Why Trump’s universalizing of the Holocaust matters to Jews
HEINZ KUNIO, 89, a survivor of the Holocaust, lays a wreath at a Holocaust Memorial in Thessaloniki yesterday on the 74th anniversary of the deportation of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz. Where’s Jared Kushner? Supporters of President Donald Trump have often defended his election campaign against charges of antisemitism by noting he has an Orthodox Jewish daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. Jews on the Right are excited about Kushner’s role as a special adviser to the president, assuming he’ll be their advocate on Israel and other Jewish issues. Jews on the Left hope Kushner, whose parents were longtime donors to the Democratic Party, will be a check on Trump’s most conservative impulses.
But although most reports put Kushner at the center of White House decision-making, he mostly remains a cipher, not only on Jewish issues but on Trump’s entire agenda. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the controversy kicked up by a White House statement on Friday to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day that made no mention of the Jews who were killed by the Nazis and in whose memory the day was created. Where was Jared when the statement was written and released?
On a day in which Trump also began closing America’s doors to refugees from various Muslim countries, this debate might seem like the most parochial example of Jewish infighting and special pleading. But the question of the universality of the Holocaust has haunted Jewish activism and scholarship for 70 years, and preserving the uniqueness of the genocide of Europe’s Jews has been a central tenet of Jewish advocacy and historicity.
On its face, the Trump statement is an emotional appeal to tolerance drawing on the lessons of the Holocaust. “It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust,” the statement begins. “It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror.”
But the omission of a specific mention of the Jews sets off alarm bells for those who understand the ways Holocaust deniers and European nationalists have sought to downplay the Jewish genocide and shift focus to the suffering of non-Jewish Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, French and others during World War II. That was the larger battle being fought in the 1980s when Jewish groups opposed the construction of a Catholic chapel in the shadow of Auschwitz. As the late Edgar Bronfman, then president of the World Jewish Congress, said at the time, “it is not only a matter of the Auschwitz convent, but the broader implications of historical revisionism in which the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the murder of the Jewish people is being suppressed.”
With the rise of nationalism in Europe and the fading of the survivor generation, the battle against such suppression has only intensified.
The late Elie Wiesel was a fierce defender of the “uniqueness” argument.
“Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims,” he famously wrote. International Holocaust Remembrance Day was established by the United Nations and is marked on the day Auschwitz was liberated in large part to counter the “de-Judaization” of the Shoah.
You wouldn’t know that from the White House statement. White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks doubled down on the statement in light of the criticism, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group, and we took into account all of those who suffered.” She also shared a Huffington Post UK article describing the “gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples” who were “targeted” by the Nazis.
The Jews’ insistence on the uniquely Jewish aspect of the Holocaust has often been turned against them, with accusations that it is meant to deny the suffering of others or to somehow shield Israel from criticism. These have been recurring themes both on the far Right and the far Left. Indeed, by insisting on the universality of the Holocaust, the Trump statement invited bipartisan condemnation. Writing for Commentary, former Reagan speechwriter John Podhoretz said the omission of the Jews is “the culmination of decades of ill feeling that seems to center on the idea that the Jews have somehow made unfair ‘use’ of the Holocaust and it should not ‘belong’ to them.” Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of the liberal website TalkingPointsMemo.com, noted that “it has long been a trope of Holocaust deniers and white nationalists to insist that Jews were only incidentally targeted.”
Kushner, the grandson of Holocaust survivors who dedicated their lives to its memory, must certainly understand the stakes in how to discuss the Shoah. One of his rare public statements of the campaign was a full-throated defense of Trump against charges of antisemitism in which he invoked his grandparents’ experience during the war. We are a little over a week into the Trump administration. There’s a learning curve, steeper than most for a president with no political experience. But Trump has a close adviser and trusted relative who can help him navigate the often contentious world of Jewish policy and politics. What we don’t know yet is if Kushner is willing to play that role, and whether the president is willing to listen. ( JTA)