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]

But that, actually, wasn’t the controversial part of this speech by the already-controversial co-author of The Israel Lobby (the book which postulates that an overwhelmingly Jewish lobby influences American Israel policy in a way that harms U.S. interests). Even if you don’t agree with this stuff, you should learn to get used to it. The one-state solution has been amply and eloquently advocated for; even Israel’s own defense minister has used the “a” word.

No, what has gotten various folks’ collective goat was Mearsheimer’s decision to divide Jewish Americans into three groups: “New Afrikaners,” “who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state”; “the great ambivalent middle,” which is what it sounds like; and “Righteous Jews,” who “believe that self-determination applies to Palestinians as well as Jews.” It’s this part of the speech that Jeffrey Goldberg compared to something out of Father Coughlin. And, I mean, ‘Righteous Jews’? Even if that’s not some sort of analogy to ‘Righteous Gentiles,’ Mearsheimer can kind of go to hell.

Sample Righteous Jews, according to Mearsheimer, are Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Goldstone, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, and Philip Weiss. Most of those associated with J Street, says Mearsheimer, are Righteous Jews, too (I promise you J Street resents this categorization, and believes Mearsheimer just made its job more difficult). Sample New Afrikaners are also usual suspects: Abraham Foxman, Marty Peretz, Mort Zuckerman, et al. Mearsheimer’s prediction is that the great ambivalent middle, currently vaguely supportive of Israel, will slowly turn against the Jewish state as its fundamentally apartheid character becomes apparent.

Before going further, I’d like to say that the person whom Mearsheimer has most slandered is the intellectual who has probably lent the greatest and most influential firepower to the solution Mearsheimer would like to see reached, that is, the single bi-national state: Tony Judt. Agree with him on Israel or not (I, for one, don’t), Judt is a sensitive, scrupulous, thoughtful, and responsible scholar who, after painstakingly weighing his own affiliations and values, arrived at a policy conclusion. To group him with Norman Finkelstein is obscene.

This list isn’t even accurate, or at least in any way useful. The important distinctions, as Mearsheimer himself says elsewhere in the speech, are whether someone supports a single, bi-national, democratic state; two nationally-based states; or a Jewish-dominated single state. Yet Righteous Jew Roger Cohen believes in a two-state solution; Righteous Jew hotbed J Street vehemently does so as well. Righteous Jew Noam Chomsky, by contrast, eminently does not; and as for Righteous Jew Norman Finkelstein (!!), he is also David Duke’s favorite Jew. If Mearsheimer were striving to be helpful, he would have divided thinkers based on their preferred solutions to the conflict.

Then again, if Mearsheimer were striving to be helpful, he would have divided thinkers. Instead, Mearsheimer divides Jewish thinkers. “Imagine,” The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait writes, “[if] a conservative were to divide the African-American community into the enlightened blacks (Clarence Thomas, Ken Blackwell, Michael Steele, Walter Williams, etc.) who reject paternalistic liberalism, and also happen to represent a tiny fringe within the community, and the bad blacks, who represent the mainstream African-American perspective.” Seriously, just imagine it.

Meanwhile, Mearsheimer’s co-author, Stephen Walt, does distance himself from the speech somewhat—he thinks that it’s too pessimistic. “I hope his speech turns out to be a ‘self-denying prophecy,’” Walt says. “In other words, if enough people are convinced by it, maybe they will act to head off the gloomy future that he foresees.” You mean the key to peace in the Mideast is for people to be convinced by this speech? Boy are we screwed.

“The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners” with Professor John J. Mearsheimer [The Jerusalem Fund]

• The New Jersey Star-Ledger was one of three finalists (though not the victor) for the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of the corruption scandal stemming from the state’s Syrian Jewish community. [Pulitzer]

• The Jewish community of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, is anxious for its own safety given the recent coup in the country. [JTA]

• Veteran negotiator Aaron David Miller posits that the Obama administration’s goal may be to encourage a change in Israeli government—so that they no longer have to deal with Prime Minister Netanyahu. [LAT]

• The notorious Norman Finkelstein appeared last week in front of the U.N. Correspondents Assocation. [TNR.com]

• Jewcy uncovers the executive editor of Village Voice Media writing something … really, really questionable about “Jews.” [Jewcy]

Old Jewish negotiator extraordinaire Herb Cohen discusses Real Housewives of New York. Pretty much can’t-miss.

