Note: This essay does not require prior reading of The Holocaust Industry
In The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein presented a new framework for understanding how the Holocaust came to take up so much space in america’s political conscience and how the historical narrative about the Holocaust (and antisemitism in general) has shifted over time. The central thesis of The Holocaust Industry is that an ideological representation, or The Holocaust, has overtaken and essentially replaced any sincere engagement with the actual historical event, which he refers to as the Nazi holocaust. According to Finkelstein, this shift was largely motivated by american Jews and Jewish organizations who wanted to defend “Jewish interests” and guarantee american support for israel. With that myopic focus, instead of developing a deep and nuanced analytical framework, nearly the entire book is spent describing specific instances where Jews and Jewish organizations benefited from or furthered the Holocaust Industry. Consequently, The Holocaust Industry, as an analytical framework, has only been applied on the most superficial level.
I understand why Finkelstein wrote The Holocaust Industry the way he did. Both of his parents survived the Nazi holocaust and the rest of his family was completely wiped out. The Holocaust Industry is an incredibly angry text directly confronting the people and institutions that he feels have, for decades, wielded The Holocaust as a political weapon. Finkelstein excoriates Elie Weisel and other producers of completely fraudulent and/or hyperbolic Holocaust literature. He condemns the Jewish organizations that sued switzerland and germany on behalf of “needy Holocaust victims” but then, when they won enormous settlements, didn’t actually give that money to the victims as promised. He lambasts the people behind the various Holocaust museums that sought to exclude any mention of non-Jewish victims or other heinous genocides and obscure the broader colonial and imperialist motivations for the Nazi holocaust. While exposing these people and organizations for the shandes they are is incredibly important, the text gives the impression that the Holocaust Industry is only upheld by Jews and only to the benefit of Jews. Because of this framing, instead of serving as a tool to help analyze and illuminate how The Holocaust Industry intersects with philosemitism, zionism, and white supremacy, this text can subtly affirm antisemitic biases about Jewish manipulation, power, and greed.
The Holocaust Industry is worth reading, but only as a jumping off point. Despite its imperfections, it holds valuable insights that we should extract and expand upon. This essay is an attempt to salvage The Holocaust Industry as an analytical framework.
Refocusing
The single most important idea we can and should take from The Holocaust Industry is that there is a concerted campaign, with specific material class and political interests, to present a narrative about the Nazi holocaust that obscures the real historical event. That is to say, there absolutely exists a Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein’s error is in assessing how it functions, who it benefits, how expansive it is, and how it aligns with broader white euro-american colonial interests.
Finkelstein opens The Holocaust Industry by analyzing how the Nazi holocaust factored into, or more accurately didn’t factor into american Jewish political life immediately after. He shows that, until decades later, The Holocaust was not the ubiquitous global memory we see it as today; there were no memorials, there was hardly any academic inquiry or analysis, and when polled, american Jewish people didn’t view the Nazi holocaust as something that deeply impacted the inner workings of Jewish life. Finkelstein provides ample evidence that this slowly began to shift in the wake of israel’s military victory in 1967, as israel proved itself to be a valuable political/military ally to america. american Jews recognized this as an opportunity. They worked to achieve greater levels of assimilation and mainstream Jewish organizations tried to more openly and conspicuously align themselves with hegemonic american ideas- liberalism, anti-communism, capitalism, imperialism, and anti-Blackness. For example, Finkelstein shows that Jewish organizations came to support the “rearmed and barely de-nazified” germany when american international policy considered germany an ally against the u.s.s.r.. Finkelstein points out that Jewish organizations such as the american Jewish committee (AJC) and anti defamation league (ADL) were fearful any break from broader american international policy would threaten Jewish gains in assimilation and power.
