Even the Holocaust Museums have an angle:
TAXPAYERS' HOLOCAUST MUSEUM:
The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC gets more federal money than the nearby Kennedy Center. The funding first appears in President Clinton's annual budget request, in the same category as funding for the Smithsonian Institution, Kennedy Center, National Gallery of Art and National Endowments for Arts and Humanities, meaning it's part of the "arts" budget.
It then goes to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies.
Here are the appropriations for the Holocaust Museum and other agencies:
FY 1997: Holocaust Museum $31,272,000 Kennedy Center $19,875,000 Nat'l Gallery of art $59,841,000
FY 1996: Holocaust Museum $28,707,000 Kennedy Center $19,306,000 Nat'l Gallery of art $58,841,000
FY 1995: Holocaust Museum $26,609,000 Kennedy Center $19,306,000 Nat'l Gallery of art $59,918,000
So if you think that the upkeep of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is privately funded, think again. Here is the phone # for the House Subcommittee in case you want to verify these numbers: (202) 225-3081.
Since the Holocaust has been made into a place for predominately Jewish victims, it means the American taxpayer is footing the bill for a religious shrine.
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- July 31, 1998 Museum of Woe
By JONATHAN MAHLER
This summer the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a scant five years after opening, welcomed its 10-millionth visitor. It was a milestone for the museum, all the more so when you stop to consider 80% of these visitors weren't even Jewish.
To what does the museum owe this success? The exhibits are, of course, powerful, and Steven Spielberg certainly did his part to inspire interest in the Holocaust with "Schindler's List." But the institution that is most likely
to be credited is--regrettably--the federal
government.
Situated on a prime piece of real estate along the Mall in Washington, the Holocaust Museum was created by a mandate from the U.S. government and receives 60% of its funding from Congress. More to the point, the museum derives a great deal of its cachet from the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, an extension of the American
diplomatic apparatus.
Indeed, few foreign dignitaries pass through Washington these days without ambling down Raoul Wallenberg Place to pay their respects to the memory of European Jewry.
But the coziness of this relationship has come at a price, one that gets embarrassing political entanglement to the next. The recent squabble over the appointment of John Roth as director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies may have been the most widely publicized of these disputes, but it was by no means the first.
The warning signs have, in fact, been there from the beginning. The first Holocaust Memorial
commission was created in 1978 by a contrite President Carter, who wanted to do right by the American Jews who had
protested, unsuccessfully, his administration's decision to sell F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia.
The
museum's early
critics--most notably
the cultural editor of
the Forward,
Jonathan
Rosen--wondered about
the logic of building a
national
memorial, in America,
to the
genocide of European Jewry, and worried that
assigning the federal
government the task would inevitably transform the
museum into a pawn
of the State Department.
It didn't take long for such fears to be realized.
On the eve of the
dedication of the Holocaust Museum in April 1993,
Elie Wiesel assailed
the museum for inviting the president of Croatia,
Franjo Tudjman, to
participate in the ceremonies. Tudjman, recall, is
also something of a
Holocaust revisionist; he once wrote that
"selfishness, craftiness,
unreliability, miserliness, underhandedness and
secrecy" were the main
characteristics of Jews. The next day, Mr. Wiesel
himself used the
museum to political effect. During his address, he
challenged Mr.
Clinton's policy on Bosnia, directly addressing the
president, who was on
the dais with him, and announcing that, as a Jew,
he could not stand idly
by as Serbian forces waged a war of extermination
against its ethnic
enemies.
The consequences of the Holocaust Museum's forays
into the political
realm are often benign. Last year, for example, the
museum was chosen
as a venue for the festivities of the second
inaugural for President Clinton,
hosting "a select group of profound Americans,"
such as Cornel West and
Betty Friedan, with no apparent connection to the
Holocaust. But things
became a little stickier this year when the State
Department asked him to
roll out the red carpet for Yasser Arafat.
Mr. Lerman enthusiastically agreed, and presented
the deal as a fait
accompli to Walter Reich, his director at the time.
Mr. Reich, however,
had doubts; after all, there was no shortage of
Holocaust memorials for
Mr. Arafat to visit in Israel. Receiving Mr. Arafat
as a head of state at the
Washington museum, Mr. Reich rightly contended,
would be a nakedly
political act. So he persuaded Mr. Lerman to
rescind the invitation. "It's
almost a crime for an institution like this to be
dragged into political
disputes," Mr. Lerman said upon reconsideration. By
now, though, even
disinviting Mr. Arafat represented a political
statement. Days later, Mr.
Lerman reissued the invite, blaming the principled
Mr. Reich--who was
fired soon after--for giving him "bad advice."
The Arafat debacle put museum watchers on alert,
and so when the
Forward reported on the appointment of the
aforementioned John Roth,
controversy erupted immediately. It seemed that Mr.
Roth, a philosopher
and theologian at Claremont-McKenna College in
California, had made a
habit of drawing facile comparisons in his
writings. The most infamous
example was a 1988 essay on the 50th anniversary of
the Nazi pogrom
known as Kristallnacht, in which he wrote:
"Kristallnacht happened
because a political state decided to be rid of
people unwanted within its
borders. It seems increasingly clear that Israel
would prefer to rid itself of
Palestinians if it could do so. . . . As much as
any other people today, they
[the Palestinians] are being forced into a tragic
part too much like the one
played by the European Jews 50 years ago." Soon
other examples turned
up, such as when Mr. Roth greeted the 1980 election
of President Reagan
by writing that he "could not help remembering how
forty years ago
economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi
nationalism and materialism."
Mr. Roth apologized for the Kristallnacht remark;
his credentials and
commitment to the study of the Holocaust were never
in doubt. Nor did
his critics deny his right to express provocative
views in a scholarly
context. But giving a man with a history of
rhetorical recklessness the
imprimatur of the federal government was a
different matter.
The embattled professor ultimately withdrew from
the post; but had he
not, he would not have been the only museum
employee with a record of
exploiting the Holocaust. Consider the museum's
director of education,
Joan Ringelheim, who has approached the study of
the Holocaust from a
feminist perspective. In so doing, she once
compared the conditions under
which European Jewry was forced to live to those of
"women and
minorities, the working class and the poor, prior
to and after the
Holocaust." Her scholarship recently ignited a
furor in the pages of
Commentary, one of America's most influential
Jewish magazines.
Such emanations from Raoul Wallenberg Place serve
to underscore
another unfortunate paradox: The U.S. Holocaust
Museum was founded
to memorialize Hitler's attempt to extinguish
Europe's Jews. But to justify
its existence as a federal institution, the museum
is obligated to stress the
ecumenical aspect of what historian Lucy Davidowicz
famously dubbed
"The War Against the Jews."
There are, to be sure, valuable civic and political
lessons to be drawn from
the Holocaust, and there is much to be learned from
the exhibits that have
been mounted in Washington. But there's a danger
inherent in trying too
hard to universalize the plight of Europe's
Jews--namely, diluting the
particularity of the experience. The story of the
genocide of Europe's Jews
is a tale of human tragedy that should be studied
by Jews and non-Jews
alike, but it's sure starting to look as if it's a
story better experienced
without the help of the federal government.
Mr. Mahler is editorial page editor of The Forward. |
