It’s odd sitting in a mansion listening to anti-Israel rhetoric, while inside they pretend they cannot hear. It is still, perhaps, the most British experience of my lifetime. Beyond the host offering to have me removed from the city — someone would take me for a drive, she said — no one had a thing to say about it. I made small talk about J.K. Rowling. That was my second mistake. I must have said something kind about her, because an amateur harpist chided me. They did have opinions.

This story is sequential, and divided into three stages: the first, from when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 to the October massacre of 2023; the second, from the massacre in Israel to the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week; the third, the five days since. For me, they have one common emotion. Rage. Not for myself, but for the murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish children today, told to remove their blazers outside school because the badges identify them as Jews.

Where does it end? Zalmen Gradowski, the Sonderkommando who buried his testimony in the ashes of Birkenau, called the crematoria in Poland a mechanism to soothe an insatiable god, “who is hungry for their flesh and thirsty for their blood”. That feels right: Nazism was a religion, and antisemitism is a subconscious act, which comes from a place beneath thought. In The Zone of Interest, the best Holocaust novel, Martis Amis called Nazism a “Walpurgisnacht”.

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The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

If this sounds morbid, this is my cultural inheritance. I’m a British Jew, fortunate and haunted, a member of one of the only intact Jewish communities in Europe. But the British love for Jews is heavily caveated. The blood libel was invented in Britain, in 1144, in Norwich. There were pogroms in London in 1189, and in Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and York in 1190. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. Ancient history, you may say. There’s no such thing. But, since our return to England in the 17th century, we have called ourselves lucky, even if England locked the gates to European Jews in 1938, leaving them to die. As a young woman, I thought British Jews pallid and uninteresting. I understand us better now. Anything not to be noticed, anything to demonstrate loyalty — our prayers for the royal family are gaudy; Bevis Marks, our famous synagogue, looks like a Wren church — but that was then.

The pause ended with Corbyn, who has absorbed the antisemitism (the anti-Zionism) that emerged from Stalin’s Russia. Its creed is: Zionism is racism. As ever, Jew hate is absolution of a kind; for a faction of the Left, it is absolution from colonialism and smaller personal failures. The journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In 2016, I covered The World Transformed, the Corbynite conclave in Liverpool, and attended a debate asking whether the Labour Party had a problem with Jews. It was the best attended event of the week, even with a world to transform, because the hard-Left thrive on aggrievement, not thought, and need an enemy — the Zionist Entity! — to explain their calamities to themselves. Afterwards, I found an organiser and told him, like a credulous child: you’ve got a problem. Can I help? Apparently not. They’ll take the Walpurgisnacht.

Those years were pre-shocks. I left the Labour Party, or, rather, it left me because it was understood that Jews had murdered the last hope of modern British Socialism in toppling Corbyn, who really toppled himself. It was a new charge — or variation on an old charge — on a long sheet.

Until October 7, 2023 was the time before; everything else was the time after. When there were celebrations on London streets, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. My non-Jewish friends exuded embarrassment, boredom and, above all, cowardice. Write about it, non-Jewish journalist friends told me. No, I thought, you write about it. It’s as much your story as mine: no, more so. Besides, Jewish testimony is suspect. Philip Roth wrote a novel about Anne Frank: The Ghost Writer. Anne survived the war, but pretends she is dead, so people will read her story. The death holds the magic, and the power. People listen harder when we’re dead.

“You’ve got their sympathy when you’re being shoved in the oven,” a Hungarian-born survivor told me. I’m not sure I’d call it sympathy. “A bit blunt,” he says, “but I’m afraid this is it. The only time I did not feel the world was antisemitic was when the gates of hell opened up in 1945 until Israel started winning the war [in 1967]. Back to the old fashioned.”

I was mesmerized by the protests: I thought I could read our future in them. On the first great march for Palestine, I saw a woman with a sign: “resistance by all means necessary”. Is this what Manchester was? I found a first draft on the back of a sign in Trafalgar Square, a failed attempt, abandoned, as its writer was: “Israel is like my ex [boyfriend].” I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Is this Sartre’s mirror?

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I stood with counter-protesters too: a group called Stop the Hate. As the marchers passed, they swelled towards us and gesticulated: the finger for “fuck you” most often; a cut-throat sometimes; the Hamas triangle, made with fingers, once. They come from all social classes, though young Muslims and bourgeois Leftists are overrepresented. This is an internal, and a proxy, war: partially a war on themselves, because their movement is anti-democratic, with a loathing of dissent.

I went to another Stop the Hate rally on a grim arterial road in inner London. Interview after interview was the same. “Just anger,” a woman told me. “Pure anger.” She works in a school, she said, and, playing football, Jewish children were told they should be gassed. A young Orthodox Jew told me antisemitism is now, “a trend. A cool trend.” That is, young people find it fashionable now. A man with a boombox played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Men laid tefillin — it’s a form of prayer — by the boombox, but only middle-aged women knew the words. Things have changed, but not that much.

Opposite us, a man stood on a traffic island holding a sign that says: “Israel kills more children than all other countries in the world combined.” He wore a suit and tie, and his expression was one of triumph amid fumes.

Again, on Yom Kippur five days ago, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. British Jews are a news story now, and we aren’t used to that. History has caught up with us. I went to Stamford Hill, where the Charedi live, and marveled at how odd their civilization — old Jewish Poland remade in London — felt that day. Some fear to wear the Star of David, or yellow hostage ribbon in public. Others do so, explicitly. Some of us go to synagogue more. Some of us go to synagogue less. Some of us have retreated into Jewish silos. Others have abandoned Jewish life. Some need Israel more. Some need it less.

The future security of Jews in Britain does not depend on Jewish denunciations of Israel. That is a feint and, when the Right has used us to attack Muslims — then what? It depends, rather, on the behavior of the impartial majority: what historians call the bystanders. I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.

In the days after Hamas’s grisly assaults of October 7, 2023, which left almost 1,200 dead, including over 800 civilians, Americans backed Israel’s muscular counterattack by 50% to 45%. But Israel’s ceaseless bombardment of Gaza has left at least 50,000 dead — most of them civilians, including 12,000 children under 12. Precise numbers are hard to come by, and Israel does not permit reporters to enter the war zone. A late-July Gallup poll found that Americans now oppose Israel’s military operation by almost two-to-one.

What is most interesting about this is the partisan skew. Whereas Republican support for the Israeli war effort has remained steady at 71%, Democratic support has collapsed, from 36% to just 8%. This matters: the Democratic Party wins about 70% of the votes of American Jews, and has been their political home since they began arriving as immigrants in the 19th century. It is under pressure to become an anti-Israel party. Under the influence of Donald Trump, the party is moving Left. And opposition to Israel has been a winner for Left parties in the West. La France Insoumise, the continent’s most anti-Israel major party, won the most seats in France’s legislative elections last year. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party’s leader, is France’s most uncompromising critic of Israel. Jeremy Corbyn, who occupies a similar spot on the British political landscape, came within a handful of seats of becoming prime minister in 2017, and now appears to be enjoying a revival.

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Gaza is the endpoint of liberal democracy

By Rajan Menon

In July, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders forced a vote to block shipments of offensive weapons to Israel. Though it failed, it did win a solid majority (27-17) of Democrats. The situation may remind veteran Democrats of the crisis they faced after October 2002, when the party’s presidential hopefuls swallowed their misgivings and made the safe-looking vote to follow George W. Bush into the Iraq War. By the 2004 presidential election, that war had gone badly wrong, and Vermont governor Howard Dean briefly appeared likely to win the Democratic nomination on the strength of his anti-war position alone.

In 2008, Democrats reached for a candidate whom obscurity had protected from the need to vote on Iraq — Barack Obama, who at the time had been a state legislator in Illinois. In this light, the stunning emergence in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, now the odds-on favorite to become mayor of the largest Jewish city on the planet, could be a historic development. Like Obama, Mamdani is a state legislator; unlike him, he has backed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which in the United States represents the outermost edge of anti-Israel activism.

In some ways, the grounds for the American shift on Israel resemble those elsewhere in the West. Time has passed. Israelis rightly insist that Zionism dates from the 19th century, and Jewish ties to the Holy Land are ancient. But the world’s willingness to countenance Israel’s extreme measures of self-defense has everything to do with the murder of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. It remains a lesson and a landmark. But it has passed from living memory. The media, for its part, has changed. Today public opinion is built out of on-the-spot clips from Gaza, and when Israel bars foreign correspondents, public opinion smells a rat.

In other ways, the American disillusionment with Israel is different from the rest of the West’s. No article on the Israel-Hamas conflict has done more to influence American opinion in recent months than Brown University historian Omer Bartov’s judgment in the pages of the New York Times that Israel was committing genocide. Bartov’s influence comes from his background as an Israeli war veteran, as the son of a major Israeli writer, and as a man whose distinguished scholarly career has focused on genocide in general and, in particular, on how soldiers and statesmen are led astray in the heat of battle. In a more recent interview, with the journalist Dan Wakin, Bartov tried to describe the sadness he felt in contemplating how Israel had squandered its moral capital. “It took a long time,” he said, “to build up the kind of support — in many ways, love — for Israel that exists in the United States.”

He is right. Americans may not think this is Israel’s finest hour. But they are far from thinking ill of it on a fundamental level. These fond feelings are, quite naturally, reciprocated. The main determinant of Israel’s ability to survive is its relationship with the United States: military, commercial, diplomatic and even legal. Imagine, for instance, the effect on Israel if the US were to reassert the presumption against dual citizenship that is still in its lawbooks, but has been allowed to lapse since the end of the Cold War.

Trump’s second presidential term has lent a note of paradox to the recent American turn against Israel. He is a straightforward champion of the country, his support for Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu subject to only two qualifications: first, a lingering resentment (reportedly) at Netanyahu’s having recognized Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory with undue haste; second, an unwillingness to be associated with bad TV — hence his pushback against Netanyahu for pooh-poohing allegations of famine in the Gaza Strip. Trump insisted that it was “real starvation stuff”.

Even leaving aside his willingness to risk war to join Israel’s war against Iran, Trump is as loyal a friend as Israel has. But his program benefits Israel only in a confused and contradictory way. At the center of Trumpism is the President’s project to liberate people from civil-rights law in its late, decadent “woke” stage. Twenty-first-century America turned tyrannical when progressive regulators and litigators came to realize that local governments, large corporations and private citizens could be threatened with lawsuits for almost anything they said about minorities or women, and anything that left the impression of a “hostile environment”. Trump has eliminated large parts of this system, especially as regards corporate America. He has ordered experienced civil-rights litigators in the Justice Department to stand down.

And he has paid a lot of attention to Jews. This makes electoral sense. As long as the Democratic Party was built “intersectionally” out of an ever-growing list of underprivileged beneficiaries of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Jews — for all their historic attachment to the party — have been a poor fit within it. That is because they are a rich and successful group, and the main diagnostic tool of civil-rights law is essentially a race-based conspiracy theory: if Group X has more wealth, income or academic honors than Group Y, some hidden plot, somewhere, must be to blame.

But when it comes to universities, Trump has not dismantled the powerful disciplinary apparatus of woke. He has harnessed it to his own ends, and he has done so by focusing on antisemitism — which has not been a problem in American universities since the middle of the last century. What has happened on campus is an increasing number of anti-Israel demonstrations. Trump has forced on universities an irresponsibly vague definition of antisemitism, created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, which assimilates many kinds of statements against Israel to run-of-the-mill antisemitism.

Trump has prompted universities to police certain genuinely disruptive campus protests — for instance, the takeover of Butler Library at Columbia University last May by 70 students who set up a “Basel al-Araj Popular University” while students were studying for finals. In a democracy with total freedom of speech, “activism” can be a way of introducing an element of intimidation into public life. The non-academic public often views American universities as places that mainly undermine the political system and only secondarily offer an education.

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On the other hand, the mildness of anti-Israel feeling among the non-academic public may in retrospect have been tied up with the de facto censorship of woke. When people speak of an Israel “lobby”, they most often mean powerful campaign-finance organizations such as AIPAC, to which many congressmen are beholden. But the debate has probably been more shaped by such groups as the Anti-Defamation League, which greet anti-Israel sentiment with organized pressure campaigns — and by a plethora of litigators, advocacy groups and unaffiliated pro-Israel campaigners.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer has credibly alleged that The Atlantic was too frightened to publish an article he co-wrote two decades ago about the Israel lobby. In the end, the story wound up being published in the London Review of Books, and a book followed in its wake. But during the high tide of woke civil-rights law, even a feebly substantiated allegation that a writer or broadcaster was a racist or antisemite placed the outlets that employed them in fear of lawsuits, boycotts and other harassment. In the early days of Trump’s second term, such fears have waned, and with them the power of pro-Israel pressure groups.

Public skepticism about Israel, meanwhile, has waxed. Certain comfortable arguments (“Israel’s fight is the fight of Western civilization”) and certain familiar solutions (the “two-state solution”) have grown contentious when we weren’t looking. The tendency of Netanyahu’s government and its defenders not to rebut criticism but simply to calumniate critics is bringing diminishing returns. As a young diplomat in the mid-Eighties, Netanyahu himself worked magic on ABC’s Nightline with bravura attacks on Israel’s foes. But he is stuck in that time. Calling starvation in Gaza a “bold-faced lie”, accusing Emmanuel Macron of “siding with Hamas” for urging an end to Israel’s blockade of aid — the tactics that once helped Netanyahu inhibit criticism may now inflame it.

Regarding American public opinion, Israel is in a delicate position. Trump’s return has made speech more free in most respects — but by no means all. For a decade now, Trumpism’s core belief has been that the Washington establishment’s priorities are a giant elite hustle. Israel has been one such priority, and it is due for a cynical reassessment. But Trump’s role as Israel’s most stalwart defender changes its symbolism and its stature — enhancing it in some contexts, detracting in others. Israel is a main target of populists. It is also populism itself.

Israel’s position in the affections of Americans is for the most part unchanged and secure. On the other hand, there is that matter of the anti-Israel activist who is set to become mayor of New York. Should Mamdani govern successfully, he could become a model for a new generation of Democratic politicians. No less important, Democrats always stand a chance in presidential elections. Taken together, that leaves Israel only one or two bad breaks away from a downgraded relationship with its indispensable backer.

The de facto ban is hypocrisy, because on some subjects Polanski will be heard. Chinatown is about child abuse, which is the very thing Polanski did: in 1977 he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in America and has lived as a fugitive in Europe since, dogged by accusations of predation. Chinatown was 50 this year, and there are public screenings in its honour. But An Officer and a Spy cannot be shown when it is urgently needed. This makes no sense. If you are prepared to allow Polanski’s work to exist — and filmmaking is a collaborative effort — why not show the truth of the Dreyfus case? If you are for censorship, censor all his work. Or none of it.

Its story is this: in 1894, the French army knew there was a German spy in their midst. They scapegoated Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), the only Jew on the general staff; when they realised the case was weak, they falsified evidence against him. “The idea of the Jew, took hold of them, seized them, dominated them,” wrote the historian Joseph Reinach. “My only crime,” Dreyfus said, “was being born a Jew.” He was convicted, and, at the official degradation ceremony, his sword was broken and the crowd shouted, “Death to Judas, death to the Jews!” He was imprisoned in French Guiana on Devil’s Island — how apt — and as Polanski pulls the camera back from the island to the ocean, Dreyfus’s isolation — his Jewishness — is explicit.

France was the first European country to give equal rights to Jews, and this was the revenge. It was also an epigraph to the Holocaust, in which many French people colluded. Eventually, due to the diligence of Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), a fellow officer and repentant antisemite, and the activism of the novelist Émile Zola, Dreyfus was pardoned, then exonerated. This is an old European story, ever revived: a Christian nation divines itself through the prism of the Jew.

Polanski does not place Dreyfus at the centre of his film: he is the man things are done to, in cinema and life. But at least he does justice to the antisemitism that destroyed him. “How does he look?” Picquart is asked of Dreyfus’s degradation. “Like a Jewish tailor weeping over his lost gold.” “What was the mood like afterwards?” “As if a healthy body had been purged of something pestilential so that life could resume.”

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The Variety critic described The Dreyfus Affair as “fabled” and “legendary”. Subconsciously, at least, he could not accept that Dreyfus was real. The IndieWire critic could not bring himself to review the film: rather he reviewed Polanski and called it “a film-length tantrum” from “cinema’s most-storied rapist… as nakedly autobiographical as anything Polanski has ever made”.

Polanski demurred — to an extent: “In the story, I sometimes find moments I have experienced myself. I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done. I must admit that I am familiar with many of the workings of the apparatus of persecution shown in the film, and that has clearly inspired me.” He was talking about the rape case. He was also talking about the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child, who were murdered by the Manson Gang in 1969: Polanski was initially blamed, because he made Rosemary’s Baby.

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If he was also talking about Kraków, where he lived and saw his father taken in the liquidation of the ghetto when he was six, he didn’t say so, and I wonder if the spurious identification with Dreyfus obscures the deeper one. Martin Amis said Polanski’s films, “with their emphasis on terror, isolation and madness, seem no more than a demonic commentary on his life”.

But why is it Polanski’s tale of Jew hate that particularly offends, not his strange, self-hating erotica (Bitter Moon) or sketches of demons (The Ninth Gate) which are more expressive of this darkness? Why can we tolerate his fictions, but not his realities? The Pianist, Polanski’s other film about antisemitism, is still permitted. But it is a fable with cartoon Nazis. It is soothing to lay all murderous antisemitism at their feet, which is a very partial truth: witness the Poles’ long battle to be considered only rescuers, when they were nothing of the kind. France, too, was a mire of collaboration and it does it credit that it both lauded An Officer and a Spy and picketed it. Britain should do the same.

There is a tendency to tell only two pieces of Jewish history: the Crucifixion and the Holocaust. The crime and the punishment, if you will. Read the Gospel of Matthew, watch Schindler’s List and you’re done. All the average person knows of Jews is that we apparently killed Christ and were burned by Nazis. There is more. If you want to understand antisemitism, learn the history of the Jews, no matter who tells it. There is an awful lot of junk culture about this subject. This is something better, from a master filmmaker and common Jewish villain.

It’s hard to accept, for example, that those who perished in the Holocaust did so in vain. It seems discourteous to the dead to suggest that their death had no point. But part of the horror of the event is that there was indeed no point to it, not even from the Nazis’ own viewpoint. You don’t need to massacre six million people in order to create a bugbear or scapegoat. Some of those who were killed had skills which the Nazis could have used in the war effort, just as they could have used the men and machinery tied up in running the concentration camps. What purpose the whole project served was metaphysical rather than practical. Annihilating Jews was an attempt to abolish the frightful form of non-being they stood for, which threatened the very foundations of the Third Reich. Even that, however, was as counterproductive as murdering Polish metal workers, since the Nazis were entranced by a dream of purity, and nothing could be purer than nothing.

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In defence of stereotypes

By Terry Eagleton

Conspiracy theories are out to purge human life of chance and coincidence. They restore a sense of purpose to a civilisation which seems without design or direction. The claim that paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy are running the banking system may take some believing, but so does the claim that the large number of young black men killed or injured in police cells is purely coincidental. And there are, of course, plenty of real conspiracies. Not all of them are the product of collective paranoia. Some paranoiacs really are persecuted, just as some hypochondriacs genuinely are ill. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the misfortune to be both. The dictionary defines a conspiracy as a secret plan to do something harmful or unlawful, in which case such groups are about as common as kindergartens. Why are they so widespread? Partly because it’s consoling to detect human agency behind a world of anonymous forces, and partly because it’s pleasant to find fellowship with other conspiracy buffs in a world short on solidarity. It’s just that the latter aim might be better served by joining a Pilates class.

