Bystander Effect
This review was published for Critics at Large.
Ken Burns’s newest documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, is the most timely, dark, and politically charged of his career. It takes as its subject the restrictionist policies of the United States toward immigrants in the decades leading up to the Second World War, and the country’s refusal to provide safe harbor for scores of refugees who sought asylum from Nazi extermination. Well aware of the hatred and persecution Jews were suffering at the hands of Hitler, the federal government—and the public-at-large—remained opposed to any exceptions to the quota system that had effectively closed America’s borders since the 1920s.
Not until late into the war did the U.S. initiate a coordinated effort to rescue people trapped in Europe. By then, almost all the victims of the Shoah had been murdered. Burns doesn’t set out make a complete study of the event—this isn't the definitive account. But with trademark craftsmanship and respect, he sheds light on an overlooked episode of the country and the genocide. The three episodes leave you enlightened, distraught, and deeply anxious.
I.
Over the course of thirty-five pictures, Burns has achieved elevated stature as a chronicler of American history. His audience at PBS consists of a distinctly middle-brow type—educated, liberal, critical of the country yet convinced of the inherent goodness of its project. It’s a viewership who believe that the arc of the United States—not just the universe—bends toward justice, that the nation can bring about a more perfect union if only it can recover its founding ideals (which are read as endorsements of progressive politics).
In this, they echo the views of Burns himself. At 69, the New Hampshire native has maintained an almost willfully naive belief in the American Dream, precious (one might say embarrassing) for a man of his years. His vision of our shared narrative—etched onto the collective consciousness through films like The Brooklyn Bridge (1981), Lewis and Clark (1997), and The National Parks (2009)—is essentially a liberal’s guide to American exceptionalism.
Born of the optimistic side of the Civil Rights movement (the Dr. King of 1963, not 1968), this story basically holds that while America has had troubling, even wicked, episodes, they’ve been overcome to yield a better future. Historian Matt Karp describes it aptly in Harper’s:
It preaches a kind of baseline optimism, expressed in complex accounts of contested and contingent events that ultimately lead to progress. In lesser hands, the liberal narrative can slide toward complacency—or worse, the construction of an American story in which each act of brutality (colonization, slavery, Jim Crow) somehow only sets the stage for the triumphant advance to come (nationhood, emancipation, civil rights).
Such a construct is under assault today from two sides: the fascist nightmare of the Trumpian right, in which America was born perfect (read, white Christian) and has gotten better ever since; and its doppelgänger on the woke left, in which America was conceived in racial sin, about which we’ve done little and from which we can never escape. Though not morally equivalent, both challenge the assumptions of the dominant liberal discourse (while refusing more broad-minded alternatives like Colin Woodard’s American Nations thesis).
Opposed to the growing influence of these contenders, Burns’s documentaries are a bulwark of whiggish history for the upper class. After all, what could be wrong with a five-part, ten-hour documentary on PBS, that most venerable of institutions? The credibility and authority of these pictures derive from the director’s patented (and much imitated) aesthetic: poetic closeups of photographs; stentorian narration of august scripts; notable actors voicing the departed; and the imprimatur of handsomely filmed contributors. Burns earns his influence by how his films feel as much as by what they say—the romantic mystique they exude that seduces your senses and your reason.
And it’s this romanticism that makes them so dangerous. His schoolboy infatuation with the country frequently gets the better of him, the earnest innocence often turning (as in his 1994 film Baseball) maudlin and bathetic. He’s said that critics take issue with his movies for their lack of irony. But that’s not the problem—the problem is their bias. As historian Timothy Snyder puts it, every nation develops a myth about itself that it teaches as historical fact. Most people living in this version of Plato’s cave never escape. At his worst, Burns is one of them. His commitment to American grandeur easily leads to whitewashed, if comforting, portrayals of the past.
Take, for example, the series that made him a household name (and about which I’ve written before): The Civil War (1990). Thanks in large part to the prominence it gives to novelist and Confederate sympathizer Shelby Foote, the film traffics in Lost Cause tropes, omits Reconstruction, and indulges a nostalgic tone that re-describes what was an existential conflict between vastly different societies into a tragic story of the fracturing of the white American family (one in which Black folks play little part).