Herb Cohen on Real Housewives of New York, S3E6 from aarongell on Vimeo.

• Norman Finkelstein, the notorious writer (his prime shtick is, he’s the son of survivors who compares Israel to the Nazis), has been trying to secure speaking venues in Germany. [JPost]

• Long Island’s Holocaust Museum and Tolerance Center reopened (after over a year of renovations) with powerful new exhibits. [NYT]

• An interesting feature on how Orthodox students at secular colleges compromise among religious strictures and the reigning hook-up culture. [New Voices]

• At the Jewish Council of Public Affairs Plenum in Dallas, Ambassador Michael Oren called for “compromise” regarding the controversy over mixed gender prayers at the Western Wall. [JCPA]

• Get prepared for the Zaretskys’ ice dancing performance tonight with this (unrelated) clip, which is also set to the Schindler’s List theme music.

To begin with: Finkelstein is keenly aware of the theological implications of Judaism. In a article in the academic journal Shofar, the poet and critic Alicia Ostriker claims that contemporary American Jewish poets seek holiness “not in the disembodied God but in the physical world.” This might be true of many Jewish poets, but not of Finkelstein. The man invokes a very Jewish—because absolutely disembodied—God, as in the poem “Desert”:

Neither upon the sky nor upon the ground

Neither in the desert nor at the mountain

Neither in the heights nor in the depths

Neither present nor absent

Neither known nor unknown

Neither strange nor familiar

Neither whole nor in fragments

Neither revealed nor hidden

Neither sacred nor profane

Neither spoken nor silent.

While it might sound like mysticism, it is pure, rational Maimonides who tells us that every time we try to nail God down in our own, too human terms, we increase our distance from Him. Finkelstein keeps Him in the realm of the divine, represented as the space between contradictions.

When Finkelstein turns from the attributes of God to our own imperfections in the poem “Scribe,” he has no trouble enlisting the cadence of the prophets:

You have heeded the word of the outside god

and you have heeded the word of no god at all,

like a prophet turned archaeologist

a scribe turned into a scribe.

This is pretty harsh stuff. Finkelstein charges us with having foresworn the future by chasing false gods or—just as bad—chasing no god at all. We have turned prophecy into nostalgia and turned our holy scribes into scribblers, the guilty transcribers of a not quite forgotten past.

Finkelstein teeters on the edge of a thumping sanctimoniousness, but he is saved from the brink here by the fact that he is indicting himself as much as he is chastising the tribes of Jeshurun, perhaps even more so. He has no other choice. God is too far away and Finkelstein has appeared too late in history for faith. This hardly presents a vista for hope and certainly not one for redemption. But Finkelstein’s work has no trouble freely espousing both a secularized recuperation of religion as well a religious approach to the secular.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Scribe is a series of poems based on a seemingly unlikely muse: architect Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, a gently polemical attempt to realign architecture and city planning with a very generous notion of human need. But Alexander describes architecture in terms of poetry, seeing in them both opportunities for physical, linguistic, and emotional fulfillment. Finkelstein, whose poems often engage the space of the whole page, sees poetry in terms of architecture. More importantly, Alexander places great stock in the imagination. He claims that a home, like a city, needs its private spaces and its dreams. “Make a place in the house,” he writes, “which is locked and secret.” There, “the archives of the house, or more potent secrets, might be kept.”

Finkelstein’s secular midrash allows him to use a bedroom to reflect on his own psyche, his love and his poetry at the same time, as in “Children’s Realm”:

I want it so within myself

and within those I love—

a continuum of spaces

where the child at play

may pass by or enter

that place common to all

of my being

Nor can it be

too far from that grown-up world

also of bodies and minds

of storms and of the peace after storms

the child and adult facing each other

across a space that is all

terror and enchantment.

