• Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will be visiting his home-away-from-home—the New York-D.C. Acela corridor—tomorrow and Friday. [The Envoy]

• Facebook will not close pages that deny the Holocaust, for reasons of free speech. A survivors group has criticized the company. [JTA]

• Harold Bloom’s favorite book in the Bible is Jonah, and here he explains why. [NYRB]

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first European leader to call for a two-state solution that recognizes Israel as “for the Jewish people.” [Contentions]

• The skinniest house in the world is being built in Warsaw for Tablet Magazine columnist Etgar Keret. [Fast Company]

We all need someone …

I have read, studied, and met Finkelstein. As many have pointed out, he—the child of Holocaust survivors—does not deny that the Holocaust happened, and I did not say he did. Nevertheless, he actively refuses to face it head-on and intentionally perverts the truth into conspiracy theories. Refusing to comment on the the reality of gas chambers or death tolls (one way or another, he says, these arguments aren’t relevant), he rejects the conventional understanding of the Holocaust as a horrific and unparalleled act of genocide that provoked justified shame and revulsion, and instead sees “the Holocaust” as a deliberate propaganda ploy created by Jews to serve a variety of selfish and immoral ends. Given his loathsome argument that “Jewish elites” deliberately “manufactured” a big outrage “industry” about the Holocaust—which in his view is simply one of many 20th-century genocides—in order to extort money and gain influence in the West and to crush all dissent and criticism of Israel, it seems entirely fair to lump Finkelstein in with Shamir and others who prefer to understand the Holocaust primarily as a narrative ploy to extend Jewish influence in the world.

While on tour for his book The Holocaust Industry, Finkelstein said, “I remain faithful to the horrendous suffering of my late parents, yet, the Nazi Holocaust has long ceased to be a source of moral or historical enlightenment. It has become a straight-out extortion racket. A handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe.” This quote alone is just cause to lump Finkelstein into the same category as Israel Shamir, which is that of Holocaust doubter. (I preferred “doubter” to “skeptic” because “skeptic” is generally a positive trait.) Shamir and Finkelstein may in fact have different definitions of the Holocaust, but they are certainly under the same umbrella.

His Jewish Problem [Tablet Magazine]

III.

Israel Shamir is reported to have a handful of names. The Guardian noted that Magnus Ljunggren, a retired professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, claims that Shamir has at least six names: Shamir’s birth name was Izrail Schmerler; in 1992 he became a Swedish citizen and went by Jöran Jermas; and then after he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem he took the name Adam Ermash.

I know one of your names is Jöran Jermas, right?

Yeah, well, I have so many names.

Where does that name come from? Because that’s on your Swedish passport, right?

Ah, eh, you know when people started to attack me I started to be worried about my freedom of movement. One wants to be able to move, so as not being stalked.

So, which is your real name?

Israel Shamir.

What about Izrail Schmerler?

What’s that?

Well, people said that’s your birth name.

That’s something that I really can’t say anything about.

Shamir is a chameleon. As we sat in Moscow last winter, and as he told me how he loved the snow and ice and liked to ice skate in Red Square, he looked Russian. In the picture on his website, where he appears to have a little darker skin and is wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh around his neck, he looks more Palestinian. And I am sure, if he were wearing a kippah while reciting verses from the Talmud in Hebrew that day, I’d think he was Jewish. It is hard to pin down the truth, but Shamir said he was born in Siberia to Jewish parents, moved to Israel in the 1960s, fought in the ’73 war as a paratrooper, and then became a journalist, living in London and working for the BBC. After that, he lived in Japan for a while and then returned to Israel to work for Haartez.

Shamir gave a speech at Tufts University in April 2001 about Arab-Israeli relations. The Tufts student newspaper reported that Shamir said: “Israeli people represent a virus form of a human being because they can live anywhere.” Shortly after, Palestinian rights groups, and two men in particular, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish, sent out a mass email warning about Shamir’s anti-Semitic views disguised as leftist pro-Palestinian activism.

You once described Jews as a virus in human form.

I never did; no, that’s an invention of Jerusalem Post. Yes, I remember when they did it. That’s absolutely a silly thing. And then they quoted it so many times; I did not say that. People accuse me of everything, you know, so I’m used to it.

This goes back to the smear jobs. Why do you think you’re a target?

Well, you know, first of all some things that I say is complicated. And it’s easy for people to make misrepresentations. Maybe because people are unhappy with what I say and they want to smear me so I will look more awful. Why not to say truth, you know? I say things just how they are, you know?

In 2001, Shamir and Norman Finkelstein spoke at Columbia University. After the speech a Jewish man came up to Shamir and asked, “Are you Jewish?” Shamir told me that he was silent. He could not answer the question because he was in a transition from Judaism to Christianity. I asked him if he is Jewish, and he said quickly and assertively, “Now I am surely not.” I asked how he could not be Jewish if his mother and father were both Jews. He said, “It is a question of choice. I believe it is a question of choice.”

Being published on David Duke’s site, and having a regular gig writing for Russia’s anti-Semitic newspaper Zavtra, one would think Shamir wouldn’t have much Jew-loving company. He leaned back, itched his mustache, and said, “I met many people who are described as anti-Semites but I didn’t meet more than one who would be in real terms hating real human beings. They could hate the concept or hate an idea, but to hate Jews on a personal level, I never came across such thing.”

In Shamir’s eyes, being an anti-Semite is a good thing. If you are never called an anti-Semite, then it means that you support warmongering, brainwashing, and the subjugation of native people, in the name of Israel.

What if someone said: “I hate Jews and I wish Hitler killed all of them.”

People say such things.

Would that be labeled anti-Semitic?

Well, you know I’ve heard it very often from Sephardic Jews in Israel. I heard it quite a few times actually. [Laughs.] “Pity you didn’t burn in Auschwitz, a pity all of you didn’t burn in Auschwitz.” I heard it many times.

That’s awful.

Well, yeah. I don’t think that much about it.

Shamir had the poker player’s gift of never letting his guard down. He never committed to a concrete statement, no matter what the topic was. Once the questions got more controversial, he smoked contemplatively and stared out the window to the gray wall. At some point, though, he brought up Auschwitz, and I felt as though someone had just given me an ice pick. I chopped away.

That’s interesting you said “burn in Auschwitz” because your definition of Auschwitz is that it was a Red Cross internment camp. What is your definition of Auschwitz?

I’m not even interested in Auschwitz, you know? I have no interest in it. What I said there is something different. What I said there was that it was perceived as—internment camp.

By who?

By everybody. By Jews in Palestine, by Europeans, by English, by Russians, by Americans. You know when the rumors of mass annihilation came to Palestine they were strongly refuted by the Jewish authorities. It was reported by many publications that life was so awful. Things are so bad as it is and people come and bring such horrible stories … that was published in many newspapers in Israel in those times. The Jewish authorities were very strongly against this sort of rumor. And it was universally thought—yes, it was a deportation camp, nothing especially wonderful about it, nobody thought it was a resort, nobody did. People thought it was a deportation camp, quite awful place.

So, it was a concentration camp?

Yeah, but when I say concentration camp is a word that was used a long time before during the Boer War, when the English fought against the Boers in South Africa. There they built concentration camps; that’s how the word became coined.

This definition of concentration camp didn’t help Shamir’s point, for more than 26,000 women and children died in the South African camps from hard labor and starvation. Shamir stubbed his cigarette out as if tapping out an aggressive form of Morse Code, smashing the butt again and again. I put my butt in the ashtray and he stubbed it out, too, as if I hadn’t done a good enough job.

So, Auschwitz as being a place to exterminate Jews …

This idea came to existence only after the war.

So, it’s a rumor?

No, no, no. I don’t say that at all. No.

But you said, “the rumor of mass annihilation.”

I can repeat more clear. I am not all that interested in what was in reality. I am interested in perceptions. Something I am dealing with is perceptions. So, perceptions during the war was that it was quite awful deportation camp, where people were deported and kept, worked hard labor, this sort of thing. That’s how it was perceived. Only after the war, different perception came. And that was a perception of mass annihilation, and mass murder, and all that.

So, it’s not a fact that there was mass annihilation?

Shamir lost his relaxed demeanor, shifted in his seat, and contracted his shoulders. He covered half his face with his tanned, wrinkled hand and continued, trying to keep it together.

That’s, not, I did not say that at all. I didn’t even say that, I didn’t even intend to say this or other way. What I say is that there was no such perception during the war. This perception came after the war.

But so which one is true?

I am not even interested in this kind of question. That is something that is very much outside of my interest.

But can you comment about if these concentration camps were for mass murder?

Ah, I have really no knowledge about it at all. I was not interested in it because I reject the idea that it is important, you see?

IV.

The waiter arrived and placed a cappuccino in front of Shamir. He politely thanked him in Russian. Shamir added no sugar, sipped from his cup, and then quickly popped a sugar cube in his mouth. I could hear his tobacco-stained teeth crush it with quick staccato crunches.

How far along are we with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Meaning?

Well, that the Jews have a goal of world domination.

Ah, well, well, well. That is kind of a very good and very complicated question. Basically the Protocols describe in this or another way some idea of creating impoverished world. A world where there is no spirit.

Do you think that is real? And that’s what’s happening?

Well, I do think that this process takes place. It’s the process of impoverishing the spiritual component of the world. This process surely goes on.

But are the Jews behind it?

Well, in total, I don’t think so.

So, you don’t think the Jews are behind that?

Not that much, not that much.

But a little bit?

Well, let’s say that it could fit some Jewish ideas. It could be explained by some Jewish ideas. For instance, the idea that there should be no religion, that the Gentiles should not have a religion: That is kind of an important Jewish concept. We should try to understand why people thought it is connected with Jews. That this kind of Kali Yuga process, the process of impoverishing the world. How come? Why people thought it is connected with Jews? Anyway that’s an interesting question. That’s what I say the possible explanation is that it is connected with the Jewish concept that non-Jews do not have direct access to God.

So, you write about how especially American goyim are brainwashed by Jewish media lords. Can you explain that a bit? How far are we? Do you think I am a brainwashed goy?

Well, first of all I don’t know. How would I know? That’s something I don’t know. It is very much impossible to know. There is a huge part of brainwash, for sure. That is what goes on a daily basis.

And what do they try to brainwash? What do the Mammonites—and what you say are quote-unquote the Jewish media lords—what are they trying to brainwash?

Well, they try to induce you with the feeling that Jews are very, very wonderfully special.

Are they not?

No.

They same as everyone, or worse?

The same, absolutely same. They try to induce with concept that whatever happens to Jews has some kind of special meaning for the world.

So, what are you trying to say? That Gentiles and Jews are the same?

Well, what I say is a little more complicated than that.

It was nearing the end of our interview. My smokes were dwindling quickly, and Shamir had already started on his second red-and-silver pack of Dunhills. I asked him: “And what’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear ‘Jews.’ ” His chin was in his right hand as his eyes looked toward the bar. He was silent for nine seconds. “Not again,” he said, punctuating his curt sentence with a long laugh. “Not again? What do you mean by that?” I asked. With no hesitation he replied, “That I am very tired of hearing this word.” He laughed heartily.

V.

On Tuesday, I sat staring out the window, watching the frozen trees and the frozen pond across the street. Every now and then large chunks of ice fell from the 12-story roof and smacked the street, or got buried in a pile of snow. This was my second-to-last day in Moscow, and I had a feeling the day before was the last time I would ever get to see my man. I called Shamir, but he didn’t pick up. I called two more times within a half hour, but no one answered. I reread certain sections of his work and tried to make sense of the man I’d been studying and the man I met. There were two different Shamirs, if not more: the anti-Semitic writer who unabashedly admits that Jews have used the Holocaust to benefit themselves and who believes that “Jewish Media Lords” have hijacked the newspapers and TV to brainwash readers into thinking that Israel is always right and Jews are the chosen people. Then there was the person I met: a gentle, polite man, who was not easily provoked and was frozen solid.

Then I received an email from Shamir. It said, “I am leaving Moscow for a stay in a monastery and will be unable to see you. I explicitly request you: Do not publish a single word without me checking the text first.” I realized that this man was afraid of what others said about him. He was discreet and controlling. He had different names for a reason. He had something to hide: a certain fear, a certain darkness, that had consumed him. Who knows what the origins of his fear are? “This time of certainty is over,” Shamir writes. He insists that Gentiles need to stand up to the elite Jews in government, the media, and anywhere else they’re hiding, or risk, he says, falling “into a New Dark Age, into a bleak anti-Utopia, and our children will not forgive us for our passivity. Or we still can pull and push, and hope for the best.” His hope is to transform his private darkness into a light that others will follow. In the meantime, he hides himself.

Two weeks later I received a Facebook message from Paul Bennett, Shamir’s editor and fellow writer on Counterpunch, a biweekly newsletter that describes what it does as “muckraking with a radical attitude.” The email started to outline how smart and misunderstood the “underdog” is and how we can learn a lot from a man with Shamir’s intelligence. But then it became a little bit threatening. “I’m sure you’re intelligent enough to understand why it would pay better to attack Shamir than to support him, but I think you may be young enough and still idealistic enough to appreciate his fine points,” wrote Bennett, a U.S. citizen, a proclaimed fan of Shamir’s, and the editor of the English versions of Shamir’s books.

Maybe he doesn’t mean it. Maybe he just wants to make a splash. But after five months following the man, I don’t think that is the case. Shamir has disguised his prejudice against Jews in the guise of a moral dilemma—to be or not to be a Jew­—and by making the right decision for other humans to follow. Reading Shamir’s work is like looking at a map of Moscow’s metro. The city and its metro system are built in circles: The innermost circle is Red Square and the Kremlin, and the outermost circle is the outskirts of the city, but they are all connected. From the center, you can easily go out to the edge. Shamir leads you to believe that you, as a reader, are getting to the epicenter of morality by admitting that elite Jews in power are evil Mammonites whose main goal is to make Jerusalem the spiritual capital of the world and to enslave the Gentiles. But the more you read, the more you try to analyze, the further away from morality you actually become.

In his Facebook message, Bennett continued to explain why as “a budding journalist” it would pay not to smear “our friend.” “When we speak to him we must realize that we are one degree away from global movers and shakers like Julian Assange,” he wrote. In the early 2000s, Shamir was nothing but a marginal anti-Semite and a prolific writer. But at that time one could write him off as a lunatic, or a self-loathing-Jew, or just a weirdo. But now, with Assange’s backing, Shamir has become a legitimate source of news and facts with a legitimate platform that is hard to ignore. His ideas may be heretical, mad, coming too fast to digest, but the Age of Assange has made Shamir less eccentric, more central—a dangerous man.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

Outside my window in Moscow everything is frozen, the thick ice-coated ground, the wind whining through alleys between the gray apartment buildings that stick out from 5-foot bases of hard snow, the orange dump trucks full of snow chugging along the street. Seven floors down, men in blue and orange overalls and black snowcaps are smashing the 3-inch-thick layers of ice coating the sidewalks with wooden-handled-and-metal-ended ice picks. Then there’s me, waiting in my thermals for the supposed Russian representative of WikiLeaks, a man who says his name is Israel Shamir, but who is also known as Jöran Jermas, and Adam Ermash, and who spends his time between Sweden, Israel, and Russia.