A lot of American conspiracy theories spring from the sheer vastness of the country. To impose some political coherence on this far-flung terrain is one reason why the word “America” is used in the States far more often than the word “Portugal” is used in Portugal. “Swedish” or “Hungarian” are purely descriptive terms, but “American” is a positive value-judgement as well as a national label. “A very fine American” means an outstanding example of a valuable species. One doesn’t imagine that the Albanians spend much time asking God to bless their country, as Americans do, or that Belgians see themselves as specially favoured by the Almighty. It’s true that a Peruvian army officer once exhorted his men to “always remember that you are Peruvians”, but this is mildly comic because nobody has much idea of what being a Peruvian means, probably not even the Peruvians. It would be like being urged to be an authentic inhabitant of Maida Vale. There are hordes of people in Ireland who see the nation as blessed and its soil as sacred, but they are known as Irish-American tourists. America, however, has to keep on talking about America in order to forge some unity out of its plurality. It has even adopted that phrase as its national slogan. In many ways, this drive for unity has been stunningly successful, as the tone in which a waitress in South Bend, Indiana says “Have a good day” is an exact replica of the tone you’ll hear in Roscoe, South Dakota. There are those, however, who fear that this cultural uniformity is not exactly what the Founding Fathers meant by freedom.

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Because the nation is so immense, Americans are particularly sensitive about their space being “invaded”. They can occasionally be heard to murmur “excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the residents of Beijing. Large tracts of space help to breed individualism, and Americans are adept at keeping their spiritual as well as physical distance. Even some of the poorest dwellings in the country stand proudly in their own meagre patch of land, unlike the tightly stacked terraced houses of post-industrial Britain. All this is the opposite of the carnivalesque, a condition in which bodies are merged and mingled to the point at which it’s hard to know where one ends and another begins. The stereotypical American body, by contrast, is squeezed tightly into its own space, sealed against disease and conscious of its precise boundaries. It’s surprising it isn’t wrapped in cellophane. Carnivalesque bodies, being devotees of Dionysus, are often drunk, a state in which their boundaries become messy and inexact, but Donald Trump is a teetotaller. There’s a relation between the fact that he uses others’ bodies purely as instruments of his own power and desire and the fact that he is a germophobe. Mexicans can be repelled by walls and barbed wire, but germs are invaders of the body politic too tiny to be rounded up and deported. As wholly invisible immigrants they represent a Right-wing nightmare.

Conspiracy theories draw on the anxiety that things which should be distinct are actually commingled, and by no means for the good. This distinctness should be true of the nation itself, which is only diminished by being locked into trade agreements or international treatises. Yet we now live in a world in which, as the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle remarks, seeing everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. The modern philosopher whose vision reflects this most starkly is Hegel, which is why Freud once remarked that philosophy is the nearest thing there is to paranoia. There are no free-wheeling cogs in the machine of global capitalism. Nothing is allowed to exist purely for its own sake, which used to be the privilege of the work of art.

Some years ago, if you smoked on the street in the United States, it was possible to have the cigarette knocked out of your hand by a concerned citizen, if not in Manhattan then perhaps in Wichita Falls. This wasn’t only because smoking can kill you, or because the States is a profoundly puritan nation somewhat given to self-righteous moralising. It’s also because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one body and another, insidiously undermining their autonomy. The model of human contact becomes infection. Smoke eventually grows invisible, yet remains lethal and ubiquitous all the same. It is thus a perfect symbol of the menacing powers detected by conspiracy theorists, which determine our lives and confiscate our freedom but which, like the Almighty himself, are both everywhere and unlocatable. These forces are toxic, contagious, all-pervasive, without any identifiable source and well-nigh impossible to overcome. In all these ways, they resemble the theories which claim to expose them.

In this sense, conspiracy theories exemplify the forces they seek to hunt down. When a pandemic breaks out in this context, as it did in 2020, it isn’t the virus that the less enlightened sections of society regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipotent, but the state which tries to protect them against it. At a time when bodies actually need to be insulated from each other for their own good, they cast off their protective masks in the name of liberty and demand to be allowed to breathe together — another irony, since breathing together is the literal meaning of “conspiracy”.

The Nazis saw themselves as avant-gardists at the very cutting-edge of technological progress, but they were also deeply archaic. If they were modernisers spellbound by the future, they were also obsessed with myth, ritual, astrology and the occult. When reason is reduced to a bloodless, purely instrumental form of rationality, it leaves a space into which the irrational can flood. This paradox is now being repeated in Trump’s America. The last word in technological wizardry co-exists with a belief in demonic powers. At the very peak of modernity, we are turning back to the Middle Ages — to a world of diabolical forces and weird convergences where nothing is what it seems. There is less and less between the world of pure appearance of Hollywood on the one hand and the invisible machinations of the deep state on the other. Between the two, everyday reality is being squeezed to death. There is still suburban middle-class life, but scratch the surface and you will find monstrous predators and blood-lusting fiends. The place where humdrum reality and diabolical powers meet is known as paedophilia, or some other unspeakable crime. The United States is a Gothic movie in which horror lurks behind every icebox and beneath every kitchen table. The trouble is that the Saviour whose mission is to send this nightmare packing is the most lurid manifestation of it of all.

To this day, evidence is still emerging of how Dutch people looked away — and sometimes even profited — as 102,000 of their fellow countrymen, women and children were murdered. It is the worst record in Western Europe. But now, as survivors approach the end of their lives, the Netherlands seems ready to pass on a truer Holocaust story to a younger generation.

In his new documentary, Lost City, director Willy Lindwer highlights evidence of the tram journey that brought Anne Frank and her family from the Weteringschans prison to Central Station on 8 August 1944 after their “secret annex” hiding place was discovered. It turns out that the Amsterdam transport company, the GVB, invoiced the Nazi occupier for these tram rides for 48,000 Jewish people — and continued to do so even after the war.

“What we discovered,” says Lindwer, “is that the Amsterdam tram collaborated in a massive way with the Nazis. And that last invoice was never paid so Amsterdam got in bailiffs for two years after the war to try to get 80 guilders back from the tram ride that the Frank family was in.”

In the coming years, the Dutch will have to confront more unsettling truths. Earlier this month, the Netherlands opened its first National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam to tell not just the tales of the astonishingly brave resistance, but also stories of the Jewish people who were murdered, the civil servants who betrayed them, and the ordinary people who did nothing — or even took the houses and possessions of the deported.

Inevitably, these two cultural events have become entangled in the public consciousness following Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Israeli president Isaac Herzog used a speech at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum to call for the “immediate safe return” of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas — while, outside, crowds of pro-Palestinian protesters turned nasty, apparently jeering at Holocaust survivor Rudie Cortissos and his great-granddaughter (although they said they supported the museum). The number of reported incidents of antisemitism in the Netherlands doubled last year and the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) reported an “enormous peak” after October 7.

To understand all this, we must look to history, and the several important ways the Netherlands differed from other Western Nazi-occupied lands. On 10 May 1940, the German army invaded the neutral country, and after five days of fighting and heavy bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch surrendered. The state was destroyed and a new administration was installed headed by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who would go on to order the deportation of the Dutch Jewish population to Nazi extermination camps.

The Netherlands — in particular, Amsterdam — had for centuries been a safe place of refuge for Jewish people. But during the war, there was far more solidarity with the Jewish populations in France and Belgium than in the Netherlands, possibly because Dutch society was based on separate “pillars”, communities living alongside one another rather than mixing. The geography of this small, densely populated and relatively unforested land certainly meant there were far fewer places for Jewish people to hide.

Indeed, while there was a Dutch resistance movement that smuggled 600 Jewish children to safety from the site of the Holocaust Museum, many citizens also profited from occupation. So-called “Jew hunters” were paid for betrayal, a Dutch railway charged Jewish people for their tickets, Amsterdam levied housing tax on Holocaust survivors for their time in the camps, and Jewish property was routinely stolen. In Lost City, a Jewish woman describes escaping arrest to find all her valuables stolen by her neighbours. Tini Jacobs-van Dulst remembers cycling through the city with her mother in September 1943, aged six, looking at empty houses and choosing one on the Diezestraat. “We never spoke about why these houses were empty,” she says. “I found out myself as a teenager.” And my late neighbour, Maud Hedeman, who survived via a prisoner exchange with Switzerland, could never understand why a Dutch family would not give her father back the family rug when they returned.

After the war, the extent of this betrayal was not discussed. For many Jewish people, the memories were simply too painful. Tram line 8 was scrapped, “Euterpestraat”, the street of the German headquarters, was renamed after resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen, and there was little space for the Jewish war experience in public life.

“The memories of Dutch Jews were mostly suppressed,” says Bart Wallet, professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam. “All the attention went to the resistance and to the military that liberated the Netherlands. Jews specifically didn’t fit the image that people wanted to convey during memorial activities and monuments… The Jewish community held their commemorations until the Sixties exclusively inside synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, not in a public sphere.” Only now, he says, can the Dutch people bear to face the full story. “The Holocaust Museum is a pivot point in Dutch memory culture.”

But for many Dutch Jews, this doesn’t go far enough. Holocaust survivor Salo Muller, who won group compensation from the NS railway service to repay the cost of Holocaust train tickets, has also demanded an apology and reparation from Amsterdam’s trams.

Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is a row over a public-funded “cold case” study naming Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as the “betrayer” of Anne Frank’s family. Rosemary Sullivan’s bestselling book on the case, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, was stoutly refuted by historians in the Netherlands and later withdrawn. It is seen by some as implicitly blaming the Jewish population for its own destruction. To the frustration of relatives, who have retained an American law firm to defend Van den Bergh’s name, the deeply contested book is still available in other countries.

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Further research on the involvement of Amsterdam’s government in the Nazi’s antisemitic policies is expected to be released this year by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “We saw ourselves as the nation of Anne Frank,” says emeritus professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate. “It hurts when we are forced to see ourselves as the nation of the tram driver transporting the Frank family to the station and from there to a transit camp, and to a death camp from there. It took us a long time to come to terms with our not-so-good track record during the Holocaust.”

This reassessment is a function of a former colonial nation wrestling with its identity. The background is one defined by tumult: where Geert Wilders wins an election by attributing all social woes to asylum seekers, where middle-class Amsterdammers blame “expats” for their housing crisis, and where, in government, the Dutch apparently lose their famed ability to “polder” across differences and form a normal coalition.

And in this polarised, politically fragmented country, it throws up the question of who “belongs”, where we all originally come from and how much that actually matters. Was Dutch tolerance ever all it was cracked up to be? And where on earth is it now?

Faced with such a task, looking honestly at the past is a good place to start. But it is an uncomfortable journey, just like the tram ride when Willy Lindwer realised that, on the way to their deaths, Anne Frank’s family would have had a brief glimpse of their secret annex.

It’s a sentiment shared in Lost City by Izak Salomons, who was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. At one point, he explains how his sweet, six-year-old grandson asked him how he survived the war. “I said: ‘Well, we were in a camp…The Germans weren’t very nice.’ Then I saw that he was welling up and so to comfort him, I said, ‘Now they are nice again.’

“He mulled it over and then said: ‘True, but they are still ashamed.’”

No wonder our society returns obsessively to what we still call “the war”, like an adoptee, severed from his roots, searching for meaning. But of all the explorations since, in film and fiction and popular history, one treatment cannot be bettered. It was 50 years ago this week that Thames TV broadcast what has since become renowned as the greatest documentary series ever made: The World at War. It is impossible to imagine ITV making it now, but then, it is impossible to imagine today’s BBC making it either.

The intellectual gulf between, say, 1997’s The Nazis: A Warning from History (a documentary about the rise of National Socialism) and 2019’s The Rise of the Nazis (a parable about Trump and Brexit, featuring Ash Sarkar and Sir Mike Jackson, doubtless the fruit of a researcher’s Twitter search for a communist and a general) is unbridgeable. It is, simply, unthinkable that any television station today would spend two years and vast sums of revenue hauling out unseen footage from state archives for 26 hours of prime-time history programming, nor present the results with such intellectual and moral sophistication.

But even then, it was prestige television: with an eye to international sales, Laurence Olivier was drafted in to provide the voiceover, with only his eccentric pronunciation — “Shtaleen”, “the Ukryne”— breaking the illusion of an omniscient observer detailing mankind’s foibles. In tones shifting scene by scene from sardonic dismissal of the human frailties and delusions underlying war to cold contempt and sorrowful, clipped pity at the sheer waste of it all, the pathos of Olivier’s narration is central to the series’ artistic success.

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From the very first lines, opening in the ruins of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, whose inhabitants were massacred by the SS, the script’s spare, cold poetry builds the frame that allows the following footage to breathe. “Down the road, on a summer’s day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now,” Olivier intones with the mournful rhythm of a funeral bell, in a script drafted by Neal Ascherson. “They were here for only a few hours. When they left, a community which had lived for over a thousand years was dead,” and Oradour left a village whose “martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China — in a World at War”.

Over the 26 hour-long episodes (streamable today in truncated form on UKTV Play), the Glaswegian-Jewish auteur Jeremy Isaacs produced an epic of unimaginable scope, interweaving the grand narrative of geopolitics with the personal recollections of the soldiers, diplomats and civilians involved, across campaigns reaching from the Russian steppes to the American heartland and the jungles of the Pacific. The cast list of interviewees is extraordinary: whole documentaries could surely be pieced together today from its offcuts. Where else could Admiral Doenitz pop up as a briefly-used talking head to talk us through the intricacies of Germany’s U-boat campaign, Anthony Eden (billed as Lord Avon) and Lord Mountbatten to unveil Whitehall’s thinking, Adolf Galland outline the Luftwaffe’s failings in the Battle of Britain or Arthur Harris and Curtis LeMay give us their unrepentant insights into the virtues and limitations of strategic bombing?

Thirty years after the events themselves, the series was made at just the right time for a work of history: long enough for its participants, late-middle-aged in their Seventies suits, to achieve some distance from their younger selves, but too close to have become memorialised, locked away in myth with the rest of the distant past. The passage of time alone means the series is unreplicable now: the great work of television history has become the matter of History in itself. Even the reminiscences of the less notable participants, the French and German and Italian army officers sitting in their book-lined studies recounting their war in cut-glass English accents, the cockneys sharing stories in a smoke-filled East End pub or the Royal Navy veteran matter-of-factly, almost innocently, describing his feelings of what we would now term Post-Traumatic Stress, are visions of a lost world.

The recollections of the survivors interviewed are the series’ backbone, but perhaps taken for granted is the faultless tradecraft of the researchers who tracked down and won their confidence: embedded within this work of history are moments of pure journalism at its best. Perhaps counterintuitively, for a series now coded as “male interest”, The World At War’s greatest strengths are built on the meticulous skill and craftsmanship of its little-praised female production staff. To unlock the memories of the Nazi interviewees, Isaacs wrote, “Susan McConachy, blonde and blue-eyed, was our star” finding and interviewing Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, whose intimate recollections of the regime bunker Götterdämerung have, via the film Downfall, since entered popular mythology. McConachy’s “worst moment”, Isaacs noted, “came when Karl Wolff, Himmler’s adjutant, put his hand on her knee and confided: ‘My dear, you are just the type from whom we liked to breed.’”

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Yet her discomfort brought dividends. As McConachy later wrote of the “most charming” Wolff, “After lunch I asked him to repeat the story he had told me one evening over supper about an incident at Minsk at which he had been present, when a hundred people were shot into an open grave as a demonstration for Himmler. He looked a bit surprised. He had forgotten that he had ever mentioned that. Then the film ran out. I wondered if, with time to think, he would actually tell the story again. When we were ready to go he did in fact tell it. I was relieved, not just because I’d got the story, but because he’d had the time to reflect on what the consequences of telling it might be and I could feel less responsible if he did in fact end up in court again when the programme was shown.”

The scene itself, with the mixed emotions playing across Wolff’s face as he tells the story of Himmler turning green beside the pit as his face was splashed with a victim’s brains, is extraordinary. No less powerful, or compelling in its moral complexity, is episode director Martin Smith’s interview with Albert Speer in the Holocaust episode Genocide, the single episode screened without accompanying music or advertising breaks. Hitler’s armaments minister recounts, with a sort of hesitant uncertainty as to how his testimony will be received, being warned not to visit the camps “because horrible things would happen. This, together with other hints I got, should have made — should have made my decision to go to Hitler immediately, or to Himmler, and to ask them what is going on and to take my own steps, but I didn’t do it, and not doing it was, so I think nowadays, the biggest fault in my life.” As Isaacs later noted laconically, “Albert Speer, surely, was economical with the truth,” but the episode doesn’t labour the point and moves on swiftly to the next scene: the viewer was trusted, once again, to make up his own mind.

As our distance from the war itself has increased, the more rigid and formulaic our emotional responses to it have become: it has become a moral parable, justifying all manner of political malignancies, rather than a narrative of the tragedy inherent in international politics. It is doubtful that, even if we still had access to senior Nazi officials, contemporary mores would allow them to be interviewed dispassionately as witnesses to history. While Smith restrained his personal disgust, it is all too easy to imagine Stacey Dooley storming out of an interview with Speer after giving him a piece of her mind. Yet the series did not shy away from the war’s horrors: if anything, its sheer sparseness made them more vivid, as in the episode intercutting the testimony of Holocaust survivors with the reminiscences of an SS camp guard throwing children into the gas chamber, blankly remarking that “you get used to anything in time”. The war itself has passed into myth: The World at War returns it to the realm of human memory.

When I was young, The World at War made me want to see war for myself, and record it for posterity. Rewatching it now, having experienced a decade of close combat and great human suffering in the intervening period, what strikes me most is the sheer quality of the combat footage, obtained by unnamed cameramen on all sides who may or may not have survived their labours. The intensity reminds us that even the most experienced journalist today has never seen war on such a scale: at least, not yet. The almost expressionist editing of their uncredited footage, the long periods when the voiceover and music trails off for bricolaged images of pure chaos, still pays the appropriate honour to their work.

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In her finding and choosing of footage, another of Isaacs’ female production staff, the archive researcher Raye Farr, was responsible for the extraordinary vividness of the series. Realising that the propaganda newsreels of the day provided only stilted, sanitised highlights, Farr searched the state archives of Europe for unused offcuts, too strange or uncomfortable for showing at the time. In the German Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Farr pestered the director for access to uncatalogued treasures, noting later that “not until you have made a nuisance of yourself do the staff throw up their hands in exasperation and say, ‘See for yourself’ — which is what you’ve been waiting for”.

The results of her tradecraft, perhaps taken for granted by viewers, are central to the series’ success. As Isaacs later wrote, among Farr’s uncatalogued finds “was material shot behind the German lines on the Eastern Front by a gifted documentary cameraman. He appears not to have been shooting for the newsreel. Some of his footage was almost idyllic, showing soldiers at rest and leisure. Other sequences were more menacing. He filmed three German soldiers gently, almost reluctantly, but, in the end, firmly clearing a village of its people, sending the men in one direction, the women and children in another. Somehow, we know they will never see each other again.”

