Forgetting and remembering the holocaust
JVL Introduction
On Yom Ha’shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, The Times of Israel published a powerful article, by Israeli academic Tammy Hoffman Holocaust Remembrance Day? We’ve already forgotten. Hoffman draws on the 1998 insights of Yehuda Elkana about the psychic damage of the mis-memorialisation of the Holocaust and the need to forget in order to remember correctly.
While Hoffman reflects on the callous reception that Israel offers to non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees, Elkana’s article, which we reproduce here, discusses how a particular memorialisation of the Holocaust in Israeli culture allows the tolerance of Israeli brutality towards Palestinians. Elana argues that “there are some myths that are essential for building our future, like the myth of excellence or the myth of creativity; certainly, it is not my intention that we cease teaching our history. What I am trying is to displace the Holocaust from being the central axis of our national experience.”
Hoffman protests that the reduction of the Holocaust to “Never Again! [for us]” from “Never Again for anyone” narrows possible thought and discourse. She decries the censorship of divergent interpretation and the totalitarian imposition of a single regime of truth.
Hoffman does not argue against the centrality of memory of the Holocaust to Israel but claims that misremembering its messages leads to overlooking the pain of others. Hoffman does not refer to the longer-standing and deeper issue that Elkana dealt with, Israeli’s tolerance of brutality towards Palestinians. Elkana identified:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief, shared by so many today, I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Mon 2 Mar 1998. Read the original here.
The Need to Forget
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Professor Yehuda Elkana’s prophetic words seem to have fallen on deaf ears, hatred consumes from within, it is not too late to steer into the skid.
A wonderful article, thanks.
It’s interesting the Professor raised current Israeli social and economic frustration as one of the reasons why the Holocaust is misconstrued today.
The (Jewish American?) historian who wrote “The Black Earth” claimed economically deprived populations without hope of “bettering” their position were especially quick to turn on their Jewish neighbours – and remarkably vicious when they did so. The historian said such attacks were driven more by the longing to acquire “free” goods without risk than by antisemitism.
Somehow it seems even more hurtful when people who’ve experienced great wrongs done to them or to their family members mistreat in their turn equally innocent and defenceless others.