Throughout the text, Finkelstein acknowledges that Jews and Jewish organizations were boosted into prominence or relegated to relative obscurity on the basis of their willingness to align with The Holocaust Industry. He then confusingly concludes that the Holocaust Industry simply serves “Jewish interests.” But, if Jews who were willing to uphold The Holocaust Industry were provided major platforms, while Jews, such as Finkelstein himself, who refused to uphold the Holocaust Industry, were cast aside and delegitimized, then clearly there are other interests at play than just “Jewish interests.” Instead of diving more deeply into the interests that he admits allowed the Holocaust Industry to materialize, Finkelstein spends an entire chapter positioning the swiss government as a victim being attacked by groups of greedy Jewish lawyers.
It is not “Jewish interests” that produced The Holocaust Industry. The concept of “Jewish interests” itself is fraught. Jews are a globally diasporic people with interests that, for a wide variety of reasons, often compete with each other. There is no one coherent set of “Jewish interests” that the Holocaust Industry could serve. Instead, the Holocaust Industry materialized because it aligns neatly with broader white euro-american imperialist interests and it serves those white euro-american interests best if they are masked as “Jewish interests.” Of course, many Jews (myself included) are white euro-americans, but making this distinction is important because while only some Jews benefit from The Holocaust Industry, all white euro-americans do, Jewish or not. So, emphasizing that The Holocaust Industry serves white euro-american interests, as opposed to “Jewish interests,” helps us both more accurately understand how The Holocaust Industry functions and avoid reproducing antisemitic scapegoating tropes about perceived “Jewish influence.”
The rhetorical sleight of hand described above is also visible in how white euro-americans position their support for israel. While israel doesn’t benefit all Jews, it does benefit all white euro-americans. However, white euro-americans often mask their support for israel as support for Jewish people. In the two attached videos, biden, who often defends israel as necessary for Jewish safety, makes clear that ‘keeping Jews safe’ is not actually relevant to whether he would support israel. As he states quite honestly, american support for israel is an investment that he would still make even if Jews literally did not exist. That The Holocaust Industry or israel happen to benefit some Jews, does not mean either serve “Jewish interests.” Instead, “Jewish interests” is used by white euro-americans as both a cloak that conceals their own motivations and as an easy moral justification. Similar to biden’s omission about u.s. support for israel, it is in america’s interest for The Holocaust Industry to exist, and were there not a Holocaust Industry, white euro-america would have to invent a Holocaust Industry. The Holocaust Industry saves white euro-america’s soul.
The Holocaust Industry’s Two Dogmas
According to Finkelstein, two central dogmas undergird the Holocaust framework, or the basis for The Holocaust Industry:
- The Holocaust marks a categorically unique historical event and
- The Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of Jews.”
The first of these dogmas, Holocaust uniqueness, is completely ubiquitous today. It is so pervasive that we likely don’t even recognize it as an ideological position. Holocaust uniqueness manifests in, for example, the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t compare any other historical or current event to the Nazi holocaust- that it would be insensitive to the victims of the Nazi holocaust to make these comparisons. Another example of how Holocaust uniqueness manifests is the idea that the Holocaust is the worst and most violent form of evil that the world has ever known. “A subtext of the Holocaust uniqueness claim,” writes Finkelstein, is that if the Holocaust is uniquely evil, then “however terrible, the suffering of others simply does not compare.” This dogma is often used to condemn as antisemites and silence both Jewish and non-Jewish Black people, non-Black Indigenous people, and other colonized people who compare their own suffering to the Nazi holocaust.
Finkelstein believes that Holocaust uniqueness relies on, and is connected to, the supposed uniqueness of antisemitism in general. This marks the second central dogma that supports The Holocaust Industry. Antisemitism uniqueness is the idea that not only was the Nazi holocaust a unique historical event, that is not comparable to any other historical event, but antisemitism itself is a hatred that is not comparable to any other form of hatred, subjugation, prejudice, or racism. The Nazi Holocaust then, is to be understood as the apex of antisemitism- both irrational and essentially inevitable. The logic of antisemitism uniqueness appears, for example, in claims that Jews are the ‘most oppressed people in history’ or that antisemitism is the “oldest” form of hate.