I have spent too much time in the paranoid corners where Shamir’s articles appear, on websites that claim the Jews planned the attacks of Sept. 11, Jews convinced the George W. Bush Administration to go to war in the Middle East, Jews have nuclear weapons not to just destroy Lebanon and Iraq and Syria, but Europe, too. Shamir says he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1947 to Jewish parents but in 2004 was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. While he claims to be a Palestinian activist, a believer in the “One State Solution,” his work reads more like right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda. He writes and speaks about the existence of “Jewish Media Lords” who have hijacked newspapers and TV to brainwash Americans into carrying out “Judaic goals,” which include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he writes in one of his books, Cabbala of Power, “The Jewish ‘plan’ is no secret; there is no need to re-read The Protocols or to ask Jews what they want.” In addition to having accused Israel of all manner of crimes, he has also been labeled a Holocaust-denier by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Shamir and I first corresponded via email four months ago. After he canceled a planned interview in February, we began talking on the phone every week, but he still refused to schedule an interview. The most he would promise me is that if I come to Moscow and called him, he might meet me, but then again he might not. “Things are getting very complicated,” he explained. “All I might have is an hour.”

The day before I left New York for Moscow, I bumped into Norman Finkelstein, a scholar and Holocaust-doubter who was denied tenure at DePaul University because of his published work, The Holocaust Industry, which claims the factual account of mass-extermination has been exploited so Jews can “gain immunity to criticism.” I had emailed Finkelstein early in February, after Shamir told me they were friends. Finkelstein wrote back, “I want nothing to do with this article. [Shamir] is a maniac.” So, when on another day on Gravesend Neck Road in Brooklyn outside of a closed-down Russian Apteka, I saw a tall man with gray thin hair wearing a brown corduroy blazer with a Palestinian flag pin on his lapel, I recognized him as Finkelstein and approached. As two young boys ran past us wearing kippas, he elaborated on his email: “He’s sleazy—Shamir said we were friends because he’s sleazy, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he stated while his nose ran in the February wind. “He has invented his entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true. And you won’t get this article published anywhere.”

One night before my trip, I realized that I started to believe this dark character who crawled out from the perverse nooks of the Internet to save my goy soul from the people he called “Jewish Media Lords.” I was sitting up on my couch at 4 a.m. reading a Shamir article about IDF soldiers who steal Palestinian organs and sell them on the black market. Then I read an article that called Jews “Christ-Killers” and another that said “a Jewish media lord—and one of the nastiest: Arthur Sulzberger Jr.” owns the New York Times. Hardly convincing, but then why was I starting to doubt the Times? I realized I had better get some sleep.

When the sun came up that first morning in Moscow, I called Shamir and told him I was in town. He told me that it’s “too hard to tell” if he would be able to meet. He suggested that if I called him at 2 p.m., he might have a better idea. If we met it would be at the Dom Zhurnalista, the Journalist’s House, off Arbatskaya metro station. While I waited and smoked, I re-read Shamir’s Cabbala of Power. Jews as a group, he argues, don’t know what they want, but at the very least they want war. Shamir quotes the Bible to explain, “‘The locusts have no king, yet they attack in formation …’ (Proverbs 30:27) and devastate whole countries as if by plan.” In Masters of Discourse Shamir writes, “There are no important media outlets in the US that are not owned or controlled by Jews.”

I was drifting in the silver smoke sitting near Red Square. I was there to meet a marginal weirdo and a notorious Holocaust-doubter. But I was also meeting a man who has real power in the newest form of journalism. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, had given Shamir access to cables and made him the organization’s representative in Moscow. Is Shamir crazy, or not? The question seemed important.

On March 1, 2011, the New York Times published an article about a report about a phone conversation that was never recorded. According to this article, Julian Assange told the British magazine the Private Eye that there is a Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks led by British journalists, including editors of the Guardian. The report, written by the publication’s editor, Ian Hislop, was based on a phone conversation Hislop had with Assange on Feb. 16, 2011. During the conversation, Hislop claimed that Assange stated the Jewish conspiracy to smear WikiLeaks was spearheaded by the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, investigations editor David Leigh, and by Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner. Although Rusbridger is not a Jew, Assange stressed that he is “sort of Jewish,” because he and David Leigh, a Jew, are brothers-in-law. But what really bothered Assange was a different article by the same publication titled, “Man in the Eye: Israel Shamir,” which claims Shamir is a Holocaust denier. Assange said that the article was “crap”—one more example of the Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks.

At 2 p.m., I called Shamir. He said he would meet me in one hour. I pulled it together, drank one more cup of coffee, and jumped on the subway. I was close.

II.

I first became curious about Shamir when the original reports came out in December in Russian and Swedish newspapers, and then in Reason and on the blog of New York Magazine, which claimed that he was the Russian “content aggregator” for WikiLeaks, as well as a “Holocaust denier.” I became more curious when I read an excerpt of the aformentioned Private Eye article about Shamir’s alleged anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying beliefs and his direct relationship with Assange. And I became very interested when I read WikiLeaks’ statement on its website: “Israel Shamir has never worked or volunteered for WikiLeaks, in any manner, whatsoever. He has never written for WikiLeaks or any associated organization, under any name and we have no plan that he do so. He is not an ‘agent’ of WikiLeaks.”

A spokesman for WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, confirmed this when I called to ask if Shamir was directly connected to the organization. “No, he is not,” said Hrafnsson. “He only worked on the Cable Gate release, like hundreds of other journalists.” Then the line went dead.

In Moscow, on my way to meet the man, I exited Arbatskaya Station and walked underneath the busy bul’var. I came out to see snow, ice, and a big black iron gate, behind which lay a courtyard and the Journalists’ House. In front of the big beige building was a set of stairs, which led down to a café. Through the window, I could see Shamir sitting at a table.

We said hello. Shook hands. “How do you like Moscow?” he asked me in fluent English, but with a Russian accent tinged with a Hebrew one, or possibly the other way around. I reached for my cigarette. He did the same. Shamir had recognizable human qualities, like a strong handshake and a fine smile. It felt nice to talk with someone, because I had been alone during my days of wandering and waiting around Moscow. Then I remembered that I was dining with a man who dedicated his life’s work to writing about why it’s wrong to be a Jew. And I knew from my reading of his work that there was something in his ice-hard anti-Semitic soul—be it anger, prejudice, or a reincarnation of an ancient darkness into modern anti-Israel sentiment—that genuinely scared me. I thought about an excerpt from Cabbala of Power: “In order to save the world from possible spiritual devastation, the Jewish state must be dismantled. … It can be done softly, without bloodshed, by creating a democratic state for all residents of Palestine, native and adoptive Palestinians. It won’t be a Jewish state, but Israeli Jews will eventually be absorbed by Palestinians, as the Jews of old were absorbed by Palestinians during the 2nd to 7th centuries.”

To me, it read like soft-core ethnic cleansing. But it was too late to analyze, as I was already studying his tan, wrinkled face and his thick, bristly mustache. Israel Shamir was a short man, neither fat nor skinny. His gray-and-black loose curls puffed around his cranium, and he sat with his elbows on the table after he fumbled to get his voice recorder to work. His hands touched, rubbed, and pressed his mustache, forehead, and temples incessantly throughout our conversation. He ordered the salad with sliced radish on top, and I ordered the borscht.

We talked about Julian Assange, of whom he said, “My acquaintance with him is so superficial. I have this very superficial view of the man.” He scratched the base of his nose above his lip. He turned his head and looked at the gray painted brick wall of the stairway out the window.

I know that when Assange was in Ellingham Hall in the Norfolk County that you went to visit him. He introduced you as “Adam.” I know you have a couple different names. Why were you introduced as Adam?

Well, Adam is my real name as well, Christian name as well. I actually use it quite often.

Yes, Adam Ermash, right?

Just Adam. Usually in many books I have it “Israel Adam Shamir.”

It was also reported that at Ellingham Hall, with Julian Assange and you were introduced as Adam, that you asked for cables about the Jews. Why did you ask for cables about the Jews and did you get any?

Oh, yeah, I have a lot of cables about the Jews. [He grins.] I have thousands of cables about the Jews.

And what do the cables say about the Jews?

Oh, it’s a very entertaining thing. I want to write about it, but I haven’t had time yet. But I think it is a very entertaining subject. A lot of cables about Jews.

Give me one example, what does a cable say?

One of them for instance that was published by me in a Russian newspaper a couple of weeks ago, there was a piece by the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow saying that Russia has no anti-Semitism.

And does Moscow have anti-Semitism?

No, surely not.

He finished his salad and put his napkin on his lap and pulled out one of the two packs of Dunhills he brought. He smoked cigarettes constantly, and he smoked with heart and vigor; he truly seemed to enjoy the act of smoking. The waiter stopped by, and Shamir ordered a cappuccino politely and nonchalantly. Our pasta did not look appetizing—noodles with chucks of tough meat in a brown oily sauce.

What is hatred?

That’s something I don’t, I’ve never experienced.

You’ve never experienced hatred?

Nuh-uh.

He was silent for 10 seconds until I asked the next question.

Well, on your site you say you’re a lightening rod for smear jobs. Do you think people hate you?

Well, they have a practical meaning also. I don’t think someone smears me because somebody hates me personally all that much. That would be very odd. I mean, provided I don’t feel hatred for others, would be strange to think someone hates me all that much.

Do you think you could be provoked to hate? What if you saw a murder?

Yaaaa …

As I understand you’ve seen terrible things that murderous Jews have done. When you were in the settlements you saw the hilltop youths—

One gets annoyed, you know. One gets annoyed. Ah, one gets annoyed. But I kind of personally don’t think I have ever felt such strong, passion as hatred. Hatred is very strong passion. I don’t think I’ve ever came close to it.

When you write about the IDF as SS soldiers in Gaza?

No, that’s not out of anger. That’s not even out of very strong anger. Or any way, that’s what I try, not to write … angrily. First of all, if one writes angrily, people do not read it. [Laughs.]

It would take days for the Moscovite ice pickers to chop through his ice. But every now and then, Shamir gets tired of smiling and laughing things off.

When I was in the West Bank there was definitely hostile feelings towards the Palestinians.

Yes. [Laughs.] Yes. Very silly, very silly. My mother lives in a settlement, called Eli.

Eli? I’ve been there.

Yeah, oh, you know. And she’s very much a settler. Very ideological. Very keen on all this stuff. She can speak forever about how awful everybody else is to them. I’ve tried many times to tell her why not kind of look at it differently, why not to see that people can live together? Basically to try to live together peacefully. That would be good enough. But kind of she didn’t really like it.

It must be hard for her to read your stuff.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes …

What does she say about your books?

Well, she doesn’t like it. [Laughs.] She doesn’t like it.

I think about how he described the Hilltop Youth once in his book Flowers of Galilee. “They seemed like nothing you ever saw. To their shaven heads, black boxes were strapped by narrow black belts; black belts crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries … for a morning prayer, but on these young men they looked like the amulets of a warlike tribe. They wore dark trousers and dark tee shirts; white shawls with black stripes flew behind their backs. Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed by some strange demon.”

Shamir continued talking about his Jewish settler mother. “Well, that’s the way with mothers. So we don’t have to worry about it all that much. We don’t have obligations of this sort towards our mothers,” he said casually. He rested his left arm on the table and held his chin in the cup of his right hand. It was getting dark outside, but our interview was far from over.

For the second installment of this article, click here.

Will Yakowicz is a writer based in New York.

And yet, it was also one of the most depressing. Although many of the young Arab journalists with whom we had bonded were undoubtedly worldly, intelligent, curious, and open-minded, they were also operating on a completely different epistemological frequency. Whenever thorny topics came up—the Holocaust, terrorism, the Arab-Israeli peace process—we couldn’t really discuss any of these matters with any substance since we weren’t even able to agree on what we were discussing. How could one begin to challenge recurring comparisons between the Israeli occupation and the Holocaust when many of the young Arab journalists didn’t actually know what the Holocaust was? Or alternatively, how do you seriously discuss the threats of Islamic terrorism with people who deny that al-Qaida carried out the attacks of September 11? And finally, how could we debate why the peace process was failing with people who adamantly refused to acknowledge that such a process existed, maintaining instead that Israelis’ sole objective remains the conquest of Arab lands?

This last and most ubiquitous claim, I quixotically tried to refute. When I pointed to the fact that for well over a decade a majority of Israelis have consistently supported the recognition of an independent Palestinian state—and often voted that way—my words were met with a suspicion that eventually gave way to surprise. “So, why didn’t we ever hear about this?” one intrepid Jordanian journalist asked me with genuine concern. I shrugged my shoulders as if perplexed. But the answer was as obvious to me then as it is now: Despite their apparent cosmopolitan disposition, these young Arab journalists—many of whom represent the intellectual voice at the forefront of the Arab Spring today—didn’t know any of these things because there were, and still are, vested interests that purposely made sure they wouldn’t.

At a time when the Western media is busy extolling the virtues of this tech-savvy “new Arab generation” of 20- and 30-year-olds and branding them “the Arab world’s agents of change,” I can’t help but think back to that disenchanting week in Madrid, which taught me just how grossly ill-prepared, albeit well-intentioned, many of these agents of change are for the Herculean task that awaits them. Having recently broken free of the physical chains placed upon their bodies by repressive governments, millions of young Arabs have yet to liberate their minds from ideological bondage to the autocrats they have toppled. No matter how nobly dedicated this Arab revolutionary generation is to transforming the Middle East, it would be highly naïve, myopic, and even delusional to assume they have acquired the liberal values necessary to create democratic societies. For the fact remains that while corrupt and authoritarian political institutions can swiftly be destroyed, the tainted ideas they had implanted into the minds of their young subjects cannot easily be removed.

***

One example of the intellectual contamination of young Arabs by the political culture in which they have grown up is their inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, as indicated by the presence of conspiracy theories still prevalent throughout the Middle East. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying that “everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.” The problem even with many of the educated and liberal-minded Arab journalists I met in Madrid was that they couldn’t always tell the difference between the two. And who could blame them? Arab elites had been able to employ what the French philosopher Louis Althusser called an “ideological state apparatus” that reinforced and reproduced their ruling ideology—while denying access and legitimacy to all of the alternatives.