The war, the documentary argues, was a catastrophic success—not because it freed 4 million souls from bondage, but because it resulted (illogically) in a unified nation on its way to greatness. In fact, the series was so erroneous that Columbia University’s Eric Foner—dean of Civil War historians and one of the many scholars Burns didn’t interview—put together a volume of critical essays in response. Yet to this day, the director sticks to his discredited thesis: that the war was caused by a blundering generation’s failure to compromise (rather than the anti-slavery movement’s success at changing northern opinion).
The Civil War is the most egregious example of Burns’s temperamental defect, but hardly the only.1 The best films of his oeuvre, on the other hand, have emerged from topics that defy his sentimental tendencies and elicit the very irony he combats. The Tenth Inning, his 2010 epilogue to Baseball, dropped the mawkish tone and mysticism of the original as it peered into the sport’s doping scandal (while still recreating the drama of the Yankees’ dynasty and Red Sox’ glory). The Central Park Five (2012), which he made with his daughter, combines a hip street vibe with moral outrage at criminal injustice. For once, his point of view is from the margins. And in 2017’s The Vietnam War (which my late friend Kevin Courrier reviewed), he takes you on an overwhelming emotional exploration of the conflict—even as he refuses, astoundingly, to render a verdict on its moral rectitude.
II.
With his latest picture, though, Burns plumbs the depths of human wickedness—and American shame—as never before. Just when you think you can’t possibly learn something knew about the Holocaust, this three-part series (co-directed by Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) proves otherwise. It’s chief contribution is to connect the domestic politics of the United States in the 1930s and ‘40s to Europe’s—to demonstrate how the xenophobia and anti-semitism of America allowed, in part, for the murder of some 6 million men, women, and children. Such bigotry, far from an aberration, goes to the core of our national character. Historian Peter Hayes says it at the outset:
I think Americans have a very hard time deciding what kind of country they want to have. We all tend to think of the United States as this country with the Statue of Liberty poem, “Give me your tired, your poor.” But in fact excluding people—shutting them out—has been as American as apple pie.
For most of its history since 1776, the film relates, the U.S. had open borders—migrant workers came and went freely. Hayes observes that when his Irish patriarch arrived in Boston in 1860, he filled out a simple landing card and was on his way. Most newcomers were from northern and western Europe until that time. After the Civil War, however, the exodus shifted to the south and east of the continent, as cheap American wheat (and the Panic of 1873) undercut the market and drove farmers into indigence. Between 1870 and 1914, 25 million people arrived from countries like Italy, Poland, and Russia, driven by economic and political insecurity. Among them were 2 million Jews.
The first episode traces the backlash to this flood of arrivals. Prejudice against Blacks, Catholics, and Jews pervaded society in the Gilded Age—from Southern good ole’ boys to Yankee WASPs. Burns treats the rise of eugenics, germ theory, and social darwinism as the intellectual cover for state-mandated sterilization and fear of demographic contagion. This nativist wave crested with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which established strict quotas, required immigrants to obtain entry visas, and made no exception for refugees. The film draws attention to how America’s destruction and confinement of Native nations, along with its enslavement of Africans, inspired a failed Viennese art student named Adolf Hitler and his band of thugs—the 1935 Nuremberg Laws were explicitly modeled on Jim Crow. Historian Timothy Snyder describes this fellow feeling:
The Nazis saw us as a model of how racial superiority is supposed to work—the superior race exterminates the lower. If anything, Hitler’s attitude toward the U.S. before the war was one of admiration.
Burns underscores that everyday Americans—not just their government—had information about Nazi policies from the start. Over three-thousand stories of the crackdown in Germany ran in American papers in 1933 alone. Yet public opinion remained opposed to asylum seekers in general, and Jews in particular. The far right surged at home, led by demagogues like Fr. Charles Coughlin, William Dudley Pelley, and Charles Lindbergh.
The film shows just how much the famed aviator and his America First movement rivaled Franklin Roosevelt for influence. As Snyder says, FDR was a globalist presiding over an isolationist society.2 Tens of thousands of desperate people applied for refuge in the United States to escape the German vise, their wait times growing to three years thanks to Johnson-Reed. Yet even after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Congress refused Roosevelt’s request to increase the quotas—in fact, it preferred to eliminate immigration completely.