As we wait in 2023, hoping to evade what may be an equally great conflagration, both Crouchback’s fictional insight in Men at Arms, and The World at War’s wise and humane cataloguing of the real-world results seem unbearably poignant. The flames of war are already engulfing the world that came into being in 1945: what comes after may be better or worse, but it will be different from anything we have ever known — just as much as the proud, globe-spanning Britain of 1939 differed from the humbled, impoverished Britain of 1945.

Within nations as well as between them, the battle lines are already being drawn. Cities will be levelled, entire peoples exiled, humans killed in hi-definition video for the applause of social media spectators. Our own age is taking up arms, waiting to usher us into its cold embrace. May future generations judge us as soberly and compassionately as the makers of The World At War.

History is not some dry mathematical exercise, events mere beads on an abacus. It is built on human imagination: on the myths and ideas that define us. After all, most history today is told as national history — and what is a nation but a group of people who decide they are one? What, for that matter, is an ummah, a diaspora, race or religion? None of these things are facts, but make-believe constructs that are no less real for being so.

And so we return to Israel. On the one hand, we have the brute facts of the past fortnight — the abacus of despair. On 7 October, a coordinated attack by Hamas saw hundreds of Palestinian men break into Israel with the aim of murdering and kidnapping as many Jews as possible. The result was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust; the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history; more than 1,400 dead and 199 captured. Then came the inevitable response: the air assault on Gaza which has killed at least 3,000 Palestinians. And now the fog of war.

Today, a simple recounting of events is all but impossible, each story revealing far more about its narrator than the battle between Israel and Hamas. For some on the Left, for example, it is now “racist” to say the mass slaughter of Israelis was in any way antisemitic. Apparently, to do so is to project European values onto the Palestinians — who do not care about ethnicity, only occupation. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a take come so close to genuine insight, only to fall into the mud at the last. Can there be anything more obsessively Western than such an insistence on framing everything through the lens of colonialism and racism?

However absurd the argument might be, it is now the dominant framing through which history is seen in the West. This racist-coloniser logic runs through the Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s claim, for instance, that “settlers are not civilians” (and so, presumably, legitimate military targets for Hamas). And it is there in the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”. In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.

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At the heart of all these claims lies the same grim conclusion: that Israel itself is illegitimate, a settler state which should be wiped off the map as if it were some kind of Levantine Rhodesia. This is the logic behind signs reading “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — not a benign call for national liberation, but a demand for the conquest of Israel itself and, at least according to Hamas, death for the Jews who live there. The founding charter of Hamas is unequivocal on this point.

Yet instead of taking Hamas at its word, there seems to be an effort in the West to reinterpret its language into something more palatable to our own understanding of the world, filled as it is with ideas of endless progress and liberation. For many of us, national liberation is an axiomatic good, part of the progress of humanity towards an ever more perfect union — the opposite of colonialism.

What Hamas’s recent attack exposed, however, is the absurdity of believing that it shares this vision. Hamas is itself a colonial enterprise committed to the idea that there are Muslim lands which, once conquered, are forever Muslim and must expand to cover the whole world. “During the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement,” the Hamas Covenant asserts. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” Even if Hamas were merely a national liberation movement, an Arab IRA rather than a Palestinian Islamic State, such an idea of universal nationalism is surely utopian — as if all nations somehow naturally exist on land that is theirs by divine right.

We did not always assume this was self-evident. “It had been discovered and brought to people’s attention in the course of the 19th century that, in order to possess individuality as a citizen, every person must belong to a definite nationality or race,” spat Joseph Roth with evident dismissiveness in The Emperor’s Tomb, his great novella about the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “I hate nationalism and nation states,” declares his bitter old Prince. “My old home, the [Habsburg] Monarchy, alone, was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins.”

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The truth, of course, is that Roth’s grand European mansions hardly offered “every condition of men” the same home comforts, which is largely why the nations within them began to yearn for states of their own — including the Jews. The result was that the 20th century was a century of cabin conversions, which often left minorities on the wrong side of new walls thrown up overnight.

Israel is not unique in this regard. Poland only emerged in its modern form after the ethnic cleansing of East Prussian Germans who once lived there. Irish independence left a million or so Protestants in the North so enraged that they launched an armed insurrection to win a separate statelet of their own — which in course left a whole new minority homeless. In every case, how nations obtain their land is always murky, violent and colonial, granted legitimacy only through the slow process of time, power and hypocrisy.

Occasionally, we glimpse the double standards involved in this process — when an American congressman complains about “planters” in Ulster, for example, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself is a planter living in the last great European empire. I wonder how many of the American professors blithely declaring that Israelis are “settlers not civilians” would be happy for themselves to be treated as legitimate targets for slaughter by the Navajo or Apache? The very idea of an independent Palestinian state is the product, ironically, of the same belief in nationalism that led the early Zionists to demand a state of their own too.

Of course, the assault that Israel is about to unleash on Gaza is not just an event that will one day become a war of history — but one that is already the product of how Israelis understand their own history. And at the heart of it is a troubling question: is there a “solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, or does the search for solutions ignore the lessons of history itself?

“The history in my regular schooling was all about progress,” the fictional historian Ruben Blum recalls in Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Netanyahus: “A world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself.” This sentiment seems to be buried somewhere deep within the Western soul: the idea that, as Cohen writes, “the past was merely the process by which the present was attained”. In this understanding of history, an independent Palestinian state will eventually emerge, sovereign and democratic, at peace with its neighbour, just as Ireland and Ukraine will do the same.

And yet, as Cohen writes, there is another way of thinking about history: a Jewish understanding. “My Hebrew school history was closed,” says Blum in comparison. “It was no history; there was no past, no present, no future. Rather, there was time, as round and perfect as the earth, which from the moment it emerged from God’s spoken light had been marked by a constant repetition, not of seasons, or harvests, or astral phenomena and the holidays they governed, but of oppression, violence, and death.”

In Cohen’s novel, this rabbinical understanding of history is shared by Benzion Netanyahu, the real-life father of today’s Israeli prime minister. Benzion was one of the great historians of the Spanish Inquisition and argued that Iberian antisemitism was not the result of religious differences, but of pure Jew-hatred. As the real-life Benzion observed: “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts, carried out by antisemitic leaders and factions that managed to take over whole countries or regions in times of anarchy, civil war, or rebellion. In the areas that fell under their control, all Jewish communities were wiped out.”

Apart from the sudden exposure of Hamas’s genocidal intent, for me, the most disturbing realisation of the past fortnight is that perhaps Benzion was right. Intellectually, I knew antisemitism existed, though I had never witnessed it first-hand. But now I have. After the slaughter in Israel it was Palestinian flags that were being waved in the streets where I live, with Jewish kids told by their schools to pretend not to be Jewish.

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In Benzion’s understanding of history, the only way to survive this circular slaughter of history is to be armed and ready to fight. There is no solution — only vigilance. It is a pessimistic understanding, yet perhaps this is Israel’s fate, its history. This was the lesson of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the great hero of revisionist Zionism who warned the Jews of Palestine that the only way they could survive would be to build an iron wall with their neighbours. And it was also the message of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, in his celebrated eulogy to Ro’i Rotberg, a kibbutz security officer killed on the Gazan border in 1956. “Yesterday with daybreak, Ro’i was murdered,” Dayan began:

“The quiet of a spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the stalkers of his soul on the furrow. Let us not hurl blame at the murderers. Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”

But this was no call for withdrawal, guilt or even compromise. Dayan continued:

“Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty… Beyond the furrow that marks the border, lies a surging sea of hatred and vengeance, yearning for the day that the tranquillity blunts our alertness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call for us to lay down our arms.”

This, ultimately, is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s understanding of Israel’s predicament and, indeed, of Jewish history itself: fated to fight for survival and to be hated. And today, it feels harder than ever to argue that it is wrong. How could you, after a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was dragged from her shelter and shot in the head not far from where Dayan spoke? The tragedy here is stark: that the more people in the West choose a history which sees the very existence of Israel as illegitimate, the more Israelis will conclude that Jabotinsky, Dayan and Benzion were right all along — that Jews are never safe, that carnage is always lurking in the dark furrows of history.

The reason behind this surprising meeting: Elmaleh had just made a film about converting to Catholicism. Stay With Us, which came out in France last November, sees Elmaleh playing himself and preparing for baptism. But it’s a heavy cross to bear. Elmaleh’s parents, also playing themselves, feel betrayed when they learn their son is changing faiths. His mother tells him: “New God, new parents! Get yourself adopted.”

The movie is clearly autobiographical. Although Elmaleh won’t reveal whether he has converted in real life, he has described his relationship to Catholicism as one of “attraction, curiosity, love” and called the Virgin Mary “my most beautiful crush”. His meeting with the Pope left him profoundly moved. “He’s an extraordinary person,” he said afterwards, “charismatic, humble, inspiring, joyous.”

Yet Elmaleh isn’t the only famous Jew to hear the siren call of the Good News. Shia LaBeouf, the star of Transformers, converted after playing the 20th-century priest Padre Pio in a drama released last year. They join a vibrant community of Jewish converts to Catholicism known as Jewish Catholics, or Hebrew Catholics. It is unknown exactly how many there are around the world, but a rough estimate would put them in the hundreds, if not in the thousands. Among them are Fr. David Neuhaus, a Jesuit who served as the Patriarchal Vicar of the Hebrew Catholic Vicariate in Jerusalem, and Fr. Antoine Lévy, a Dominican currently conducting doctoral research at the University of Tel Aviv.

Both clerics converted in their twenties, and neither repudiate their Jewish identity. On the contrary, Neuhaus tells me he’s “conscious of the fact I’m not just a Catholic like all other Catholics, but I’m from a Jewish family and part of Jewish history”. That last point is crucial: Jewish identity is bigger than just practising Judaism. Many secular Jews know little about the Torah, but still feel a strong connection to Jewish peoplehood and traditions.

Lévy, who wrote a book entitled Jewish Church, says “nobody can define Jewish identity. It’s impossible.” He adds that being born Jewish is not something you can “get rid of” — likening it to the Christian concept of sacrament. “It’s in you for life,” he explains. “Whatever you do, whatever you become… a Christian Jew is still a Jew.”

Many rabbis would, of course, disagree with that statement. To convert to another religion is often perceived in the Jewish community as a betrayal — even a denial — of one’s heritage. And yet, precisely because Judaism is more than just a religion, it isn’t that simple. As Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur tells Elmaleh in Stay With Us: “You can look for a way out of the Jewish House, but nobody has ever found it.”

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But how does one put up a crucifix in the Jewish House? What does it entail to be a Jewish Catholic? Theologically, it is not such a huge switch. As Lévy says: “The leap is short and simple. You simply need to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah of Israel.” The New Testament, under this framework, is the fulfilment of a prophecy set up in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament as Christians call it: that a Jewish man, descended directly from King David, will reveal himself as the Messiah. Christians believe Jesus, who was Jewish, was the Messiah. (Christ means Messiah in Greek.) Jews normally don’t and are still awaiting him.

Yet it is important to remember that, as Neuhaus puts it, Jews and Christians “share a language” derived from the Hebrew Bible. “Because of that shared language and those shared scriptures,” explains Neuhaus, “we can agree on many, many things. Our ethical standards, our moral vocabulary are very, very, very much shared.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy for Jews, even if they are non-religious like Neuhaus and Lévy were in their youths, to convert to Catholicism. “There’s still a huge existential and cultural barrier,” says Lévy. It results from what he calls the “historical memory of Christian antisemitism”. When I asked David Kertzer, a Pulitzer-winning anthropologist and the leading expert on the history of the Catholic Church’s relations with the Jews, to describe that history, he replied: “demonisation”. Jews “were regarded as collectively responsible for the death of Jesus and were seen as obstinate because they refused to recognise the veracity of the divinity of Jesus and of the Christian message”. This was the impetus for the Catholic persecution of Jews through millennia.

Catholics certainly weren’t the only Christians to persecute Jews, but their record stands out. It includes the forced conversions of Jews; the massacres of Jews by mobs; the mass expulsions of Jews from Catholic kingdoms and provinces during the Medieval Inquisition; the segregation of Jews in ghettos, outside of which they were forced to wear a pointy hat so as to be immediately recognisable; taking Jewish children, who had been secretly baptised by Catholics, away from their family and raising them in the Church.

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Neuhaus and Lévy both wrestled with this history when converting. Their conversions, it must be understood, were motivated by faith and their personal experience of God. As Neuhaus puts it: “I didn’t become a Christian or a Catholic because of Christianity or Catholicism. I became a Christian because of an encounter with Jesus.” That’s the case for most Jewish converts to Catholicism. The impetus is spiritual, the why ineffable by the cold standards of reason. In Stay With Us, Elmaleh recounts how he entered a cathedral as a kid and came face-to-face with a statue of the Virgin Mary. To his surprise, he felt a surge of emotion and began to cry. In that moment, he was seized by faith. Later, when trying to explain to his parents why he so badly wants to convert, Elmaleh says he didn’t look for Mary; she found him.

But the past weighed heavily on their shoulders. “When I told my mother and my wider family that I would join the Catholic Church,” remembers Lévy, “they immediately said: ‘Now you’re joining those people who have been persecuting us for 2,000 years. You’re joining the herd of wolves.’” Neuhaus’s mother asked her son: “How can you join them after what they did to us?”

So, how could they? The answer lies in the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. It was initiated by Pope John XXIII to respond to the extraordinary change of the 20th century. To thrive in the new century and beyond, the Church had to change too. It needed, the Pope felt, aggiornamento — or updating.

Among these updates, Neuhaus says, was “taking out the animosity towards the Jewish people”. John XXIII acted with determination to drive through this change. His successor, Paul VI, codified it in the 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration released shortly before the Council’s closure. It marked the moment when, Kertzer explains, the policy of “demonisation” of the Jews ended. No longer were they considered collectively guilty for Jesus’s death. In fact, as Nostra Aetate stated: “God holds the Jews most dear.”

This change was key in Neuhaus’ and Lévy’s decisions to convert to Catholicism. It meant they were able to enter the Church with a clear conscience. “I would have never joined the Church in a time of persecution,” Lévy says. Neuhaus agrees — he needed, and still needs, “to be part of a Church that’s trying to find a new way to live a relationship of respect with the Jewish people”.

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By Damian Thompson

Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has made more overtures towards the Jewish community. In 1986, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to set foot in a synagogue. In 1994, he established diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel. And in 2000, he made an official visit to the country and prayed at the Western Wall. John Paul II’s successors, Benedict XVI and Francis, have continued to foster a spirit of reconciliation.

That’s not to say there aren’t antisemites left in the Church. “I’ve encountered them again and again,” says Neuhaus. “What I think I can say with some degree of certainty is that the Church hierarchy now is against them, trying to discipline them and bring them to affirm what was affirmed at the Second Vatican Council.”

Despite those advances, there remains a major unresolved issue between Jews and Catholics. It has to do with the Vatican’s reckoning over its policies in the lead up to the Holocaust as well as its silence during the Holocaust. Kertzer has researched the subject, including in Vatican archives, for the past 20 years. In The Popes Against the Jews, he writes: “The physical elimination of the Jews of Europe came at the end of a long road… a road that the Catholic Church did a great deal to help build.” As detailed in the book, Vatican-supervised publications such as Civiltà Cattolica were purveyors of antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, vilifying Jews as hellbent on world domination. This rhetoric influenced European public opinion and fuelled antisemitic politicians. “When eventually both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists are trying to justify the persecution of Jews,” says Kertzer, “they justify them in no small part by reference to Christian sources.”

The Vatican has sought to address this, releasing a report entitled We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah in 1998. It asks whether the fact that “the Shoah took place in Europe… raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards Jews”. But the report goes on to assert that “the Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity.” As an explanation, it draws a distinction between Nazi antisemitism and Christian “anti-Judaism”, which it defines as “long-standing sentiments of mistrust and hostility”. In its telling, the former was based on racial animus, but the latter was religious.

“We Remember is certainly not a frank document,” says Kertzer, for whom the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny. “It just doesn’t recognise the reality that the demonisation of the Jews by the Church didn’t just involve so-called ‘religious criticisms’. It accused the Jews of seeking world domination.”

However, Neuhaus, who lost family during the Holocaust, adheres to the distinction outlined in We Remember. But he says that, in the late 19th century, “there was an unconsciousness about how anti-Judaism became antisemitism”. He continues: “When you read articles published in Civiltà Cattolica in the 1890s, around the time of Dreyfus, you see there is this complete confusion between anti-Judaism and antisemitism moulding into one animosity against the Jewish people.”

As for Lévy, he too acknowledges that Nazi antisemitism was “indebted” to Christian antisemitism, but cautions against making sweeping statements. He also says it’s important to “remember the number of Jews who were saved by Catholics during the Second World War”. As it happened, one of them was a Jewish teenager named Aron Lustiger. The son of Polish immigrants to France, he found refuge in Catholic boarding schools during the Nazi occupation.

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At age 13, in 1940, Lustiger visited a church and felt a powerful desire to become Catholic. He converted and took as his baptismal name Jean-Marie. After the war, he joined the Church and climbed up the hierarchy, but he was outspoken about being Jewish his entire life. “To say that I am no longer a Jew,” he explained, “is like denying my father and mother… I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

For Lustiger, moreover, his Jewish identity and Catholic faith weren’t antithetical but complementary. He described himself as a “fulfilled Jew”, saying: “The vocation of Israel is to bring light to the goyim [gentiles]. That is my hope, and I believe Christianity is the means of achieving it.” Lustiger was the prototypical Jewish Catholic.

In 1981, John Paul II appointed him Archbishop of Paris. And in 1983, he was made a cardinal. “The Jewish Cardinal”, as some called him. Lustiger died in 2007, but his legacy can still be felt. Bishop Robert Barron, one of the Church’s most popular clerics, said in 2021 that “the recovery of the Jewishness of Christianity will be what [Lustiger] is most remembered for”. Barron, who is set to become a leading figure in the Church in the coming decades, has himself spoken of the necessity to “re-Judaise Catholicism” — that is, “to read Christ, the Bible, and the Christian faith through the lens of Israel”. In fact, the “re-Judaisation” of Catholicism has been an ongoing process since the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps, by following in Lustiger’s footsteps, Jewish converts to Catholicism are not abandoning Judaism, but spreading its message elsewhere.

Still, Spiegelman’s Maus seems fated to wind up one day in its own Dead Sea Scrolls-like wing in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which stands on the National Mall in Washington DC, a stone’s throw away from the gorgeous Yoruba crown of the American Museum of African American History. Since the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993, fewer and fewer American Jews seem to question the wisdom of putting a gruesome and terrifying act of mass murder at the centre of their collective identity. In a recent Pew Research Center study, 76% of American Jews said that “remembering the Holocaust” was a key component of what being Jewish meant to them — far ahead of other ostensible pillars of communal life such as “working for justice and equality” (59%), “caring about Israel” (45%), “having a good sense of humour” (34%), or “observing Jewish law” (15%).

The centrality of the Holocaust to American Jewish self-definition is also a surprisingly recent phenomenon. The invisible barrier that partitioned the American Jewish success story from the terrors of the Holocaust only began to dissolve in the late Seventies, with the airing of the 1978 mini-series Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep. Conceived and sold as a kind of Jewish Roots, Alex Haley’s sweeping drama about American slavery which had aired the previous year, Holocaust was seen by large mass audiences in both the US and Germany, breaking the informal ban on portraying Nazi crimes through the lives of their Jewish victims. In that same year, the Polish Jewish writer Issac Bashevis Singer, who lived in Manhattan and wrote movingly in Yiddish about the vanished world of European Jewry and the lives of émigré Holocaust survivors in America, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, leading to broader interest in his work in the US. The following year saw the publication of two taboo-breaking American novels that brought the Holocaust into mainstream literary culture, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, both of which underlined the uneasy continuities between Europe and America (Streep also starred in the movie version of Styron’s novel).