The distorted public image of the Holocaust in the Arab world is a salient example of just how this apparatus functions. In preventing literary works such as the The Diary of Anne Frank from entering their classrooms and libraries (and in some cases formally banning them), and by barring films like Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List from their theaters, Arab governments succeeded in preventing widespread awareness of the gas chambers at Auschwitz or the mass graves at Babi Yar from the minds of their youths. That Arab intellectuals were accordingly “uninterested,” in the words of historians Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, who have studied the Arab reaction to the Holocaust, in the actual experiences of the victims explains why the mounds of documented evidence, testimonies, and confessions—or everything that makes this immense body of knowledge so incontrovertible—has deliberately been withheld from the impressionable minds of young Arabs. The result of this state-engineered project of mass censorship is that in the absence of any empirical evidence corroborating the experiences of the Holocaust, a false space of contention has been created into which dangerous pseudo-intellectuals like David Irving and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could freely inject their own denialist theories, and present fiction as fact. Having been denied the data with which to challenge such claims, too many young Arabs have unknowingly been suspended in a state of blissful ignorance that has led them to believe that the only Holocaust that ever took place—as one bright though hopelessly misguided young Arab journalist once told me—was the one perpetrated by Israelis upon Palestinians.

Pervasive ignorance about the Holocaust is emblematic of what has become the normative pattern of intellectual falsification and factual distortion permeating all levels of Arab society. This institutionalized culture of fabrication and fantasy that rules Arab political culture has come to encompass anything from the still widely believed myth that the Mossad orchestrated the September 11 terror attacks to equally preposterous though lesser known claims that America deliberately dropped humanitarian aid in Afghanistan on mine fields to lure innocent civilians into killing traps. Although outrageous conspiracy theories of this sort are a global phenomenon—persistent in the United States, too—what is so different and therefore ultimately disturbing about their manifestation in the Arab world is their source: Rather than originating and remaining on the fringes of society, they are the products of respectable mainstream elites and institutions—all of which naturally transformed these meticulously crafted prevarications in the eyes of the highly impressionable youths into “credible” sources of information.

When the leading newspapers of record, revered academic intellectuals, and admired cultural figures all tell the same lie, why would anyone go looking in search of the truth? No matter how progressive these sons and daughters of the Arab Spring are, the long-held prejudices of their fathers and mothers have already been learned by a state-run ideological apparatus that worked to condition their minds in a certain way. Having grown up watching a beloved Mickey Mouse-like television character extolling the virtues of violence and hatred to them as kids; having then encountered these same toxic messages reproduced and embellished in their elementary-school textbooks; having noticed that the prized dates at their local market were branded as “Osamas” for their exceptional taste; having walked on their way to and from school every day through streets named after suicide bombers; having seen the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the best-seller shelf at their local bookstores and watched ancient Jewish blood libels reincarnated as their favorite primetime dramas, what chance did this revolutionary Arab generation ever really have for even engaging, let alone embracing, the values of tolerance and pluralism that are the sine qua non for the liberal democratic society they now wish to establish?

One need not be an expert on adolescent cognitive development to realize that by contaminating both the private and public spheres of Arab society with hollow truths and sophisticated lies that infested all facets of daily life—the household, schoolroom, mosque, media, cafés, and workplace—Arab governments had not only stolen the intellectual innocence of their youths, but have severely impeded their capability to ever get it back. To expect this young Arab generation to undergo a miraculous metamorphosis that could erase decades of institutionalized indoctrination and transform entrenched bigotry into tolerance, envy into cooperation, malice into concord, is akin to asking of them to eschew their entire life’s experience. George Orwell aptly captured the challenge facing millions of young Arab reformers today: When living in a corrupt society, one cannot remain uncorrupted.

***

But rather than account for the source of the disease, the pervasiveness of conspiratorial thinking in the Arab world is symptomatic of a much deeper problem. A civilization that voraciously consumes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion while refusing to even glance at the pages from The Diary of Anne Frank, apparently petrified of the insights a 15-year-old Jewish girl hiding for her life in an Amsterdam attic might have, is one profoundly consumed not only by fear, self-loathing, and parochialism, but by the threat of any genuine exercise of individual free thought. Conspiracy theories are so rampant in the Arab world precisely because the minds of so many young Arabs have been made fertile for their cultivation. Depriving their citizens not only of access to any alternative sources of knowledge that could counter such fraudulent theories, but also of the chance to develop the curiosity and willingness to think critically and independently is exactly what enabled Arab authoritarians to rule unchallenged for so many years.

Without engaging in the details of the long and tragic civilizational decline in the face of Western modernity that saw the gradual closing of the Arab mind to outside ideas, it’s worth reflecting, as many scholars have already done, upon the sad—and practically nonexistent—state of the humanities in the Arab world, where that ancient Socratic dictum that an unexamined life is a life not worth living has long been buried and forgotten. If anything, what both secularist and Islamist authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East have always had in common is their shared animosity toward independent, original, and critical thought and their subsequent institutional attempts to stifle it through politicized knowledge that instilled in their youths offsetting values of obedience, submission, and conformity.

Even the United Nations Development Program reached a similar conclusion a few years ago in a report that recognized the absence of a well-balanced Western-style education and warned against an expanding “knowledge gap” gripping Arab societies. The report warned of “ideologies, societal structures and values that inhibit critical thinking, cut Arabs off from their knowledge-rich heritage and block the free flow of ideas and learning,” while calling for “a deep-seated reform in the organizational, social and political context of knowledge” that could potentially unleash “a human renaissance across the Arab world.”

Such proposals are neither Orientalist nor patronizing, as some might argue, but rather realistic. No matter how genuinely committed this Arab revolutionary generation remains to founding a just and democratic Middle East, without a vigorous cultivation of the humanistic proclivities for critical thought and independent reasoning, attempts to transplant “readymade” democratic institutions are destined to fail. The belief that periodic visits to the ballot box or the ratification of new constitutions will furnish Arab citizens with the values that bred these democratic instruments of government in the first place is akin to the madness Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver observed behind attempts to build a house from the roof down.

***

While the last few months have reminded us just how easily dictators can be deposed, bridges overtaken, and town squares overrun, the last few centuries teach us that it is often easier to liberate the body than the mind. In the West, as mass democracy began taking root over a century ago, progressive intellectuals like John Dewey and Matthew Arnold soberly understood that in order for the democratic system to sustain itself, people were going to have to acquire democratic skills and, quite literally, “learn” how to be free.

But who will teach this to the young Arab generations? The proliferation of the Internet and satellite television could be a good start if it was not as perilous as it is promising: The free flow of information can be counterproductive unless people know to discern fact from fiction and critically assess what they are consuming. Another encouraging sign is that Arab elites primarily in the Gulf have spotted this intellectual deficit and have begun inviting prominent American universities like NYU and George Mason to expand their pedagogical umbrellas over their youths in the hopes of importing the seeds of enlightenment for future Arab generations. But even that is insufficient.

The key to resolving this dilemma and ultimately liberating Arab minds lies in the hands of the revolutionary generation itself, and particularly in its capacity to bow humbly before the forces of history and recognize the extent—and especially the limitations—of its monumental accomplishments. Too many revolutions degenerated into tyranny precisely because they tried to create a brand new society purified of the ills inherited from the old one. If this Arab Spring generation, which has toppled the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (and threatens those in Tripoli, Sana’a, and Damascus), is indeed committed to building a democratic Middle East, it must therefore start by forgoing the hubris of such utopian aspirations and accept that millions of young Arabs—many of whom have actively supported the revolutions—are nevertheless still beholden to many of the regressive ideas against which they were waged.

To expect that decades of indoctrination can be expunged with a couple of tweets and a few weeks of protests is brash, arrogant, and ultimately dangerous. Acquiring the democratic mindset is a process that requires incremental change, not sweeping transformation. A failure to comprehend this won’t simply lead the Arab Spring astray, but may very well cause the young members of the extraordinary generation behind it to rebuild even more malignant versions of the regimes they set out to replace.

Deborah Lipstadt on The Eichmann Trial from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

The Eichmann Trial [Nextbook Press]
The Trial [Tablet Magazine]

These and other issues form the basis of The Eichmann Trial, a new book by Emory University historian Deborah E. Lipstadt from Nextbook Press. Lipstadt is no stranger to the courtroom or to the perils of anti-Semitism. In 1996, she was sued by David Irving, who’d accused her of libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier. Lipstadt won her case at trial in 2000. She joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the importance of survivor testimony, about the controversy surrounding the 1961 trial, and about how her courtroom experience changed the way she thinks of Eichmann’s. [Running time: 21:26.]

Now, Heeb Magazine (and our hats off to them) has performed some old fashioned new school journalism and discovered the cherry on the top of this story.

…it gets better, because once this story was posted on various websites, of course, people began to comment, including one “Steven Goldberg,” who stepped up to defend Santomauro (or “Santamauro” as “Mr. Goldberg” spells it.) If you read the local CBS website, all you see is Goldberg’s post. But what “Mr. Goldberg” didn’t realize is that when he posted on the Fox site through his twitter account, it didn’t just show his post, but the account from which it was posted–which belongs to [drumroll, please] Michael Santomauro.

Michael Santomauro: I salute you. Let us hope all Holocaust deniers can rise to your level.

Now, a not so quick admission. In early December, Mr. Santamauro commented repeatedly on Marc Tracy’s fantastic review of Ruth Franklin’s book of criticism A Thousand Darknesses (If you haven’t read it, go now. It is on my list of the top ten best Tablet articles). Santamauro was peddling his shpiel, but was also thoroughly debunked by Tablet’s readers in an excellent exercise of truth winning out.

Today, the editorial staff removed those comments as violating the magazine’s lenient standards policy. Personally, I am uneasy with this decision—and I should say that I’ve been encouraged to voice that dissent. I disagreed, both because I thought our readers rallied to the occasion without any interference, and because, while I occasionally disagree with Tablet commentary and articles, I never feel like I’ve lost anything from reading them, and often the magazine gains something by allowing them.

In that vein, what do you think? We’ll see if I can take it.

E-Mail About Holocaust Book Questioning The Holocaust Shakes A School [NYT]
Users of Roommate Service Receive Anti-Jewish E-mails [NYT]
Holocaust Denier, Michael Santomauro, Puts The “Twit” in Twitter [Heeb]

Reason’s Michael C. Moynihan sifts through the reports. According to Swedish and Russian media—and with the “broad strokes” having been confirmed by WikiLeaks—the group’s official man in charge of deciding which cables get sent to Russian news organizations, is a man named Israel Shamir (or alternatively Adam Ermash or Jöran Jermas). Moynihan reports that Shamir has called Auschwitz “an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the U.S. internment center in Guantanamo);” said, “It’s every Muslim and Christian’s duty to deny the Holocaust;” described the Jews as “virus in human form;” and endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Wikipedia says Shamir was born in Siberia in 1947, moved to Israel in 1969, fought in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem in 2004.

Moreover, his son, Johannes Wahlström, is a WikiLeaks spokesperson in Sweden (the country where the organization is generally based), and has been known to be sympathetic to his father’s views; he once argued in print that Swedish media was manipulated by Jewish interests to benefit Israel.

Shamir was the co-author of a recent, prominent essay alleging that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who recently turned himself in to British authorities after Sweden charged him with two sex crimes, was the victim of a “honey pot” scheme, that is, where someone is deliberately seduced in order to use the affair against him or her.

In brighter news, those who may find themsleves open to WikiLeaks’s raison d’être but turned off by the charges against Assange and now the group’s troubling association with Shamir may have a new champion: OpenLeaks, a splinter group “led by WikiLeaks veterans tired of Assange’s dictatorial style and obsession with being the organization’s public face” is soon to open up shop, Moynihan reports. He adds that the new group “claims to not be motivated by a particular set of political beliefs and promises to be transparent about its own operations and finances.”

Assange’s Extremist Employees [Reason]
Assange Besieged [Counterpunch]
Related: Rabbi OKs Spy Sex

The event, called “Training teacher-trainers: European Holocaust History, Human Rights, and Tolerance Today,” featured just one session open to the public, held on Monday morning. The speakers at the opening session were U.S. Ambassador Anne E. Derse; State Jewish Museum (Tolerance Center) head Markas Zingeris; diplomat-historian Alfonsas Eidintas; and two senior Jewish-American dignitaries, AJC director of international relations Andrew Baker, and Washington Holocaust Museum outreach director Stephen Feinberg. The controversial right-wing Jewish MP Emanuelis Zingeris, himself a signatory of the Prague Declaration, made a characteristically dramatic entry halfway through and spoke briefly. Finally, a vice-director of the museum invited the assembled to coffee and politely reminded everyone that the following sessions were closed to all but invited participants.

None of the speakers made any acknowledgment to the silently seated leaders of the Jewish community, who were not asked by the organizers to say a word of greeting. And not one of the speeches managed to mention the essential facts of the sobering history: The Baltics had the highest percentage of Jewish deaths in Holocaust-era Europe—around 95 percent—because of the massive local collaboration, which in this part of the world entailed serving in many cases as the actual murderers. Nor did they mention that during 2010, a Lithuanian court legalized public swastikas. That the permit for a neo-Nazi parade was taken out by a member of parliament. That the foreign minister claimed a foreign Jewish plot is behind new dual-citizenship proposals. That zero progress is made on enabling the safe return of 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Rachel Margolis, one of the Jewish partisan veterans under special prosecutors’ sham investigation. It was as if a grand new field of “Lithuanian Holocaust Studies” could gain international acceptance while shirking each and every one of the painful issues with impunity.

Conspicuously absent at the conference were the foreign ambassadors in town, from Britain, Estonia, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. NATO envoys for these seven countries here last week sent a formal letter (organized by the British embassy, rumor has it) to Lithuanian authorities protesting the recent Holocaust denial in the press by an Interior Ministry specialist (who has since resigned). The letter also made bold reference to the broader issue: “Spurious attempts are made to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania, which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent in either their intention or result.” The Polish ambassador added his own eloquent letter.

And from the United States? Utter, painful silence.

***

In the diplomatic community here, the codeword for this saga is “The $64,000 Question” (even though the operative currency is the euro). Back in April, Hannah Rosenthal, the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, announced during a trip to Lithuania that “the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius has received a 63,572 Euro grant for International Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research to develop a Holocaust education program with the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and other partners.” As the sum is identical to one applied for by the U.S. embassy from the International Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, it is assumed that the ITF is the source of the funding.

An October query from DefendingHistory.com to the American embassy elicited an Orwellian response from a senior embassy official: “Disbursement information about USG public diplomacy grants is not public” [italics mine]. Then, on November 21, the Tel Aviv-based Association of Lithuanian Jews, the world’s most active association of Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, released to the media its letter to the U.S. ambassador, which included the warning that “it would be a huge and painful blow to Holocaust Survivors, and to the memory of the victims, if even one single euro were granted to those engaged in pursuing and promoting this antisemitic revisionism under the guise of local Holocaust education.” The letter went on to ask the embassy to release “all details of disbursement of this grant without further delay to clear the air.”

On the day of the conference opening, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, which focuses on bringing war criminals to justice, preventing their posthumous rehabilitation, and on defending the historical narrative of the Holocaust, wrote in the Guardian: “For Washington to ignore a blatant distortion of the historical events of the Second World War only emboldens those invested in outright denial of the Holocaust.” While the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius, the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, or the American Jewish Committee could have been expected to stand firm against the historical record being revised by the right-wing leadership of the Baltic states, and with the Holocaust Survivor community to which it has been loyal in the past, it is hard to ignore the frightening possibility that they have all, on this particular occasion, been duped. By whom? A highly polished state-sponsored effort to win Western and foreign Jewish acquiescence to the obfuscation of the Holocaust and the legitimization of that obfuscation, in history and education alike. All that’s needed is for a handful of foreign dignitaries and the American Embassy to be bamboozled once, and that alleged conceptual support will be cited until the end of days.