Against this torrent of intolerance, Burns showcases the everyday Americans who came to the aid of Nazi targets. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the Reformed Free Synagogue in Manhattan organized relief efforts and held mass rallies in Madison Square Garden (so did, however, the fascist German American Bund). As one country after another fell to the Wehrmacht in 1939 and ‘40, Jewish organizations like the National Refugee Service and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society coordinated loans, procured tickets, and landed jobs for thousands of asylum seekers. They worked alongside the YMCA, the Unitarian Service Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee. In 1940, journalist Varian Fry founded the Emergency Rescue Committee with the support of the First Lady. Along with the American vice consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham, he rescued some two thousand people from Vichy France—until Secretary of State Cordell Hull put a stop to it.
III.
The situation worsened drastically, however, with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In a span of weeks, millions of Jews living in Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Russia proper fell under the German jackboot. The series puts these regions at the center of the narrative, thanks no doubt to the contributions of Snyder. In his seminal works Bloodlands (2010) and Black Earth (2015), the Yale scholar gives prominence to the Nazis’ obsession with the east. The Führer imagined the earth as a cramped space of limited resources, with races locked in an eternal struggle for survival.3
His vision, such as it was, involved a war in the east at once colonial and anti-colonial—colonial in that the Germans would subjugate the Slavs, anti-colonial in that they would overcome the Jews (whom he fantasized leading a world order both capitalist and communist). Just as white Americans had raised their standard of living through territorial conquest and ethnic cleansing, so too the Germans would win Lebensraum for themselves by invading the U.S.S.R. The plan had four parts:
First, a lightning victory would destroy the Soviet state.
Then, some 30 million people were to be starved in a “Hunger Plan” (inspired by Stalin’s famine in Ukraine).
Jews, thirdly, were to be removed from the continent. Survivors would be killed or enslaved.
Finally, the Nazi regime would raze all cities and industrial centers to the ground and settle the lands with Germans.
As the late Tony Judt argued, there was nothing original in Hitler’s proposals—empires have carried out programs of colonization and genocide for centuries. The novelty lay in applying them to Europeans, in their own homes. With Operation Barbarossa, this nightmare began to take shape. Burns doesn’t directly address the debate around the origins of the Holocaust—the “functionalist” vs. “intentionalist” theses. But the film suggests a combination of both. The elimination of the Jews from their midst was the animating principle of Nazi ideology from the beginning, Hayes says. By expanding eastward, however, the Germans ensured they’d absorb millions of such people into the Reich. What to do?
Thousands of Poles had already been shot over the previous two years by the Nazis and Soviets, the country’s Jews herded into ghettoes. But the occupation there at least had some semblance of order. In contrast, Hitler considered the Soviet republics to be lawless lands presenting no juridical barriers to his barbarism. Within days of the June invasion, the film states, Hermann Göring asked SS leader Reinhard Heydrich for an overall “solution” to the Jewish question. Because of Britain’s control of the sea, the original plan (from May) to deport Jews to Madagascar was scrapped. Similar ideas of containing them in a colony inside Poland or Siberia were also deemed impractical.
Mass killings began at the same time, with Einsatzgruppen, gangs of locals, and German order police shooting tens of thousands of Jews in places like Babi Yar. Over the coming months, some 2 million would be massacred. Burns tends to this event with great care, guided by writer Daniel Mendelsohn, whose 2006 memoir The Lost chronicles the tragic fate of his relatives in the east. His uncle, Shmiel, and a cousin were hidden by a schoolteacher, while Smiel’s eldest daughter joined a band of partisans in the forest. All were eventually discovered and shot. Mendelsohn bemoans the collective loss of their memory and that of everyone who died in the “Shoah by bullets.”
In his books, Snyder argues that the gassing of the rest of Europe’s Jews was a perverse consolation prize for the Nazis once they realized—with the shocking Soviet counter-offensive in December 1941—that they couldn’t win the war, nor carry out the full extent of their program. But the film claims otherwise: that the Final Solution was decided between September and October of that year, as experiments with mobile gassing vans took place. Here it stands in agreement with historian Christopher Browning. (Curiously, though, Browning was not interviewed, nor Nazi experts Richard Evans and Ian Kershaw.)