Finkelstein notes that the logics of Holocaust and antisemitism uniqueness require either the complete erasure of or only partial recognition of the non-Jewish victims. He writes, “if The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of the Jews, the persecution of non-Jews in The Holocaust was merely accidental and the persecution of non-Jews in history merely episodic.” Picking and choosing which victims will or may be remembered is a hallmark of The Holocaust Industry because, at its heart, it is the struggle to control what The Holocaust itself is remembered as. If we acknowledge that the nazis targeted not just Jews, but also Roma, African people, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, and Polish people, among others, then we must also admit that the nazi ideology is not simply a hatred of Jews with accidental non-Jewish victims. If we recognize that all of the victims of the Nazi holocaust were targeted within the framework of the nazi ideology, then the nazi ideology and the Nazi holocaust couldn’t just have been the apex of irrational antisemitism.
In essence, these two dogmas are an attempt to decontextualize and dehistoricize antisemitism and the Nazi holocaust, such that any attempt to study either seems futile, antisemitic even, because The Holocaust is impossible to understand. “Rationally comprehending The Holocaust amounts, in this view,” writes Finkelstein, “to denying it,” because rational and honest historical analysis “denies The Holocaust’s uniqueness and mystery.” Elie Weisel, a veritable Holocaust Industry celebrity, went as far as to claim that comparing other historical atrocities to The Holocaust constitutes a “total betrayal of Jewish history.” If The Holocaust Industry did not exist, the Nazi holocaust would be treated no differently from any other historical event.
According to Finkelstein, both of these two dogmas came to exist because they are a form of property that only Jews would be able to wield. He writes that Holocaust and antisemitism uniqueness persist because “unique suffering confers unique entitlement.” According to Finkelstein, the supposed uniqueness of the Holocaust, and of antisemitism more broadly, sets Jews apart from others as not just uniquely oppressed, but as unique in general. He wryly explains that this argument essentially boils down to the assertion that “the Holocaust is special because Jews are special.” To Finkelstein, The Holocaust was and is an “invaluable chip in a high-stakes power game” for american Jewish elites. Often, he implies, this entitlement materializes as support for zionism and defense against anti-zionism. Finkelstein writes:
In effect, Holocaust uniqueness — this “claim” upon others, this “moral capital” — serves as Israel’s prize alibi. “The singularity of the Jewish suffering,” historian Peter Baldwin suggests, “adds to the moral and emotional claims that Israel can make . . . on other nations.” Thus, according to Nathan Glazer, The Holocaust, which pointed to the “peculiar distinctiveness of the Jews,” gave Jews “the right to consider themselves specially threatened and specially worthy of whatever efforts were necessary for survival.” To cite one typical example, every account of Israel’s decision to develop nuclear weapons evokes the specter of The Holocaust. As if Israel otherwise would not have gone nuclear.
Finkelstein is partly correct- these two central dogmas are absolutely critical components in upholding and maintaining The Holocaust Industry. But, the question Finkelstein never answers- or even seriously asks- is if The Holocaust Industry is a form of unique entitlement that could only benefit Jews, why are so many non-Jews benefiting?
For example, take the “Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial” in Boise, Idaho. This memorial was not erected immediately after Anne Frank was killed, nor was the memorial erected after Anne Frank’s diary was first published. Instead, this memorial was erected in the early 2000’s, when a group of business-people in Idaho wanted to “offset the negative image of Idaho as a place of intolerance and hatred.” The Wassmuth Center For Human Rights is very open about the fact that a memorial to a literal child victim of the Nazi holocaust- in a city and state where that child had never been- would be an effective way to spruce up their public image and encourage tourism. Unfortunately, they were right. This memorial was not condemned as a gross ploy to use the memory of the Nazi holocaust for a city’s personal gain. Instead, the memorial received TripAdvisor’s “Certificate of Excellence.” This wielding of The Holocaust and Holocaust Remembrance is not intended to serve Jews or Jewish interests. This memorial is not a product of unique entitlement benefiting Jews.
In analyzing u.s. Holocaust museum politics, Finkelstein, again fails to seriously contend with how The Holocaust Industry benefits non-Jews. Yet, here, this failure seems almost comically absurd. He writes:
The first question is why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the nation’s capitol. Its presence on the Washington Mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the wailing accusations of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans.
