Скачать или смотреть EDWARD LINENTHAL: U.S. Holocaust Museum (its creation: politics, controversies)

EDWARD LINENTHAL
This interview, unseen until now like all of those posted at this youtube channel, was conducted in 2010, at his home.

Professor Linenthal is today retired from the Indiana University history department. His interests included religious and American studies. He was for a time the editor-in-chief of the American History Journal. He has written or edited a number of books but my interest in professor Linenthal was his book PRESERVING MEMORY: THE STRUGGLE TO CREATE AMERICA’S HOLOCAUST MUSEUM, which addressed the behind-the-scenes issues – controversially political and otherwise – in creating Washington D.C.’s prominent United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, which adjoins the national mall.

In this interview, professor Linenthal addresses:

the origins of his investigation into the creation of the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum; “The book is really a biography of the most celebrated – in some ways controversial – significant museums in American history. How does the Holocaust belong as an American memory?” “Almost no Jewish organizations” would give Linenthal grant money to do his research; some people felt such a Holocaust museum belonged in Europe, not America; some people felt it didn’t celebrate the American Jewish community but focused on “dying Jews”; the creation of the U.S.-sponsored museum would officially recognize the Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel’s influence on the creation of the museum (“The Jewish core of the Holocaust would be sacred”); “This is not a secular institution. It is a sacred institution. It is first and foremost a symbolic burial place for those that went up in ashes”; “It’s a place where the memory of the Holocaust … with the center of it being the Jewish genocide and the Holocaust was sacred. Any dilution of that was seen as a transgression of Holocaust memory.”

“Membership on the Holocaust Memorial Council was very, very controversial”; “The issue of the relationship between Jews and other Holocaust victims ran throughout the entire project”; “If the phrase ‘Never again’ means anything, why in the Hell have there been so many genocides since then?”

“One of the reasons that the President’s Commission [to create the Holocaust Museum] was formed – not the only one – was that the Carter administration had a very problematic relationship with the state of Israel”; “Some people thought that the museum – when it came to be decided that it would be in Washington adjacent to the Washington Mall … that it was a a kind of sop to the state of Israel, a sop to the American Jewish community, on the part of the Carter administration. I think that’s overly cynical. I think it’s also naïve not to think that the politics of memory plays a role in this.”

“Why in the American Jewish community did the Holocaust become so central?”; the 1967 Israeli war is when “the Holocaust moved to the center of American Jewish identity”; the Holocaust (and Israel) as a story of “destruction to redemption”;

Holocaust survivors “granted sacred status” and interest in the Holocaust became “a secular religiosity of American Jews”; the commerciality of the Holocaust (“There’s no business like Shoah business”);

How does one define the ‘Holocaust’, per six million Jewish deaths and five million non-Jewish deaths under the Nazis?; Some Eastern European groups wanted to acquire some of the Holocaust “moral capital.”

“One of the more controversial elements in the development of the museum was whether or not to include the Armenian genocide” (“Some of the Armenian representation in the museum was taken out”); “There were some American Jews hired by the Turks, and some Israeli groups, who were willing to support [Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide] … There were American Jews – politicians – who supported the museum in Washington who would not support Bob Dole’s move for an Armenian Day of Remembrance in Congress. I find this very disheartening.”

No representation in the Holocaust museum about Jewish “capos” and Jewish Councils in Europe that collaborated with the Nazis, etc.