Browning explains the drive towards industrialized killing as the result of Germany’s premature euphoria the previous summer, when its blitzkrieg captured or destroyed entire Soviet divisions. (Some 3.5 million Soviet prisoners would be starved or shot over the ensuing years, in a modified version of the Hunger Plan.) Drunk on the prospect of victory—especially once they took Kyiv and encircled Leningrad that October—the Nazi high command lurched from elimination to extinction. German Jews began to be deported to the east. The building of the first death camps started on November 1. Chelmno commenced operations a month later.
The film also makes clear that Hitler did not opt to murder the Jews in revenge over America’s entry into the war (as the deluded blogger Michael Tracey has been arguing in recent days). The infamous Wannsee Conference (dramatized to chilling effect in the 2001 film Conspiracy) had been scheduled to occur just two days after the surprise attack on Hawaii. And when it finally took place on January 20, 1942, it merely coordinated plans that had been hatched the previous fall. Far from enraging him, Pearl Harbor delighted the Führer, who’d pressured Japan to attack so as to tie down the U.S. in the Pacific. Weakened by Jews, Blacks, and love of lucre—and facing an invincible foe—the Americans would be unable to fight on two fronts.
IV.
He was wrong, of course. But three-quarters of his victims were murdered before a single G.I. set foot in Europe—all in a span of just twenty months. Ninety-percent were killed in the northeast quadrant of the continent, out of reach by Allied aircraft until 1944 (the series takes an agnostic view on whether the Allies should’ve bombed Auschwitz at that point). The film’s contributors stress that the U.S. could’ve easily publicized information about the killings, organized resistance, and launched rescue operations. For almost a year and half after learning of Hitler’s plan, though, the government sat on its hands—even longer since reports of atrocities first appeared in newspapers during the spring of ‘42.
Much of this negligence was due to the machinations of the State Department. Under Hull and Assistant Secretary Breckenridge Long, it quashed reports of Nazi intentions and lied to prevent agitation on the subject. Yet blame went all around. The administration believed any relief operation would detract from the war effort, and the virulence of American bigotry cowed FDR from giving even the appearance of sympathy for Jews. Far from fighting to stop the genocide, military personnel were kept in the dark about it, lest the knowledge somehow damage morale. And even as they waged war against the racist German regime (in segregated units, no less), Roosevelt interred their own Japanese American countrymen in camps. Daniel Greene sums up the brutal truth to Burns:
We do rally as a nation to defeat fascism. We just don’t rally as a nation to rescue the victims of fascism.
It wasn’t until January of ‘44 that Roosevelt, at the urging of his Hyde Park neighbor and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, created the War Refugee Board—the only government agency instituted to save Jews by any Allied nation. Led by John Pehle of Treasury, it engaged in myriad clandestine operations that bore fruit. Its greatest success came in Hungary, where some 120,000 Jews were rescued through a coordinated international campaign that involved the military, the press, and foreign envoys like Swedish attache Raoul Wallenberg. Almost all the major rescuers in the Holocaust, Snyder points out, were diplomats. Jews living in places where the state provided a sovereign buffer between them and the German occupiers had higher rates of survival. Bureaucracy enabled the Nazis’ plan. It also thwarted them. A piece of paper from a routine functionary meant the difference between life and death.
Given the state’s capacity to obstruct the machinery of death, America’s refusal to help—an evil all ours—is more than a blot on our national record. It’s an oil spill. The U.S. welcomed more refugees from Hitler’s Europe than any single country—some 225,000—and saved thousands of others from the grave. But the fact is that in the two decades leading up to the war, it could’ve taken in more people by orders of magnitude. As Deborah Lipstadt (current U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Anti-Semitism and subject of the 2016 drama Denial) tells Burns, the time to stop a genocide is before it happens. Our irresponsibility “is not one of the things that will go down in the long annals of good things America did,” she says. “It goes in a different book.” Indeed, scholar Nell Irvin Painter reminds us (as images of the Klan, MLK’s assassination, and Civil Rights riots flash before our eyes) that white supremacy and anti-semitism form a major current of American history:
The stream is always there. And we should not be shocked. We should not think, ‘This is not America.’ It is.
