• President Obama will be speaking this coming Sunday at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. [AP/WP]

• Skiing in summertime: In one of the largest such busts in the country’s history, two men were arrested in Israel with $60 million worth of cocaine. [AP/WP]

• In a nearly overwhelming confluence of Nextbook Press star power, tonight author Elie Wiesel will receive the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first award, and author Deborah Lipstadt will speak. [WP]

• A new U.N. report on Iran’s nuclear program vindicates the Obama administration’s strategy of successfully pursuing multilateral sanctions, argues Matt Duss. [CAP]

• Tonight is Storahtelling’s B Mitzvah, celebrated at City Winery in Manhattan. Go give it a pocket watch! [Storahtelling]

Today in Jonathan Richman’s 60th (sixtieth!) birthday.

1. Hausner’s opening: In the name of 6 Million: J’accuse

Many Israelis, including those born well after the Eichmann trial, can recite Hausner’s opening paragraph by heart. In a few sentences it encapsulated how the young nation conceived of this trial. Here was yet another tyrant—in a long succession of tyrants—who was once again trying to destroy the Jewish people. This time, however, the Jewish people, acting through the agency of the State of Israel, could bring him to account for his evil deeds.

2. George Wellers’ testimony

Though much of the testimony concerned the fate of masses of people, sometimes it was an individual’s story that entered one’s heart. George Wellers described the French children who were rounded up in July 1942, separated from their parents, and held at Drancy. He recalled one young boy whom he knew was destined for Auschwitz but whom he tried to reassure.

3. Martin Foldi

The murder of Hungarian Jews came late in the war even as the Allies were landing in Normandy, Rome was liberated, and the Soviets were pushing eastward. Close to a half million Jews were murdered in the space of seven weeks. This action gave Auschwitz its reputation as the epitome of the world’s killing field. Here a Hungarian Jew, Martin Foldi, described arriving at Auschwitz and watching his wife and children move further away from him toward what he ultimately learned were the gas chambers. He was able to see them because his little girl wore a red coat. Many years later Steven Spielberg would reprise that little girl and her coat in his film Schindler’s List.

4. Magistrate Moshe Beisky

Moshe Beisky was a respected magistrate in Tel Aviv. He had passed up opportunities to escape from the camp in which he was being held because he knew the other people in the barracks would be killed as a warning to others who might contemplate escaping. When he entered the witness box he declined the judge’s offer to sit. He spoke for a while describing his experiences during the war. Then Hausner, with no warning, asked him why he did not fight back. Why, when a massive number of Jews were surrounded by only a few hundred SS men, did they not escape? Beisky, taken aback, sat down and gave one of the most honest and plaintive descriptions of what Jewish inmates faced.

5. Resistance fighters

Many Israelis anticipated that the testimony of the resistance fighters would provide the one moment of uplift in the trial. Here, after all, were those who had fought back against their murderers. These were the heroes. Yet in their testimony both Aba Kovner and Zvia Lubetkin-Zuckerman cautioned against asking why people did not fight back. Fighting back, Lubetkin noted, came in many forms including continuing to educate children when the Germans outlawed it. Kovner observed that resistance is only possible when there is someone to coordinate it and organize it. The Jews had no one to do that. Don’t, he cautioned, blame the victims.

6. Pastor Heinrich Grüber

Pastor Heinrich Grüber was the only non-Jewish German to testify at the trial. He had met with Eichmann many times during the war to negotiate on behalf of Jewish converts in his congregation. He found Eichmann to be like a “block of marble.” At the end of his testimony, paraphrasing the words of the Hebrew Prophets, he expressed the hope that the Germans’ sin would be forgiven by a forgiving people. People in the courtroom wept. Israelis showered him with cards and letters. Many believed his words marked the beginning of the process of “redemption.”

The email added, “The Museum is America’s national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history, and serves as this country’s memorial to the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust.” Sounds pretty essential to me!

No Accord in Budget Talks as Policy Fight Hampers Deal [NYT]

• Ahmadinejad sacked his foreign minister and replaced him with the head of Iran’s nuclear energy agency, in a sign that the president has successfully consolidated power. [Laura Rozen]

• Bernard Madoff is likely not eligible for a furlough to attend the funeral of his son, who killed himself over the weekend. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Vox Tablet contributor Hugh Levinson has a podcast about Safed, a northern Israeli town with a fascinating spiritual past. [BBC]

• Hitch on Kissinger. Always a good time. [Slate]

• Classic headline: “Suspected Israeli Neo-Nazi Arrested in Kyrgyzstan.” It’s like I always say, those crazy Kyrgyz! [Haaretz]

Somebody was listening in on that argument you were having with your uncle about Israel (h/t Goldblog).

Hitler, Jesus Art in Alleged Museum Shooter’s Home [AP]
FBI Seized Hollow-Point Bullets from Supremacist’s Arundel Home [Baltimore Sun]

Earlier: James von Brunn, in His Own Words

The AP is also reporting that an official with the union representing the guards says he pushed for bulletproof vests after a man made threatening remarks to guards there several years ago. The wire service notes that von Brunn, a former Navy officer, went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., last month to complain about increased minority enrollment at the school. The museum, meantime, was to host the premiere of a new play on Wednesday, the day of the shooting, called Anne & Emmett, which imagines a conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both teenaged victims of racism. “I went from opening-night jitters to murder at the museum,” playwright Janet Langhart Cohen told the Washington Post. “It was like a bad dream: A white racist killed a black man at a Jewish shrine.” The play will go on tonight at George Washington University.