In the context of these cracks in the cultural ice, which would culminate, in 1993, with the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, the appearance of Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical cartoon strips about Jewish mice and Nazi cats in the underground comics magazine Raw in 1980 — the strips were published in book form as Maus in 1986 — did not cause much of a stir. Yet for those of us who were kids in New York and read Raw, Spiegelman’s strips were the ultimate Holocaust Samizdat. Were they sacrilegious? Were they art?

When I asked Spiegelman that question a few years back, he sighed, and gave his stock answer: “The Holocaust trumps art every time.” Spiegelman, whose name can be translated as “art mirrors man”, is the owner of a stunningly fertile graphic imagination that over the past 40 years has produced dozens of formally innovative and often searingly self-reflective strips in various magazines, including Arcade and Raw, which he co-founded and edited with his wife, French artist and editor Francoise Mouly. In his day job at the Topps trading card company, he created and edited the Garbage Pail Kid series before moving on to a more upscale day job at The New Yorker, where he created some of the magazine’s most iconic covers of the past three decades, including a Hasid and a black woman kissing on Valentine’s Day and the famous post-9/11 “black cover”, which, when you held it at an angle to the light, showed the outlines of the vanished Twin Towers.

Spiegelman came by his interest in the Holocaust naturally enough, as a child of parents who survived Auschwitz and settled in New York City after the war. Spiegelman himself was born in Stockholm, Sweden; his brother Rysio was poisoned in a bunker in Poland along with two other small children by his aunt, so that they wouldn’t be taken to an extermination camp. When Spiegelman was 20, he was confined in a mental hospital, whereupon his mother killed herself. Spiegelman was released from a state mental institution in Binghamton, N.Y., to attend her funeral — an event that would become the basis of one of his early, devastatingly personal cartoons. Spiegelman’s father then burned his mother’s diaries about her experiences during the war and in the camps, which she had intended for her son to read after her death.

His impulse to rid himself — and his son — of the burden of the Holocaust was not unusual, either among survivors or American Jews in general. The Holocaust was largely a taboo subject among American Jews, most of whom were glad to have left Europe and the experiences of European Jewry behind, especially given the opposing fates of Europe’s Jews and America’s. Where European Jews had faced total annihilation, American Jews had gained unparalleled social acceptance in a more open and democratic country that they were eager to embrace, and which seemed increasingly, and even unusually, willing to embrace them.

The key to Jewish social acceptance in America, which included access to higher education, jobs, and housing that had routinely been denied to Jews before the war, was their military service during the Second World War. More than 600,000 American Jews fought in the Allied Armed Forces to defeat Hitler, who was both a national enemy and a particular enemy of the Jews he sought to exterminate. The fight against Hitler therefore united American nationalism and Jewish particularism in a way that helped liberate Jews from the prejudice they had suffered before the war. The Manhattan Project, which gifted the United States rather than Nazi Germany with the most terrifyingly destructive weapon known to mankind, was led by the Jewish physicist Robert Oppenheimer and a team of émigré scientists, most of whom were also Jewish, and was grounded in a theory of matter whose outstanding progenitors were physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were also — well, you get the point. Another half million or so American Jews fought in Korea.

The replacement of images of American Jewish wartime patriotism, heroism and strength with images of European victimhood struck Jews in the Fifties as a dubious, undesirable and even potentially dangerous trade-off. Far from being a pillar of communal identity, the Holocaust was mostly a kind of terrifying in-group secret that accompanied the great movement of Jews from urban ghettos to tennis clubs in leafy suburbs like the one that Philip Roth portrayed in Goodbye, Columbus. Speak too loudly about the Holocaust, or so the whispered communal voices suggested, and friendly post-war Americans might recall that before 1939 many of them — especially at the higher echelons of society — had been fervent antisemites. Survivors such as Art Spiegelman’s parents, who came to America after the war with numbers tattooed on their arms, speaking broken English and haunted by terrible memories, were unwanted guests at the banquet of post-war American Jewish success, bearers of the grim message that it could all vanish tomorrow.

A good part of the energy of American Jewish culture after the war can therefore be seen in part as the product of an act of profound and even generative repression of a tragedy that after all, had happened somewhere else. In Hollywood, where Jews, individually and collectively, exerted an enormous cultural presence, it took until Schindler’s List for an A-list Jewish director or executive or star to make a major film about the destruction of European Jewry. Neither The Naked and the Dead nor Catch-22, the two classic American Second World War novels, written by the Jewish novelists Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller respectively, mentioned the Holocaust. The 1959 movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank was directed by George Stevens and otherwise carefully de-natured to avoid seeming like a Jewish story.

For an American kid like Spiegelman, who was nevertheless unable to avoid the subject of the Holocaust because of the ways they had shaped his own life, it was necessary to find non-mainstream cultural forms in which to express his terrors. Spiegelman credits Mad magazine and the sensibility of its founder Harvey Kurtzman for shaping his early desire to use cartoons to express his sense that something was not entirely right with the way the world around him worked or was portrayed in mainstream acceptable culture. His first Mad anthology, which he studied with the intensity that some of his peers brought to pages of the Talmud, was a gift from his mother, the Auschwitz survivor who killed herself.

Starting in 1978, Spiegelman, then a well-known underground cartoonist, began interviewing his father about his wartime experiences. In the early Eighties, he began creating strips that narrated his father’s stories and portrayed his own relationship with his father, a miserly and compulsive yet deeply sympathetic character; the strips were published in Raw under the title “Maus”. Both the title and the device of portraying Jews as mice and Germans as cats had been used by Spiegelman before, in a three-page strip he had published in 1972 and that was later published in his collection Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which attracted the admiration of hundreds of dedicated alternative comics fans but few buyers.

Today, it seems clear that Maus and Maus II, Spiegelman’s continuation of the first collection, are the most powerful and significant works of art produced by any American Jewish writer or artist about the Holocaust. While their enduring popularity is a tribute to Spiegelman’s deep honesty about his emotional experience of his upbringing and of his graphic and narrative talent, it is also a reflection of the way in which the Holocaust has morphed from a threatening and largely repressed communal trauma to the glue that binds the American Jewish community together. If Art Spiegelman is a genius who created a work of searing originality and insight out of his familial and personal suffering, it is also hard not to worry about the anti-aesthetic and communal consequences of his achievement. If he is right to complain that the Holocaust trumps art, it was Maus that opened the floodgates.

Of course, Jews are hardly the only group of Americans who seek to define themselves through historical trauma. In America’s flourishing victimhood Olympics, to be a black American is to be the descendent of slaves, who were whipped and chained — even if your Nigerian parents came to America to study medicine on Fulbright Scholarships. To be Asian is to have been sent to labour camps during the Second World War — “Asian” being one of the catch-all American identity groupings like “Hispanic” that lump together the experiences of widely differing nationalities, population groups and tribes. To be gay is to be persecuted for your sexual preferences, like Oscar Wilde, or be denied treatment for Aids. In all these cases, the moral virtue and practical wisdom of inculcating identities centred around the traumatic experiences of people who, in most cases, are no longer alive is simply taken as an article of faith.

Yet Jews remain a special case, in part because the trauma inflicted on them was so recent and totalising; in part because they are in fact a tribe, with a continuous collective historical memory stretching back to the Old Testament; and in part, because they are also, simultaneously, an unabashed American success story. The apparent contradictions between the American Jewish success story and the Holocaust victimhood narrative can be unsettling, both for purveyors of victimhood ideology and for American Jews. For if historical trauma begets present-day ills, then why are Jews so successful — and were they ever truly victims? And what if Jewish success in fact begets Jewish victimhood, in which case America’s special status as a safe haven from the terrors of Jewish history is illusory?

The fact is, neither the Left nor the Right in America can get what they actually want from the Holocaust, which is a simple and gratifying victory over their political enemies. Fantasies about rural Trumpers gleefully carting liberal American Jews off to the gas chambers have more in common with fetish porn than they do with American social or political reality. Similarly, the poor inner-city teenagers who physically attack poor urban religious Jews with sickening regularity have little in common with goose-stepping would-be Übermenschen.

The eagerness with which both sides in America’s inane political wars seek to deploy the Holocaust as a weapon is not a sign of any great respect for the dead. Nor does it do anything to help living Jews, whose position as a small minority in an increasingly fractured and unstable country seems unlikely to improve anytime soon, no matter how often the Left and Right accuse the other side of being Nazis.

Perhaps Art Spiegelman’s parents understood something important about the past that today’s balkanised and trauma-obsessed Americans can no longer credit: that the greatest gift you can give your children is to free them from the past, so that they can become something new. For Art Spiegelman’s parents, the demand that they not pass on their incalculable suffering to their son was simply too great. The rest of America has no such excuse.

David Samuels contributed an essay to Maus Now, a new essay collection edited by Hillary Chute (Viking).

When we arrived last week, we considered a rehearsal, making it into a game. How many times have parents tried to shield their children from the full reality of war by turning it into a game? As the rockets begin their downward trajectory, falling God knows where, we would be somewhere underneath singing “run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run”.

And what have we forgotten? Blankets, Ventolin, Lego Spiderman? No, forget everything. When the sirens go, you just run. Or choose to stay in bed and console yourself with the statistical improbability of a hit, or cower in the corridor and hope for the best. But cowering in the corridor was not the reason the boys have their Israeli passports. Jews hiding in the house from those who would murder them is too freighted with memory. No, we will let the boys sleep even if the sirens sound. Fuck Islamic Jihad.

“But what about…?” Here it comes. Even the people who mean well can’t help but qualify their sympathy with reference to the children of those firing the rockets. Of course, I inwardly weep for the children of Gaza who have been killed in this latest exchange. But I also feel little but contempt for those who want me to accept this acknowledgment as a condition of their concern. It is estimated that in the last few days, more of Gaza’s children have been killed by the clowns of Islamic Jihad and their misfiring rockets than by Israeli action. Israel has the Iron Dome, the fantastically successful anti-missile system that meant 96% of rockets from Gaza were shot down before they reached their intended target. A home was hit in Sderot, a wall damaged in Netanya. But beyond minor injuries, no Israelis were hurt. The Iranians, who fund Palestinian Islamic Jihad, do not get a lot for their money.

But still, Islamic Jihad has never been interested in peace. Founded in the Eighties, they seek the violent eradication of Israel, insisting on “the jihad solution and the martydom style as the only choice for liberation”. Their modus operandi is to deliberately target civilians rather than military targets — on public buses, in restaurants. Islamic Jihad exists to kill Jews. And Israel, which exists to protect Jews, has absolutely every moral right to defend itself against them.

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Attacking their leadership — the people planning to kill Jews — is what protecting Jews means in practice. But in practice, it also involves complex moral judgments of the sort Islamic Jihad would never dream of making. Yes, targeting murderous antisemites who hide out in heavily built-up areas inevitably involves risks to the civilian population. And I believe the Israelis do their best to avoid these because it is absolutely not in their interest to kill Palestinian civilians and stir up more hatred against them.

But some refuse to accept any of this. Former Labour MP Claudia Webbe’s hot take on the situation was: “15 Palestinian children murdered by Israel over the weekend”. Murdered? Seriously? Murdered means that children were being deliberately targeted. This is a lie, but it is of a piece with a whole crazy gamut of posturing that takes place around the Palestinian cause.

During last weekend’s Brighton Pride, the Palestinian flag was waved about, despite the fact that being gay in the Palestinian Territories is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Over in Iran, they hang gay men. By contrast, last month’s Tel Aviv Pride was supported by 170,000 Israelis.

But it’s not just liberal Europeans who succumb to this ridiculous double-think. Over in Mea She’arim, Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood, they also fly the Palestinian flag. Many of its residents think the state of Israel is a secular blasphemy, with Zionism impertinently doing the work that is properly reserved for God’s Messiah. So they do what they can to rile the Zionist imposter. This despite the fact that the Rabbi most responsible for anti-Zionist sentiment amongst the Haredim — Joel Teitelbaum — was himself saved from the Nazis by Zionists. Indeed, more Jews have been saved by the head-covering of the IDF’s Iron Kipa (in Hebrew, Kippat Barzel) than by the furry ones of the Satmar Hasidism.

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But despite all this nonsense, there is some hope to be gleaned from the military action of the last few days. Most importantly, Hamas didn’t join in. Hamas are rivals to Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Territories, the latter of which isn’t engaged politically with the everyday life of Palestinians. Of course, Hamas offered their verbal support and it may well be that they were just not sufficiently re-armed after their last pasting to do much to help. But perhaps there is another explanation.

Whisper it, but there could be more going on in Gaza than bomb-making and tunnel-digging. There are now 14,000 work permits in place that allow Gazans to work in Israel. Thousands more are in the offing, with the Israeli government likely to reward Hamas for their military inactivity. The political side of Hamas knows how valuable these jobs are to the economy.

During lockdown, for instance, Gaza saw a very significant increase in the number of little sewing circles that supply cheap fashion items to the Israelis, whose textile manufacturing industry has all but collapsed as their economy re-focused around hi-tech start-ups. And the fact that Islamic Jihad has had such a disastrous few days — its leadership eliminated, its missiles falling on their own people — only underlines the fact that, on the ground, economic activity is a far more sustainable road map to co-existence than cheap rockets from Iran. Hamas remain committed to the elimination of the Zionist entity, but perhaps at some point, even for them, jobs are more important than their murderous ideology.

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Gaza remains a place of real human misery, of course. Millions of people crammed into an area of just 140 square miles, often with no water or electricity for hours on end. But the Israelis have no interest in making matters worse for them. Indeed, quite the opposite. Yes, they will defend themselves — pre-emptively sometimes — from the threat that comes from Gaza. But this is because no country in the world would sit by as their neighbour prepared to fire on their citizens. That is probably why Ukraine sent a message of solidarity to the Israelis over the weekend. As President Zelenskyy himself has said, Ukraine will become “a big Israel” after the war with Russia.

Up to a million Jews were murdered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen units in Ukraine during the Second World War. Israel exists as a kind of sacred vow to stop this ever happening again. As a Jew himself, Zelenskyy understands this. As do my family who had great-grandparents murdered over there. This, by the way, is the right use of the word “murdered”. And it’s why my boys are citizens of this extraordinary, beautiful, troubled and defiant country. The sirens remind my family that Jews continue to be targeted. But they don’t put us off being here. In fact, they have quite the opposite effect: they remind us how much we need this place to exist. And why it is worth fighting for.

Alex, who is not Jewish, explains that he intends to take the book with him into battle. He says his nickname is Zion, “because I am a Zionist”.

Golda Meir is very popular in Ukraine these days, with a version of her saying about Israel and Arabs still circulating on social media: “If Russia lays down its weapons, there is no war. If Ukraine lays down its weapons, there is no Ukraine.” Yet in his speech to the Knesset on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy quoted a different Meir remark: “We intend to remain alive. Our neighbours want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.”

Had Zelenskyy continued in this vein, his speech may have had a warmer reception. Israelis, even those who weren’t yet born in 1973, have a sense of what it’s like to be attacked by larger armies who think their country should not exist. The Israeli army’s ethos is largely about being a smaller, scrappier and smarter force that can successfully take on those who seek to annihilate us. So when Ukrainians quote Golda Meir’s pithy remarks, it resonates in Israel, because we understand — first-hand or through our close family members — what Ukraine is experiencing.

Israelis also see parallels between Ukraine and its current situation because, as politicians in Jerusalem often say, Israel must be able to “defend itself, by itself”. While grateful for military aid from the US, Israel never expected other countries’ soldiers to take part in its wars. Many of its politicians and pundits — myself included — watched the world do next to nothing when Russia amassed its tanks on the border, concluding it was yet further proof that Israel can and must rely on itself. Plus, as Zelenskyy could have pointed out, Russia is an ally of Iran, which is bent on Israel’s destruction.

But rather than highlight this, Zelenskyy chose to focus much of his speech on the Holocaust, a rare misstep in his video tour of parliaments. Israelis, of course, know all about the horrors of the Holocaust. They know, for instance, that it was not a war between the armies of two nations. Rather, it was Nazi Germany’s attempt to erase all Jews from the earth. It was industrial-scale genocide, with gas chambers, death marches and — as at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, which Zelenskyy mentioned — the mass execution of thousands of people lined up in front of ditches.

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Zelenskyy referenced Righteous Among the Nations, the more than 2,600 Ukrainians documented as having saved Jews. “Ukrainians made their choice 80 years ago,” he said. “They rescued Jews. People of Israel, now you have such a choice.” But many Israelis know the role that many more Ukrainians played in the Holocaust: roughly 80,000 Ukrainians volunteered for the SS, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police rounded up Jews to be massacred at Babyn Yar, Lviv, Zhitomir and elsewhere.

None of this should be relevant to a war in which Russia invaded Ukraine and is brutally bombarding its cities. Polls show that Israelis overwhelmingly support Ukraine, and that is reflected in the Knesset, as well.

Yet many Israeli politicians expressed discomfort with Zelenskyy’s speech. “It is impossible to rewrite the terrible history of the Holocaust,” Israeli Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel said. “The war is terrible but the comparison with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Final Solution is outrageous.” Likud former cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz suggested that, had the speech not been given at wartime, people “would have it bordered on Holocaust denial”.

Still, as Soviet-born American writer Alex Zeldin has observed, Zelenskyy’s speech demonstrated a very Soviet way of speaking about the Holocaust, which is focused more on Jews who fought in the Red Army during World War Two — and therefore suffered in the same way as other Soviet people — than the Nazi goal of extermination of the Jewish people. In Israel, too, many agree that we should cut him some slack, considering his desperate situation.

For instance, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who brewed a diplomatic crisis with Poland over accusations of Holocaust distortion, sent a simple message of support for Ukraine after the speech. And when Lapid and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett were asked about Zelenskyy’s comments the following day, they both started by saying they didn’t want to judge someone fighting for his country’s survival — though they did add that his comparison was inappropriate. Hendel, who was one of the first to complain about Zelenskyy’s Holocaust remarks, said the same to me: we must also remember that he is managing a crisis.

During his speech, Zelenskyy asked the Knesset the same question that he has asked every parliament in recent weeks: why can’t Israel put more economic pressure on Russia or send weapons to Ukraine?

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Israel has condemned Russia at the UN and in repeated statements since. It has sent several planes full of humanitarian aid and on Tuesday became the first country to open a field hospital in Ukraine . The main reason why Israel has not done more is that it does not want to antagonise Russia, which looms over its northern border with Syria. We should also remember that, unlike Baltic states which have an actual border with Russia, Israel is not a member of Nato.

Of course, it is still reasonable for Zelenskyy to demand more from the Knesset, considering his country is fighting for its survival. But many of his specific requests didn’t make much sense. For example, Zelenskyy strongly implied that Ukraine needs Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system, saying: “Everyone in Israel knows that your missile defence is the best. It is powerful. Everyone knows that your weapon is strong… And you can definitely help us protect our lives, the lives of Ukrainians, the lives of Ukrainian Jews.”

