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The Holocaust, Second-Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Alan L. Berger
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Extract

Widespread discourse about the Holocaust entered American popular culture in the seventies in two main ways: a series of television shows that purportedly focused on the destruction of European Judaism and two books that dealt specifically with the children of survivors. The television miniseries, Gerald Green's Holocaust (1978), suited the national need for simplified history and melodrama. Moreover, given the American penchant for ethnic identifiers, Holocaust became known as the Jewish Roots. The networks soon aired other Holocaust programs, including Herman Wouk's far less commercially successful The Winds of War. The resultant Holocaust discourse was frequently poorly informed and historically naive. On the one hand, it reflected a tendency in Western culture to think that the Holocaust ended definitively in 1945. On the other hand, this discourse frequently neutralized the evil of nazism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 23 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1995

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References

Notes

1. Clearly, the writings of Elie Wiesel, the televised Eichmann trial, and the works of certain professional novelists in the late sixties and early seventies all had an impact on American culture. Nevertheless, the emergence of something like a national Holocaust discourse began appearing only in the late seventies. The high acdaim that greeted the appearance of Eliach, Yaffa's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar served to confirm the continuing pres-ence of this discourse in the decade of the eighties.

2. Important studies of this phenomenon include Friedländer, Saul, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, tr. Weyr, Thomas (New York: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar; Rosenfeld, Alvin H., Imagining Hitler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Sontag, Susan, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).Google Scholar

3. Steinitz, Lucy Y. and Szony, David, eds., Living after the Holocaust: Reflections by Children of Survivors in America, rev. 2d ed. (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1979).Google Scholar

4. Epstein, Helen, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979), 9.Google Scholar

5. Wiesel, Elie, The Forgotten (New York: Summit Books, 1992), 148.Google Scholar For a literary study of Wiesel's notion of the second-generation witness, see Berger, Alan L., “Elie Wiesel's Second Generation Witness: Passing the Torch of Remembrance,” in Telling the Tale: A Tribute to Elie Wiesel on the Occassion of His 65th Birthday: Essays, Reflections, and Poems, ed. Cargas, Harry James (St. Louis: Time Being Books, 1993).Google Scholar

6. Concerning the writings of the second generation, see the following works of Berger, Alan L.: “Job's Children: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity in Second Generation Literature,” in Jewish Identity in America, ed. Gordis, David M. and Ben-Horin, Yoav (Los Angeles: The University of Judaism, 1991)Google Scholar; “Bearing Witness: Second Generation Literature of the Shoah,” Modern Judaism 10, no. 1 (February 1990): 43-63; “Ashes and Hope: The Holocaust in Second Generation American Literature,” in Reflections of the Holocaust in Art and Literature, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1990); and “Memory and Meaning,” in Methodology in the Academic Teaching of the Holocaust, ed. Zev Garber, Alan L. Berger, and Richard Libowitz (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988). Four important nonfiction works have recently appeared that should be noted in this context: Hass, Aaron, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Miller, Judith, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990)Google Scholar; Helmreich, William B., Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)Google Scholar; and Young, James E., The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).Google Scholar All four books shed light on the issue of the relationship between the Shoah and identity Although Hass's study is the only one that specifically focuses on the second generation in America, the books by Miller and Young each have a useful chapter on the issue of American national memory and the Holocaust, while Helmreich's study has a superb chapter on children of survivors.

7. Fresco, Nadine, “Remembering the Unknown,” in International Review of Psycho-Analysis 11, no. 4 (1984): 419.Google Scholar

8. Fogelman, Eva, “Intergenerational Group Therapy: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Offspring ofSurvivors,” in Psychoanalytic Review 75, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 619.Google Scholar

9. Ibid.

10. Friedmann, Thomas, Damaged Goods (Sag Harbor, New York: The Permanent Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Spiegelman, Art, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)Google Scholar; Spiegelman, Art, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991)Google Scholar; Finkelstein, Barbara, Summer Long-a-Coming (New York: Harper and Row, 1987)Google Scholar; Salamon, Julie, White Lies (Boston: Hill and Company, 1987)Google Scholar; Raphael, Lev, Dancing on Tisha b'Av (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Raphael, Lev, Winter Eyes: A Novel About Secrets (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).Google Scholar For studies of American second-generation writers, see note 6 above.