***

It is not too late to turn this frightful fiasco into an inspirational success. On the last day of the conference, and with future events planned under the same grant, some bold welcome correctives can be enacted. Here are six for starters:

1. Invite a group of Holocaust Survivors―including Rachel Margolis―to sit in the front row, and invite them to meet at length with the educators being trained.

2. Tackle today’s hard issues up front—including the Prague Declaration, the ongoing Lithuanian investigations against Holocaust Survivor resistance heroes, and the recent law in effect criminalizing the Western narrative of the Holocaust by threatening two years in prison for those who would deny the notion of two equal genocides—instead of sweeping them under the rug.

3. Exclude the state organizations that campaign for the “Genocide and Resistance Research Center of  Lithuania” and the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (the so called red-brown commission, from which Yitzhak Arad and Sir Martin Gilbert resigned on principle, leaving it with no credibility in serious Holocaust studies circles).

4. Give the Jewish community of today’s Lithuania a primary role in Holocaust education. Have these educators meet real living Jews of various generations. Enable, most urgently, the fine young educators attending the conference to get to know prewar Lithuanian Jews at the last moment in history when this is possible, thereby fostering the inter-community harmony and understanding that comes from genuine dialogue.

5. Use grant funds to bring to Lithuania ample copies of essential books in English on the Lithuanian Holocaust. Virtually all the history teachers in question read English, and there is no reason why they should not have access to the same materials that their counterparts in the West use to study this subject. Among these for Lithuania would be Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Karen Sutton’s The Massacre of the Jews of Lithuania, Efraim Zuroff’s Operation Last Chance, and published primary sources such as Kazimierz Sakowicz’s Ponary Diary.

6. Make certain the sessions are never again closed to the public.

Dovid Katz is chief analyst at the Litvak Studies Institute and a research associate at University College London. He is the author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and the website DefendingHistory.com.

“David is, I think, the most important man in America right now,” Beck said in July, introducing one of Barton’s many appearances on his show. In addition to being a frequent TV guest of Beck’s, Barton is also one of three professors at Beck’s online school, Beck University. He was a member of the expert panel that created Texas’ controversial new history standards, which played down Thomas Jefferson and played up John Calvin. In September, he spoke at a rally for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, where he was billed as a “constitutional scholar.” Later this month, he and Newt Gingrich will headline a meeting for Nevada pastors at a Las Vegas resort, meant to mobilize them ahead of the upcoming elections.

“Barton’s role in the Tea Party movement is much like it’s been in the Republican Party for the last decade,” says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group that has watched Barton for years. “He is acting as an intellectual resource for them. He gives them the words in their increasingly extremist vocabulary. On the right he has become this great icon of American historical scholarship, when he’s anything but.”

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage.

This is in many ways an old story. People who write about the religious right—myself included—have often marveled at the intricacy and resilience of the movement’s carefully wrought alternative history. The Anti-Defamation League was criticizing Barton as far back as 1994, writing in one report: “This ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo.”

Yet Barton just keeps getting more powerful and more mainstream. His public career began in the late 1980s when, he has written, God ordered him to the library to investigate the ostensible correlation between the end of state-mandated school prayer and declines in SAT scores. “I didn’t know why,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1988 America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?, “but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important.”

The next year he published The Myth of Separation, a farrago of quotes torn from context and outright misinformation. It claimed, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson described the wall of separation between church and state as “one directional,” keeping the state out of the church while maintaining “Christian principles in government.” It also falsely attributed a quote to James Madison, that the government’s future was “staked upon the Ten Commandments.” He later issued an extended correction for these and other mistakes, though that hasn’t stopped them from being repeated endlessly online.

Barton found an eager audience for his Christian nationalist history on the right-wing fringe. In 1991, as the ADL has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a group founded by Pete Peters, a pastor in the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Black people, according to Christian Identity theology, are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. Barton was advertised as “a new and special speaker” who would ask, “Was it the plan of our forefathers that America be the melting pot home of various religions and philosophies?” (One can assume that the answer was no.) On November 24 of that year, Barton spoke at another Christianity Identity gathering, this one in Oregon. According to the ADL, his self-published books were advertised in “The Watchman,” a Christian Identity publication.

Soon, though, Barton’s star started rising on the mainstream right, and he denounced Christian Identity, claiming that he hadn’t known he was addressing racist groups when he appeared at the movement’s meetings. That sounds implausible—it’s hard to imagine how one might speak at two white supremacist summits in five months by accident. Still, the association didn’t seem to hurt him. By the middle of the 1990s, every major religious right organization marketed Barton’s self-published books. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, praised Barton’s “wonderful” and “most useful” work, and, in 1997, Barton was elected vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The Bush campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004.

In recent years, Barton has pioneered a new kind of historical revisionism, one that absolves conservative Republicans of any complicity in American racism, which he lays entirely at the feet of Democrats. He points out, correctly, that before 1964, many of the country’s most virulently racist politicians were Democrats. He neglects to mention that they fled to the GOP en masse after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, in one astonishing document, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democrats to his “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation. In an equally audacious reinterpretation of history, he paints the founding era as a golden age of racial comity, denying that racism was ever an essential part of America’s DNA.

Such rhetorical maneuvers have been particularly useful to Beck, obsessed as he is with secret histories and a prelapsarian version of the American past. Over the summer, Beck hosted a series of shows he called “Founders’ Fridays,” revisionist forays into American history guided by Barton. Under the guise of teaching black history, Founders’ Fridays argued against the idea that black people had been oppressed by the Revolutionary generation. On July 5, for example, Barton presented a newspaper from the late 18th century that featured the obituary of a black man who had fought in the Revolution. The obituaries, Barton pointed out, were “not broken out black and white. … It’s telling you who’s died, didn’t matter whether were you black or white or anything, you’re a citizen.”

Denying the racial sins of the Founding Fathers makes it easier to deify them—and, in turn, to promote faith in America’s Christian destiny. “In learning about the founders and seeing the heroes that were involved, it only strengthens my view that this was a divine document, the Declaration of Independence,” said Beck at the end of one show. “For the most part, these guys were amazing. And they struggled in their time to do the right thing. You say that they’re not Christians. They were Christians. And they fought for people who weren’t. The same thing with [saying] they were all white. Well, they fought for people who weren’t.”

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes. He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

• Community board approval of the Ground Zero Islamic center in May was followed (caveat: Correlation does not prove causation!) by a significant uptick in local U.S. governments’ alleged discrimination against Muslims trying to build mosques. [Ben Smith]

• Holocaust denier David Irving was denied permission to conduct a tour on the Auschwitz grounds. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Remnants of a 1500-year-old Samaritan synagogue were uncovered in the Jordan Valley. [JTA]

• The New Israel Fund has modified donation guidelines so as to try to avoid supporting groups not seen as sufficiently Zionist. [JTA]

• Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, unleashed on midtown Manhattan. Look out, ladies! [Page Six]

Mayor Bloomberg announced the winner of the Sukkah City competition. Jewcy was there.

Three hundred of us had been flown in for the founding conference of a new Moscow-based watchdog organization, World Without Nazism. For the event’s kick-off, conference participants gathered in a sun-dappled Vichnoyi Slavy Park, home to the city’s Monument of Eternal Glory at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier. We were each handed a red carnation, arranged in parade formation, and led 100 yards toward a massive obelisk memorial. My moment of supreme disorientation occurred just a few steps into the procession, when from behind the bushes came a jolting martial thunder: Previously unseen Brezhnev-era trucks topped with what looked like air-raid sirens had begun blasting the opening chords of “People, Awake!” a 1941 hit from the back catalog of the Red Army Choir. After we reached the obelisk, the very loud Soviet anthem gave way to another, and then another.

“We’ll come back with victory!” promised the all-male choir. “The Red Army is the strongest!”

Under this siege of Soviet orchestral swells, I struggled to remember my purpose in Kiev. Was I here for a conference on combating anti-Semitism? Or had I been cast in a shitty remake of Battle at Kursk?

A similar schizophrenia defined the rest of the inaugural conference of World Without Nazism (WWN), a new initiative from the World Congress of Russian Jewry and its president, the Kremlin-connected mini-oligarch Boris Shpigel. On the opening morning of proceedings, the event distinguished itself by becoming what might be the only conference to receive official letters of support from both Hillary Clinton and the autonomous government of South Ossetia. At the podium, speakers spoke of trivialization and denial, though it was not always clear whether they were referring to the Holocaust, or the decisive sacrifice of millions of Red Army soldiers. At the Hotel Prezidente, where the conference was taking place, whores prowled the muzak-cursed lobby as aggressively as they would have 15 years ago.

The most potent symbol of this schizophrenia is also its primary source. While the new organization aspires to global influence and credibility—a kind of Moscow-based Anti-Defamation League that would partner with the European Union and the United Nations—its founding president and public face is a man whose fortunes depend in part on framing Jewish interests to fit the view from the Kremlin.

Boris Shpigel is a bald, round man who looks older than his 57 years and is given to slumping in his seat. He emerged early in the Boris Yeltsin era. Like others who prospered during the 1990s, he anticipated the coming curve and founded the pharmaceuticals firm Biotek shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By the time Vladimir Putin assumed power, Shpigel had grown his firm from a small research outfit south of Moscow to a major producer dominant in more than 70 markets across the Eurasian expanse. In 2002, he helped found and lead the Party of Russia’s Rebirth, a centrist social-democratic party that enjoyed the blessing of Mikhail Gorbachev (and, thought some, the Kremlin, which had been known to fund center-left parties designed to siphon off support from the Communists). By the time Shpigel was elected president of the World Congress of Russian Jewry in 2007, he was a major player at the nexus of business, diplomacy, and culture among Russia, Israel, and the Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora. Today, as a Duma member, Shpigel sits on committees that handle everything from public institutions to the funding of science, culture, education, and health care.

Concerns over coziness with the Kremlin have dogged WWN’s parent organization, the World Congress of Russian Jewry. When it was founded in 2002 as an outgrowth of the Lubavitch-led Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, some worried the WCRJ was too intertwined with the Russian government to be an effective advocate. Since assuming the WCRJ presidency, Shpigel has only helped validate these concerns. During Russia’s conflict with Georgia over South Ossetia in the summer 2008, Shpigel issued an overheated statement on WCRJ letterhead calling for a tribunal to investigate what he termed acts of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” committed by the Georgian military. Though the casual use of such language is anathema to responsible Jewish leadership, Shpigel did not hesitate to echo the Kremlin’s bombast. It was left to Shpigel’s deputy at the Congress, Israeli Knesset Member Ze’ev Elkin, to dial back the statement. The role of the WCRJ, an exasperated Elkin told Haaretz, is to worry about the well-being of Jews worldwide, not get involved in “geo-political conflicts.”

Yet viewed from Moscow, the growth of far-right activity in the former Eastern bloc is hard to disentangle from geo-politics. This is especially true when this activity bubbles up behind NATO lines, embodied by groups espousing anti-Russian and anti-Semitic rhetoric. WWN’s early fire has been directed toward the Baltics, where attacks on Soviet war monuments are increasingly accompanied by efforts to celebrate the Nazis (as well as their local collaborators) and edit the history of the Holocaust. In July, WWN’s first official statement targeted a decision by Riga’s Administrative Court to sanction a public demonstration honoring the Nazi occupation government. WWN was quick and correct to publicize and condemn the decision. But its letter contained a whiff of Kremlin anti-Western boilerplate, blaming EU leniency for the rise of far-right nationalism in the region.

That the European Union has indeed failed to rigorously enforce laws on extremism and denial does not change the fact that the WWN’s condemnations, if they are to be taken seriously, must be matched by efforts to shame authorities in Russia itself, which is home to a growing culture of far-right street violence targeting Jews, activists, and, especially, migrant workers from Central Asia. Notably, WWN was silent in late August when 100 skinheads attacked a concert in the central Russian city of Miass, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of a 14-year-old girl. (The organization did, however, find time in August to issue a statement in opposition to Manhattan’s Park51 development, aka the “Ground Zero Mosque.”)

One speaker in Kiev publicly addressed these issues and urged the new organization to recognize the historical crimes of communism, even as it challenges official efforts in Eastern Europe to equate and conflate those crimes with those of the Nazis. That speaker was Dovid Katz, a former professor at the University of Vilnius (and Tablet contributor) and the curator of HolocaustInTheBaltics.com. “While we reject the theories of ‘equivalence’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes,” said Katz, “we must be careful never to join those who would deny or mitigate or trivialize the enormous crimes committed by Stalinism and Soviet domination of many lands and peoples against their will.”

“It is also very important that our movement has a democratic Western atmosphere,” he continued. “It must never be seen to be in any way subservient to today’s Russian area politics. We should be meeting in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, not just Kiev, Moscow, and Minsk.”

Regardless of where it holds future meetings, and however compromised by Kremlin ties it may be, WWN hardly lacks for urgent work. As the multinational cast of speakers in Kiev made clear, there is a rising “brown tide” in Eastern Europe and throughout the continent. Well-organized neo-fascist political movements are on the march in Hungary and Italy. In the Baltics, monuments to the Holocaust are being removed and the Nazi occupations publicly glorified. Far-right thugs and activists prowl the streets, march on capitals, speak in universities, and organize online, often in flagrant violation of the law.

If World Without Nazism is to join the fight against these developments, it must overcome suspicions that it is little more than just a PR operation for the Russian foreign ministry. Here’s hoping that it does.

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

You can read Yad Vashem’s condemnation here. You can view some of the images here.

Weird stuff is going on with Iran right now. Earlier this week, someone reportedly attempted to kill Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though the president himself claims that the explosion near him was in fact a firecracker.

And on Tuesday, a group of ex-intelligence professionals calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote President Obama warning him of Israel’s allegedly imminent plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Israel might mousetrap the U.S. into war with Iran,” the letter, which also cited “the Likud lobby,” asserts.

Iranian Website Mocks Holocaust ‘Lie’ [JPost]
‘Obama Misplaced Trust in Netanyahu’ [JPost]

She has stiff competition, to be sure, but Margolis’s recent experiences are almost too surreal and painful to be believed. After the war—during which her parents and brother were murdered—Margolis decided to rebuild her life in her native city of Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania. For more than 40 years, she taught biology at Vilnius University. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Lithuanian democracy permitted it, she helped found the city’s only Holocaust museum and became one of its stalwart presences, returning to Lithuania to lecture each summer even after relocating to Israel in the mid-1990s.

Now, at 88, Margolis is being defamed as a war criminal. Her crime? Surviving the Vilna ghetto to join the anti-Nazi resistance in the forests of Lithuania.