But the Iron Dome would have very little effect in helping Ukraine fight Russia. For starters, the rockets and UAVs that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launch at Israel from Gaza are much cruder than Russia’s ballistic missiles and other projectiles. Meanwhile, Israel barely has enough Iron Dome batteries to cover its own territory, which is a fraction of Ukraine’s size, and you can be certain that Hamas and PIJ would immediately take advantage of a situation in which Israel sent its Iron Dome elsewhere. On top of that, it would take a long time to transport an Iron Dome interceptor and make it operational, and the US Congress only just approved the $1 billion Israel needed to replenish the Iron Dome batteries used during the war with Gaza in May.

Zelenskyy surely knows all of this; his own Ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Kornichuk, said at the beginning of the war that “Russia uses completely different weapons from the Palestinians, so Iron Dome would probably not help us”. In a similar vein of asking for the irrelevant, Hendel told me that Ukraine has repeatedly requested that he ban Moscow’s official news stations, on the grounds that they spread dangerous disinformation — even though the channels are not actually broadcasted in Israel.

In another section of his speech, Zelenskyy criticised Bennett’s mediation efforts between Ukraine and Russia. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle; the jury so far is out, and Bennett himself says he is not sure what impact he can have, though he is willing to try in order to end the war and save lives.

But Zelenskyy’s sharp remarks that “indifference kills” belie the fact that it is Zelenskyy himself who drew Bennett into the role of intermediary. Zelenskyy has been asking Israel to mediate between Ukraine and Russia since February 2021, citing Jerusalem’s good ties with Moscow. How could Bennett do this while also showing as much support as the West?

Despite this, some Right-wing American pundits have speculated that the speech was, in fact, the Biden administration using Zelenskyy as a way to pressure Israel to get in line with the West. My sources in Washington have told me this is not true, but that US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and others did warn Bennett that assuming the role of a mediator may put him in the line of diplomatic and rhetorical fire.

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It’s striking that after his speech to the Knesset, Zelenskyy somewhat backtracked in a video message on his Telegram channel: “Of course, Israel has its interests, strategy to protect its citizens. We understand all of it. The prime minister of Israel, Mr Bennett, is trying to find a way of holding talks, and we are grateful for this. We are grateful for his efforts so that sooner or later we will begin to have talks with Russia, possibly in Jerusalem. That’s the right place to find peace. If possible.” Whatever the motivation or strategy behind Zelenskyy’s zigging in the Knesset and zagging on Telegram, it seems he is aware that, contrary to his speeches in Washington, London and Brussels, his instincts or advice were off when it came to Jerusalem.

One suspects that, had he not made crude Holocaust comparisons and impractical demands, there may have been public pressure in Israel for the government to do more to help Ukraine. That being said, the misstep doesn’t seem to be hurting him much in Israel. Bennett is still willing to mediate between Russia and Ukraine and even said he would visit Kyiv if there is progress in the talks. Meanwhile. a public opinion poll taken before the speech showed 76% of Israelis supported Ukraine in the war and only 10% supported Russia.

It remains unclear whether those figures have shifted since Zelenskyy’s speech. But Israelis surely can understand his situation, even if the speech didn’t land. As Ukraine’s favourite Israeli Golda Meir once said: “If we have a choice between being dead and pitied and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”

I have no idea how someone can have that much courage and emotional wherewithal at such a tender age. Miraculously, both survived. The Red Army finally liberated the city, in 1944, after which Luba made aliya to Israel where she became a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. She was a formidable woman.

Putin also imagines himself a liberator, his soldiers being some sort of new Red Army freeing Ukraine from latter day Nazis. For years, Russian state-controlled media has repeatedly cast the Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, never fully freed from the wickedness of anti-Semitism. “Mojem povtorit” the Russians say. We can do it again. We can defeat Nazism again.

Putin wants to recruit Jewish suffering — the suffering of my wife’s family, among millions of others — as some sort of ghastly pretext for his wicked war on the Ukrainian people.

Yes, there is a small far-Right element to Ukrainian politics. But the same could be said of modern-day Poland and Hungary, even in France or Germany. And I won’t dignify Putin’s narrative of liberation by arguing with it. You don’t rain down bombs upon innocent civilians if you want to liberate them. And you don’t bomb the holocaust memorial site at Babi Yar if you are intent on freeing the country from “Nazis”. And let’s not forget that the current and elected president of Ukraine is Jewish.

What is particularly disappointing, however, is that various Israeli leaders have allowed themselves to be manipulated in the service of Putin’s dangerous historical revisionism. In 2018, the then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood next to Putin in Moscow’s Red Square, watching Russian tanks roll past, commemorating the 73^rd anniversary of the Russian victory over the Nazis.

It helps Putin’s anti-Nazi narrative to be filmed being close to Israeli prime ministers, so it is no coincidence that one of the only world leaders to have met Putin over the past two weeks of the war has been the new Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Israel may have voted to condemn the Russian invasion at the United Nations, but you can be pretty sure that all Russian TV will show is the Russian and Israeli leaders shaking hands and smiling at each other. The message is clear: the Jews approve of what we are doing. But both Netanyahu and Bennett were always being played.

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They probably knew it too. But both had domestic reasons for being there. First, Israeli voters like to see their leaders fraternising with big players on the world stage, and 1.2 million of them are originally from Russia. Also Israel, like London, is the home to several serious Russian oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich, with billions invested. But most important is the fact that Russia has been an important ally in the fight against Isis in Syria —and Israeli politicians hope that Russia may even be persuaded to block any new nuclear deal that the Americans want to revive with Iran.

It is because of the politics of the Middle East that Israeli politicians are prepared to stand grinning beside Putin. “It is necessary to ensure the continued security coordination between the Russian army and the Israel Defence Forces,” Netanyahu said, before he flew out to admire Putin’s tanks. Which is why, when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, the Israelis said nothing. So despite the fact that Ukraine was for centuries the absolute centre of world Judaism (which is why, for the ultra-Orthodox especially, it contains a number of important pilgrimage sites – such as the birthplace of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov), modern Jews don’t really see this part of the world as particularly important. The Pale of Settlement is the old Jewish world; Israel the new one. The Russian invasion is not our fight.

But it should be. Not only for obvious humanitarian reasons. But also, as a recent editorial in the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz rightly claimed: “Putin’s attempt to liken the invading Russian army to the Red Army that liberated East Europe and the extermination camps from Nazi Germany borders on Holocaust denial.” To requisition the mass murder of Jews as justification for the present invasion of Ukraine is a perversion of history so vast that it threatens to undermine the very purpose for which the state of Israel was established.

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By David Patrikarakos

Last week, my two youngest children received their Israeli passports in the post. I felt a sense of relief that I find difficult to explain. “Home is the place where they have to let you in,” as Rabbi Sacks once explained it to me. His point was that whatever happens in the world, having an Israeli passport guarantees Jews a safe place if ever they need it. I want this option for my boys. Their great great grandparents, Luba’s Mum and Dad, were murdered by genocidal Nazis in Lviv. They are remembered at Yad Vashem in the Hall of Names alongside so many others whose blood was spilt in Ukraine.

The memory of their deaths is profoundly disrespected by Putin’s cynical exploitation. Israeli leaders have allowed themselves to become stooges in some sordid Russian conspiracy where they are forced to play act the narratives of the second world war for a gullible TV audience. And Putin has taken the memories of dead Jews and used them as an excuse to conduct a war of aggression against a civilian population and to target their Jewish leader for assassination.

Uncovering and maintaining the truth of what happened during the holocaust is quite properly a modern Jewish commandment — both a sacred and a secular mitzvah. “Though shalt not grant Hitler posthumous victories”, was how Emil Fackenheim described it. Putin’s manipulation of the history of the Jews to deliver a patently fraudulent casus belli is a lie that must be kept a million miles away from the story of the Jewish people during the holocaust. Russian propaganda is an insult to their memory.

Once again in Europe millions of people are on the move, terrified families, women and children fleeing violent men in uniforms, elderly people hiding in freezing basements, cities reduced rubble. It looks like history, but it is today. Dressing up as liberators, the Russians have come as the aggressor. They have now become the very thing that they say they hate. And there is a special place in hell for people such as this.

With this image, Sullivan ends her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Her subtitle, less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept, trails the book’s bombshell: that a Jewish Council member, Arnold van den Bergh, was in their view “the betrayer”.

It took five years, a €100,000 public subsidy, cutting edge artificial intelligence and a retired FBI special agent, Vince Pankoke, to reach this conclusion — which was launched less than a month ago by an international publishing machine. Sullivan outlines the theory of the Cold Case Diary team: that Van den Bergh “saved his family by giving up addresses, including Prinsengracht 163, to the SD”.

The team described itself as “confident” of this conclusion, which was based on an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived two years hiding from the Nazis in The Secret Annex. But the global publicity campaign, promoting the idea that it was a Jewish man who betrayed the Franks, unleashed a wave of criticism.

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Some scholars and historians immediately questioned the claim, sources distanced themselves, the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos apologised for any offence caused and paused distribution, influential German magazine Die Zeit accused Sullivan of “sensationalism”, and the heads of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Anne Frank Fonds in Basel expressed doubts about the work. The team fiercely defended their conclusions in their blog. But they did  backpedal on earlier interviews, in which they had stated that there was an “85% probability” that they were correct, saying this was not an 85% certainty but a “conditional probability”.

While the book predicts a strong reaction to its “powerful” and “unsettling” conclusions — which are presented like a “true crime” documentary and with the certainty of a court verdict — the team has apparently been surprised and shocked by the backlash. They feel like victims of a kind of witch hunt.

The Dutch wounds of Nazi occupation are clearly so close to the surface that, at a scratch, they still bleed. The Netherlands has the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: an estimated 73% of the Jewish population died. Professor Frank van Vree — a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — points out that Remembrance Day on 4 May was named one of the most important national unifiers in a recent, wide-ranging study by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research.

But just as the Dutch self-image of a tolerant, open society has been challenged by admissions of systemic racism, looking closely at the reality of the Holocaust reveals some uncomfortable truths. “From the mid-Sixties, the story of the destruction of Dutch Jewry and the complicity of the non-Jewish Dutch is a permanent struggle with the rosy Dutch self-image,” says Van Vree. “The knowledge that this really happened… in a society that considered itself a haven of tolerance… It never disappeared, this feeling of guilt”.

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And the story of Anne Frank brings a lot of these tensions to the surface. After it was published in 1947 (and with the 1955 Broadway play that brought it to American attention), the diary weathered claims that it was fake, as well as initial hesitancy from international publishers to make Anne Frank, as some historians have it, the centrepiece of Holocaust memorial.

Her story is also perfectly designed for a global audience. “She comes from a very humanist, Frankfurt-based family; she counts as one of the famous Dutch but in reality she’s German,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, emeritus professor and chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “And the way Judaism was practised in the Anne Frank family comes very close to the American reform tradition.

“Anne Frank is ideal for identification,” he goes on. “She keeps her faith in humanity, she has all the dreams 13-year-old girls have”. And we fulfil Anne’s dream of becoming a writer by the positive act of reading. “The Anne Frank diary has become a sort of mirror of our society”.

There’s one conspicuous absence in the book, though. “Anne Frank is of course the most famous Holocaust victim”, says ten Cate, “because her book is not about the Holocaust”. The diary ends abruptly; we know where she went, and what happened to her. But “the Holocaust is not mentioned in the book.” The great question the reader is left with is: who betrayed her?

Past theories include warehouse worker Willem van Maaren, Dutch national socialist Tonny Ahlers, famous “Jew-hunter” Ans van Dijk, and a bureaucratic investigation into food stamp fraud. But while ever more books come out to present a new villain to counter Anne Frank’s heroism, the truth of the Dutch war experience was different: collaborating with the Nazis was not the occasional act of the rare individual.

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The Netherlands suffered military defeat in five days. There is evidence of sustained civil service and economic collaboration with Nazism after this — the state railway company, for instance, recently agreed to pay €50m in compensation for transporting people to Nazi camps. The population, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. But many police and civilians betrayed Jewish people in hiding and received financial rewards: kopgeld or “head bounty” (Pankoke, the retired special agent, discovered a microfilm of 956 kopgeld receipts in an American archive).

Solidarity with Jewish people was greater in France and Belgium, which had experience of resistance movements, and where the Germans did not institute a civilian government. The geography there also made hiding easier.

But after the war, the Dutch popular narrative did not recognise that particular groups had suffered more. Stories of the treatment received by Jewish people returning from the camps are appalling: they were given no preferential state help, and sometimes found their possessions taken by other citizens not keen to return them. They even faced housing tax bills for the time when they were imprisoned by Nazis.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the Protestant Church in 2020 declared its sense of guilt for failing to protect the Jewish population. That year, Dutch king Willem-Alexander said in his Remembrance Day speech that his great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina — while in exile in London — did not do enough to support the Jewish community, even “if only by words”.

But it’s very late in the day to recognise some of these injustices. When, in 2016, Amsterdam announced a €10m payment to Holocaust survivors for taxing them while they were in the camps, there were not enough of them left to take it, and the money was instead given to Jewish-related causes.

Meanwhile, after years of examining the cases of museums exhibiting art looted by the Nazis, Dutch restitutions policy has only just been changed to show “more humanity and goodwill”. This year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is expected to hand back a Kandinsky painting, considered a “forced sale”, to the Jewish heirs. Other claim cases are still rumbling.

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During this moment of reckoning, the aim of the Cold Case Diary team was, to quote Pankoke, to “provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured”. But the fact that it points the finger at a Jewish man has been a source of much controversy. Van Vree feels this kind of conclusion should only be made when it is beyond any reasonable doubt. “That’s the last thing that you should suggest — only at the very end, if you are absolutely sure about it”, he says. “The critics are almost all people who are very aware of the non-Jewish guilt about what happened. This is very improper, and if you accept it, you might imply that actually the non-Jews are innocent, so to speak”.

For relatives of Van den Burgh, including his great-niece Elise Tak, the accusation is “appalling”. She questions the proof that any list of hiding places existed, and where the accusatory, anonymous note sent to Otto Frank came from.

Meanwhile the Dutch population is left wondering how to feel about the behaviour of its ancestors. Which is ironic, given that the filmmaker Thijs Bayens started the “cold case” project to try to understand what happens to a population if life is “threaded with fear”.

“The truth never is about the past — it always is about us,” says ten Cate, who expects to see another four or five ‘betrayers’ named in his lifetime. “If it’s only about the past, we don’t give a damn. Historians … isolate particular facts and events from the past and bring them into focus because we want to re-form them to something that is relevant for our own identity. Often it takes the form: what would I have done and what exactly is the relation between us, our identity, our self-image, and what happened in the past? Are we entitled to have a better self-image than our parents?”

Whatever your answer, and whatever you think of Sullivan’s book and the team’s conclusions, we have to confront the facts. Reparations can still be made, especially while there are survivors. “It is important to have these conversations now,” he says. “Belated justice is justice.” And even after attempts at justice, it is important to remember, and to trip over, the painful stumbling stones of the past.

In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream. “He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal; he would be hosting a podcast.

Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians; Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties.

The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or — and this is crucial — worry about being funny. What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Ba dum tss.

While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years — including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside — see laughter as a secondary concern. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”

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Comedians increasingly want to be philosophers. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.”

The first great philosopher-comic was Lenny Bruce. In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin describes the evolution of stand-up comedy between the Forties and the Seventies as “a long march from joke-telling to truth-telling”, with Lenny Bruce as its gung-ho general. Starting in 1953, he was not alone in reinventing comedy but he established a new template for the stand-up: raw, authentic, discomfitingly honest, ferociously intolerant of hypocrisy and cant and sometimes messy. Comedians in that mould couldn’t just make people laugh; they had to offer a point of view. “With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan.

As Kliph Nesteroff explains in The Comedians, some critics didn’t consider what Bruce was doing to be comedy at all. Time complained that he “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world”, while the Los Angeles Times deplored his “soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message”. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, claimed for comedians the radical freedom not to be funny all the time.

At that time, only three kinds of people enjoyed the privilege of speaking their minds to an audience for an hour: politicians, preachers and comedians. In fact, the priest delivering Bruce’s eulogy said “he was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner”. After Bruce’s death, the baton of comedian as social critic passed to the likes of Richard Pryor (“the Picasso of our profession,” according to Jerry Seinfeld) and George Carlin, whose aphorisms now circulate, like Orwell’s or Gandhi’s, in the form of earnest Twitter memes.

These pioneers cast a long shadow. A 2017 Rolling Stone list of the best stand-ups of all time was topped by Pryor, Carlin and Bruce, with others in the same tradition — Louis CK, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle — close behind. At number 13 was Bill Hicks. “To me, the comic is the guy who says ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms,” Hicks told the New Yorker in 1993. “He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

The politics of this brand of comedy are, more often than not, libertarian. Comics want the freedom to say whatever they like as long as it’s funny so have often ended up on the frontlines of the battle for free speech. Bruce was twice tried on obscenity charges, while Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed his celebrated routine ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972. When an English vicar complained of blasphemy in Bill Hicks’s 1992 show Revelations, he replied: “This is about freedom and freedom of speech and words can’t hurt you.”

The culture has changed somewhat since then. In comedy, at least, there are now more taboos on the Left than on the Right and the spectre of cancel culture is to someone like Chappelle what the NYPD was to Lenny Bruce, minus the court cases. In The Closer, Chappelle expresses the comedian’s licence to say anything in a less noble form than Hicks: “Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

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This licence is immensely powerful. Take Jimmy Carr’s Roma Holocaust joke, for example. In the context of his recent Netflix special, it’s still, I think, grotesquely misjudged — but Carr goes on to talk about the forgotten victims of the Nazis and why he made the joke. It clearly didn’t shock the audience in the room, nor the huge number of people who watched the special during its first six weeks. It only became scandalous when a 40-second clip went viral on TikTok and Twitter: the land of no context.

Even in a stand-up environment, though, Chappelle’s disclaimer isn’t enough. I don’t buy the popular binary division between comedy that “punches up” (good) and the kind that “punches down” (bad). Comedy doesn’t cleave so neatly, and nor does society. But I’m equally unconvinced by the “just jokes” defence.

For one thing, it’s not the case that anything goes. No major comedian currently delivers the kind of racist jokes that were commonplace in the Seventies, however deftly constructed they might be. (Carr celebrates Black Lives Matter in his Netflix show before getting laughs out of the Roma.) For another, it’s inconsistently applied. Ricky Gervais has arguably replaced Richard Dawkins as Britain’s most famous atheist and on that issue he wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, comedians want to say whatever they like even when they’re not being funny.

You can see this double standard at work in Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. I agreed with Stewart that Crossfire was a toxic travesty of debate but notice how he positioned himself. When Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson criticised him for asking politicians soft questions, Stewart replied that he’s on Comedy Central: “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But when Carlson complained, “I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny,” Stewart said, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Depending on the moment, he is Schrödinger’s comedian: just a funnyman but also not just a funnyman.

Rogan uses this trick, too. He would not be interviewing politicians, authors and epidemiologists if he were only about the laughs, but he keeps his comedian’s licence in his back pocket in case of emergency. Last April, Dr Anthony Fauci criticised him for advising young, healthy people not to get vaccinated. In his self-deprecating response, Rogan said: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian who just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

This is very convenient. Rogan is half a conspiracy theorist: he has the curiosity but not the commitment. To his credit, he sometimes admits to being wrong. But he has that particular blend of scepticism (towards mainstream expertise) and credulity (towards anybody challenging it), so he becomes a conduit for false information, even when he’s not explicitly endorsing it. In the case of the present Spotify controversy, whether Rogan himself is an anti-vaxxer (he claims he isn’t) is a moot point if he is sympathetically conversing with vaccine sceptics to an audience of millions.