V.
The failure of the U.S. to mitigate the humanitarian disaster becomes all the more unconscionable when you hear the stories of survivors. Burns selects five eye witnesses to history’s greatest crime, who represent distinct types of victim. Sol Messinger hailed from Berlin and was a passenger on the ocean liner St. Louis in May of 1939. Along with his family and nine-hundred other refugees on board, he was denied entry into the States (and several additional countries) and was forced to return to Europe. On the other hand, Susan and Joseph Hilsenrath (brother and sister from Bad Kreuznach in Germany) got sponsored to come to America. His tearful description of seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time—after years of fleeing Nazi goons—will move even the most hardened cynic.
Günther “Guy” Stern grew up in Hildesheim to a cultured, literary family. After Brown Shirts assaulted his father, he was sent to relatives in the States in the fall of 1937 with the help of a merciful American consul. From there, he hoped to secure papers for his parents and siblings. But no one would hear his plea. In an astonishing reversal of fortunes, he returned to Europe as an Army intelligence officer and interrogator, and in that capacity was present at the liberation of Buchenwald. As he puts it, he fought two wars against the Nazis: America’s and his own.
But the most harrowing testimony belongs to Eva Geiringer. A native of Vienna, she watched in terror as her neighbors greeted the arrival of the Germans with ecstasy. Her family managed to get to Holland, where they lived on the same block as Anne Frank. Like the Geiringers, the Franks had applied for visas to the United States. None came. Instead, they were all deported to Auschwitz. Her account of survival sends you reeling, her soft voice and gentle countenance contrasting with the inky images of the camp. When she describes climbing into a bunk with her sick mother to huddle against the cold, it shatters you.
Even after the camps were discovered and stories like Eva’s made public, however, a quarter of a million Jews languished without a home for years—as late as 1952. When asked whether the U.S. should allow in more refugees than it had before the war, only five percent of Americans said yes, and more than a third said the number should be fewer. The quotas continued to be enforced until 1965, when Lyndon Johnson signed a new immigration law that abolished them. Burns rightly celebrates the millions of newcomers who’ve journeyed to these shores since. But as he points out, that open hand was never extended to migrants from the Americas, nor to refugees.
And he omits more damning facts: Deportations of undocumented workers have trended upward since the Reagan administration, including over 3 million under Barack Obama. Even before Donald Trump instituted a ban on Muslim emigrants and his cruel family-separation policy, the United States let in a pitifully low number of aslyum seekers—fewer than 100,000 on average each year. Through the entirety of the Syrian war—during which some 5 million souls fled the country—America welcomed only 18,007 of them inside our borders. This amounts to less than half the number of Canada, and a drop in the bucket compared to Germany.
Likewise, the film’s treatment of the Nuremberg Trials and other tribunals that brought Nazis to justice is too narrow. Burns secures an interview with the American lawyer Benjamin Ferencz and highlights his prosecution of twenty-two commanders of the Einsatzgruppen. While he was successful, the series leaves out some inconvenient truths: That most perpetrators of the Holocaust (like the leaders of the Confederacy) died in their beds. That the U.S. is one of just four countries to declare that it never intends to become a party to the International Criminal Court, which Ferencz helped create. And that Ferencz himself has argued that the George W. Bush administration committed war crimes in Iraq. This kind of American exceptionalism Burns is reluctant to discuss.
VI.
The sheer fact that survivors like Messinger, Stern, and Geiringer are still with us, and in good health, unnerves you. A full human lifetime has barely passed since the Holocaust. At this moment, however, the nations of the world are again falling to fascism—Italy, Brazil, even Sweden. It’s here that we can take Burns in for a tougher critique. The series provides some context for the rise of the Nazis: humiliation from defeat in the Great War, the instability of Weimar, and the collapse of the Depression. It points out that Hitler was offered the chancellorship by conservative elites as a way to crush the left (which he promptly did). Snyder rings the tocsin:
The people who brought Hitler to power were conscious and aware and desirous of doing away with democracy.