11. Author's telephone discussion with Greenberg, April 2, 1993.

12. Greenberg, Irving, “Voluntary Covenant,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Responses to the Shoah, ed. Jacobs, Steven L. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993), 96.Google Scholar The citation is taken from Soloveitchik, Rabbi Joseph B., “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition 7, no. 2 (Summer 1965): 29.Google Scholar A critique of Greenberg's view of Soloveitchik as a model for untraditional response to the Holocaust is given by Singer, David and Sokol, Moshe, “Joseph Soloveitchik: Lonely Man of Faith,” in Modern Judaism 2, no. 3 (October 1982): 253-54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The authors argue that Soloveitchik, despite presenting his thought in modern, post-Kantian forms, was far more traditional than most scholars assume. For a trenchant theological critique of Greenberg's position, see Katz, Steven T., “Voluntary Covenant: Irving Greenberg on Faith after the Holocaust,” in Historicism, the Holocaust, and Zionism: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought and History, by Katz, Steven T. (New York: New York University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, chap. 9. It remains the case that Greenberg's voluntary covenant addresses the radically altered nature of post-Auschwitz Jewish identity by acknowledging both the paradigm-shattering nature of the Shoah and the need for pragmatic yet traditionally anchored sources for Jewish identity.

13. Greenberg, Irving, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (New York: Summit, 1988), 338 Google Scholar; Greenberg, Irving, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, ed. Fleischner, Eva (New York: KTAV, 1977), 23.Google Scholar

14. Greenberg, , The Voluntary Covenant (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1982), 7.Google Scholar

15. Greenberg, , The Jewish Way, 224 Google Scholar; Greenberg quoted in Katz, , Historicism, the Holocaust, and Zionism, 238.Google Scholar

16. Greenberg, , The Voluntary Covenant, 15–16.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 28.

18. Mead, Sidney, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 113-15.Google Scholar In observing what is “American” about American Jewry, the historian Joseph L. Blau emphasizes the Jeffersonian background of “voluntaryism.” This means that “each generation reconstitutes society and owes to the past no Obligation to transmit its heritage…. [E]very individual has the right to select, out of the wide range of possible ways of cooperating with his fellows, whichever way or ways he wills. Thus individual will (voluntas) becomes the basis of association, instead of tradition or heritage.” “Voluntaryism,” continues Blau, was “unknown in Jewish experience prior to Jewry's American sojourn, contributed by American culture to Jewish life.” Fundamentally, “voluntaryism [is] the idea that a man's religious affiliations are his own concern and not the business of the Community.” Blau, Joseph L., Judaism in America: From Curiosity to Third Faith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 11, 19.Google Scholar

19. Greenberg, , “Cloud of Smoke,” 42.Google Scholar

20. Greenberg, , The Voluntary Covenant, 21, 22 (italics added).Google Scholar

21. Lifton, Robert Jay, “Witnessing Survival,” in Genocide and Human Rights: A Global Anthology, ed. Porter, Jack Nusan (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1982), 264.Google Scholar

22. Prince, Robert M., “A Case Study of a Psychohistorical Figure: The Influence of the Holocaust on Identity,” Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy (Spring/Summer 1980): 44.Google Scholar

23. Raphael, Lev, “On a Narrow Bridge: A Jewish Writer's Journey,” Reconstrutionist 57, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 21.Google Scholar

24. Gans, Ronald, “An Interview with Lev Raphael,” Christopher Street 13, no. 5, issue 150 (1990):31.Google Scholar

25. “An Interview with Lev Raphael,” Frontiers (March 1, 1991): 42. Hereafter this interview will be cited as Frontiers.

26. Raphael, Lev, “Caravans,” in Dancing on Tisha b'Av, 70, 73.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., 72-73.