Russell Brand, too, has been described as “a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers”. He’s been on a journey. In 2013, Brand abruptly transformed himself from verbose dandy lothario into revolutionary seer in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in which he urged people not to vote. His ensuing book, Revolution, was a peculiar mix of rehab memoir, New Age mysticism and solid policy proposals from Left-wing thinkers such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, liberally salted with self-deprecation: “I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom.”

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During the pandemic, Brand’s obsession with political alienation and challenging official narratives has led him a long way from Piketty. The breathlessly clickbaity titles of his YouTube videos are often indistinguishable from those of the conservative guests he gently interviews on a regular basis: “Why The Left Can’t Handle Donald Trump”, “Vaccine Gold Rush: Do You Trust Gates?”, “They’re Eliminating FREE THOUGHT!! Billionaires’ Plan To CONTROL The Internet”, the latter bearing the hashtag #GeorgeSoros.

Brand claims that he is “breaking down the news, providing you with information you won’t get in mainstream media”. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. “What do I know?” he says in a recent video defending Rogan. “What could I claim to know? I’ve never been to university or higher education of any kind, except for showing-off school.” To his fans, of course, this makes him all the more reliable: one of them, not one of Them. That video is called “The Truth”.

Comedians should be free to switch lanes, but when Al Franken runs for the US Senate, or David Baddiel writes Jews Don’t Count, they aren’t doing so as comedians and they are making a choice. Comedians who express political opinions through the discipline of stand-up (a discipline which inevitably tests and sharpens those opinions) are also making a choice. Just as a musician has more freedom in a protest song than in an essay, or a film-maker more liberty in a drama based on a true story than in a documentary, the criteria are relatively clear. Rogan and Brand raise an interesting question: does the privilege of comedy apply even when you’re not doing comedy?

I do wonder if Hicks, with his nascent taste for conspiracy theories and spiritual self-discovery, would have wound up in a similar role. 70 years after Lenny Bruce’s comedy revolution, Rogan and Brand represent a very modern, very online mutation which is both post-funny and post-truth-telling. Rather than establishing a point of view and crafting it into a routine, they offer a muddy, non-committal version of “anything goes” in which misinformation is simply another interesting idea for the open-minded to consider and pushback is establishment intolerance of free speech.

By hedging their bets, they have achieved a freedom that Carlin and Hicks could only have dreamt of. If you say they should clarify their own positions, or take responsibility for the opinions they promote, well, they say, they’re comedians, not intellectuals. Why so serious?

They might be wearing Hugo Boss and driving Volkswagens, but Nazis don’t really seem to live on the same planet as us; and that’s why, maybe, Nazi content is sort of like True Crime or UFO stories. And, of course, there’s the taboo part of it: most of the Holocaust freaks I’ve known are either Jewish or anti-Semitic, all of them fascinated by this primal bloodlust that it’s more polite to ignore.

But where does Albert Speer fit into this narrative? Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and lead architect, known for his grandiose designs for the “Thousand Year Reich”, was one of the lucky Nazis. He was sent to prison for 20 years, but afterwards he was able to profit from his actions: in 1970, the man who had commanded an estimated 12 million slave labourers, about 2.5 million of whom died, wrote a best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich. He was later approached by Kubrick-protégé Andrew Birkin about a film adaptation, and, in conversations that Birkin recorded as they workshopped their screenplay in 1972, downplayed his relationship with Hitler and his knowledge of wartime atrocities. Fortunately, Paramount Pictures did not pick up the script, and it was not produced.

I couldn’t help asking myself, while watching Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood, composed of dramatisations of those Birkin recordings and footage from the Nuremberg trials: what is the point of Nazi documentaries, and why am I watching one? I suppose the straightforward answer is Holocaust Remembrance, as with Yom HaShoah and public memorials and the Holocaust Studies lessons that are mandatory in sixteen US states.

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But if Holocaust remembrance is really the point of Holocaust documentaries, I’m not sure these films are up to the task. The most Holocaust-conscious people I know have tended to be, let’s say, “Holocaust-critical independent researchers”, like the shaved-head kid with an Iron Cross ring that sat in the front of my college Holocaust Studies class and “asked a lot of questions”. I think he may have thought it was a workshop.

I’ve never met someone who doesn’t know the phrase “six million”, but I’ve known a number that would say “six million sounds like a lot”, and I’m not sure Speer Goes to Hollywood is going to make much of a difference for them. If these films are simply preaching to the choir, that’s fine; but does that mean Nazi films are just True Crime for boys?

That said, I suppose Nazi documentaries may still serve some salutary function in American society. In an era of increasing groupthink and hyperpoliticisation, we might consider that Nazi eugenicists were, actually, “following the science”, with the eager collaboration of leading American scientists funded by the Rockefellers. And with today’s poorly educated often decried as “Nazis”, we might do well to reflect that the German profession that voted for the Nazi party in the highest numbers was physicians. Speer might fit in there: reminding us that Nazis can be charming, well-spoken, and professional.

Perhaps there’s some value in Hannah Arendt’s idea of “the banality of evil”: that evildoers aren’t scary, “perverted and sadistic” monsters, but instead thoughtless, “terrifyingly normal” joiners. Arendt’s thesis has since been criticised as more research shows that Adolf Eichmann did, actually, have some real ideological investment in the extermination of the Jews. However, as a general rule, there’s some truth there: people tend to think they’re doing the right thing, or at least not committing a crime against humanity — and they tend to do the easiest thing under the circumstances.

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But how do you show banality in film, a medium designed to hypnotise the masses with spectacle and splendour? The most obvious answer can be found in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-long Shoah (1985); a 355-minute torrent of interviews about the most revolting atrocities, described through minute, twist-of-the-knife probing, but with almost nothing to see. There aren’t photographs; there aren’t newsreels; there aren’t, God forbid, animations. There’s mostly absence: the empty field of stones and grass where there was Treblinka, the grey pond, wide and boring, where thousands of Jews’ ashes were dumped. And, sometimes, that absence extends to the interviews, showing how the Final Solution was executed by commonplace acts and with, even, commonplace feeling: in one chilling interview, a few residents of the village of Auschwitz calmly, undramatically, say they’re happy the Jews are gone.

Speer Goes to Hollywood doesn’t have the visual subtlety of Shoah; it’s more or less what you’d expect, built on familiar black-and-white archival images of rallies, camps and propaganda. But I suppose it, actually, implicitly denies the banality of an evil thesis. Speer mythologised himself in two ways: first, that he was a great architect, and second, that he wasn’t interested in genocide, just in making some really impressive buildings. As he says, “I was just 29 and I would have sold my soul to Mephisto”.

Yet his explanations, an exercise in cognitive dissonance, are sometimes inadvertently absurd in their coldness: for example, when talking about the Jews in Weimar Berlin, he says: “I can’t really say [I had] an anti-Semitic feeling. It was a feeling of disgust when I saw it.” He later claims that though he knew Hitler was planning to annihilate the Jews, he had “no direct knowledge” of the camps since a friend had told him never to go to Auschwitz because “terrible things [were] happening there”.

But however hard he was trying to whitewash himself, he still comes across as narcissistic and deluded. When he emerges from prison, he cheerily says to excited journalists: “You see that after 20 years I’m still relatively good looking”. And when Birkin tells him that “Paramount and the Jewish Brigade associated with them” (wow!) have rejected the script, since only two out of its one-hundred-ten pages address the extermination of the Jews (wow!), Speer states, “That is their problem” (wow!).

Paramount didn’t produce the film, but ‘the Speer myth’ — this poor handsome man; he had no idea what they were doing at those funny places out East — did make him millions in book royalties. Still, I’m not sure how many Holocaust-heads today truly believe that he didn’t know about the camps, given that correspondence released in 2007 made it clear he was lying.

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Westminster doesn't need a Holocaust memorial

By Tanya Gold

And yet he still commands a unique fascination. Perhaps Speer seemed less obscene; perhaps, 15 years after the end of the war, his “poor-me” memoirs made mankind seem kinder. I don’t know. Speer was a weird figure. And he was neither a politician nor a military man; he was an architect and urbanist, a fairly influential pioneer of sustainable building and planning. He was also a moving writer, who wrote of Hitler’s unhappiness and Eva Braun’s loneliness in ways that are genuinely absorbing. He was almost respectable.

Here’s the thing, though: he was still an official in the Nazi Party, who, as his own book makes clear, was intimate with Hitler, Goebbels, and the whole gang. It’s clear why Speer lied, and not all that surprising how he lied: the real question, which this latest film and countless before fail to ask, is why anyone believed him.

The synagogue was named for the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who led the Jewish community here in the 12^th century, when Cairo was the most important Jewish centre in the Middle East. The building was nothing but a roofless shell, but I discovered a work crew laying planks in one of the rooms, up to their knees in fetid water. It turned out that the Egyptian government — the same regime that took possession of much of the property of the 80,000 Jews who’d been forced out of the country two generations earlier — was engaged in a restoration project.

A polite young engineer on the site showed me the location of the stand where the Torah scroll was once read. Another man, in civilian clothes but with some vaguely military authority, told me not to take pictures.

There couldn’t be anything bad about the restoration of a synagogue, could there? It was hard to explain why none of this felt right; why I preferred to see the building left to rot, rather than see it made up like a corpse at a wake. I had the same feeling when I saw other journalists refer seriously to the “Jewish community of Cairo”, quoting a woman who was its “President”.

There was no community, just a regime-approved simulacrum designed to allow everyone to pretend that an ethnic cleansing hadn’t taken place, and that something dead was alive. It was Weekend at Bernie’s. At the time of my visit, the Egyptian Government was trying to get one of its officials elected to a top cultural post at the UN, an effort hindered by this same official’s past support for burning Hebrew books. A synagogue renovation couldn’t hurt his cause! The real Jews were long out of Egypt, but their imaginary avatars were still hard at work serving the narrative needs of others.

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In Cairo, and at similar sites I’ve visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe, I’ve felt — in the words of the author Dara Horn — an “unarticulated sense that despite all the supposed goodwill, something was clearly off”. Horn has now articulated that sense, and many other important and elusive senses, in a superb new essay collection, People Love Dead Jews. (I should mention that I spent a summer with the author on a youth programme three decades ago, and have remained in touch.) Horn comes at her subject with a deep grasp of history and a personal commitment to the living Jewish tradition, with an acerbic sense of humour that pops out now and then — and also, refreshingly and necessarily, with anger.

One memorable essay recounts a bizarre trip to several “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, China, near the Siberian border. The city is known for its vast Ice Festival every winter, and also for being founded by Jews who were sent there by Tsarist Russia as part of a railway project, but were then dispossessed and driven out by a mix of imperial Japanese occupiers, White Russian bigots, and rapacious communists of both the Soviet and Maoist variety. (Horn quips that “Jewish heritage sites” — a benign term used in many countries for the purpose of multicultural branding and drawing Jewish tourism — sounds better than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.”)

The author visits “the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East”, which turns out not to be a real cemetery at all, but just gravestones on empty ground. The original cemetery was re-zoned years ago and the Harbin municipality moved only the markers, not the bodies, which now seem to be under an amusement park.

The names of those Jews have inevitably been forgotten. A very different posthumous fate befell Anne Frank, the subject of another essay in this book, who, in the decades since her murder at age 16, has been turned into a global brand. Horn is cutting about the way her famous diary has been used as a feel-good story that flatters readers in the same way that a renovated synagogue flatters the multiculturalism of the Egyptian state.

The book’s most famous sentence — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — is something we all like to hear. But it obscures the obvious truth of the text, which was written a few weeks before Anne was turned in by Dutch neighbours to die in a German camp. No one was good enough to save her. “It is far more gratifying,” Horn writes, “to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognise the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t.”

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And it’s easier to love a Jewish girl who can no longer express her potentially uncomfortable conclusions about her own life than it is to tolerate her annoyingly living co-religionists. In 2018, the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, located at the site of the house where she hid with her family, wouldn’t let a Jewish employee wear a kippah, explaining that this violated the museum’s “neutrality”. The directors changed their mind only after four months of deliberations, Horn observes, “which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” A similar observation might be made about a place like Belgium, which also has nice Jewish museums and memorials, yet just passed a law banning kosher slaughter, a necessity for those living Belgian Jews who would like to practice their religion.

Looming over Horn’s essay collection is the place that is now home to the largest number of living Jews, the state of Israel. Israel is the ultimate demonstration of Horn’s thesis, though she mostly, and wisely, steers clear of the topic. Many people eager to venerate their vanished Jews are simultaneously uncomfortable with the ones who are still alive in the tiny corner of the Middle East where they fled after most other places on earth became unlivable.

Horn skirts close in one moving essay about a group of Yiddish actors and writers in the Soviet Union of the 1940s who were exploited for propaganda, then killed when they were no longer useful. The communists could tolerate Jews, she writes, “provided they weren’t practising the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism” — meaning that nearly all of Jewish life was out of bounds. “The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist.”

This differentiation, which outlived the Soviets and is increasingly popular on the Western Left today, is largely lost on the plurality of Jews who are Israelis, and on the vast majority who think a Jewish state is a good idea. Older people here in Israel still remember how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, just 28 years after the concentration camps closed, the same liberal countries of Europe that were expressing pious regret for the recent extermination of their Jews wouldn’t allow desperately needed American resupply flights to land in their territory en route to Israel, which had just been attacked by two Arab clients of the Soviets and was struggling to recover.

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And in 2021, young Jews can still see how countries like France, Germany, and the UK lay solemn wreaths at Holocaust memorials while participating in the isolation of the Jewish state at the UN, where the Human Rights Council, to give just one example, has condemned Israel more times than all other countries on earth combined. They can also observe how activists in places awash with Jewish heritage sites and Holocaust museums are energetically promoting a boycott of “Zionists” with telling success.

Horn doesn’t go there, in part because she doesn’t need to; her inspired essays say enough. But it is that kind of hypocrisy that’s at the heart of her argument. People Love Dead Jews helps explain the acute anxiety of many Jewish citizens of Western countries in 2021, who feel the ground shifting as old forms of thought reappear in public on both the Left and the Right — and as it becomes clear how few lessons have really been learned.

Even so, a vast Holocaust memorial will soon rise in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to parliament, against opposition from local residents and many British Jews, including Holocaust survivors. But the last obstacles are overcome: the government has pushed it through because they want it.

There is already an adequate memorial in Hyde Park — size does not matter here; Albert Speer loved size — and a permanent exhibition at the Imperial War Museum less than a mile from parliament. The newest memorial — there are more than 300 already worldwide, rising seemingly in harmony with anti-Semitism itself, like a bad symphony — will attempt to convey meaning through what looks like a giant toast rack, or a child’s toy; simple for ease of understanding.

They all do that. The Holocaust memorial has become an architectural cliché. For some reason blocks are favoured, as if part of some giant cosmic warehouse, and that all adds to the ennui; the numbness; the nothingness. There is no Holocaust memorial better than a live Jew, or, even better, a Jew who is not afraid. But it’s too late for that. Britain did not behave perfectly: far from it. We offered nothing during the Evian Conference of 1938, convened by the League of Nations to discuss German and Austrian refugees. The Evian Conference is not much discussed, probably because it locked European Jews in a prison the size of a continent for ease of murder. Joseph Goebbels was thrilled by this dismal indifference to Jews, writing in his diary that the Nazi regime was better than the so-called “civilised” world because it was more honest.

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In fact, Lord Winterton, a member of the House of Lords and the British representative at Evian, apologised to Germany for “unwarranted interference in affairs of state”. His official quote was: “The United Kingdom is not a country of immigration”. Foreign office memos were reliably anti-Jewish: “this office spends too much time dealing with the wailing Jews”; “Why should the Jews be spared distress…when they have deserved it?”

After an international outcry, 288 German Jews were admitted to Britain from the refugee ship the St Louis — “the voyage of the damned” — after America and other countries shut them out. (Three other countries eventually took refugees from the ship but many perished.) The captain Gustav Schröder even considered wrecking the ship off Cornwall to save his passengers. 10,000 Jewish children were admitted to Britain — the Kindertransport — after lobbying by MPs including Eleanor Rathbone and Josiah Wedgwood, Quakers and British Jews, though their parents were excluded, of course. There were British rescuers. The banker Nicholas Winton saved 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before the war. The Mills and Boon novelist Mary Burchell smuggled valuables out of Germany so refugees could meet the financial requirements to enter Britain. Frank Foley, a passport control officer — and spy — in the British Embassy in Berlin “bent the rules” to save Jewish families. But the small quota of Jews allowed to British-controlled Palestine — 15,000 a year from 1939 for five years — was never filled. After the war the British government agreed to take any Jewish children still alive in continental Europe. They found 732, some of whom were the Children of Windermere, sheltered for a while in the Lake District. Rescue, as I said, is the perfect memorial. And that was that: until now.

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Why build a Holocaust memorial here, now — a sort of awful twin to the Palace of Westminster, which is likewise otherworldly and alienating? I, who experience Britain as a haven — my ancestors are Polish Jews and between 1941 and 1945 Polish Jewry declined from roughly 3,400,000 to 300,000 with mass murder (we do not know the exact figures, for obvious reasons) — will not be able to look at it. I have an idea that it will sully, for me, something sacred. I know, of course, that not all minority communities feel this way: why should they? It is one Jew’s emotional response. Many British Jews want this memorial and lobbied the Conservative government for it.

But even if your motives are decent, all the evidence points one way: Holocaust memorials, by themselves, do not work. They have not worked: the news will tell you that. We do not know what works. A stable political system might help — anti-Semitism is, most prosaically, a pressure valve in times of social and economic distress — as would a detailed rebuttal of every lazy and ancient libel against the Jewish people: the deicide; the well-poisoners; the puppet masters. Those who call Jews puppet masters will have a lot to say about this memorial. They are saying it already. They say our misery is favoured, that we exploit it, that we have special access to power to ensure a large memorial to our dead.

For example, the Church in Britain is planning a formal apology to the Jews for medieval anti-Semitism. But it won’t talk about the role of the scriptures in inciting it; they remain. Teaching the Holocaust outside the confines of wider Jewish history is pointless. Without an educated and engaged population aware of the context of this genocide — and all genocides, separately — the Holocaust assumes the dimensions of a fairy tale. Enter the Palace of the Ugly Toast Rack, children, and be afraid, but do not be wary. Here is a place of such unique evil it has nothing to do with you. Build the structures high and they are inhuman. The only thing people really need to understand about the Holocaust is that it happened to people like them; to avoid another they must do something. Will the memorial facilitate that?

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No, it reads like denial, and cynicism, a kind of national virtue signalling: Britain turns its face to the place it has done least wrong, to distract from wrongs elsewhere. To read of plans commemorating Jews — easy to rally support for, since they are dead — while politicians tut at migrant boats and fantasise about interning refugees on islands is nauseating. Europe is facing the greatest refugee crisis since the war. The government is playing catch-up in bronze because it’s easy. Perhaps, in 80 years, when the current migrants are shut out, and dead, they will be honoured with an ugly memorial.