Margolis is one of a group of elderly survivors who have become pawns in a sinister game of Holocaust obfuscation by local authorities in the Baltic states—which, though they are among the smallest nations in Europe, had the highest rates of Holocaust genocide in Europe. A more complex phenomenon than Holocaust denial, obfuscation does not deny a single Jewish death at the hands of the Nazis. Instead, it uses as a starting point the idea that the Nazi genocide was not a unique event but rather a reaction to Soviet “genocide” (and antecedent to further Soviet genocide) in which the same elements of Lithuanian society that often sided with the Nazi invaders were persecuted and imprisoned by the Communist regime, whose officials included Jews.

The “double genocide” movement has gained the support of government and political parties in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, which have invested substantial treasure to persuade the entire European Union to accept the equality of the Nazi Holocaust and Soviet crimes. Their biggest success has been the Prague Declaration, issued from a conference on “European Conscience and Communism” in June 2008, which demands that Europe “recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy”; that Communism be assessed “the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal”; that a single “day of remembrance of the victims of both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes” be declared, thus effectively eliminating Holocaust Remembrance Day; and that European history textbooks be “overhauled” so that “children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes.”

Signs of the movement’s success are visible throughout Lithuania. The Museum of Genocide Victims on Vilnius’s central boulevard mentions the word Holocaust only sparingly and glosses over events at a place called Ponar in Yiddish (now known as Paneriai), where 100,000 unarmed civilians, some 70,000 of them Jews, were murdered, mostly by local Lithuanian militia. Instead, Lithuania’s Holocaust museum is devoted entirely to Soviet crimes. At a recent exhibition on the Ukrainian famine, a huge poster featured a woman telling visitors: “In Auschwitz we were given some spinach and a little bread. War is terrible, but famine is even worse.”

Two years ago, on Lithuania’s independence day, neo-Nazis marched down the capital’s central boulevard chanting “Juden raus,” or “Jews out,” and brandishing a specially modified Lithuanian swastika. (It has since become illegal in Lithuania to display Nazi or Soviet symbols.) Only after heavy pressure from local embassies—including those of the United States and other Western powers—did the country’s leaders condemn the march, a week after it occurred. This year, on March 11, “Juden raus” was replaced by the slogan “Lietuva Lietuviams,” or Lithuania for Lithuanians, and it is not a fringe movement. The permit for the march was issued to Kazimieras Uoka, a signatory on Lithuania’s March 11, 1990, declaration of independence and a member of parliament from the country’s ruling coalition, the right-wing Homeland Union Lithuanian Christian Democrat Political Group. Top officials said not a word until the Norwegian ambassador, Steinar Gil, protested on March 19, noting that 50 members of the country’s parliament had protested a gay-rights march but not one objected to the neo-Nazis. The country’s prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, replied on March 23, saying, “There are skinheads and neo-Nazis in every country, and they sometimes take a walk or chant something.”

Local authorities and government agencies have also instigated campaigns of slander and legal threats against elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors whose experiences fighting in the forests with Communist-backed partisans against the Nazis would appear to threaten the viability of the “double genocide” theory.

“The only good Jew for them,” said Berl Glazer, 85, believed to be the only elderly Orthodox Jew left in Lithuania, “is a dead Jew.”

***

It took Shmuel Shragge, an 84-year-old former truck driver, three sentences to sum up the perversion of history that it has taken me—a Brooklyn-born professor who settled in Lithuania to set up the Yiddish-studies program at Vilnius University—close to a decade to understand.

Shragge and his wife, Basye, 81, a retired medical doctor, are among the last of the prewar tribe of Litvaks, the Jews of Lithuania, whose seven centuries of history include some of the greatest achievements of European Jewish culture. On a recent visit to their modest, immaculate Soviet-era apartment in Kaunas, once known as Kovno and now Lithuania’s second-largest city, Shragge revealed what was for him one of the most horrific memories.

He stood up, walked across the room and picked off the top sheet of a stack of plain white paper. Before sitting back down, he abruptly tore the piece of paper in two and let the halves glide down to the floor. “That was one of the first atrocities I saw right at the beginning, before the Germans came, in the hours and days after war broke out here on June 22, 1941,” he said. I looked up at him, confused.

“The Soviet army was fleeing the German bombardment,” he explained. “But it would be some days before the Germans arrived. They took a young Jewish girl on the street and sawed her in half, like that piece of paper, and left the two halves to rot in the middle of the street, near the center of the city.”

Who was “they,” I asked? “They are the local Lithuanian ‘freedom fighters’ who were wearing the white arm bands of the Lithuanian Activist Front, who got the Holocaust going here by starting to murder Jewish civilians throughout the country before the Germans even arrived. Today they are honored as ‘heroes against the Soviets’ as if the Soviets were running from them.”

But maybe these first Holocaust murders were directed against Jews who had been sympathetic to, or collaborators with, the Soviet occupiers who had taken over Lithuania a year before? “Oh no, those guys ran away together with the Soviet army,” he answered. “The massacres of Jews started with old rabbis and young women as the main targets.”

Today, Shragge said, relations with his Lithuanian neighbors are excellent, though he added that there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the country. I asked him who the anti-Semites are. “The big shots,” he said. “The government, editors, professors, television people. Instead of wanting to understand what actually happened and to teach it truthfully to young people today, they are obsessed with mixing everything up and claiming that Nazism and Communism were equal. But you only have to scratch them to hear that all Jews were Communists and got what they deserved, and that Communism was the real genocide here.”

Since independence, the Lithuanian government has avoided returning prewar communal property, making it arguably the only country in the European Union to fail to enact restitution to the Jewish community. However, egged on by Emanuelis Zingeris, an ambitious Jewish member of parliament and a member of the dominant right-wing party, the state has also been toying with ideas to develop the Vilna ghetto as a Jewish-themed tourist park. Supporters of the project call it “Fragments.” Opponents, principally in the Jewish community, dub it the “Dead Jew Disneyland Park.” The state has also funded Jewish-themed statues, cultural events, and plaques designating historic buildings.

Lithuania’s contradictory “Jewish affairs policy”—which it shares with its Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, and with right-wing nationalist factions in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—originates in the desire to airbrush the Holocaust out of history. This wish is intimately intertwined with Eastern Europe’s special kind of anti-Semitism, which maintains a love for Israeli, American, and other Western Jews, as well as for the prewar Jewish heritage but loathes present-day Jewish communities. At the heart of that loathing is the sin of memory: Local Jews know that the few Jews who survived usually did so thanks to the Soviet Union, while local nationalists sided with Hitler and carried out much of the killing.

The presence of so few local Jews is, in part, what has made it so easy for the double genocide theory, and its corollary of Holocaust obfuscation, to take root. Ignored by both the Jewish and Western worlds—with the important exception of the Simon Wiesenthal Center—the double genocide movement has begun to spread to major international organizations. Last July, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe issued the Vilnius Declaration, which included a number of the most noxious elements from the Prague Declaration. The declaration takes the assumptions of the double genocide movement as a given by referring to “two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide.” Moreover, it calls explicitly for a combined “Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism,” which, observers point out, would inevitably replace Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Shamefully, the United States was among the nations that voted for ratification of this deliberate distortion of history, which is intended to whitewash the crimes of local right-wing elements in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust by eliminating the memory of the Holocaust itself. When I spoke to several visiting U.S. congressmen and senators during their visit to Vilnius for the conference, it was obvious that they did not have the vaguest idea about the implications of U.S. approval of the declaration. Among them were Senators George Voinovich and Benjamin Cardin, who had spoken out forcefully in support of the Jewish position on restitution of communal property and against anti-Semitism. But the bigger issue, the revision of European history to delete the Holocaust, went unnoticed.

***

Holocaust obfuscation is the perverted product of the attempt to encourage the states of the Baltics and Eastern Europe to confront the history of World War II—including local collaboration with the Nazis. In the late 1990s, as part of their European accession bids, Eastern European states found themselves pressured by NATO and the European Union to commemorate the Holocaust. In response, the three Baltic states each set up “red-brown commissions,” panels charged with studying both Soviet and Nazi crimes. The Lithuanian commission, with the Orwellian name the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania,” has the most notorious history of all. Housed in the prime minister’s office, the commission succeeded in attracting Israeli Holocaust scholar Yitzhak Arad, who is the founding director of Yad Vashem, a Holocaust survivor, and a hero of the anti-Nazi partisan resistance.

In joining the group, Arad was given assurances of academic independence. But in April 2006, the Lithuanian daily Respublika called Arad a war criminal for having fought with the anti-Nazi Soviets. Within months, the state’s prosecutors began an investigation into Arad. After an international outcry, part of the investigation was dropped in the fall of 2008. Prosecutors issued a statement calling on “the public” to provide more evidence, citing an anonymous “expert historian” who attacked a book Arad had published in 1979. Observers were puzzled. Arad quit the commission and is now listed on its website as having his “membership suspended.” In protest against the entire enterprise, another member of the commission, British historian Martin Gilbert, resigned.

But this turmoil at the commission was only the beginning. On May 5, 2008, following demands made earlier that year in the daily Lietuvos Aidas, state prosecutors sent armed police to look for two Jewish female Holocaust survivors, both veterans of the anti-Nazi partisan resistance. One, 87-year-old Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, is a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.

The other was Rachel Margolis. As a researcher at the local Holocaust museum, Margolis had made a sensational rediscovery of the diary of a Christian Pole named Kazimierz Sakowicz, who witnessed thousands of murders at Ponar. Sakowicz reported that the volunteer killers were mostly locals. For this discovery and the subsequent publication of the diary in 1999 (Yale University Press brought out an English edition in 2005), Margolis had become a target of hatred for those who adhere to the ideology of a “double genocide.”

Both women had been incarcerated in the Vilna ghetto, and both lost their parents and siblings in the Holocaust. Both escaped the ghetto on different dates in September 1943, and both joined Soviet-sponsored anti-Nazi partisans in the forest. It was this last fact that enabled prosecutors to allege in “pre-trial investigations” that the two women should be considered war criminals for having fought with the Soviets.

Like Arad, Brantsovsky and Margolis were investigated for war crimes without any charges or specific allegations, just innuendo based on published Holocaust memoirs. “At least the anti-Semites finally began to read our memoirs,” Margolis told me.

The defamation campaign against Lithuanian Holocaust survivors reached a peak at the end of May 2008, when prosecutors told the media that the two women could not be located. This gave rise to Internet posts claiming “the Jews hide their own criminals.” But Fania Brantsovsky works at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, a minute’s walk from the presidential palace, and Rachel Margolis is easily reachable in Rechovot. Both were found in minutes during the course of reporting this piece.

When confronted, chief prosecutor Rimvydas Valentukevicius, from the Division of Special Investigations at the Prosecutor General’s Office of Lithuania, told Swedish journalist Arne Bengtsson: “We are investigating criminal activities, which could be crimes against humanity. The information has to be checked. It is a normal procedure. I see nothing political in that. Why is there so much interest in them? Is it only because they are Jewish?” In reply to this oft-repeated prosecutorial rejoinder to press inquiries, Shimon Alperovich, 81, chairman of the Jewish community of Lithuania, wrote in a widely circulated public letter: “The prosecutors in Lithuania do not cease to persecute anti-Nazi Jewish partisans. The Prosecution Service’s claims that ‘hundreds of witnesses are being questioned’ are belied by the fact that only Jewish names are ever heard in the media: Yitzhak Arad, Fania Brantsovsky, Rachel Margolis, and others.”

Thankfully, there has been one fortunate wrinkle to this story. For those who believe in double genocide, it is important to have a paper trail of investigations into “Soviet Jewish partisans” to “equal” investigations into Nazi war criminals—and, in Lithuania, this effort has recently gone spectacularly wrong. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western embassies in Eastern Europe began to honor persons hounded by state prosecutors. The Irish ambassador, Donal Denham, boldly hosted a reception at his residence within weeks of police questioning Brantsovsky. Then-U.S. Ambassador John Cloud issued Brantsovsky a certificate of honor. The British and Norwegian ambassadors recruited Brantsovsky to lead walks through the former Vilna ghetto for the Lithuanian capital’s diplomatic corps. The president of Germany awarded Brantsovsky the Federal Cross of Merit last October. Within minutes of the award’s presentation, Lithuania’s main Internet news portal published a vicious attack calling Brantsovsky a mass murderer.

The state’s prosecution service will neither charge nor clear Rachel Margolis for her “crime” of surviving the Vilna ghetto, putting her in a legal limbo, which in effect makes it impossible for her to visit the country where she was born and where her parents are buried. “Tell your readers,” she told me, “that the anti-Semites will never succeed to turn history upside down, because the free world knows the truth. They know who the Nazis were and they know who the victims were. It’s really very simple.” She adds one more thing, from her home in Israel: “Tell them that I want to return once more to see my hometown, Vilna.”

Dovid Katz is the research director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and a cofounder of the Litvak Studies Institute. He is the author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and the website HolocaustInTheBaltics.com.

• Mel Brooks will get his very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame later this month. [On the Red Carpet]

• Philip Barak, a 75-year-old race-car driver, said he didn’t start winning until he painted his car blue and white. [Jewish Chronicle]

• Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have proven that the “pleasantness” of odors is determined by molecular structure, which doesn’t help explain why some people salivate over a whiff of gefilte fish, while others run from the room. [WI]

• National Geographic recommends the Jewish Mob walking tour at NYC’s new Museum of the American Gangster. We suggest you check out Tablet’s history of the Israeli mafia. [NG]

Reached for comment, Irving confirmed that the talk was planned for the Kolping Society. “We have a valid contract, and we’re going to go ahead with that,” he said. “We’ll be there at 7 p.m.” When a similar situation occurred in Toronto, he said, “I turned up, and my entire audience turned up, and that was the end of that. I’m sure that the Kolping Society will see reason.” He said that the Society’s claim of canceling the event was a “smokescreen” and that he will still speak there—as, he added, he’d previously done, in 2004. A Society spokeswoman denied both those claims. “He has no contract at all,” she said. “There’s absolutely no contract. He cannot come in the building.”

UPDATE: New Jersey Residents Against David Irving, a counterpart to the New York anti-Irving group, has announced that an American Legion post in the town of Wayne has canceled a lecture Irving had been scheduled to give there tonight.

Earlier: David Irving to Speak in New York, Secretly

Elan Steinberg, vice-president of a national organization called the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, told Tablet Magazine that Irving is scheduling his engagements this way for another reason. It’s “a way of disguising who he is to hotel managers and others who rent out public venues,” Steinberg said. “Time and time again, hotel managers, bookshops, etc, have allowed him to speak there not realizing who he is.” The American Gathering is therefore alerting the press that Irving will be in town, in the hope that venue managers will inquire into the identity of any mysterious guests who might be renting space on Saturday, Steinberg said. That strategy worked in Jackson, Mississippi, he said, when his group notified the city’s mayor that Irving planned to speak at City Hall, prompting Irving to move his talk to a different location.

In the case of his upcoming New York engagement, a spy-versus-spy situation has emerged: a group called New Yorkers Against David Irving is attempting to infiltrate the lecture; Irving, in turn, said that two of his followers were present at the protest organization’s planning meeting last night. Steinberg said that the American Gathering is not attempting to get on Irving’s email list, but that if he gets a tip on Irving’s whereabouts ahead of time, he’ll send his own email inviting members to go protest.