28. Ibid., 75, 77, 78.

29. The Stonewall riot, which takes its name from a Greenwich Village gay bar, occurred over a three-day period in 1969.

30. Raphael, , “Caravans,” 81.Google Scholar

31. Lev Raphael, “Abominations,” in Dancing on Tisha b'Av.

32. Frontiers, 43.

33. A revealing discussion on the difference between Conservative and Orthodox attitudes toward gays and lesbians is presented in “Homosexuality and Halachic Judaism—Two Views,” Moment 18, no. 3 (June 1993): 40-45. Yet, because homosexuality is such an explosive issue in the Jewish Community, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, who writes as a member of Conservative Judaism, cannot be said to offer the denominational viewpoint. His distinction between halakhic and metahakkhic views of homosexuality is sensitive and insightful but far from being widely accepted. It is much clearer that Rabbi Barry Freundel provides the Orthodox point of view in rejecting homosexuality while urging gays to change their sexual behavior. The magazine features several articles on this issue, induding its cover story, “Uncomfortably—The Jewish Community Confronts Homosexuality,” 28-35.

34. Raphael, , “Abominations,” 229.Google Scholar

35. Flender, Harold, Rescue in Denmark (New York: MacFadden-Bartell, 1968), 215-16.Google Scholar Flender correctly observes that Nazi Germany never imposed the Nuremberg decrees, including wearing the yellow star, on Denmark. This in no way undermines the support and concern for his Jewish subjects that characterized the behavior of King Christian X. It is, however, important to separate truth from fantasy.

36. Orthodox Judaism opposes gayness in theological terms as an abomination (to'evah) and urges individual gays to change. See Rabbi Freundel, “Homosexuality and Halakhic Judaism,” 44.

37. This is not to dismiss the significant role played by support groups in the lives of second-generation members (see note 8).

38. Frontiers, 43.

39. Raphael, , Winter Eyes, 122. Google Scholar

40. Ibid., 120, 106.

41. Ibid., 233, 234.

42. Greenberg, , The Voluntary Covenant, 21.Google Scholar

43. Esther B. Fein, “Holocaust as a Cartoonist's Way of Getting to Know His Father,” interview of Spiegelman in The New York Times, December 10, 1991, C1.

44. Spiegelman, , Maus II, 15.Google Scholar

45. Rosen, Jonathan, “Spiegelman: The Man behind Maus,” interview in The Forward, January 17, 1992, 1.Google Scholar Hereafter, this interview will be cited as Forward. Spiegelman clearly sees himself as a second-generation witness. He dedicated the first volume of Maus to Anja. The second volume is inscribed to the memory of his murdered brother, Richieu, and to his own daughter, Nadja.

46. Forward, 11.

47. Spiegelman, Maus II, unnumbered page.

48. Pres, Terrence Des, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Lang, Berel (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 229.Google Scholar

49. Hillel Halkin, “Inhuman Comedy,” review of Maus II in Commentary 93, no. 2 (February 1992): 56.

50. Soloveitchik, , “The Lonely Man of Faith,” 28–29.Google Scholar

51. Spiegelman, , Maus I, 103.Google Scholar

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., 5; Maus II, 60.

54. Spiegelman, , Maus II, 74 Google Scholar

55. On French second-generation writers, see Fine, Ellen S.'s perceptive study, “The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Lang, , 41–57.Google Scholar

56. Hirt-Manheimer, Aron, “The Art of Art Spiegelman,” interview in Reform Judaism 15 (Spring 1987): 23.Google Scholar

57. Langer, Lawrence L., Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 6.Google Scholar

58. Spiegelman, , Maus II, 29.Google Scholar

59. Wiesel, Elie, One Generation After, tr. Edelman, Lily and Wiesel, Elie (New York: Random House, 1970), 35.Google Scholar

60. Greenberg's emphasis on the role of lay leadership in the Jewish community and its apparently secular activities that mask deeply religious purposes is relevant in this context. For example, he writes that the “secular” is “appropriate to the new era of holiness in which humans take responsibility for sanctification and redemption” (The Voluntary Covenant, 26). Greenberg emphasizes the salvific role of humanity. He writes that “God was saying to humans: You stop the Holocaust. You bring on the redemption. You act to insure that it will never again occur. I will be with you totally in whatever you do, wherever you go, whatever happens, but you must do it.” Greenberg, Irving, “History, Holocaust and Covenant,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5, no. 1 (1990): 7–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Forward, 11. Spiegelman's attestation confirms the point made by Michael A. Meyer that “antisemitism may produce mild or severe negations of seif. Or it may have entirely the opposite effect, resulting in renewed affirmation of Jewish identity.” See Meyer's insightful study, Jewish Identity in the Modern World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 33.

62. Forward, 11.

63. Greenberg, , The Voluntary Covenant, 27.Google Scholar