Other political issues also emerge in the museum. It mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism so as not to offend a powerful constituency. It downplays the discriminatory US immigration quotas before the war, exaggerates the US role in liberating the concentration camps, and silently passes over the massive US recruitment of Nazi war criminals at the war’s end. The Museum’s overarching message is that “we” couldn’t even conceive, let alone commit, such evil deeds.
Rather than genuinely assessing all of the interests behind the museum, he concludes that it was a ploy by then president carter to ensure Jewish support. According to Finkelstein, “with a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the project to placate Jewish contributors and voters.” If the explanation were as simple as Carter attempting to garner support, surely there were more effective actions than initiating a major project to appease one of the smallest minority groups in the country. It is not simply “hypocrisy” as Finkelstein asserts, for the u.s. to establish a Holocaust museum that mutes the christian and european nature of antisemitism. Nor is it “hypocrisy” for the u.s. to position nazism as the worst and most inconceivable historical atrocity while it actively commits anti-Black/colonial violence. Instead, these actions are all directly connected to each other. The basis of The Holocaust Industry, according to Finkelstein, is the idea that The Holocaust is uniquely evil, such that the persecution of non-Jews within the Nazi holocaust was accidental and the persecution of non-Jews throughout history is “merely episodic.” Who, then, does this dogma benefit more than the societies actively engaged in that persecution?
In the book’s penultimate chapter, Finkelstein writes about the major Jewish organizations that demanded reparations for Jewish victims from switzerland, germany, and other european countries. Here, Finkelstein truly fails to see the forest for the trees. Instead of analyzing The Holocaust Industry as it exists within and benefits broader white euro-american colonial structures, he positions the german and swiss governments as victims being targeted by greedy american Jewish lawyers (for the record, Finkelstein is right that those lawyers are disgusting scumbags). In detailing the campaigns these organizations waged, Finkelstein notes the immense support they received from u.s. politicians. Many promised that they would boycott switzerland or germany if they each refused to acquiesce to the demands, because, as one congressperson said, “the passage of time must not be an excuse for unjust enrichment.” Even president clinton chimed in, declaring that, “we must confront and, as best we can, right the terrible injustice of the past.” Finkelstein scoffs at this support, mocking it as hypocritical, given america’s history. He writes, “noble sentiments all, but nowhere to be heard — unless they are being actively ridiculed — when it comes to African-American compensation for slavery.”
Finkelstein fails to recognize that these american politicians are not being hypocritical by demanding that switzerland and germany pay reparations to Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust despite america’s refusal to pay reparations to Black people for slavery. These american politicans simply understand The Holocaust Industry better than Finkelstein does. He writes “it is much easier to deplore the crimes of others than to look at ourselves,” but fails to realize that the u.s. is not deploring the crimes of others because introspection is difficult. The u.s. deplores the crimes of others precisely so that it can continue perpetrating its own colonial crimes. This is The Holocaust Industry!
The Holocaust Industry as Part of, Not Separate From
Where Finkelstein failed, Houria Bouteldja flourishes. In Whites, Jews, and Us, she makes the connections that Finkelstein refuses to make. Where Finkelstein focuses on the Jews who uphold The Holocaust Industry, Bouteldja rightly positions The Holocaust Industry within centuries of white euro-american colonial violence. She writes:
Manipulation has only one goal: to share the Shoah, to dilute it, to deracinate Hitler and move him to the colonized populations, and in the end, to exonerate white people. To universalize anti-Semitism, to make of it an a-temporal and stateless phenomenon, is to kill two birds with one stone: it is to justify the hold-up of Palestine as well as the repression of indigenous people in Europe… Before mass crimes were tested in Europe, they were first tested in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia. To dehumanize a race, to destroy it, to make it disappear from the surface of the earth, is already inscribed in the colonial genes of National Socialism. Hitler was nothing if not a good student. If the techniques of mass massacre revealed all their efficiency in the concentration camps, it is because they had been tested on us, and thus made all the more efficient; and if white ferociousness came down on you with such savagery, it is because European populations closed their eyes to the “tropical genocides.”
