Holocaust Memorialism: Why here? Why now?

… By 1978, Holocaust remembrance was becoming a national tidal wave. The broadcast that April of Holocaust, the blockbuster NBC- TV miniseries, drew some 120 million viewers, making it one of the most watched events in television history. The central problem in modern Jewish theology was now a fixture of American popular culture.

It was also, increasingly, a matter of smart politics.

The first to propose a national memorial to the Holocaust was Mark Siegel, a Jewish liaison on the staff of the Carter White House. He raised the idea in a 1977 memo, suggesting it as a way to press for Senate ratification of the International Convention on Genocide.

The genocide convention was adopted by the United Nations in 1949 in response to the Holocaust. It defined racial mass-murder as a crime against humanity. American ratification had been held up in the Senate far three decades by a small group of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, essentially the same group that had closed the gates in 1938 and gutted the Displaced Persons acts in 1948. They saw the genocide treaty as a Communist assault on U.S. sovereignty. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, elected to the Senate in 1974, was now the treaty's leading opponent.

In Siegel's view, a national Holocaust memorial might undercut Helms and his allies by focusing public attention on the evils of genocide and the need to defend human rights across borders. It seemed like an idea with guaranteed appeal to a human-rights advocate such as Jimmy Carter.

Siegel's boss, White House domestic-policy chief Stuart Eizenstat, liked the memorial idea for a different although related reason. He was distressed over the growing phenomenon of Holocaust denial. A small group of far-right ideologues, centered in California [Ed. probably the IHR], had been winning headlines with their theory that the Nazi Holocaust was a hoax cooked up by Jews. The Jews' goal, supposedly, was to win world sympathy, to mask their own crimes in the banks and media they controlled, and to drum up support for Israel.

As a symbol of human rights, the Holocaust memorial idea sat around in the White House for nearly a year. In the spring of 1978, it was dusted off for a more compelling reason, namely domestic politics. Carter's standing among Jews was in disastrous shape as a result of his continuing clashes with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel. It was sure to damage his re-election effort.

In March 1978, domestic-policy aide Ellen Goldstein sent a memo to Eizenstat reminding him of Siegel's memorial idea. She suggested that it might be linked to Israel's thirtieth anniversary, two months away. Democrats were looking to the date as a chance to throw a party for the Jews at the White House and patch things up. Reading Goldstein's memo, Eizenstat recalls, "it didn't escape my thought that it could help with political relations." And so Carter used the occasion of Israel's thirtieth birthday to announce the creation of the President's Commission on the Holocaust.

[Ed. Goldberg doesn’t mention this but the Commission was created as a quid pro quo for Begin’s acquiescence in the Camp David Accords which had been signed a few months previously]

With the formation of the president's Holocaust commission, later renamed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the Jewish community's campaign to put Jewish suffering on the national agenda was essentially won. The commission convened under its chairman, the revered Holocaust survivor and chronicler Elie Wiesel, and voted to build a national museum. The lessons of the Holocaust were now the Jewish community's moral legacy to America.

[Ed. then follows a lengthy discussion of the ‘Armenian Problem’ which was solved by the simple expedient of settling for “… an oblique reference through a quote from Hitler - 'Who remembers the Armenians?"- that mentioned the Armenians' fate as a source of inspiration for his own anti-Jewish plans.]

The Armenian Holocaust debate did not end there. Prominent Jewish leaders carried the fight to Congress, where Armenian-American groups were trying to win passage of a resolution honoring their suffering. In a series of congressional confrontations through the 1980s, supporters of an Armenian resolution ran into opposition from some of Israel's leading supporters, notably Representative Stephen Solarz of Brooklyn and lawyer-lobbyist Paul Berger, a top lay figure in the UJA.

…

To many minds, American Jewish advocacy reached the pinnacle of its success on Thursday morning, April 22, 1993, when President Bill Clinton dedicated the United States Holocaust Museum. [Ed. Goldberg was writing in 1996] Built by congressional mandate on federal land - though paid for with $168 million in private donations - it was America's four-storey "living memorial" to the European Jews massacred by Nazi Germany.

The museum dedication capped a week of nonstop Holocaust commemoration in the capital. On Monday, the president and the first lady spent two and a half hours touring the museum. On Tuesday, congressional and Jewish community leaders gathered in the Capitol Rotunda for their annual Holocaust Remembrance Day observance. On Wednesday, the Clintons and Gores hosted five hundred Jewish community leaders at a formal White House reception. On Thursday, as ten thousand people watched under an unseasonably blustery sky, the president lit an eternal flame to dedicate the museum, flanked by the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and the chairman of the museum's board, Baltimore real-estate investor Harvey Meyerhoff.

'I've never been as proud of being a Jew and an American as I was this week," said the capital's best-known Jewish community spokesman, Hyman Bookbinder, emeritus director of the American Jewish Committee's Washington office. "This week we saw the effect of all our political work and our moral efforts, despite all the problems. Day after day there was action and expressions of understanding of our pain."

…

"Here on the town square of our national life," said President Clinton in his dedication speech, "on this fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, at Eisenhower Plaza on Raoul Wallenberg Place, we dedicate the United States Holocaust Museum and so bind one of the darkest lessons in history to the hopeful soul of America."

Within a few days after opening its doors, the museum would establish itself as the single most sought-after tourist attraction in Washington. Alongside the national museums of art, American history, natural science, and space travel, America now had a national museum of Jewish suffering.