You can hear a kind of meditative stateliness (the archaism of that “so” ) which goes with the biblical repetitiveness (“storms and the peace after storms”). All this leads to that quiet little bang at the end, the magical face-off between generations.

There is a payoff to his use of Alexander’s book. “Sacred Sites/Holy Ground” stands at the imaginative center of Finkelstein’s topography of a radically transformed world. In it, he quotes Alexander’s call for “SACRED SITES.” Like Alexander, Finkelstein does not name these sites nor does he specify the exact nature of their sanctity, beyond the fact that laws should afford them permanent protection: “OUR ROOTS/IN THE VISIBLE SURROUNDINGS/CANNOT BE VIOLATED.” Our roots in a visible landscape—not in divine sanction; these are utopian, not overtly religious places.

The suggestive relation between Finkelstein’s vision of a fulfilled life and redemption is telling. Redemption remains a promise while utopia remains a hope. These days, they are both the stuff of chastened prophecy and skeptical exhortation. But according to Finkelstein, they both are necessary if our scribblers are to transform themselves into scribes.

***

It doesn’t seem quite fair to talk about Natalie Lyalin’s Pink & Hot Pink Habitat and dwell on the fact that she was born in Russia. But it is unavoidable. She herself says that “the immigration experience has been a great and interesting rift in my life. I think that kind of upheaval is great psychological material for writing poems.” That rift shows up in her poems in a number of ways.

Like much contemporary poetry her work is disjunctive. In “Jeffrey Bloodhound Sans” she writes:

Girl words. A tomato. A plum. An apricot.

Time is holding in a clear tube.

Time is lightning on a spare key.

Words that do not yet exist. Alibubo. Bubsigtree. Grivstalbikt.

But these disjunctions are not just examples of a period style. They express deep dislocations—linguistic, physical and psychological.

Language first: it’s hard not to view her flights of linguistic fancy as the result of having to live between languages. Memories of Russian come up when she imitates her father’s voice: “Feel this here pain” and “Whatever happened at prom?” Speakers of Slavic languages have a miserable time with definite articles as well as finding the right place for adjectives and adverbs.

When it comes to syntax, English is also remarkably simple compared to Russian, German, and a host of other languages. But English hammers non-native speakers with the number and complexity of its idioms. The freedom to get idioms wrong, to discover new connections, even to make up words that do not yet exist, is miserable for an immigrant, but a real gift for a poet.

Nevertheless, dislocation has its costs:

Your family is in flight. It seems that decades didn’t happen or happened all at once. The next few years are all weddings. On the end of holidays we wait for the next holiday. We remember bombed out resorts and the constant cigarettes.

(“Opalescent”)

Lyalin the poet cannot distance herself from the confusions of memory. She might begin as a “you” but ends up inevitably with a “we.”

Pink & Hot Pink Habitat is not a particularly grim book, although for all its surface play, it is a very serious one. Lyalin has probably earned the right to express real doubt: “They promise that G-d is not vengeful,/ but do they really know that.” But by the same token, doubt also lends weight to passages like this:

Humans are G-d’s secret architecture and your mother is the cupola of maple leaves. I have put myself here, in this orb of muscle and wonderment, grain, gold silk and the map of roads.

(“Dune and Swale”)

Muscle and wonderment. If nothing else, a good prescription for Jewish poems.

Fair-minded viewers will not accuse him of having denied that some people still spew horrendous stereotypes of yid and kike, given that he practically begins Defamation by interviewing one of the offenders: his grandmother in Jerusalem. Jews? They’re nothing but schemers and layabouts, she tells him, liquor-store owners and interest gougers, too lazy to do any real work but skilled in every sharp practice. (Her definition of “Jews,” I should note, is limited to those in the Diaspora.) Shamir also records, and argues with, some equally noxious slurs voiced by African-Americans on a streetcorner in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to win adherents because, look, you can see it checks out. Moving from word to deed, he visits a synagogue in Moscow, where an intruder had recently expressed his opinion of Jews by attacking some of them with a knife.