A talk Irving gave in Palm Beach, Fla., late last month, ended in violence, not between followers and protesters, but between two followers, one of whom police identified as a white supremacist, according to the Jackson Free Press. They got into a knife fight outside the meeting room.

Knife Fight at Holocaust Denier Book-Signing [Jackson Free Press]

Broder—whose 2006 book, Hurra, Wir Kapitulieren (Hurray! We’re Capitulating!), posited that the world is handing itself over to dangerous Islamist powers—even says he would focus on relations with those Muslim communities in Germany that “step in for strict separation of religion and state and a secular society.”

While Haaretz feels certain Broder has little chance of winning the presidency, he does have one slight demographic edge: at 63, he is closer to the increasing German Jewish population of Soviet immigrants and their children and than to “the Holocaust generation” that has held power in the community. And, at the very least, says the paper, his announcement has made a splash: “The council is outraged, the lay Jewish community amused and a new debate about German-Jewish relations has been sparked—just how Broder likes it.”

The German Shepherd: Is Germany Ready for a Provocative Jewish Leader? [Haaretz]

Given Oren’s state employment, his essay might be written off as the work of a stooge—were it not for the fact that his civilian scholarship and analysis has appeared in TNR for years and been taken quite seriously. Bibi may be ideological, but he’s not stupid, and Oren’s appointment looks now to be almost enough to make up for the disaster of Avigdor Lieberman’s.

Deep Denial [TNR]

On Facebook, a Spy Revealed (Pale Legs, Too) [NYT]
MI6 Chief Blows His Cover [Mail]

One point to which Mark Weber, one of the leading proponents of Holocaust revisionism in the country, often returned is that it’s impossible to know why people believe what they do. Weber seemed almost amused by his own choice of obsessions, as if he knew that his own path has been more random than not. I happen to agree. Maybe, I surmised, if he’d read Tolkien at a young age, he would have been a fantasy fan; maybe if he’d been born 10 years earlier, he would have got involved in the Goldwater campaign and ended up a mainstream conservative. Who knows?

It would be folly to suppose that any single person from one’s past has written the script for everything to come. But it would also be naive to think that being close to a Jew isn’t important in the life of someone who spends decades talking about the lies of Jews. Smith practically went straight from the arms of a Jewish lover to the arms of those who deny the existence of Nazi gas chambers. Weber didn’t gain a Jewish relative until years after he found the Holocaust-denial movement, but this relative has become a dirty rumor, one tossed around by his enemies, a scurrilous allegation that nobody has proved until now.

The Jewish woman Bradley Smith lived with for eight years during the 1970s is Susan Brown, a practicing psychologist in Los Angeles who works principally with autistic children. She has been happily married for 20 years to another man, and she has two grown children, three grown stepchildren, and seven granddaughters. After I had learned her name—from an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Smith’s—and found her phone number, I called her up. She had fond memories of the old Bradley, the one who didn’t think one way or another about gas chambers.

“We met through mutual friends,” Brown told me. “Bradley had been involved in this trial through his bookstore, so he got to know a lot of people through the Los Angeles Free Press, which I was involved with it—I had contributed some money. So that’s how I met him. We were all politically involved with that.”

I asked Brown if she was surprised when she heard about Smith’s new career, which didn’t begin until after their relationship had ended.

“Totally mystified” is how Brown described her reaction, “but I have some theories.

“Whatever else Bradley is, he is in addition a very bright guy, very well read, and he worked assiduously for many years in politics, with the bookstore on Fairfax [Avenue]. He was circulating with all the people I still circulate with. In the years I knew him there wasn’t ever any smidgen of a thought [about Holocaust denial]; I was getting my Ph.D. then, and there was a lot of talking, [but] not one iota of glimmer of this budding thought, nothing at all there.”

Smith was, Brown told me, reluctant to adopt party lines; he was never a West Coast liberal like so many of the Hollywood people—most of them Jews— he ran with. “He was not, not a mindless liberal in that way,” Brown said. “He was very thoughtful about things he would say. He was not ‘one of them’ in the [world of] sixties politics.” Like many libertarians, whether inclined to the left or the right, Smith had a maverick streak, so perhaps the seeds of his ultimate career were always present, if apparently benign.

“But I think the thing that pushed him over,” Brown said, “was that he never could get published.” For an aspiring writer in a city with so many successful writers and artists, this was a failure that could rub a man raw. “It wasn’t like he never got close. He had corresponded with literary journals—The New Yorker, The Atlantic. He wasn’t a total dud. He was sending things back and forth, and he couldn‘t crack it. The people we knew were all interested in the same things, and he couldn’t make it like they could, and it was killing him.

”I think he found a niche to do a 180; he had the skills that were needed for that niche. It can from some happenstance meeting”—Smith met a Holocaust denier at a libertarian convention—“and it was out of great despair that he found a place. And I think it just took over his life. He saw that he could go with it, and he did, and it just took over.”

Despite the odd turn that Smith’s life took, Brown remembered their time together as pleasant, and their parting as amicable. “We lived together all the time I was doing my dissertation,” she said. “He was a wonderful friend to me, he was lovely to my two young children.” He even had an aliyah at her son’s bar mitzvah, reading the prayer for a Torah reading. “I tell you, he was—long after our personal sexual relationship was the core of what kept us together, he was a wonderful friend to me, in terms of my kids, and he understood what was import to me and them.”

I mentioned to Brown that Smith was now married to a Mexican woman.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “It would be too intrusive psychologically to live with someone who asked too many questions of him. He’d have to be with someone as bright as he is, or be with someone with a caretaking relationship, and there would be that comfort. It wouldn’t be a woman who could provoke him. He has taken a position. He knows the other paths, and he doesn’t need to be placed in conflict or turmoil about those things.”

Having talked about her ex-lover’s new life of obsession with Jews, I was moved to asked Brown about her own relationship to Judaism.

“I am more of a practicing Jew now than then,” she told me. “I was in school then. I had my hands full with having young children. I was raised not in an Orthodox home, but I was educated in a yeshiva, and I had a very big background in Jewish studies. And he was always interested in that. ”

***

Although Smith had refused to give me his ex-lover’s name, forcing me to track her down without his help, he had told me about her existence; he was not ashamed to have lived with and loved a Jew. Weber, by contrast, had refused to discuss the truth or falsity of the rumors that he had a Jewish sister. Smith had chosen to love a Jew, a fact that could potentially be much more damaging among his professional colleagues, yet he had volunteered the information, while Weber, who couldn’t be expected to choose his sister’s religious path, seemed worried that I would find her.  And when I did find Terese Weber, Mark’s Jewish sister, thus confirming the rumor that had been spread for years by his enemies in other factions of the anti-Semitic right, she was perfectly happy to talk. “I always thought the day would come when somebody would come fishing for information,” she said, as soon as I told her why I was calling.

“I had an Orthodox conversion,” Terese told me, when I reached her by phone. She now lives in Houston and is a professional harpist, working under the business name Have Harp Will Travel. Her ex-husband, she went on to say, is an Israeli Jew whom she married in 1984 and who took her to Israel in 1987. “I had a Conservative conversion in 1984 at a quite conservative congregation in Tucson, and an Orthodox conversion in Portland before we went [to Israel], and then I had to go before a beit din in Tel Aviv.” Terese, who is now 53, also studied Hebrew at an ulpan in Israel, and she lived there until 1989, by which time her marriage was shaky. “We divorced in 1990, but we’re still on very good terms.” And, Terese added, she still considers herself a Jew.

Terese analyzed her brother with the same compassion, albeit more exasperation, that I had heard from Susan Brown as she’d talked about Bradley Smith. Brown, of course, has been free of Smith for over thirty years, free in a way that a sister is never really free of a brother. Especially when, as Terese sees it, Mark is simply seeking attention from their parents.

“I don’t believe he believes it,” Terese said. “I think he embraced it as a subject because it’s the worst thing he can think of to do. He’s just acting out. My theory is it’s just a gigantic acting-out.

“As far as whether he was into it from an early age: yes. He knew all about it”—Holocaust denial. “Even though he embraced the liberal cause of the Biafrans when he was 18, he has been onto this since he was about 20.”

Terese added that Mark “was raised Catholic,” and she explained that her parents’ Catholicism was open-minded and questioning, not at all reactionary: “It’s an inversion of my parents’ ideals,” she said of her brother. I had already spoken with five of Mark’s classmates from Portland’s Jesuit High School, Class of 1969; they had all described their schooling as rigorous but fairly progressive, especially for a boys’ Catholic school. But all five also agreed that Mark Weber had stood apart from the dominant school culture. He was a bit of a loner—smart, a strong member of the debate team, but not particularly social. None of them could remember if he had siblings; one was expressly certain that Weber had been an only child, and this at a school where many of the Catholic boys had numerous brothers and sisters. In truth, of course, he was one of four children: besides Terese, there are a brother and a sister who still live in Portland. It’s just that he never seemed to talk about them.

Terese suggested other reasons that her brother might be attracted to Holocaust denial: he is smart and curious, has always loved to debate, and has a natural affinity for the underdog, whether the Biafrans or, in an odd inversion of the idea of the underdog, the historical revisionists. But she kept returning to the idea that finally this was Mark’s Oedipal struggle, and she insisted that some for some people that is explanation enough. “Don’t you know anyone,” she asked me, “who chooses not to have a fulfilling life because it would give too much naches to their parents?”

Their parents were not, Terese added, the easiest people. “Neither of my parents had very much example of how to bring up a family,” she said, sounding more sorrowful than angry. And perhaps it was a difficult legacy for all the children. Terese is divorced, her brother Bruce is a drifter with no permanent address, and Mark’s first marriage resulted in a bitter divorce after three years; Mark almost never sees his 11-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. Still, Terese makes no excuses for her brother: “He had every advantage. Catholic grade school, Jesuit high school, the best money could buy. There was money to go to college. I’m sorry he turned out so colorful.”

***

Mark Weber does not concur with his sister’s diagnosis. “I’m rather close to my parents, both of them,” he said, “and to everyone in the family except my sister Terese. I felt secure as a child.” He would not discuss his differences with Terese except to say, “I love her, and I wish her well.”

This may sound strange, but I believe him. In most regards, Weber seems like a fairly normal person, and his feelings for his parents are, like most people’s feelings about their parents, probably mixed. His family psychodrama was not, in any case, unusual enough to explain his chosen profession.

Weber is best understood as a particular kind of history buff. Bradley Smith is basically a provocateur—as he admitted, he’s a Holocaust revisionist who doesn’t read much Holocaust scholarship—but Weber is a relentless accumulator of facts and theories about history. When we were fact-checking this article on the phone, one of his lengthiest corrections involved my description of his library. “It doesn’t just contain books about Jewish history,” he told me. “There’s Russian history, European history….” And in fact his interests have always been broader than Robert Faurisson’s or Arthur Butz’s; both men are single-issue voters, concerned largely with gas chambers. Meanwhile, Willis Carto’s magazine pursues fringe topics like “Indo-Aryan end-time beliefs” and whether the government has secretly spirited the gold away from Fort Knox. Weber keeps his head buried in books about European history and journals about Middle Eastern politics.

But as one professor of mine, who had worked as a public historian, once told me: “Beware the history buff.” The buff—as opposed to the scholar, or the curious peruser, or the dilettante—eats up all this knowledge but can’t properly digest it. He (most buffs seem to be male) cannot keep facts in perspective; he fails at precisely the task the scholar is good at, figuring out which facts matter most, which pieces of evidence to privilege, what to weigh more than what. So a particular truth—that there are a lot of Jewish executives in Hollywood, or that African Americans commit more crimes, per capita, than whites—assumes an outsized importance. With no ability to create proper contexts for facts, the buff is in danger of becoming either a conspiracy theorist or a bigot, or both. This is why there is so much crossover between the communities of, say, 9/11 skeptics and anti-Semites. Conspiracy theorists and bigots are people with faulty judgment casting about for answers; but whereas the conspiracy theorist needlessly increases the complexity of the world, the bigot needlessly simplifies. “The Jews have secret meetings where they plan the world economy,” says the conspiracy theorist; “the Jews are treacherous, bad people,” says the bigot.

However much crossover the two communities may have, and however much a given obsessive personality may veer from one pathology to the other, the conspiracy theorist and the bigot are always in danger of falling out. What looks like common ground—“We all agree that Jews are the problem”—is quickly discovered to be an irreparable schism. For Weber, Smith’s desire to keep looking at diagrams of locking mechanisms on gas-chamber doors starts to look pretty silly, and his explanation that there’s been a massive historical fraud, beginning at the Nuremberg trials, looks like a fairly weak conspiracy theory. For Weber, now, it’s not complicated, it’s simple: Jews are a different kind of people—“an ethnic community with a consciousness fortified by an unusual religion,” as Weber put it, and “[t]here’s no other group in the world like that.”

There were moments in my conversations with Mark Weber when I felt a keen despair, a sadness that actually began keeping me up at night. Partly, I was reacting to his cold and pessimistic analysis of “the Jewish problem”: Jews can be poisonous to the societies in which they live, but Zionism is “an aberration” and Israel is “a failure by its own standards.” So, I had asked him, “What’s the answer for the Jews?” And Weber replied, “It’s a huge problem. Nobody has an easy answer.”

As chilling as this was to hear, there was something clarifying, and tonic, about listening to the mind of Holocaust denier at work. As he spoke, it was patently obvious how his obsessive study, and the accumulation of facts—shorn of actual wisdom—led him to into the comfortable embrace of absurd conclusions.

Wisdom is an obvious cure, but it was by talking with Weber that I came to realize the importance of compassion, too. In college and graduate school, I studied history for many years, and never once did I think that it was important how I felt about my subjects; the proper goal was the ever-elusive objectivity. But talking with Weber made me realize something about objectivity: being objective about a particular set of facts cannot always save one from spending a lifetime railing against the Zionist menace (or the black menace, or the invasion of Latino immigrants). Some measure of interest in—compassion for, even love for—those people, those fellow human beings, is an incentive to look at the whole picture: why many Jews love Israel, why black crime rates are higher, why Latinos break the law to come to America.

Weber thus has two problems that prevent him from being a real historian. Not only can he not put facts in their proper context, he doesn’t really want to. He dislikes Jews, and even if his dislike weren’t further complicated by his deforming need for simple answers, it’s absurd for someone who dislikes Jews to be a historian of the Jews. It’s in the nature of humanity that only someone who likes another person or group of people—likes with skepticism, of course, but still likes—can have the sympathetic imagination to really understand that person or group. At the very least, a good scholar has to seek out the company of his subjects—something that would be easy for Weber, whose Orange County is hardly Judenrein. Weber has a deep admiration for Jews—us powerful, cohesive, brilliant Jews—but it’s an admiration that could never survive actually knowing us. “I’m not friends with many Jews,” Weber admitted to me. Hardly surprising, of course. But for his research he goes to AIPAC conventions, not Sabbath services, not classes at the local JCC. He doesn’t go to coffee shops in Jewish neighborhoods to eavesdrop. He does not, in short, do his research. Like sons of the Confederacy who seem to know everything about the glorious old South but don’t really understand anything, Weber has a lot of facts, and most of them are even right. But by the standards of the true historian, Weber is a lowly fraud.