There is a memorial already in Victoria Tower Gardens: Samuel Sanders Teulon’s memorial to Thomas Fowell Buxton, the abolitionist. That it is to the abolitionist rather than the enslaved is typical. It is obvious what should be memorialised by the British state at the centre of its pomp: slavery and murderous colonialism. But that is too loaded for a government led by a man whose novel Seventy-Two Virgins is little more than a collection of racist epithets. Better to let compliant Jews have their memorial and, to the rest, nothing.

Beautiful trees will be destroyed: the opposite of the Jewish dictum to choose life. The Buxton memorial — such as it is — will be overshadowed; black pain dwarfed, quite literally, by Jewish pain. A promise will be broken: in 1879 a donation of £1000 was given by the Rt Hon W H Smith, on condition that Victoria Tower Gardens would serve local people in perpetuity. It will become a target for anti-Semites, and their myths of Jewish power. And, finally, as a Holocaust survivor pointed out to me this morning, it’s on a flood plain. That should be enough.

Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.

Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.

There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.

The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.

When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.

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One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.

Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness. This, to do violence to language, was the constructive aspect of his project. The destructive side of the Nazis was the orgiastic way they revelled in nothingness and meaninglessness for their own sake. They, too, were in thrall to the death drive, which seduces us into delighting in destruction as an end in itself. As Primo Levi points out, one of the most chilling aspects of the Nazi concentration camps is that they were unnecessary. In fact, from the Nazis’s viewpoint they were in some ways counterproductive, disposing of men and women whose talents could have been harnessed to their war effort and tying down personnel and resources which might have been used elsewhere.

You might claim that it suited the Nazis to create a bugbear — an alien Other against which the nation would be united in its antagonism. But you do not need to kill six million people to create a bugbear. There was a crazed excess about the project which betrays the fact that the rationality driving it was by no means simply an instrumental one. This is one way in which the Nazi extermination differs from, say, Stalin’s slaughter of the kulaks and others, which was practically, politically motivated. This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter.

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Perhaps the camps were driven by practical reason in the sense that you needed to kill every last Jew in order to ensure that a Germany cleansed of despicable weakness would triumph in its wars. This was one motive for supposedly purifying the race. But it was also an end in itself. Evil has the mystery of things that are motiveless. This is one reason why it is sometimes seen as glamorous, compared to the prim world of virtue. In fact, virtue is also a matter of doing things for their own sake, rather than for profit and reward, and thus has an unnerving resemblance to evil. The devil, one should recall, was once an angel. Evil may appear full of energy and exoticism, but that is just outward show.

In reality it is flat, kitschy, sham and superficial, an incapacity for living at any depth. It is Jimmy Savile’s tracksuit, not Dracula’s gown, the spectacles of Adolf Eichmann rather than the lethal eyes of the Medusa. The evil are those who are deficient in the art of living — an art which Aristotle believed you had to get good at by constant practice if you were truly to become a person. There is no reason for doing this, any more than there is reason for burying little children on Saddleworth Moor.

Vice became exciting when virtue grew boring. For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, virtue is all about abundance of life. By the time we arrive at the philosophy of John Locke in the late 17th century, virtue is now a thoroughly bourgeois affair — a matter of thrift, prudence, chastity, temperance, honesty, sobriety and a number of other qualities for which one feels more admiration than affection. No wonder, then, that with the rise of the middle classes evil finally comes into own, as Milton’s magnificently rebellious Satan overshadows his stiff-necked bureaucrat of a God. Dickens’s heroes have all the virtues, but his villains have all the life. One would rather knock back a glass of whisky with Fagan than share an orange juice with Oliver Twist. How to make goodness interesting becomes an exacting artistic problem. A few centuries later, “wicked” would come to mean “great”, and Gothic would be all the rage in university English departments.

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In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the saintly monk Father Zosima declares that the Satanic “demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they shall burn everlastingly in the flames of their own hatred, and long for death and non-being. But death shall not be granted them.” The evil can’t die because they are kept alive by their own loathing and self-torment. Only their misery can assure them that they still exist. This is what is traditionally meant by hell. It is the kingdom of the mad, absurd, surreal, farcical, disgusting and excremental — of all, in short, that pounds meaning and value to pieces. If only the evil could let themselves go, they might recognise that there is a more fertile kind of nothingness than destruction, namely the act of self-dispossession. Only in this way might they be open to genuine life.

Yet this demands a courage which is found wanting in one of the great literary figures of our own time, William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Marooned on his rock in the Atlantic Ocean, dead but unable to accept the fact, Martin’s giant, lobster-like claws grip one another to protect the dark centre of his identity against the flashes of black lighting which batter relentlessly against them, seeking to unlock his self-defence and penetrate his inner being so that he might be saved. Martin, however, who regards himself as too precious to die, turns his face to the sky and shouts “I shit on your heaven!” The novel ends without the reader ever learning who is the victor in this contest. We shall never know whether heaven could take this insult on the chin, smash Martin’s defences to pieces and thus allow him to be reborn.

Yes, we expect those things. We desire them. They comfort us. They tell us we have nothing to do with these people. They are an anomaly, a curio, a fascinating oddity that will not come again. A biography of Josef Mengele is being written as I type. It will likely be a best-seller for these reasons, though I do not want to read it.

Martha Gellhorn, who covered the Eichmann trial for the Atlantic magazine, wrote this in 1962 of her subject: “We fear him because we know that he is sane. It would be a great comfort to us if he were insane; we could then dismiss him, with horror, no doubt, but reassuring ourselves that he is not like us.” 

It feels morally necessary to distance oneself from the perpetrators of the Shoah because in that is expiation, the removal of complicity, and, therefore, sanity. But it is not useful, and it teaches us nothing.  Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil” does not work either. It may be an intellectual’s gravest insult — Arendt the grumpy don judging Eichmann the functional idiot — but ennui is hardly a useful response to a shocking eruption of mass murder.

It is comforting, of course, to see Nazism as the rise of the stupid — Hitler’s credulous army of chicken farmers — but that is not true either. Many of the leading Nazis were highly cultured, or from highly cultured families. The father of Reinhard Heydrich — Hitler’s “man with the iron heart” and Eichmann’s overlord — founded a conservatoire. Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer was Heinrich Tessenow’s assistant at 22. Members of the Einsatzgruppen, the  elite paramilitary death squad, had a disproportionate number of PhDs. And of the fifteen people who sat around the table at the Wannsee House to plan the Final Solution to the invented problem of Europe’s Jews, seven had doctorates in law and another a doctorate in political science.

For every chicken farmer in the Nazi high command there were two lawyers.  There were ideologues and functionaries; fellow travellers and the ambitious; greedy souls who wanted the Jews’ homes, businesses and the shoes of their children. Some were very odd, of course. Himmler went looking for the Holy Grail (too much Wagner?).

No strategy of emotional distancing works and, anyway, history proves you wrong. Anti-racist education has failed, and anti-Semitism thrives again. It seems its brief absence post-war — a copious pause, an exhaustion, a burning out — was the anomaly. This willingness — this desire — for distance is at least part of the cause.

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We cling to the singular monster narrative, but the opposite is true. Nazism would not have thrived without its millions of collaborators and bystanders; as Gellhorn said” “eager thousands obeyed him [Eichmann]…. there was endless work for willing hands”. Without them it would have begun and ended in Munich in the early 1920s, a small, repulsive stain on a city rather than a twelve-year Reich that was supposed to last for a thousand years. One can spend too long imagining parallel futures for the Weimar Republic. But that is comforting too.

They enabled it, and that, in its totality, is its lesson and its terror. That is why it is necessary to put devil’s horns on Eichmann and Heydrich; on Streicher and Mengele. That is why Auschwitz, which appeared most recently in an X-Men film as a creation myth for a superhero, is debased into myth. More than 37% of the vote went to Nazis in July 1932 and this was a full seven years after Adolf Hitler exposed what he wanted in Mein Kampf. They only had to read it. Did they?

The Austrians greeted the Anschluss with garlands of flowers and why not? They requested the union in 1918 and when Hitler entered Vienna 90% of the population greeted him as Jews committed suicide or were forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes. Later, the Jews of Paris were not rounded up by the Gestapo. They were rounded up by the French police. In Lithuania and Ukraine natives did not wait for the Germans to massacre the Jewish population. They started themselves, knowing their retrospective defence was on its way.

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There were rescuers, of course, many thousands of them — remember Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who waged his own war on Eichmann and lost everything, dying in a Russian prison after the war, and Princess Alice of Greece, mother to the Duke to Edinburgh, hiding the Cohens — but they were not representative. It was your neighbours who would send you to your deaths.

Why such complicity? It is disorientating to compile a tidy list of the causes of the Shoah (studying Nazism will give you a horror of lists by itself) but it must be done. And the most important element is not economic collapse, or thwarted nationalism, or the Versailles Treaty, or the implicit weakness of the Weimar Republic or the useful idiocies of Communism.

It is Christianity, and that is as uncomfortable a truth as the realisation that Adolf Eichmann and the rest of his gang of mass murderers were ordinary human beings. (The wife of the commandant of Auschwitz complained that her husband did not sleep with her enough, distracted as he was by the murder of Jews and Roma.) Nazism was its own religion, it is true, but the Shoah flowered amid two thousand years of anti-Jewish hatred, warped by Nazism from contempt into a death sentence. Christianity did not order the death of Jews. It merely wanted them to live in shame. They were more useful that way.

This is the complicity we dare not name. It is easier to pass the devils’s horns from the Jews to the architects of the Final Solution than to understand what enabled the one to kill the other: the deicide myth, the founding story of Jewish power and Jewish malice. This, from the gospel of Luke: “To the cross, to the cross with him!” This, from the gospel of Matthew: “His blood be on us and on our children”. This, from the gospel of John: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do what your father desires”. To Saint Gregory they were “slayers of the Lord.” To Saint John they “surpassed the ferocity of wild beasts”.

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“What then shall we Christians do” asked Martin Luther, “with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First their synagogues and churches should be set on fire…” There isn’t a positive image of Jew in European culture before the Enlightenment. Gotthold Lessing’s play The Jews (1749) failed on the Berlin stage because the hero was a Jew. The audience could not believe it.

In his book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) the historian Raul Hilberg noted that the canonical law and Nazi law proposed many of the same measures. In 1965 the Second Lateran Council retrospectively removed the charge of deicide from almost all Jews — it was passed by 2221 to 88 of the assembled bishops — and that is surely an admission that millions in history have believed these libels.

But millions do not make good villains, either morally, or narratively. They do not make particularly good victims either. That is why Stephen Spielberg ruined his potential masterpiece Schindler’s List by emphasising a pretty girl in a red coat, the only colour in the film. That, to paraphrase Mel Brooks’s The Producers, is your victim.

Instead, we prefer to emphasise the gaudy monsters, which only serves to make the Shoah more mysterious and, in the end, meaningless. For if so few are responsible, who can take responsibility? Nowadays, if you are not committing mass murder, you can consider yourself benign. “The private conscience is not only the last protection of the civilised world, it is the one guarantee of the dignity of man,” Martha Gellhorn concluded after watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Or, to put it another way, demonise the few and we cease to be afraid of what we should fear most: ourselves.

Yet he had played an active role in an industrial-sized enterprise of human cruelty and malevolence. There was something deeply unnerving about this: the disproportion between the smallness of this man and the Himalayan magnitude of the Holocaust. It didn’t seem to add up.

As a criminologist, I have been trained to think that evil is a social category or label that dominant groups impose on less powerful “Others” – the marginalised. If there’s a “criminology of evil”, it’s a criminology of how modern states and their elaborate network of enforcers succeed in demonising people who can’t or won’t follow the rules of the system. According to this account, evil people aren’t really evil; they’re just the convenient victims of the “problematic” use of state power. They’re the symbolic scapegoats we invent to signal our virtue so that we can feel good and exorcise our demons.

Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann, while recognising his quotidian evil, readily fits in with this. Far from being a monster, Eichmann, in Arendt’s eyes, is a “thoughtless” Everyman. Even his motives, according to Arendt, were bland and boring, more to do with needy imperatives like pleasing superiors, career advancement and wanting to be liked.

But there’s another part of the story of human evil that Arendt and today’s criminologists cannot or do not want to confront. This is the part that has to do with the monstrousness of monstrous people. It’s the part that’s so squalid and viscerally disgusting that we can’t help but stare at it, shocked and dumbfounded by the scale of human wickedness grimly staring us in the face. It’s the stories that, as the renowned scholar William Ian Miller puts it, “sicken us in the telling, things for which there could be no plausible claim of right: rape, child abuse, torture, genocide, predatory murder and maiming”.

If there’s a genre to which these stories belong, it’s horror. And yet there’s no criminology of horror. Indeed, all of those sharp insights about “the banality of evil” quickly lose their edge the closer we venture toward that region of, to quote Miller again, “dark unbelievability”.

If, as I have, you’ve watched a lot of ISIS atrocity propaganda, or listened to the testimony of those who narrowly missed appearing in it, you’ll know all about dark unbelievability. It’s the sheer insanity of filming a toddler shoot a defenceless man, of filming a group of hostages being decapitated, of filming a man burned alive in a cage. It’s the sheer depravity of inventing ever more creative ways to torture and kill people because you think your fan-base will love it and your enemies hate it.

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The calculated evil of Adolf Eichmann

By Alexander Faludy

Granted, there was a method to ISIS’s madness. The group murdered people on camera — 2,375 in all, between January 2015 and June 2020 — because it wanted to terrify its enemies and inflame its supporters. And, like any terrorist group, it also wanted maximum exposure and publicity. But there was also an undeniably expressive quality to ISIS’s violence which can’t simply be reduced to cold means-ends logic. ISIS murdered not just with savage efficiency, but with hot exuberance and glee.

For a recent lecture on Trinidadian ISIS militants, I pulled out a particularly gruesome video that I planned to show. Uploaded to the internet in the summer of 2014, by which point ISIS had captured Mosul in Iraq and declared the formation of the caliphate, it shows a jihadi in military fatigues holding up a severed head.

“Hello, my name is John,” he says in a mock English accent, performing the role of ventriloquist. This is followed by howls of laughter, from both the militant and the person filming. “See, he doesn’t smile today,” the militant adds. “Right now John look like he died of natural causes,” a voice with a Trinidadian accent says off-camera. More riotous laughter.

These men are clearly enjoying themselves, which surely raises the spectre of a kind of evil that is anything but banal. Or does it?

A sanitised, sociological reading of the video would conclude that the laughter is an expression not of sadistic delight but of nervous energy; the men are laughing because they’re secretly horrified. They’re desensitised to killing and have been brutalised by war. It’s a way for these men to bond, and if they’re violent and thuggish it’s because they’re following the script of toxic masculinity. Indeed, the whole spectacle before us is determined by the situation, and not the predispositions, choices, desires or quirks of the men themselves. As the social psychologist Albert Bandura puts it: “Conducive social conditions rather than monstrous people… produce heinous deeds. Given appropriate social conditions, decent, ordinary people can be led to do extraordinarily cruel things.”

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Let’s leave aside the question of whether the men in the video are “decent, ordinary people”; though I suspect that cutting a man’s head off and then laughing about it on camera is reason to doubt such a proposition. Instead, let’s probe the sly determinism inscribed in that  causal reference — “led” — in the above quotation from Bandura. Who or what led ISIS western militants to Syria? And who or what led them to cut off heads and laugh about it?

The typical sociological account of western ISIS militants would have it that everything but the agency of the militants themselves led them to go to Syria. Western imperialism led them. Slick ISIS videos led them. Their bruising experiences with the British security state led them. The Iraq war led them. Islamophobia led them. The caliphate-fantasy led them. Shadowy recruiters led them. Insecurity, identity-confusion, trauma, boredom — all of that somehow led them. And, then, once they got to Syria and Iraq, peer pressure, PTSD, fear, the need to belong — all of that led them to enslave people and commit terrible atrocities.

But none of this explains anything. It doesn’t explain why the so-called “Beatles” — the British ISIS beheading outfit — spent a lot of time taunting and degrading their victims prior to killing them. It doesn’t explain the insanity of the ISIS videos. It doesn’t explain the laughter of those Trinidadian ISIS militants. It doesn’t explain all the “useless violence”— as Primo Levi called it — that ISIS committed both on and off camera; the sort of violence that, as Levi explained, has no purpose other than creating pain.

More than twenty years ago, the political theorist C. Fred Alford brilliantly dissected the famous Stanley Milgram experiments that were carried out at Yale University in the 1960s. The subjects in the experiments, called “teachers”, think that they’re delivering shocks to a “learner”, who is actually in on the experiment with Milgram. The learner is a middle-aged man with a heart condition — or so Milgram informs the teacher. The teacher’s task is clear: he must flick a switch on the generator and deliver an electric shock to the learner when he fails to memorise word pairs. The shocks begin at 15 volts and go up to 450.

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Alford concedes that the teachers do not appear to like their job: “They ask the experimenter not to go on, they talk about how worried they are about the learner. They smoke too much and sweat furiously…they complain, they hesitate…” Yet most deliver the electric shocks. “All they have to do… is just say no, and mean it. Less than half do,” Alford writes.

Milgram interpreted this finding as evidence of “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority”. But Alford doesn’t buy it, and is struck by a little discussed detail that recurred throughout the experiments: namely, the grotesque laughter, “the giggling fits at the shock generator”.

“What if these men are giggling in embarrassed pleasure at being given permission to inflict great pain and suffering on an innocent and vulnerable man?” Alford asks. “What if what the teachers really want, what they long for, is permission to hurt someone?” Milgram rejected this conclusion outright: the teachers in the experiment are slavish, not sadistic. But he presented no evidence for this view.

Whether Alford is right about the teachers’s laughter remains to be seen, but his broader psychoanalytic perspective, which recognises the agency of people who do evil and the pleasures they take from controlling others through violence, captures something Arendt missed in her account of evil as “banal”.

Extensive footage from the Milgram experiments can be viewed on YouTube and you can judge for yourself whether or not Alford was onto something. Or there are those dark recesses of the internet, stuffed with videos of horrors inflicted by people who, pace Arendt, are terrifyingly terrible: ISIS butchers, chainsaw-wielding Mexican cartel murderers, serial killers armed with screwdrivers and many more grotesque figures.

And therein lies the problem with Arendt’s account of Eichmann: she was so bewitched by the smallness of the man that, to this day, it dulls us to all the thoughtful malevolence that surrounds us, should we dare to look at it and see it for what it really is.

For speed and scale the deportations went unmatched: 424,000 people were despatched by train in just 52 days, from 14 May to 9 July. In this fleeting window Hungarian Jews became the single largest group gassed at Auschwitz. The crematoria couldn’t cope with such “over-supply”, and Commandant Rudolf Höß ordered special fire pits dug — filling the camp with noxious smoke. According to Primo Levi, “there were weeks when only Hungarian was heard in Auschwitz”.

Physical annihilation was undergirded by Eichmann’s elaborate psychological strategy. Sophisticated Budapest Jews who might escape or resist were pacified by newspaper reports that only “ost Juden” from Hungary’s nether regions were being removed as “undesirables”. Many only saw through the lie, if at all, when deportations reached Budapest’s outer suburbs in early July — just before Admiral Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Head of State, halted them under diplomatic pressure from the Western Allies and neutrals.

Throughout the deportations, and across Hungary’s length, Eichmann deluged Jews with ever more complex regulations covering the minutiae of daily life. These instilled a false sense of permanence which inhibited hiding or escape: “why would the authorities go to all this trouble if they were just going to get rid of us?”