That said, Shamir is not bent on amassing evidence of widespread, virulent anti-Semitism (as Marc Levin tried to do in his 2005 documentary, Protocols of Zion). He is interested, rather, in a different project, and a legitimate one: examining the moral effect on Jews in general, and Israelis in particular, of their persistent fear of anti-Semites.

To explore this topic, Shamir proceeds in the most labor-intensive tradition of documentary filmmaking, carrying his camera through three continents, poking its lens into the ongoing lives of more than two dozen people and developing the material he gathers into three intertwined storylines.

In the first of these, he follows Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Shamir visits with Foxman’s staff in New York; attempts (with often comic results) to find an appropriately blood-chilling case of anti-Semitism in the ADL’s register of reported insults and slights; and then accompanies Foxman and some ADL donors on a visit to Eastern Europe.

Rotund, bustling, and quick to smile, Foxman appears in these scenes as someone who is open enough to give Shamir the run of his office and thoughtful enough to discuss with him the contradictions of the anti-anti-Semitism trade. (Foxman explains that foreign political leaders receive him respectfully only because they believe he has the ear of the United States government—putting him in the position of subtly reinforcing the myth of Jewish power, even while he combats it.) Shamir confesses in voiceover that he admires the way the ADL director handled a high-level meeting—you get to see it and judge for yourself—and concludes that Foxman is so highly attuned to threats to the Jewish people that he might be thought of as an early-warning instrument. As much as Shamir may be at odds with Foxman as a political figure, he seems to like the man.

The reverse holds true in the second storyline. In this part of the film, Shamir interviews academics—including Norman G. Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry—who argue that the Jewish community’s institutionalized preoccupation with anti-Semitism is exaggerated and that it serves the unwholesome function of forestalling criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. I think it’s fair to say that Shamir endorses this position—but, again, his presentation of it has surprising nuances.

The first time you see Finkelstein, something of his character comes through—enough to make him a gift to the filmmaker, as a painfully spare, frighteningly high-strung contrast to Foxman; but the unambiguous purpose of the interview is simply to draw out his views, and so to advance Shamir’s. The second interview, though, is all about character, and it’s a catastrophe. Raging, railing, unable to keep still, Finkelstein sarcastically tosses off a Nazi salute for the camera, after which the action really heads downhill. By the time it hits bottom, you feel that Shamir might assent to many of Finkelstein’s ideas, but he could never give this man his trust.

The characters who do claim Shamir’s heart, and the film’s, are the Israeli high-school students in the third storyline: unguarded, boisterous, impressionable kids from Haifa, who are being readied for their military service (including duty in the occupied territories) by being taken on a curriculum-approved trip to death-camp sites in Poland. As their tour proceeds, you see that no effort is spared to convince these young people that for Jews, the world will forever be an all-enveloping cloud of hostility, capable of shooting out bolts from any direction, at any time. You observe the change come over the kids as they incorporate this lesson; and if you’re like Shamir, you fear for them—and for the people who will soon be in their rifle sights.

Defamation does a remarkably good job of blending and pacing these complex, wide-ranging storylines. The film’s method of argument is honest—Shamir neither disguises his opinions nor conceals those of others—and the globe-trotting is justified by any number of discoveries made along the route. But the most appealing feature of Defamation, the one that really sells the film, is the jocular, somewhat faux-naif manner that Shamir adopts. He makes it fun to think about Jews overburdening themselves (and others) with their fears—and this, as I said, is a problem.

So long as Defamation plays to an audience of Jews—the film’s own subjects—Shamir’s light, satirical touch can only be welcome. But audiences of other backgrounds will also be drawn to the film—because it’s enjoyable, because it advances a political critique that many people want to hear, and also (let’s not forget those street corner anti-Semites) because its representative Jews sometimes come off as moneyed influence-peddlers. Let me be clear: on the whole I respect what Shamir has done in Defamation, and I think that Jews really ought to have the minimum of courage required to see his arguments aired. But having grown up as a Christ-killer, bloodied on the streets of South Chicago, I may perhaps be forgiven for lacking the full measure of mental freedom that Shamir would like me to have. When I consider how this film might play when we’re no longer talking just among ourselves, I start to think that it’s no laughing matter.

