on that. I also grew up with South African apartheid as permanent as
far as I could tell and the thrill when Nelson Mandela came out of prison I had
very clear memories of listening on the radio and just having goosebumps all
over and thinking this is just the most wonderful thing. Freud one-point
argued that truth is like a beam of light and you can marginalize
it but the arc of the truth tends to expand and King had a metaphor used
about the arc of justice. I think it's used in the Civil Rights Museum in
Alabama in Montgomery, so I try to indicate to the students that history plays funny
tricks on people and sometimes the tricks are down tricks (negative tricks)
but sometimes the tricks are that people rise to occasions and and open that arc
of enlightenment and liberty and democracy and the scorecard in
the world is a mixed scorecard. We've had some great victories in my lifetime,
we've had some disappointments and losses. I would say on the whole, the
direction to me is actually positive. I mean when you think of Asia,
for example, which has nothing to do with Liberty and democracy in some ways, but
it has to do with eating and nutrition and longevity that you know 40
percent of the world population that when I was a kid my mom would said "eat,
there are people starving in China." The transformation going on in that part
of the world is just... my son's living there. My son moved to China, I email with
him. When we talk about what's it like in Guangzhou and the idea that he's in that
environment and the change is going on environment, so I'm not... I don't tend to
be a half-empty person. I tend to be a half-full person but I can't be
half-full unless I deal with what I see as a reality. You're giving me that
signal, two minutes.
Going back to teaching the holocaust and genocide,
I just want to comment on this perhaps. I teach in high school and one of the more
difficult things I have been challenged with over the course of the last five
years of teaching Holocaust and genocide is of course we learned about it starts,
with some stereotypes, dehumanization, etc. and what we have taught
through tolerance over the last decade or so is that "you can't say that in front of these people"or whatever
and what I have seen instead which is perhaps even more of a barrier
to try to break is that the group within itself, it's okay to go. In other
words, the Jewish kids can use your stereotypes with each other
dehumanize each other according to the stereotypes but you can't do it from outside.
It same thing with African-Americans and so now it's like to
try to break that barrier, I'm looked at as an outsider. You can't tell us what to do
because this is our group and this is what we can say to each other. You don't
understand. First, congratulations. You just got your masters, right?
As a teacher, pedagogically what I find is there has
to be time in the classroom before I can do that that. When I walk in the room,
let's say when I teach an ethnic minority relations class and I'm the
white guy up there, the old white guy up there, and I have a class of forty
percent African-American, twenty percent Latino and white, I begin with mistrust.
In fact, I legitimate their mistrust at the beginning. I talk about their reasons
for mistrusting me and I basically say don't trust me, no reason. Just trust me.
What I try to do is over the first month or so behave in such a way that they begin to
see some possibility of trusting and as we move along in the semester I can take
more risks, precisely along the lines you're indicating. I can talk about
acting black, I can talk about Puerto Rican kids and their views of
Dominicans. I couldn't do that first week but if I'm affected in the classroom by
the middle or the end of the classroom if.... you know in
all your classes is a point, if it works, where they're on your side. We've
somehow gotten across. It just happens doesn't happen the first week. Once that
happens I find that I can address these issues and here's the kicker and less
line students handle it better than my colleagues. I want to thank Mr. Lyons for
what was obviously a very stimulating exciting presentation. Thank you, Paul.
I would like to invite you to come back in another month when Professor Michael
Hayes will dazzle us with his presentation, "Carcasses of Memory: Ruins as Memorials to Wartime
Destruction and Persecution in Germany."
Thank you everybody and hope to see you on November the 8th.
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