Bouteldja doesn’t understand history as a timeline where “pre-Holocaust” magically transformed into Holocaust, which gave way to “post-Holocaust.” Instead, the Nazi holocaust materialized as a byproduct of the white euro-american colonialism that ravaged the world for centuries and continues to do so today. The same white euro-american countries who fomented the colonial imperialist ideology that became nazism, who committed the Nazi holocaust, and who benefited from the Nazi holocaust needed to distance themselves from it or they would perish. But, they wanted to distance themselves from the Nazi holocaust in a way that absolved themselves of all of their past crimes, not just the ones they committed during the Nazi holocaust. Further, they wanted to absolve themselves so completely that their ongoing crimes would be obscured and attempts at accountability rendered hopeless. This is where The Holocaust Industry is most effective.
This process of white euro-american rebirth starts with adherence to the dogmas of The Holocaust Industry and proceeds as a commitment to “protecting the Jews” and “making right” the harm caused by this fictional dehistoricized version of The Holocaust. Next, white euro-america reiterates these commitments as if they are a shield against all allegations of racism, hatred, and violence. In Why Race Still Matters, Alana Lentin describes this dynamic:
In the present moment, publicly performing opposition to antisemitism and support for Israel — the two having been made equivalent — has also become a proxy for politicians and public figures’ commitment to antiracism. Leaning on antisemitism as the sine qua non of racism and associating it singularly with the Nazi Holocaust, reinterpreted as a unique and aberrant event rather than the manifestation of a 500-year process, silences any questioning of this professed antiracism.
For example, after the Nazi holocaust, germany paid billions of dollars of reparations to Jews and to the settler state of israel and promised to fight antisemitism and protect the Jews from another Holocaust. germany then forgave itself and moved on. Left out of this is any serious acknowledgment of or reparations for their mass genocide against the Herero Nation in the early 1900’s. Further, as Bouteldja describes, germany positions itself as having defeated antisemitism and relocates the current german antisemitism to Muslim german immigrants. Consequently, fighting antisemitism and Holocaust Remembrance are used as justifications for racism and repression against Muslim german immigrants. The u.s., france, britian, and the entirety of the white euro-american world all wield The Holocaust Industry in this same way. In the u.s., Anne Frank memorials and Holocaust museums are used as a form of self-absolution and identity formation. In france, just as in germany, antisemitism is projected onto the Muslim population and the so-called fight against antisemitism becomes a war against Muslim people. All over white euro-america, the Nazi holocaust is erased and The Holocaust Industry takes its place.
Finkelstein ends The Holocaust Industry concluding that we must “restore the Nazi holocaust as a rational subject of inquiry.” But in focusing his entire text on only the actions of Jews and Jewish organizations, Finkelstein leaves us ill-equipped to do so. Bouteldja gives us the antidote:
We need to repatriate anti-Semitism, identify its geopolitical territory, its original locus. Anti-Semitism is European. It is a product of modernity. The Dreyfus affair, the impetuous development of anti-Jewish movements in the interwar period, the rise of Nazism, and the Vichy regime, all demonstrate anti-Semitism’s deep-seated roots in Europe. It has confined you to the lower echelons of the hierarchy of honors, but it is not universal. It is circumscribed in space and time. No, the Inuit, the Dogon, and the Tibetans are not anti-Semitic. They aren’t Philo-Semitic either. They don’t care about you… The risk of removing its singularity from the Nazi genocide is real, and you would be right to point it out. The negationist tendency looms large with the anti-Semites. But to have let the commemoration of the Nazi genocide become a “European civil religion” makes one fear for the worst, because one either has or does not have faith in religion. In this context, atheism produces imitators, it reproduces itself…. If you really fear negationism, it is urgent to lay to rest these ideologies that glorify you as supreme victims and create hierarchies of horror. You must do justice to the Roma, the homosexuals, the Soviets, and the communists who died alongside your own people, and you must just as urgently recognize one of Nazism’s origins: the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism.