Burns fails, however, to explain fascism as a political ideology and psychological disposition—what its adherents say and do. He focuses on Hitler’s specific beliefs, which are essential, but doesn’t draw out the parallels between his movement and similar ones, like Mussolini’s. This oversight is conspicuous, since the series wants us to recognize the parallels between the political dynamics of the 1930s and now. Any honest observer can see them, but lots of people refuse because today’s far right doesn’t look, talk, or act exactly like the Nazis. An expansive taxonomy of its elements, like Robert O. Paxton’s—would’ve sealed Burns’s argument. At one point, he includes an excerpt from a letter by a G.I. telling his father that it’s not enough to defeat far-right regimes—their philosophy itself has to be eradicated. How can we do that if we aren’t taught what it is?4
Any successful film about the Holocaust leaves you with emotions you can’t resolve. Burns’s picture is no different—it gets under your skin, haunts your mind, and robs you of sleep. He takes you to the edge of the abyss, thanks in large part to the staccato strings that play on the soundtrack like a horror movie. Yet the film, in the end, lacks the requisite righteous anger, and he pulls back from contemplating the enormity of 6 million murdered Jews—not to mention the 6 to 8 million others killed by Nazi policies.5 Whether this is to prevent emotional numbing (an understandable concern) I’m unsure. Nevertheless, as the series progresses with its weighty inevitability, you feel a gnawing sense of the familiar.
History does not repeat itself, the saying goes, but it does rhyme. Godwin’s Law not withstanding, the siren songs of the 1930s and our own time rhyme too well. The conspiracy theories of Lindbergh more than echo ours, the insidious arguments of America First matched by today’s apologists for Putin and his rape of Ukraine. Gov. DeSantis’s recent dumping of refugees onto the streets was a page right out of the fascist playbook. Mendelsohn reminds us that the conventions of civilized behavior are fragile. The perpetrators of Nazi depravity were ordinary men and women, he insists, no different from us:
You look at your neighbors, the people at the dry cleaners, the waiters in the restaurant. That’s who these people were. Don’t kid yourself.
The final episode ends with an explosive montage: shots of Charlottesville, the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, and January 6 cascading together in a deluge of fear. Trump’s face never appears, but his voice—mixed as a demonic cacophony—hangs ominously in the air. The Holocaust is a story of the recent past, the sequence suggests, and warns of a possible future. Snyder in particular emphasizes this point, as the impending climate catastrophe reopens the door to the eco-scarcity paranoia at the root of Hitler’s hellscape. The scholar puts it thus:
If we’re going to be a country in the future, then we have to have a view of our own history which allows us to see what we were. Then we can become something different. And we have to become something different if we’re going to make it.
That’s a tall order, based on what Burns reveals. For once, he finds no silver lining, and refuses cheap succor. “We have seen the nadir of human behavior,” Stern says, “and we have no guarantee it won’t recur.” After the screen faded black, I lay in bed a long time, staring into the dark.
The same sentimentality undermines 2007’s The War, where he peddles nostalgic notions of the “Greatest Generation” and its “Good War,” popularized by Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg in the previous decade. And it makes for a noticeable flaw in The Vietnam War. As my late friend Kevin Courrier wrote, upon viewing it you find yourself “so emotionally devastated by the experience that you won't find it easy to sum up its impact.”
Yet bookending that series are dubious claims that the U.S. began its involvement in Vietnam “in good faith,” and (more shockingly) that the war’s rectitude is still an open question. The first of these might be up for debate, but the second? Burns puts contrasting judgments of the conflagration side-by-side in a strained attempt at evenhandedness. But that’s like airing competing assertions about climate change—1) it’s real and catastrophic vs. 2) it’s sensationalized and trivial—and pretending they enjoy equal weight in the scientific community.
Fortunately, the first-person accounts of participants keep these films tethered to the ground. In The War, this effect comes through the philosophical erudition and realist (even jaundiced) perspective of Paul Fussell and Sam Hynes—veterans and scholars of the literature of war. Likewise, The Vietnam War is anchored by gut-wrenching interviews with subjects on both sides of the conflict, including soldier/writers Karl Marlantes, Tim O’Brien, and Bảo Ninh.