Once, after hearing Weber lament that Jews would always be an insoluble problem, I said that if he were right, Jews would deserve his compassion. He did not quite see matters that way. “I don’t wish Jews badly,” he said, “but I am less concerned with the future of Jews than I am with humanity, the world.” That Jews are part of humanity, and that we live in his world, seemed an idle technicality at best.

One scholar of Holocaust denial told me, quoting a friend, that Holocaust deniers they “are like the shit you step on in the street—it has no relevance unless you fail to scrape it off before entering your home.” In part, I understand the sentiment: I often felt as if Weber, in particular, had come home with me, invaded my office, even my bedroom. But I don’t share the scatological disgust. Instead, I remember what the theologian Stanley Hauerwas once told me about premillennial dispensationalists, those fundamentalist Christians who extrapolate from the Bible extremely complicated, unbelievably detailed, scenarios about the end times, like those in the Left Behind novels. “They’re very smart,” Hauerwas said. “You can’t be stupid and come up with that. God gave them minds, and they need to use them.” In other words, forbidden by their religion from developing real intellectual curiosity, they turn their brainpower toward half-baked biblical exegesis that makes sense according to its own hermetic logic. Weber and Smith are trapped like that. Holocaust denial is, like more benign species of fundamentalism, a well-furnished playground for immature and sometimes deranged intellects. It isn’t necessarily about Jews, or even about the Holocaust; it’s about finding something to do with one’s mind. These people aren’t stupid or cynical: Smith does seem to have a noble libertarian streak, and Weber is smart and industrious. And if they could scale the walls that they’ve built for themselves, and look around at the world outside the playground, they might even do some good.

Sitting across from Mark Weber, formerly the leading light of American Holocaust revisionism, in his California office, I asked him the unavoidable question: did the gas chambers ever exist? “There may have been gas chambers,” he said. But he wanted to make a larger point about the war and historical memory: “It would be astonishing if a historical chapter as big as the Holocaust weren’t subject to some exaggeration. The same is true of Stalin—how many people did he kill? Estimates vary. Now the idea that the Holocaust is free of this kind of exaggeration is almost impossible.”

From there, Weber segued to the discussion he hopes to have more of, since he now is willing to concede—to use his words—“the immense catastrophe in which millions of European Jews died during World War II.” Today, Weber is much more interested in Jewish-Zionist power, which of course, he says, is what allows that Jewish suffering to be exaggerated.

“I don’t hate Jews,” he said. “I don’t wish ill to anyone because of his ancestry. But I talk about Jewish-Zionist power because it is a real thing and it has consequences, and those consequences are harmful.” For Weber, some of those consequences are how the United States exercises power in the Middle East: unconditional support for Israel, the invasion of Iraq, the death of young American soldiers in unnecessary foreign adventures—all brought about in large part by the unique power of American Jews, with their dual loyalties and preternatural skill for organization.

Of course, the very idea that Jews have too much influence presupposes that there’s an appropriate amount of influence any ethnic or religious group should have; so as much as Weber would like to keep his views on culture separate from his views on foreign affairs and politics, his reasoning ineluctably links the two. I was glad to find, then, that he is refreshingly candid in his views on culture. These views were formed partly during his travels in Europe, during time he took off from college. It was an interregnum during which, according to one person close to Weber, he lived in Germany and was arrested for displaying a swastika—an episode the details of which Weber disputes. (That “is wrong, and I will leave it there,” he told me. “Were you arrested for something else, then?” I asked. “I’m not going to get into that,” he said.)

“When I was in Europe,” Weber said, “I was very struck that there are all sorts of different groups: Flemish, Dutch, Bretons, French. I thought it’s a good thing all these groups exist and the world would be worse off if they disappeared.” I pointed out that even if that kind of homogeneity were desirable, the United States has never had it—we’ve always been a country of immigrants. Weber conceded the point, but said that up until the time of World War II we had a common narrative, that we were “this English people that brings other people in to assimilate.”

The loss of that unifying story is in good measure, Weber says, Jews’ fault. Weber believes that even Jews who embraced this mainstream, Christian America often undermined it. “The Jewish role in American culture has served immensely to de-Christianize Christmas, that’s just one example,” he said. “And one of the most popular Christmas songs is ‘White Christmas,’ by Irving Berlin. Jewish songs about Christmas strip it almost of any religious character.” Another time, on the phone, Weber put his concern even more starkly: “Jewish leaders in America push for, work for, an America—it’s a gross generalization, I know—an America with no racial or cultural identity. Not just in this country, but around the world, including in Europe. That’s almost a truism.”

Jews succeed in this deracinating project because of their extraordinary constitution as a people. “It’s an ethnic community with a consciousness fortified by an unusual religion,” Weber told me. “There’s no other group in the world like that…. It’s a collective community narrative, or community sense,” one that holds even for Jews who are secular, ignorant of Torah, married to non-Jews, and never in synagogue. “Every Jew is aware that Jews are a chosen people. They may not understand what that means. But to pretend—I don’t want to say I know lots of Jews or I have lots of Jewish friends—but there’s a Jewish consciousness that says they’re a special people.”

Mark Weber had just described the plaintive, hopeful dream of every rabbi in America. While Jewish rabbis, scholars, and grandmothers across the land fret that Jews have no sense of common purpose, no Jewish learning, and no loyalty to the tribe, Weber was here to announce that Jews were purposive, unified, loyal, and engaged.

Weber’s voice was thick with admiration for Jews—and it was full of derision, or at least pity, for his old friend, gas-chamber skeptic Bradley Smith. “Smith was on Donahue in the ’80s, and he was on TV and radio a lot,” Weber told me. “[But] he’s increasingly obscure. The times are different…. When Bradley first started, that was a startling claim, that the gas chambers didn’t exist…. But Bradley Smith has been marginalized in a way he wasn’t in the ’80s and ’90s.” It was ironic, then, that Smith was getting a dose of new publicity thanks to Weber, whose rather histrionic break with Smith and his kind had made them all interesting again, at least to me.

But the elderly and kindly-looking Smith, when I met him at a California Starbucks, wanted to talk not about the Holocaust but mainly about his short-lived career as a self-published author. He has written a book-length monologue called The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, which includes mysterious koans like this: “Jews were in there too from the beginning with Christians and Nazis and the others working on the bomb. They were good at it too. Einstein, Oppenheimer. Teller. What distinguishes Jews primarily from the others is that there aren’t so many of them.” When I insisted on discussing the work for which he is most famous—a series of advertisements in campus newspapers, beginning in the 1990s, questioning various aspects of the received Holocaust story—Smith began attacking David Sweet, the president of Youngstown State University, in whose campus newspaper Smith had recently placed his advertisement asking for, “with proof, the name of one person who was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.” In a letter to the Youngstown State newspaper in March, just days before I met with Smith, Sweet had quoted John Silber, the former president of Boston University, who in 2000 had called Smith a liar.

It incensed Smith that he had been called a liar—just as it incensed him that more non-Jewish professors at Northwestern didn’t stand up for their colleague Arthur Butz, an engineering professor who has argued the gas chambers did not exist; just as it incensed him that Mark Weber has allowed the Institute for Historical Review, once the premier organization in the world for Holocaust revisionism, to lapse into irrelevance. Back in 1993, Smith sided with Weber and others against Willis Carto, who according to Smith “wanted to change the nature of the Journal of Historical Review,” then the IHR’s major publication. “[The journal] was set up primarily to pursue revisionist arguments with regard to the gas-chamber story and the Holocaust,” Smith clarified for me, by phone, a few weeks after our meeting. But Carto, who was accused of hiding funds bequeathed to the IHR, and now runs a fringe publication called The Barnes Review, grew more interested in “nationalism and the race issues and conspiracy stuff,” Smith said. “I mean, he is interested in the Bilderbergers, and stuff like that, and that simply isn’t what those of us who wanted the journal wanted in it…. It was the center of the revisionist movement internationally, and we wanted it to remain that way. They published good stuff, carefully edited.”

Alas, The Journal of Historical Review has not been a priority of Mark Weber’s for a long time, and hence there was mistrust between Smith and Weber even before Weber’s eccentric turn away from the important stuff—gas-chamber questioning—toward the more abstract project of extreme anti-Zionist paranoia. After all, the journal “failed under Mark Weber,” Smith told me. “He hasn’t published it in 10 or 12 years. He’s not really a businessman, and he’s not an editor. It’s difficult for him to work with writers. Mark has a tendency to rewrite stuff, rather than edit stuff.

“I think he functions much better when he has a boss than when he is the boss,” Smith said. “He is not lazy at all, and he is very smart, and he’s a good speaker, and he’s a good writer, when he writes. He has everything. But he can’t run the business, and he can’t work with writers. He lost everybody.”

Smith and Weber each tried to be charitable about the other. For example, Weber had told me that while he didn’t approve of race-mixing, he’d never held it against Smith that Smith has a Mexican wife and a half-Mexican daughter. And Smith was careful not to traffic in the unsavory rumors spread by Weber’s enemies—for example, that he has a Jewish sister. The rumor “comes across my desk every two to three years,” Smith told me, “and I’ve never thought to ask him about it.”

But the rumor was true. Weber did have a Jewish sister. And Smith, currently married to a Mexican, once shared his life with a Jewish lover. I set out to find these women.

TOMORROW: Part IV of “The Denial Twist”: My Sister, My Lover: The Jewish women in the Holocaust deniers’ lives.

The Newport Beach offices of Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review are located in a rented warehouse space in a bland office park. Weber is a former leader of the American Holocaust-denial movement who has now embraced a more intellectualized anti-Semitism; his chief goal is to expose the long tentacles of Jewish-Zionist power. As he showed me in, he paused to introduce me to a young, female intern, one of two who work for him now. According to tax records, Weber is the only paid employee of the Institute, and in the last year for which the Institute’s tax forms are available his salary was $43,999.

His office, lacking walls but defined by bookshelves all around, seems bereft of personal effects. He refused to talk about his ex-wife or his two children; during the time we spent together, he took one call from his current wife, a Russian immigrant whose name he would not give me, and that was as close as he would let me get to his family. His office life was clearly defined by books: books stacked on rows of metal shelves, to be shipped to people who buy from the IHR’s publishing arm, and books crammed into the tall wooden shelves that hold his research library. Dozens of the books, hundreds even, were about Jews and the Holocaust, many of them books I knew from my own graduate studies, written by Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, David Wyman, and others. There were also volumes of Judaica, including Herzl’s diaries and The Encyclopedia of Zionism. I was reminded of the English novelist Howard Jacobson’s brilliant insight about Holocaust deniers: “You will know them because they know more about the Jewish religion than you do. As soon as you meet one of those, and think, by God they’ve got a lot of quotations, by God they know everything about Jews—then that’s what they are. And what cheers me about all this, is that your true anti-Semite, like your true Holocaust denier, is doomed to a kind of Dante-esque hell of living among Jewish things, Jewish books, Jewish artifacts. You can see them in the library, they’ve got the Talmud up here, and they’re burrowing away to find more and more evidence against the Jews. Few Jews live a more perfect scholarly Jewish life.”

This perfectly describes Mark Weber. During the course of our two conversations in person (I returned the next day for another three hours), and several more on the telephone, Weber spoke knowledgeably about the Hebrew Bible, Jewish holidays, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the founding of the state of Israel, Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and the work of Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman. It became clear that he reads the Jewish press more closely than I do, and I write for the Jewish press. At one point, he and I got into an argument over the proper connotations of the Yiddish word macher—a fight that ended, I must sheepishly admit, when I realized he was right.

Gray-goateed, youthful, brown-eyed, in a crisp short-sleeved dress shirt, Weber sat behind a desk and explained to me the source of his conflict with Bradley Smith and others, men with whom he worked closely since before he became head of the IHR in 1995. Throughout our conversation, he positioned himself as the moderate and a freethinker, exasperated by trying to reason with the crazies. He seemed particularly dismayed by Smith and the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, who are both interested above all in questioning the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. “I find myself—knock on wood—trying to talk dispassionately to both sides,” Weber said. “I think people like Bradley Smith and Faurisson are frustrated that they haven’t been more effective. We all wish things were as we wish them to be. I was disappointed that Bradley Smith would turn his back on years of friendship to say the things he did…. [But] Bradley Smith and Robert Faurisson have their identities tied to Holocaust revisionism in a way that isn’t healthy.”

As Weber sees it, he is interested in a wide variety of questions, while Smith and Faurisson are one-issue obsessives. If Smith and others are too “tied” to Holocaust revisionism, Weber is by contrast a scholar—“the only director of the IHR to have any training as an historian,” as he puts it—and an iconoclastic seeker. It’s true that Weber has authored essays on subjects not strictly about Jews or the Holocaust; one recent paper, posted on his web site, is “The ‘Good War’ Myth of World War II,” an attack on Roosevelt and Churchill that never mentions the Holocaust. But even that paper is ultimately an attempt to draw a moral equivalence between Americans and the Nazis, and most of Weber’s corpus is concerned with either attacks on Jews or the defense of anti-Semites. His papers and pamphlets include “Buchenwald: Legend and Reality” and “Fred Leuchter: Courageous Defender of Historical Truth,” an apologia for a Holocaust denier whom Weber calls, in a macabre turn of phrase, “the foremost American expert on gassing and gas chamber technology.”

Weber’s father, a journalist-turned-lawyer, managed President Kennedy’s Oregon campaign in 1960, and his mother returned to school for a doctorate in biology after her children were grown, but Weber traveled far from his prosaic, middle-class roots. As a teenager he was as an activist for the Biafran refugees, then after college taught secondary school in Ghana, only to become in 1978, after travels in Europe and time living in Germany, a writer for a neo-Nazi newspaper, and later, at the IHR, the premier face of Holocaust denial and revisionism in America. But in his conversations with me, Weber seemed to be arguing that his catholicity of interests, his unusual history, and his broad focus on white supremacy, Holocaust skepticism, and historical revisionism on a range of topics (like the causes of World War II, Stalin’s crimes, and Hiroshima, as well as present-day Middle Eastern politics) showed him to be of higher caliber than those who natter on about gas chambers.

“What’s odd is, as [Smith] himself says, he’s not a scholar, not a historian,” said Weber, who, by contrast, holds a master’s in European history from Indiana University. “He’s a publicist for this idea…. It’s hard to see, increasingly, how he can get traction. His latest thing is to place ads [often in campus newspapers] that say, ‘Name one person who died in a gas chamber.’ And maybe one person will read that and say, ‘Okay, okay, I can’t.’ But it’s a pretty far remove from most people’s concerns.” It was hard to tell, listening to Weber, if he wanted to shift the IHR’s identity away from flat-out Holocaust denial because he had decided that it was wrong, and that the Holocaust did happen, or because it was ineffectual, a school of losers who might be right but had failed to convince anybody, and thus deserved their own ignominy. Was Weber abandoning Smith just because he was a loser? I found myself feeling a strange pity for Smith.

