Remembering Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg passed away on August 4. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies.

"Arendt borrowed extensively from Hilberg's work with less-than-generous attribution. He never forgave her this oversight and - what truly is unforgivable - her condescending references to his study in private correspondence and her recommending against its publication by Princeton University Press. In his memoir Hilberg parries the insult, asserting, wrongly in my opinion, that Arendt's study The Origins of Totalitarianism lacked originality. It is true that Arendt could be lazy about facts, which might account for Hilberg's harsh judgment, but the first part of Origins contains many shrewd insights on the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation and paradoxes of the nation-state."

Hilberg reserved even greater contempt (and loathing) for Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the highly touted The War Against the Jews. Here it can be said that his verdict was faultless. During the heyday of the Holocaust religion in the 1970s-1980s, Dawidowicz was its designated high priestess. The problem was that, as Hilberg brutally demonstrates in his memoir, she got the most elementary facts wrong. I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz's depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. "When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair," my mother laughed. "They had been trying to pass as Gentiles." The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein's The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz's fantasy."

"After a division of Henry Holt (Metropolitan) agreed to publish my (Finkelstein) critical essay on Goldhagen (together with one by Birn), the Holocaust industry went ballistic. Its attempts to halt the book's publication were neutralized, however, when Hilberg stepped forward to praise my contribution. But Adam Shatz, wielding the hatchet in Slate breezily surmised that Hilberg, along with the half dozen other leading scholars who blurbed the book, hadn't read carefully what I wrote. In light of what is known about Hilberg's fastidiousness, this would have been strangely out of character."

*Slate is a tabloid run by the Washington Post and hosts such venerable "artists" as the Allah Despising Christopher Hitchcock..Hitchens. Sorry. The Washington Post of course runs the mirror tabloid in Israel known as The Jerusalem Post.