Shoah not fodder for pop culture

With all the Holocaust museums and memorials, with Holocaust curricula mandated in thousands of schools and colleges and Holocaust imagery and terminology permeating Western culture - would someone please tell me why 63 percent of passersby on an Orlando, Fla., street did not know what Auschwitz was?

If "teaching the Holocaust" was supposed to ensure "never again," it has been a dismal failure.

Ask the Rwandans or the Cambodians or the Bosnians or the people of Darfur.

Further proof? The U.S. State Department, at the behest of Congress, has just issued a country-by-country report showing that Jew-hatred is on the rise; that ultra-nationalists and "others" continue to assert "the Jewish community controls governments, the media, international business and the financial world."

The report confirms (as if we didn't know) that anti-Israel sentiment "crosses the line between objective criticism of Israeli policies and anti-Semitism"; that elements in Europe's Muslim population serve as a toxic reservoir of anti-Jewish sentiment; and that hard-Left "criticism of both the United States and globalization spills over to Israel, and to Jews in general, who are identified with both."

Does anyone really think that spending more on Holocaust education, or museums, or memorials, or seminars, or memoirs will make a dent in this reality?

Type out the word "Holocaust" on Google and you'll get about seven million hits. So don't tell me we've failed to raise the Holocaust in the consciousness of mankind.

What we have failed to do is correctly assess the value of consciousness-raising.

The problem runs deeper. Sixty years after the Shoah, the Berlin Jewish community is still trying to get more money out of the German government. Money is a big factor in pedestrianizing the Shoah.

The Claims Conference has come under repeated criticism over how Holocaust reparation money has been disbursed. There's legislation pending in the Knesset that would (quite rightly) give Israel a greater say in what happens to Holocaust-related funds.

But the memorialization of Hitler's victims has been sullied by the money it takes to keep Shoah-business in business.

Beyond making sure that the survivors receive their compensation checks, isn't it time we said enough is enough?

The issue isn't just money. When will we finally stop manipulating the Shoah for partisan purposes?

When MK (Knesset member) Danny Naveh opposes a postage stamp marking Israel-Germany friendship because it doesn't reference the Shoah, I don't see his stance as honoring the memory of the martyrs or showing sensitivity to the survivors, but as demagoguery.

Another stamp bearing Shoah imagery isn't what Israel needs.

Partly because every time we play politics with the Holocaust we further desensitize Jews and non-Jews alike to what the destruction of European Jewry meant.

We've made a mockery of memory.

I'm fed up with militant vegetarians talking about a "chicken holocaust"; with nutty settlers bemoaning "the transfer" of Gazan Jewry; with homosexual activists referring to AIDS as a "gay Holocaust"; with African-American militants calling the slave-trade the "real Holocaust."

As journalist Jonathan Rosen argued when the U.S. Holocaust Museum opened in 1993, "The murder of six million Jews is not a metaphor for human suffering. It is not a metaphor for anything, and the more it becomes one - the more it is removed from the time and place necessary to any true telling of historical events - the less it will be anything at all."

In his must-read "The Holocaust and Collective Memory," Peter Novick says, "Probably the Holocaust both sensitizes and desensitizes, and there's no way to draw up a balance sheet."

So if there is no way to guarantee the right balance, let's be extra careful. The Shoah is not to be fetishized; it is not a source of identity, it is not fodder for pop culture.

Rather than universalizing the Holocaust, we need to particularize it.

Jews need to take back the Shoah and sanctify it in the way we recall the destruction of the Second Temple.

It's time to stop peddling the Holocaust to the outside world - that's been to no avail. It's also time to stop manipulating it within the Jewish world for politics or money.

What we need is a moratorium during which we ease off on the museums, memorials, books, and imagery and do some soul-searching.

Meanwhile, let's inject special meaning into Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day. Let's make sure that both Israeli and Diaspora youngsters understand the narrative of the Holocaust, but let's do so with wisdom.

We have worked so hard - and so successfully - to universalize the Shoah that it is in danger of losing its special, particular, meaning to the Jewish people.

It's a case of breadth and depth in conflict.

Elliot Jager is editorial features editor at The Jerusalem Post. Reach him at jager@jpost.com.

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