That feeling hardly dissipated when I met Smith in person. An enthusiastic raconteur, Smith told me at length about his days as a bullfighter in Mexico, an activity he enjoyed before his days working at an art gallery in New York and then as a bookseller in Los Angeles. Above all, he rejected Weber’s portrayal of him as a single-issue obsessive. Instead, he argued, he was a passionate libertarian, primarily concerned with protecting the sanctity of the freedom of speech. He offered another piece of his history into evidence: Earlier in his storied life, Smith operated one of the few bookstores in Los Angeles where one could buy “obscene” books, and in 1962 he was convicted of selling Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer; his lawyer on appeal was the renowned First Amendment crusader Stanley Fleishman, the disabled polio victim immortalized in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife. On the website of Smith’s one-man organization, the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), Smith praises Jews for coming to his defense at that dark hour: “All my life I have watched Jews lead the struggle to maintain a free press and intellectual freedom in America. In the 1960s, when I was a book dealer on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, I was arrested, jailed, tried and convicted for selling a book then banned by the U.S. Government—Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Jews from every walk of life supported my stand against Government censorship.”

Smith may be romanticizing his past as a free-speech crusader; at his trial, he positioned himself not so much as a martyr for the cause as a simple bookseller caught in a web of legalese. According to a Los Angeles Times article of February 8, 1962, Smith declared in his testimony that “he had not heard of the state obscenity law until two weeks after his arrest.” Nevertheless, Smith did take real risks for the cause, and he now says that the fight against censorship has always been his main concern; according to his professed logic, the possibility for “open debate” about whether or not there were gas chambers is useful as the ultimate test of whether our speech is truly free.

In this regard he differs from both Weber and from Faurisson, who sees debunking the Holocaust as an instrument for undermining the Israeli state. Put simply, if we take these men at their words, Smith sees the gas chambers as a question of free speech; Faurisson, as an underpinning of a fraudulent Jewish state; and Weber, as a distraction from the machinations of Jewish power in America. These distinctions may seem trivial to some, different facets of the same anti-Semitic menace; but for the men struggling for the soul of Holocaust revisionism, these differences are all that there is.

TOMORROW: Part III of “The Denial Twist”: The Smith v. Weber feud gets personal.

In reality, however, that caricature grossly misunderstands this anti-Semitic Holocaust skepticism, which is not a unified movement but a loose confederation of people who often have very little in common. The major American organization known for its theories of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), received just under $250,000 in contributions for the 12 months ending on April 30, 2008, the last year for which figures are available, and that money could have come from only a handful of contributors; the Institute’s publishing arm had sales of $53,269—or, to give a generous estimate, about 5,000 books. The Institute’s Journal of Historical Review was last published in 2002, and the very next year a rival publication, The Revisionist, which had already folded once before, ceased publication. The world of Holocaust denial comprises one-man enterprises, fledgling organizations with tiny budgets and few followers, and amateurish magazines with the lifespans of fruit flies.

These enterprises seem poised to become even more fragile, thanks to an internecine feud that began early this year and threatens to cripple an already lame Holocaust-denial movement. In January, IHR director Mark Weber posted an article on his web site arguing that Holocaust “revisionism” has failed to gain traction in either history departments or with the public at large: “[T]here has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective,” Weber wrote. And, he continued, it was time to leave the Holocaust behind and focus on Jewish malevolence today: “Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.”

Soon after Weber’s statements became public, his onetime friend and colleague, 79-year-old Bradley Smith, was quick to denounce his former fellow traveler. “There are those who feel he has … betrayed the revisionist movement,” Smith told the Forward.

Holocaust deniers are a touchy bunch, prone to infighting, but the war of words between Weber and Smith, two old allies, was something special; a battle had been joined in the heart of the American Holocaust-denial movement.  I was intrigued by Weber, this man who claimed to be leaving Holocaust revisionism behind. It was easy enough to judge him just an anti-Semite at war with other anti-Semites. If anything, Weber’s shift to anti-Zionism only confirmed his anti-Semitism; after all, if he were just a disinterested, objective historian, then having dropped the historical question of the Holocaust he’d begin a study of, say, the British raj or the history of Hawaiian agriculture. That he continued to be obsessed with the alleged lies and machinations of Jews seemed proof of an objective disorder.

But because I believe in redemption, and because Weber’s web site offered a curious mixture of anti-Semitic nonsense and mainstream news articles about Israel, and even articles from the Jewish press, I decided that it was worth trying to talk to Mark Weber. Maybe he was a new man. Or maybe he was trying to become one. And while I was at it, I figured, I might as well also try to talk to Smith.

Between February and May, I met in person and spoke multiple times on the telephone with both Smith, who lives in Mexico and whose cuddliness in person seems to mock his reputation as a dangerous extremist, and Weber, a 57-year-old native Oregonian who seems a good deal smarter than Smith but also a good deal less mirthful. These were men whose friendship was on the outs, and each was eager to emphasize his differences with the other. But they were also similar, in ways I did not expect. For example, both Weber and Smith seem to think of themselves as Enlightenment liberals: Smith fashions himself a free-speech absolutist, whose Holocaust skepticism is merely about usefully breaking taboos, while Weber sees himself as a positivist, sifting evidence to determine what is true and what is not. Each man, too, seems to want to be loved and, I thought, a bit puzzled that it has not worked out that way.  Most surprising, both Weber and Smith loved Jews. They don’t love Jews generally, of course, but each man has a Jewish woman in his past with whom he has had a close relationship. Discovering these contradictions in the lives of Smith and Weber did not arouse in me any sympathy, and of course it doesn’t discredit their ideas, which are wrong on their own merits. But to meet these two men late in their careers in anti-Semitism, and to get to know them as they tangled with each other, helped illuminate what kind of man might choose to cross the borders of respectable opinion, and what inner needs might keep him exiled from his fellow man.

****

After I had secured the Weber interview, Smith, whose home in Mexico is just 100 miles from where Weber lives in Southern California, volunteered to drive across the border and meet me. For one airfare, I could meet two extremists.

Of the two men, Bradley Smith is much closer to the common perception of a classic Holocaust denier, singularly obsessed with disproving the existence of the Nazi machinery of death. But the elderly Smith was kindly enough to endure the traffic jam at the Mexican-American border and meet me at the Starbucks in San Clemente, California, the beach town where Richard Nixon began his exile. Smith had left a message on my mobile phone saying that he would wait for me in the parking lot, and that’s where I found him, snoozing behind the wheel of his pickup truck. I rapped on the window, and the aging radical opened his eyes with a start, remembered where he was, smiled at me, popped open his door, and lumbered out, smiling warmly. In his worn flannel shirt and jeans, a scraggly white beard dressing up his weather-beaten face, Smith looked like an old, sagacious cowhand, the kind of guy whose favorite story is about how he forgave the beloved bull who once got startled and kicked him in the head.

Once we were both seated at the coffee shop, I tried to ask Smith about possible flaws in the works of great Holocaust historians.

“You’ve read all the standard accounts,” I asked, “like Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg?”

“Yeah,” Smith said, “that’s what I started with, I read Hilberg. I didn’t read them very closely. Because I’m not really interested in the history of the period.”

I was a little shocked. “I mean, you read Lucy Dawidowicz’s book on the period? You read David Wyman?”

“Not thoroughly,” Smith said. “Wyman, I didn’t read. He came a bit too late.”

I was astounded. “But that’s kind of amazing, right? Because here are these classic works of Holocaust literature that purport to show it all and you say you haven’t read them closely. So you have read Arthur Butz, who’s a nobody in the field, closely, but you haven’t read the great titans in the field closely?”  “You know what? I’m not interested in the story,” he replied. “Revisionists have written very detailed documents about the holes—”

“So what are you interested in?”

“In a free exchange of ideas.”

“But you aren’t interested in trying to find out which ideas are right?”

“Not particularly. You know what I’m really interested in? Every generation has its taboo, and I happen to be here with this taboo. I happen to be here with this one. And I can see how it’s exploited, and who benefits from the exploitation.”

And so it went for a while. As we got up to leave, Smith said that he had a gift for me. He reached into his bag and produced paperback copies of The Man Who Saw His Own Liver and his self-published memoir, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist. He assured me that they were both good reads.

TOMORROW: Part II of “The Denial Twist”: Meeting Mark Weber.

At first, she said, she thought the noise might have been a piece of equipment falling down stairs, making a “kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk” sound. But then the group heard the sound of returning fire and realized the museum was under attack. “I just stopped,” said Lipstadt, a Tablet contributing editor. Within minutes, museum staff escorted them out of the building and to safety on the National Mall.

Did Lipstadt, best known for winning a much-publicized court battle against Holocaust denier David Irving, ever anticipate coming under physical attack, even indirectly, by Holocaust revisionists? “Oh, no—not at all,” she said. “I’m sure if you go to David Irving he’s going to say it’s a terrible thing. The smarter ones amongst them know it doesn’t make them look good. But in their hearts are they sort of happy they closed this place down for a day? I don’t doubt it.”

Related: Museum Shooting: Witness Account [CNN]

Brits are divided on how the BNP, which was hitherto relegated to occasional victories in local elections, managed to send two of their riffraff to the European legislature. One theory holds that Gordon Brown’s Labour Party is in such a state of ruin (it won a mere 13 percent of the vote, the first time since World War II that it won less than 20 percent) that working-class districts, particularly in the North, voted for fascists out of spite (because really, comrade, who could ever cast for a Tory?). That would be one way to piss off the bourgeois city-dwellers who plundered the economy, brought the country under the yoke of the European Union, and acquiesced—this is the uncomfortable part—to the influx of so many unassimilable immigrants. But there is also the creeping specter of anti-Semitism in Britain, which has been well sniffed in the air and documented on the page by lifelong Labourites such as Nick Cohen and Howard Jacobson. “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself,” Marx wrote to Engels after surveying the results of the 1867 British election, which saw a stunning victory for the Conservatives. How much worse a disgrace in 2009.

BNP Wins Its First Seats in European Parliament [London Times]

Germany has the idea that a criminal law might do the trick, and so is campaigning to get the European Union to impose prison sentences of up to three years on anyone who denies that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews during World War II. Critics offer numerous reasons not to enact the law.

For starters, there’s freedom of expression as a foundational and distinguishing principle of free societies. Rarely can this aspirational norm help resolve difficult questions, however, since even the most liberal of free societies is unlikely to permit absolute freedom of expression, for example when such expression presents an imminent risk of violence.

More pragmatic critics might focus on the risk that criminal prosecution for Holocaust denial will backfire, and instead of extinguishing anti-Semitism, will foment it. The deniers will be confirmed in their belief that Jews and forces beholden to them are powerful in the extreme, and that the deniers are victims, heroes, and martyrs to the cause of an unpopular truth. They will be forced underground and it will become more difficult for law enforcement to monitor them for truly violent conspiratorial activity. They will be made more credible and important because the law conveys that Holocaust denial is a genuinely dangerous and very possibly convincing position that cannot be disposed of in the context of an open debate.

Supporters of the law might counter that Holocaust denial is genuinely dangerous—and that the Holocaust was enabled in the first place by the failure to take anti-Semitism seriously when the early signs appeared. Maybe so—we can’t know the future or what alternative realities might have been. It’s hard enough to get a grip on the present and the actual past. But even if the law’s supporters are correct, it does not necessarily follow that criminal prohibition is the best approach.

I’m more like-minded to the pragmatic critics than the principled ones or the supporters of the law, but what strikes me most about the law is that it represents a wholly different type of denial. That the Holocaust happened is not an uncertainty—at least not to the reasonable-minded. But Germans struggle individually and as a country with something far less certain: how to manage the heinous and guilty legacy that the previous generation left them. It’s easy to take a strong stand against Holocaust denial—it’s like saying that racism is bad or that life is precious—but for Germany to pour the energy of its EU presidency into shoring up its position that the Holocaust did in fact happen is an evasion of the much more complex and perhaps ultimately unanswerable questions that accompany the history inflicted upon Germans by their dying generation.

If you keep up with the Holocaust (it happened just the once, but the histories, museums, memorials, literary and artistic renditions, and psychological, theological, and ethical reflections keep coming), then you might have observed a change. As the survivors die off, and their children and grandchildren replace them as the producers of the most current representations, it’s no longer principally the Holocaust—that primary and massive historical event or constellation of events—that constitutes the object of thought. Writers, poets, artists, and the rest of us are far too narcissistic for that. What we (the children and grandchildren) write about is the consequences of the Holocaust for succeeding generations. Our stories are about the trips back to Germany and Poland, our visits to concentration camps and ancestral villages, our love affairs, friendships, and encounters with Germans whose grandparents or great-uncles might have murdered our own.

One of the currents that runs through so many of these pieces is a deep ambivalence about blame. It seems manifestly unfair to hold our contemporaries responsible for the crimes of their progenitors, but that does not seem to ameliorate the mistrust that can be read in the accounts of those who go back and forge relationships and provoke encounters in the old country. And even for those who might never undertake such a pilgrimage, plenty of Jews—myself among them—won’t buy a German car or a Krupps coffeemaker. It’s completely irrational, I realize, or at least it will be in a few more years when truly all of the perpetrators are dead and cannot possibly profit from these purchases. But the antagonism stubbornly persists.

That’s a phenomenon on the Jewish side. On the German side, insofar as I have witnessed it, a mirror image forms. Among Germans, national self-flagellation uncomfortably coexists with the resentment of a nation that experiences itself as a victim. This tension can be seen in the recent German debate about Holocaust restitution (a subject on which I’ve done research). Over the years, political forces within Germany mostly associated with the left have supported reparations payments to Israel and pensions for Holocaust survivors living around the globe. When, in the late 1990’s, the world started to read news articles about efforts to recover stolen art and unpaid life insurance proceeds and to obtain compensation for former slaves of the Third Reich’s industrial sector, many Germans, more typically associated with the right, started to feel that they had paid enough. They had apologized sufficiently, and they (the Germans who would bear the costs of more restitution and further confessions) were not the guilty ones, after all, so why were they being sued, humiliated, and held accountable? When will it end? When will they have paid the debt for a crime that happened before they were even born? While these positions seem to travel to some extent with left or right political tendencies, I suspect that most individual Germans have experienced the full panoply of emotions at one time or another.

My own mistrust is fed by this kind of resentment; it feels to me on the very precarious verge of anti-Semitism. But it’s also obvious that these people are suffering. The inheritors of the Holocaust, including Germans as well as Jews, have been left an unmanageable legacy. It really might be that it’s just impossible to know how to be a German right now. Obsessing about the Holocaust deniers is one way to go, but in the end that is a displacement of German uncertainty and guilt. Whatever the law’s practical effects on anti-Semitism in Europe, it will distract from the crisis of identity that today’s Germans face.