Stuart Klawans is the film critic of the Nation and author of the books Film Follies and Left in the Dark.

Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, shows through extensive quotation that “nearly every historian, literary scholar, and cultural critic … maintains that America’s Jews had little interest in thinking about, engaging with, and memorializing the Holocaust.” She suggests that the historian Leon Jick was the first to make this claim, in 1981, writing in highly loaded terms that American Jews “collaborated or at least acquiesced in a campaign to make the world forget” the Holocaust. Historians of all schools and political persuasions accepted that interpretation:Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Alvin Rosenfeld, Gerald Sorin, Alan Mintz, and Edward Alexander are among the prominent writers whom Diner cites repeating the “myth of silence.”

But Diner is especially exercised by two recent, controversial books, Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life and Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Indsutry, which show that the “myth of silence” is of more than just historical significance. For Novick and Finkelstein, whom Diner describes as “harsh critics of American Jewry from the left,” the silence of postwar Jews, broken only by the Israeli victory in 1967, leads to the conclusion that contemporary American Jewish interest in the Holocaust is inauthentic and exaggerated—or worse, a right-wing stratagem to force Jews to fall in line behind Israel. “Between the end of the war and the 1960s,” Diner quotes Novick as recalling, “the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse.”

This idea is so entrenched that it will be hard to uproot. But I don’t see how any reader of Diner’s exhaustively and innovatively researched book could possibly continue to believe in the “myth of silence.” For We Remember With Reverence and Love records thousands of Jewish voices—rabbis, community organizers, fundraisers, journalists, lobbyists, labor leaders, high school students—from the period 1945-62, all talking, passionately and unstoppably, about the Holocaust. There is little narrative in Diner’s book; rather, as in a legal brief, there is a succession of exhibits, from the press releases of the American Jewish Committee right down to the literary magazine of the Reform summer camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, each adding weight to Diner’s historical case. “The Jews of America,” she writes, “rather than ignoring the Holocaust, opened up the possibility of fitting it into their communal lives.”

The central insight driving Diner’s research is that the “word ‘memorial’ need not have been present in every text, on every page, in every pageant, concert, speech, or artifact,” for such texts and artifacts to be considered part of American Jews’ work of memory. In fact, only Diner’s first chapter focuses on Holocaust memorials and monuments, such as the one that was supposed to be erected at 84th Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The cornerstone for the “American Memorial to Six Million Jews of Europe” was laid as early as 1947, by New York’s mayor, in a grand public ceremony—vivid proof that New York’s Jews were hardly ashamed of discussing the Holocaust in public.

A design was commissioned for a 60-foot pylon topped by a menorah, but Robert Moses, New York’s public-works czar, quashed the plan. In the following years, a series of funding problems and bureaucratic squabbles meant that nothing was ever built. A particular complication facing the New York monument and others planned in the United States, Diner shows, was the firm opposition to all such projects by Yad Vashem, which insisted that “the land of Israel is the only and right place where such a significant monument should stand.”

The failure of the Riverside Drive memorial is no great loss—and not just because it’s hard to imagine such a rhetorically grandiose monument in such a quiet residential neighborhood. Rather, stone and marble may simply be the wrong medium for preserving the memory of such enormous loss and suffering. More eloquent are the yizker bikher—memory books, produced by landsmanshaftn to record the lives of their old communities, now wiped out by the Nazis; the adoption by American synagogues of Torah scrolls and other objects salvaged from wrecked German synagogues; and the dedication of trees in the “Martyr’s Forest” in Israel. Then there were the memorial readings added to Passover seders, and even the attempt, during the 1950s, to turn the minor Jewish fast day of the Tenth of Tevet into a Holocaust remembrance day. That effort faltered after Israel designated the 27th of Nisan as Yom HaShoah, to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Indeed, as early as 1945, Diner shows, Jewish groups marked the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with memorial services, which New York’s Governor Thomas Dewey attended.