Lindbergh’s wild conspiracy theories about attempts to lure the U.S. into another world war met a ready audience. American companies did business with Hitler’s regime, and Hollywood censored itself to prevent any mention of the Nazis from appearing onscreen. Others denounced the President’s “Jew Deal” and tagged him “Frank D. Rosenfeld” because of the many Jews he placed in his administration (even more than Ulysses Grant). When FDR called for a “quarantine” to stop the march of fascism abroad, his opponents demanded his impeachment.
Jews were not a race but a subhuman pestilence that sapped the strength of every nation in which they lived. “Hitler says Jews are responsible for any idea that allows us to see ourselves as people,” Snyder tells Burns, “rather than members of a race.” Concepts like God, conscience, and human rights were—according to the dictator—alien ideas with which Jews had infected the world.
I’ve no idea, but Burns’s neglect here might have something to do with the perspective of Lipstadt. The choice of her as a contributor is noteworthy. She’s the author of major works on the Holocaust and became part of a cause célèbre in 1996 after the British anti-semite and confabulist David Irving sued her for libel. She ascribes to a school of thought known as “eternalism,” which holds that the destruction of the Jews between 1933 and 1945 was a singular catastrophe that flowed from the unique, universal, immutable prejudice that is anti-semitism.
As Mari Cohen writes in Jewish Currents, Lipstadt’s described anti-Jewish hatred as a virus or infection, passed down through the ages. In using such biological metaphors, eternalists echo the arguments of some opponents of anti-black racism, who assert (as in The 1619 Project) that bigotry against people of color is part of America’s “DNA.” Anti-semitism and Negrophobia are a kind metaphysical reality here, a God-like essence that stands outside of—and determines—human history. Such a view resists attempts to draw resemblances between the murder of the Jews and other genocides—between the Nazis’ chosen enemy and the demonization of groups by similar movements. Burns tries to stay neutral on this score, but that becomes hard when, at the end of the series, he makes explicit comparisons between 20th-century fascism and our own.
Critics of eternalists (who call themselves “contextualists”) respond that racism of any ilk is an epiphenomenon within history, rising and falling over time due to various factors: psychological, economic, political, etc. The nationalist narratives of eternalists “are designed to freeze history,” writes historian James Oakes in Catalyst, “tracing virtually unbroken lineages back through centuries, even millennia, often through racial or quasi-racial conceptions of a folk heritage.” Nationalism of any sort, he continues, “is always an interpretation of history, and it is always a distorted interpretation.”
Contextualists argue that rhetorical devices that conflate racism with Original Sin (aside from being philosophically dubious) “exceptionalize” anti-Jewish hatred. This impedes solidarity with other racialized groups, they insist, and pushes Jews toward defensive, reactionary, and militaristic attitudes. To wit, Lipstadt regards calls for Israel to change from being a Jewish state based on discrimination, to a bi-national one based on equality, as tantamount to anti-semitism. Her position, common for decades among liberal Zionists, has become increasingly untenable over the last twenty years as the country’s hardened its treatment of Palestinians.
Her eternalist views have also led her to draw equivalences between anti-semitism on the right with that on the left—not just in the past, but today. This has resulted in the kind of labored “both-sides-ism” that Burns often succumbs to. When testifying in the aftermath of the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, for example, she took pains to point out the anti-semitism of Karl Marx. And during the January 6 insurrection—led by the white supremacist Proud Boys—she tweeted that there “is antisemitism on the left, for sure, but it [sic] there on the right too.”
While true on their face, such statements elide the reality that, once again, the clear and present danger to Jews and other vulnerable groups comes from the right—as evidenced by the fact that Trump equivocated in his response to Charlottesville, welcomed the support of the Proud Boys, and left Lipstadt’s post empty for almost his entire tenure. Activist Morriah Kaplan puts the matter bluntly to Cohen: “To fight antisemitism as envoy, you can’t just take a scattershot approach. You actually need to focus. And that requires being able to say, ‘the threat of X is greater than Y.’”
Dara Horn at The Atlantic is worth a read on this point.
Wow, this post was a voyage! Thanks for writing it, and I'm glad I devoted the time to read every word.