DC Museum Reopens After Fatal Shooting [AP via Yahoo!]
Slain Security Guard Remembered as “Teddy Bear” [AP via Yahoo!]
Guards Who Stopped Von Brunn Were Retired Cop, Ex-Marine [WP]
Officials Wanted Vests for Security Guards [AP via Yahoo!]
Attack Underscores Play’s Message [WP]

But acting as if all anti-Semites are basically the same person, just slight variations on a theme, actually underestimates the power of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the power of this pathology lies in its ability to be pressed into service by all kinds of men and women, including people who would never speak to one another. Some anti-Semites are real dangers; others are misguided obsessives; others are just sad sacks. To ignore their diversity is to miss the historical significance of anti-Jewish bigotry.

Since January I have been working on a long investigation for Tablet (to run later this month) of the Holocaust denial movement, of which von Brunn is reported to be a proud member. But as I have seen close-up, it is so riven by internal divisions that it is hardly a “movement” at all. For example, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, is nothing like von Brunn, from what I can tell of news reports describing the alleged D.C. shooter. Weber does not believe in race-mixing, thinks Jews are almost ineluctably disloyal to the countries in which they live, and has worked with some of the worst racists in America. But his temperament is not that of the paranoiac. Rather, he is something of a history buff gone wrong, an obsessive whose deep intelligence collects facts but can’t place them in any kind of context. The Jews fascinate him in an unhealthy way, but he doesn’t attribute to Jews magical powers to plan vast conspiracies and keep them secret. What’s more, in my interviews with him, Weber conceded to me that there may in fact have been gas chambers; he also wrote an article, discussed intelligently in the Forward last January, criticizing several famous Holocaust deniers for being stuck in the past. (Weber would prefer to stop talking about gas chambers and focus instead on the threat of Zionist influence on American foreign policy.) Many of his beliefs are loathsome and wrong, but Weber is not delusional and he is not violent. He is more comfortable with books than with guns.

For many years Weber was closely allied with Bradley Smith, the founder of a one-man shop called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Like Weber, Smith would never encourage violence, and he too sees himself as something of a litterateur. But while Weber has a master’s degree in history and is widely read, Smith is almost gleeful about his anti-intellectualism. Before becoming active in questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers, Smith was active in the libertarian movement, and he was drawn to Holocaust denial because he believed questioning of the Holocaust was a taboo worth smashing. Smith sees himself as a free-speech zealot whose great contribution is to ask a question—were there gas chambers?—that most of us are too afraid to ask. And for what it’s worth, Smith has no problem with race-mixing: he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife.

Smith, in turn, has no use for Willis Carto, who lost control of the Institute for Historical Review in a lawsuit in the early 1990s and went on to found The Barnes Review, perhaps the strangest publication I have ever read. Its purpose seems to be extreme historical revisionism, including Holocaust denial but also the defenses of the indefensible (Charles Lindbergh, Rudolf Hess) and a bizarre white man’s pseudo-populism (“Rediscovering the Forgotten White Ancestors Of Many American Indians”). Carto is where anti-Semitism and racism intersect with a mystical, LaRouche-like detachment from reality.

And then there are the outright Nazi sympathizers or Klansman types, those who may share elements of other, more cerebral forms of anti-Semitism but also have a visceral sense that the Jews are vermin. In the writings of James K. Warner, for example, one sees none of Weber’s almost admiring sense of the Jews as a cohesive people, nor any of Smith’s relish for testing the limits of free expression. In fact, reading Warner’s attack on Weber as a Mossad agent, alongside his theories about Scientologists and the CIA, one sees exactly the kind of undifferentiated, enraged stupidity that I imagine von Brunn possesses. It’s a zealotry far different from what I have found in Bradley Smith or Mark Weber.

It is tempting, of course, to say, “So what?” The world would be better off without any of it—the racial fear-mongering of Weber, the provocations of Smith, the trashy publications of Carto, the deranged bile of Warner—so why bother to waste too much effort in classification? First, we should be more sophisticated in our thinking; let’s do better than those who pervert truth for a living. Second, it’s smart and pragmatic to try to tell the maniacs from the misguided, the merely stupid, and those just seeking attention. It’s good policing, in other words.

Third, while von Brunn sounds mentally ill in a very obvious way, many anti-Semites and bigots have become what they are by exaggerating in themselves certain traits that are in all of us. Oddly, it would be comforting to imagine that von Brunn’s fellow anti-Semites are all like him, homicidal and deranged. At least we would know what we’re dealing with—and, better yet, we don’t have worry that we or anyone we know could ever be like that.

Finally, we need to recognize the multifarious nature of anti-Semitism. It is different from other bigotries—not worse or more harmful, just different, in historically significant ways. People who hate blacks or Hispanics don’t accuse them of plotting world conspiracies or controlling the Federal Reserve; nobody has accused Mormons of plotting to overthrow capitalism. But Jews are conceived as both money-hungry usurers and anti-American communists; as preening materialists and dirty, schnorring paupers; as genetically inferior but able to control the world through secret cabals. As Sartre famously remarked, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. Anti-Semitism is not simple, for if it were, it would not be so useful.

Mark Oppenheimer, a Tablet contributing editor,is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

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]

Security Guard Killed at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum [WP]