But explicitly memorial activities are just the tip of the iceberg that Diner reveals. Almost every aspect of organized Jewish life, in the years after 1945, was touched by the memory of the Holocaust. Jewish cultural organizations immediately began sponsoring research into the history of the catastrophe. The American Jewish Committee published a series of historical and sociological books under the rubric “Studies in Prejudice.” The Jewish Labor Committee and the Joint Distribution Committee sent researchers to the displaced-persons camps to interview survivors and gather documents. The Claims Conference, which represented Jewish groups negotiating for reparations from Germany, was another major sponsor of Holocaust research. Indeed, so much was written on the subject that, already in 1958, Diner finds one writer observing that “the Jewish persecution and extermination by the Nazis [has] in the course of years created a vast literature.”

Far from ignoring the Holocaust, Diner makes clear, the major institutions of American Jewish life made it their mission to record the terrible history and to make sure the world knew about it. Nor did Jews shy away from invoking the Holocaust in contemporary political debates. It was central to the American Jewish reaction to the fate of Jews in DP camps after the war, to the the British ban on immigration to Palestine, and above all to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In 1946, the Zionist propaganda show A Flag Is Born ran for three months on Broadway; its explicit theme was the need for a Jewish state to receive the survivors of the Holocaust. (Marlon Brando, unlikely as it seems, played David, a Jewish refugee.)

Again, when Jewish organizations and individuals spoke out against postwar rapprochement with West Germany, or protested the Berlin Philharmonic’s American tour under the pro-Nazi conductor Herbert von Karajan, or fought back against the American Nazi Party’s provocative tactics, they did so by invoking the memory of the six million. (Not even the discovery that “a local manufacturer of toy model airplanes was using swastikas on his reproductions of certain German airplanes” was deemed too trivial for the Synagogue Council of America to protest.) And of course, for many American Jews, a commitment to liberalism and to the civil rights movement was a direct result of the experience of the Holocaust.

So pervasive does Diner find the Holocaust to have been in postwar American Jewish life, that it becomes a mystery how the “myth of silence” ever gained credibility in the first place. Diner devotes her conclusion to this question, suggesting that the upheavals of the 1960s are to blame. As young Jews rebelled against their parents and experimented with a new kind of ethnic identity politics, they “considered American Jewish institutions to have become too consensus-oriented, too unwilling to assert Jewish distinctiveness, and too concerned with avoiding confrontation with others.” The Holocaust became the major battleground for this generational revolt: “the leaders of the community institutions,” the new generation held, “had so lusted after acceptance into a corrupt America that they forgot the lessons of the Holocaust.”

Yet Diner is perhaps too ready to blame the 1960s generation. After all, We Remember With Reverence and Love is full of examples of the harsh and frightening ways the Holocaust was taught to young Jews in the postwar period—that is, to the very children who would grow up to be the rebels of the 1960s. At Yeshiva Flatbush, in 1949, children were “taught the catastrophe by having students construct, as a Passover project, a replica of a concentration camp.” At the Reform summer camp in Oconomowoc, in 1961, teenagers staged a reenactment of the Eichmann trial, before moving on, in a sign of the times, to “a role-play staging of the history of racial oppression in America.” One wonders what the campfire sing-alongs sounded like.

How could American Jewish children, born after the Holocaust but raised with an excruciating consciousness of their guilt and their luck, possibly respond to such a birthright? How else but by proclaiming that they alone were fully equal to the burden of memory—that where their parents, who lived through the time of the Holocaust, were silent, they would speak out? Perhaps the “myth of silence” was a necessary stage in American Jewry’s ongoing struggle to make sense of its place in a post-Holocaust world. But even if that myth once served a need, thanks to Hasia Diner’s work, it must now be retired for good.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.