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Interview: Leon Wieseltier Discusses Comparisons Being Drawn Between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
All Things Considered: May 21, 2002
 'Hitler Is Dead'
JOHN YDSTIE, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm John Ydstie.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host: And I'm Robert Siegel.
Hitler is dead. So declares the cover of The New Republic this week, advertising an essay inside by the magazine's
literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier is addressing a rash of Holocaust references invoked over Palestinian violence
against Israelis: An American Jewish writer warns of a second Holocaust. One conservative columnist writes The Final
Solution Phase Two. Another describes the Passover bombing in the Israeli city Netanya as Kristallnacht transposed to
Israel. Kristallnacht was the night of Nazi attacks on German Jews that presaged mass murder.
Leon Wieseltier's essay, Hitler is Dead, is subtitled On the Ethnic Panic of the Jews. He joins us.
And I wonder if you could begin, Mr. Wieseltier, with reading the paragraph in your essay that begins `There is a Jewish
panic now...'
Mr. LEON WIESELTIER (Literary Editor, The New Republic): `There is a Jewish panic now. The savagery of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Arab world, the rise in anti-Jewish words and
deeds in Europe--all this has left many Jews speculating morbidly about being the last Jews left. And the Jews of the
United States significantly exceed the Jews of Israel in this morbidity. The community is sunk in excitability in the
imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control. Death is at every Jewish door. Fear is wild, reason is
derailed, anxiety is the supreme proof of authenticity. Imprecise and inflammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is
everywhere.'
SIEGEL: Thank you for reading that. You quote in your article the writer Nat Hentoff as saying, `If a loudspeaker goes
off and the voice says, "All Jews gather in Times Square," it could never surprise me.' You say it would surprise you.
Mr. WIESELTIER: It most certainly would.
SIEGEL: What's going on here?
Mr. WIESELTIER: A number of things are going on. One is genuine concern about the savagery to which Israeli society
has recently been exposed. Another is the mechanisms of identity, which in this country certainly, and to a certain extent in
traditional Jewish life, are premised on the notion that there is a single pattern that repeats itself throughout Jewish history,
and it's a terrible pattern. It's a pattern of disaster. There's always a single enemy, and the enemy keeps reappearing. And
the enemy has only one objective, which is our extinction.
The Romans become the Crusaders. The Crusaders become Ach Melnitsky(ph) in the Ukraine in the 17th century
pogroms. Melnitsky becomes Pet Lora(ph), who was a great massacrer of the Jews in the 1920s in Russia. He then
becomes Hitler, who then becomes Arafat and so on. There's one enemy, and the enemy has one objective, and it's a war
till the end of time. And there's no possibility of peace or compromise. All that is possible is kill or be killed.
SIEGEL: But as you write, `Fear is wild. Reason is derailed.' This kind of perception of the enemy of the Jews as being
the same enemy recurring throughout history...
Mr. WIESELTIER: Oh, I don't think you can think or act politically, and I don't think you can think or act strategically
unless you regard the situation concretely, not through tendencious and typological, historical lens. It's actually not even
historical thinking to think this way. It's some kind of metahistorical thinking. And it has more of a basis in emotion than it
does in the actual circumstances on the ground. Arafat is not Hitler. He's terrible, but he's not Hitler. Hamas, who's worse
than Arafat, is also not Hitler.
There are many, many significant distinctions between the adversities that Jews once faced and the adversity that they face
in the Middle East right now, among them being the fact that Israel is a very powerful state fighting a stateless people who
have the power to make life in Israel miserable but do not have the power to destroy the Jewish state.
SIEGEL: But as you write, the equation of, say, the bombing in Netanya with the murders of Jews in Europe at the hands
of the Nazis isn't just hyperbole; it also has real political consequences.
Mr. WIESELTIER: Oh, sure. I mean, people who believe in the pattern are basically despairing of political solutions.
There was no political solution for the Third Reich's view of the Jews. There was only resistance or flight or death. But
there are political solutions, at least I think so, that can be slowly obtained in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And some of
the people who are peddling these extreme and inaccurate historical analogies are really trying to shut down a certain kind
of thinking about the possibilities of diplomacy and strategy in politics.
SIEGEL: I suspect that even among people who are dismayed by the implication of the Holocaust at this point as some
sort of template against which to work in the Middle East, the thought of the memory of the Holocaust--standing and
being known by all and being an object lesson to all--the idea of that fading out of popular consciousness is terrifying, the
thought that people might forget it.
Mr. WIESELTIER: I will tell you I don't think that Jewish culture generally, or American culture, is in any danger of
forgetting the Holocaust. That's putting it mildly. I think quite the contrary, that the memory of the Holocaust, the imagery
of the Holocaust, is so ubiquitous in Jewish life and in American life that sometimes it can actually cloud judgment. And,
you know, memory has become a sacred thing in contemporary culture. It doesn't deserve that sanctity. Memory has to
be corrected by history. There are times when memory is pertinent. There are times when memory is not at all pertinent.
There are many considerations that one must make when one comes to protect oneself, one's family, one's people. One
cannot only just morbidly wish to honor the memory of those who died before us.
SIEGEL: I want to go back to that quotation from Nat Hentoff.
Mr. WIESELTIER: Mm-hmm.
SIEGEL: `If a voice were to say, "Jews, gather in Times Square," I wouldn't be surprised.'
Mr. WIESELTIER: It think it's completely delusional. It's entirely an expression of the psyche and has really no basis in
American reality whatsoever. There was a time when there was active anti-Semitic prejudice in this country. That time has
passed. It must also be said that even the anti-Semitic prejudice that Jews experienced in this country differed by orders
of magnitude from what they experienced in Europe. Being refused a room in a hotel in Saratoga Springs is not like a
pogrom.
SIEGEL: And yet I suspect that you, like me, were raised to know that if you were to say such things, a little voice in the
back of your brain is supposed to say, `German Jews said this in 1920. German Jews...
Mr. WIESELTIER: Right. That's right.
SIEGEL: ...said this in 1920.'
Mr. WIESELTIER: And they were wrong. And I don't believe we're wrong. I think that you have to make discriminations
based on your judgment of historical realities, political realities, social realities, philosophical realities. Unlike Europe,
anti-Semitism never enjoyed any legitimacy whatsoever in this country. I think that the great developments of the modern
period brought about a degree of relief of Jewish suffering that Jews could never have dreamed of in the centuries that
preceded the modern period.
SIEGEL: Leon Wieseltier, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Mr. WIESELTIER: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: Leon Wieseltier is literary editor of The New Republic. His essay, Hitler is Dead, appears in the current issue of
that magazine.
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