Even as deportations rolled on, Eichmann conducted elaborate negotiations for fanciful “rescue schemes” including, but not limited to, the infamous “Blood for Trucks” project involving Rudolf Kastner — the proposed barter of one million Jewish lives for 10,000 Western motor vehicles for use on the Eastern front against the USSR. The aim, Eichmann later acknowledged, was not just to split Western powers from the Soviets, but also to distract Hungary’s Jewish leaders from counter-organising: keeping minds busy and hopes alive.

All the while Eichmann treated Jewish leaders in Budapest to flashes of menace.  One day he promised them a return to normality “after the war”, the next he would snarl “Do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound!” With studied cruelty Eichmann arranged the ghettoisation of Hungary’s Jews to begin on Sunday, 16 April: the first day of Passover, 1944.

Eichmann did many things in Hungary; the one thing he did not do was simply “obey orders” — indeed over time he defied them with gathering frequency. That autumn as inevitable defeat became ever more apparent Eichmann, helped by local enthusiasts, intensified his efforts, instigating newly inventive means of eliminating Jews in Hungary and the Balkans through “death marches” and localised killing sprees. In doing so, Eichmann subverted instructions from Himmler who ordered cessation as part of a delusional plan to negotiate with the allies.

This “Eichmann in Budapest” should be recalled while contemplating the later Eichmann in Jerusalem.

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By 11 May 1960 a fugitive Eichmann had lived for a decade in Buenos Aries as “Ricardo Klement”, a rabbit farmer and, later, Mercedes-Benz factory worker, an immigrant hailing from the German minority in Italy’s South Tyrol. That evening Mossad agents, following a tip-off, kidnapped “Klement” from the street outside his house as he walked home from the bus stop after work.

Ten days later a drugged-up Eichmann left Argentina on false papers aboard an El Al flight supporting a diplomatic protocol visit timed to cover his extraction. Fearing a rescue bid by any Nazi sympathiser network while refuelling, the plane exceeded its permitted milage. By touchdown in Tel Aviv it was flying on vapours.

Preparing the prosecution case took almost a year. Eichmann’s trial commenced in Jerusalem’s brand-new Bet Ha’Am theatre on 11 April 1961 before three Israeli judges. Eichmann was accused of fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people and against humanity. The unusual venue arose from unprecedented international interest: over 400 journalists sought accreditation, and the country had no courtroom large enough.

Controversy raged around the trial. Eichmann’s removal, a triumph of spycraft, was a flagrant breach of Argentina’s sovereignty. Israel’s authority to try crimes occurring outside its borders, enacted by (and against) non-citizens prior to its foundation seemed, at best, dubious. Sixty years on, however, discord persists less in regards to the trial’s legal foundations and more because of how courtroom events were theorised by one writer: Hannah Arendt.

Arendt, a pre-war Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, travelled to Jerusalem to observe the trial for The New Yorker and confront the government that caused her own life’s profound dislocation. Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) consolidated her reflective articles for the New Yorker published that year. Its subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, became synonymous with the trial: it’s how most people “know” about Eichmann.

Unfortunately, Arendt was utterly, appallingly, wrong about the man she saw, or thought she saw, in Jerusalem.

“Banality” appears just once in Arendt’s main text: in the very last sentence. Reflecting on Eichmann’s clunky, formulaic, farewell prior to execution Arendt opined: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summoning up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, world and thought defying banality of evil.”

The “banal” designation comes at the narrative’s end but condenses observations made in memorable passages throughout including “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect he was a clown”. 

Observing 55-year-old Eichmann’s bureaucratic bearing, ponderous speech, and petty jealousies Arendt deemed his key role in genocide motivated not by fanatical anti-Semitism (his denial of which she accepted), but “thoughtlessness” in its most literal sense. Arendt used the word to connote not “forgetfulness” but absence of autonomous cognition. She took Eichmann’s seeming “inability to speak” as evidencing incapacity to think. Such a person, Arendt reasoned, greets the “Führer principle” joyfully – relieved from the agony of forming opinions.

Arendt’s verdict bled through her book’s cover into mainstream pop psychology. The “banality of evil” became a banality itself thanks to excessive invocation at dinner parties and in newspaper columns. It escaped Arendt that Eichmann, who she dismissed as uneducated, was playing a clever game.

Understanding Eichmann requires less focus on transcripts of the 1961 trial and more on a collection of late 1950’s recordings from informal seminars in Argentina. These were attended by numerous former and aspirant Nazis, and taped by Dutch sympathiser-journalist Willem Sassen, who hoped to write a book rehabilitating the Third Reich by proving the “Jewish propaganda” about the “slaughter of six million” to be a hoax.

Following lengthy conversations with Eichmann, Sassen abandoned the project, having been told precisely what he didn’t want to hear, and from the horse’s mouth — the “propaganda” was true.

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Regrettably these recordings, though known of in 1961, were available to the court only in fragmentary transcripts: the full cache didn’t re-emerge until 1999. If they had been played at trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem would read very differently. (Fortunately, an analytical summary is now available in Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, published in 2011.)

On the penultimate recording in a long series (68 tapes) Eichmann, articulating his role in the Holocaust reflects on his divided nature, says: “I the cautious bureaucrat, that was me, yes indeed. But I would like to expand on the issue of the ‘cautious bureaucrat’ somewhat… This cautious bureaucrat was attended by a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood which is my birth right.”

A terrifying crescendo is reached with these words “No, I have to tell you quite honestly that if out of the 10.3 million [worldwide] Jews… identified we had killed 10.3 million, I would be satisfied… We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood… if we had eliminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects”. Contemplating repentance, Eichmann exclaims “I could do it cheaply for the sake of current opinion… [but] for me to deeply regret it, for me to pretend that a Saul has become a Paul… I cannot do that”.

Sassen’s Holocaust denial project ended abruptly soon afterwards.

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Before Adolf Eichmann was Ricardo Klement, he was Otto Henninger and before that Adolf-Karl Barth. At war’s end, under yet another name, he was captured by the allies but escaped. We shouldn’t be surprised if one so used to disguising his identity might also conceal his complex nature. Genocidal bent and aptitude for dissimulation was not temporarily sequential: they were interlaced aspects of personality. Long before adopting false names Eichmann mastered self-concealment.

In the 1930s and 40s Eichmann wove elaborate biographic myths to create confusion. He convinced Jewish interlocutors of linguistic gifts he didn’t possess in Yiddish and Hebrew, and forged a story of upbringing amid a notorious “Templar’ German community in Palestine known for anti-Semitic violence. These motifs, fused with deep knowledge of Zionist literature in translation, allowed him to disorientate Jewish interlocutors: simultaneously opening up an unexpected connection and a register of menacing threat.

Yet despite her analytical faults, we shouldn’t condemn Arendt harshly — as some have. Critics like Deborah Lipstadt allege Arendt arrived in Jerusalem with a commission from The New Yorker and a suitcase bursting with ideas she wanted to demonstrate. They attribute to her a drive to render Eichmann a worked example of her thesis in her 1951 masterpiece the Origins of Totalitarianism about the moral disabling of individuals which a supercharged ideology possessed of state-power can achieve.

This is unfair. Arendt didn’t see in Eichmann what she wanted but what he projected. Arendt’s evaluation is consonant with that of many journalists reporting on the trial with no ideological axe to grind. It’s just that her intellectual subtlety was outflanked by Eichmann’s psychological one. As Stangeth points out, Eichmann lead “a highly intelligent person to defeat herself with her own weapon”, the assumption philosopher Arendt carried that “someone speaks and writes only when they want to be understood”.

Conversely Israeli Police Captain Avner Less, who interrogated Eichmann pre-trial, was sharper. “After the end of the first hearing [interview], I was convinced that Eichmann wasn’t telling this story for the first time,” he said afterwards: “I had the feeling this man had been rehearsing it somewhere.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem wore a mask, yet pulling that mask off doesn’t pull the rug from under Arendt’s Totalitarianism. Historical sociologists take the deep conditioning of the Third Reich seriously; contemporary behavioural psychology confirms our susceptibility to manipulation by authority figures. Paradoxically Eichmann’s performance supports Totalitarianism’s thesis: he could ably present himself as one deformed by totalitarianism because he helped to fashion it and deform others.

And so, under questioning, Eichmann presented himself both as one for whom obedience was the supreme virtue and as a mere “messenger” operating an intermediate administrative ‘clearing house’ for orders. Though he couldn’t evade conviction he hoped to slip the noose by passing himself off as a cog in the machine.

Curiously his counsel, Cologne lawyer Robert Servatius, took a contrary approach. Servatius asserted not that superior orders absolved Eichmann from subjective moral responsibility. Rather, he argued, the order’s receipt and discharge objectively subsumed Eichmann’s personal actions into “Acts of the German State” raising the shield of “sovereign immunity” — a more plausible legal argument then than now. The defence concluded on 15 August.

Judgment came on 11 December. Rejecting Servatius’s “Act of State” defence, Eichmann was found guilty on all counts. The defendant’s interpretation of events was likewise dismissed: Hungary proved Eichmann’s distinct moral agency: he was not just “obeying orders”.

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A sentence of execution by hanging followed on 15 December, and was carried out on 31 May 1962. Eichmann’s body, like his victims’, was cremated: the ashes scattered at sea to prevent a grave attracting Neo-Nazi pilgrims.

It has become fashionable, since the Sassen tapes emerged, to despatch Arendt’s thesis, or at least a representation of it, to the winds of oblivion too. Her “banality of evil” thesis should, it is argued — because of its contextual inapplicability to Eichmann — be banished from the moral Lexicon per se. This however risks an empirical misreading of both Eichmann and his trial.

Eichmann was both a calmly meticulous administrator and a murderous anti-Semite. The punctilious observer of office routine and arranger of index cards is far better placed to achieve genocidal aims than the volatile smasher of windows.

The infectiousness of the genuine “banality of evil” was demonstrated, inadvertently, at trial by the defence counsel. Robert Servatius, himself entirely innocent of complicity in genocide witnessed to its precondition by unthinking, and at the time scandalous, reference of the gassing at Auschwitz as “medical matters”. The lawyer meant no offence — he had, as a former inhabitant of Nazi Germany, simply internalised the euphemistic language by which such things were referred to under the Third Reich.

If we discard Arendt completely, we risk something worse than misreading Eichmann. We chance missing the mask calculated evil wears before us now.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

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He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

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As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

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He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.

Two of the very few who did survive were Grisha and Luba, the Shoenbaum’s two children. The family were originally taken off to the local concentration camp, Janowaska. But Boris bribed his captors, and managed to engineer their escape. Within days, Boris and Rosa had been recaptured and shot. But the teenage Luba managed to pass herself off as a Christian and got a job as a local housekeeper. She hid her brother in a local clock tower for three years, secretly taking him food as he struggled to stay alive amid the constant fear of discovery and the stench of pigeon shit.

After the war, Luba made her way to Israel where she became a financial advisor to the government. Even as an elderly woman in Tel Aviv, she would cross herself and exclaim “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” – the deception had been so deep. Her little brother, Grisha, now Gregory, left for America where he became an eminent biochemist, working to alleviate the side effects of chemotherapy at St Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He passed away last month at the age of 91. Luba, also now passed away, was my wife’s grandmother. Every year, my mother-in-law goes to Yad Vashem to light a candle for Boris and Rosa.

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A few months ago, my wife had a baby boy, and we have named him Jonah Boris. Given this back story, you can imagine how much we appreciated it when some of my more delightful Twitter followers decided that Boris (my son now inevitably nicknamed Jo Bo) was a less than appropriate name, with some interpreting this as indicative of fascist sympathies. My reaction was unpublishable.

So too was my reaction to the latest comments of the newly appointed Israeli education minister, Rafi Peretz that intermarriage – Jews ‘marrying out’ – “is like a second holocaust”. His comment, made last week, during a government cabinet meeting is indicative of a growing rift between hard line Israeli nationalists and the increasingly liberal Jewish diaspora, especially in places like the United States. Peretz was commenting on a briefing given to the Netanyahu government by Dennis Ross, formerly a senior official in the Obama administration, on recent trends in Jewish communities around the world. Peretz pointedly commented that over the last 70 years, the Jewish community has “lost six million people” – a figure that is commonly understood to be the number of Jews that were murdered in the Shoah.

This wildly insensitive comment has done little to advance the good feelings that the Fraser family has towards the current direction of Israeli politics. At present, we are preparing for a three month visit to Tel Aviv in the Autumn, where I am going to enrol in an Ulpan, a Hebrew language school designed for non-Hebrew speaking immigrants.

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My wife and I decided that our boys – both Jews on account of their mother – ought probably to get their Israeli passports. But the conversation with the Israeli embassy didn’t go well. It seems that our boys will not be allowed to have Fraser on their Israeli passports – though that is their name. The embassy official needed proof that ours was not a sham marriage – or indeed any sort of marriage at all. They demanded Facebook photographs of us together throughout the year before our marriage. Bizarrely, being properly married in a Register Office – with documentary evidence – and living together for three years and having two children didn’t count as sufficient evidence that ours isn’t a sham marriage. But Facebook photos would do. In the face of all this ridiculous officialdom, Mrs Fraser – who is really not to be messed with – is no longer minded to continue with the process of application.

Given the current rate of Jews ‘marrying out’, you might have thought the Israeli government would try a little harder to be encouraging of those, like me, who are not Jewish and who are trying extremely hard to bring up their children as Jews. We promised each other that we would “respect each other’s traditions” in our Ketubah – a kind of pre-nuptial agreement common in Jewish weddings.

Both my Jewish children have been circumcised. They are being brought up in a bilingual family – where Hebrew is spoken at home, despite my struggling with it. My two year old chats with his grandmother on the phone most days in broken Hebrew. Both are being regularly taken to Israel. The Rabbi of the schul in Golders Green – where my father’s family (all Jewish) were seat-holders – has been extremely welcoming, even in our unusual circumstances. But the Israeli government is hardly doing their bit to make all of this any easier.

Part of the problem here is that philosemitism is sometimes viewed with something of the same contempt that Jews rightly have for antisemitism. Indeed, for some, philosemitism is now regarded as an even greater existential threat than antisemitism itself. For whereas antisemitism has often served to bind the Jewish community together, philosemitism has meant, in practice, that the barriers that have kept the Jewish community apart and distinctive are no longer operational.

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The historical Shtetls of Eastern Europe, for example, in which people like the Shoenbaum’s survived for generations, were often regarded as a kind of survival pod in a world of hostility, forcing people together. Antisemitism fostered boundary maintenance. In contrast, in a place like the modern US, where Jews are generally viewed with admiration, the barriers have collapsed and Jews are marrying out, often not bringing up their children as Jewish.

This problem has a long history. The Bible is full of Jews who married out. Judah married an Ethiopian. Joseph married an Egyptian. Moses married a Moabilte and an Egyptian. David – whose great-grandmother was Ruth, a Moabitess – married a Philistine. And the great King Solomon married just about anyone he could get his hands on – 700 wives and 300 concubines, including Pharoah’s daughter, and women from Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon, and from the Hittites.

It was Ezra, on returning from the Babylonian Exile, that first introduced the novel idea that Jews ought to maintain their genetic purity by refusing to take foreigners in marriage. He writes (Ezra 9):

“The leaders came to me and said, ‘The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices, like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them. And the leaders and officials have led the way in this unfaithfulness.’ When I heard this, I tore my tunic and cloak, pulled hair from my head and beard and sat down appalled.”

The Book of Ezra ends with a long list of names and then the sentence: “All these had married foreign women, and they sent them away with their children.”

But for all this, what constitutes Jewishness has never been completely fixed. Historically, the boundaries have always been in flux. And with the current situation in large parts of the diaspora, the nature of Jewishness is in flux once again.

No, my marriage is not a "second holocaust"

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Rafi Peretz’s comments are clearly offensive. Describing my marriage as a part of some “second holocaust” is ludicrous. Read Phillip Sands’s magnificent East West Street – or listen to our Confessions podcast – to understand the central role that the city of Lvov had in the formation of the modern meaning of the word genocide. To put what happened to Boris Shoenbaum in the same category as the birth circumstances our precious new child that bears his name – well, I have no words really.

But seeing past my anger, the minister’s statement is indicative of the changing nature of Jewish identity. In 2017, the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute published a study that found that – excluding the Heredi community – close to 60% of US Jews are married to non-Jews and only 15% are married to other Jews and raising their children as Jewish. It is probably these statistics – far more than the sort of shabby, low grade prejudice that currently lurks within the Labour Party – that really bothers those who are looking long-term at the future existence of the Jewish people. For the more conservatively-minded, assimilation constitutes a deeper existential threat.

But for others, all this represents just another shift in the meaning of what it is to be Jewish. If you read properly scholarly work on the subject – such as Shaye Cohen’s brilliant “The Beginnings of Jewishness” – you will see that the boundaries have always been changing. People like Rafi Peretz don’t control what it means to be Jewish. Nor indeed, does the Israeli government. Not even the Rabbinate. And they just don’t like it.

But for all the horrors of the twentieth century – and those more recently – the Holocaust stands as the most thoroughgoing and explicit demonstration of humanity’s capacity for evil. As Churchill wrote: “The Final Solution is probably the greatest, most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”

This is not about some sick contest of suffering in which the Jews are declared the winner. It is, rather, that we can only truly understand the lessons of the Holocaust if we acknowledge what made it unique.

A useful starting point is with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, himself a survivor who escaped to Britain after a year at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (His elder brother, who would not leave Germany, was murdered by the Nazis.) For Fackenheim, four characteristics of the Holocaust separated it from other examples of mass murder.

First, the mere fact of being born Jewish was itself enough to merit extermination. (And the definition was – in modern parlance – as inclusive as possible, to ensure that no trace of Judaism would be left on earth.) Many Poles and Russians were also murdered by the Nazis, but their death was not pre-determined by Nazi ideology as a fundamental requirement – although Gypsies were also murdered for the crime of existing.

So secondly, the sole purpose of the Final Solution was to wipe out every Jew from the face of the earth. An entire people would be extinguished. Other genocides have targeted groups or races for mass murder; but they were not designed to remove them in their entirety. The Turkish genocide of Armenians or the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, for example, were both unspeakable crimes. But they did not have all of Fackenheim’s four characteristics of the Holocaust.

Thus Fackenheim’s third unique characteristic was that there was no economic, political or territorial goal which the Final Solution was designed to leverage. The Final Solution was its own purpose. It was not part of the larger territorial war but it was nonetheless considered to a fundamental part of the Third Reich’s war effort. The two were equal in importance and so there was no significant internal dissent from the idea that resources that could have been used in war were instead used to exterminate the Jews.

It is this third characteristic that is perhaps the most rationally inexplicable of all elements of the Holocaust – that it had no purpose other than the murder of an entire people for the sake of their murder.

Fourthly, as Daniel Goldhagen further elaborated in his seminal 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Holocaust was carried out not by a cadre of committed ideologues or committed soldiers but by ordinary Germans – what Fackenheim described as “ordinary job holders with an extraordinary job.”

Goldhagen argued that the overwhelming majority of Germans were “willing executioners” because of the “eliminationist antisemitism” which had taken hold in German political culture over many centuries. Crucially, he destroyed the comfortable myths that most Germans knew nothing of the Holocaust – and that it was only the SS and not the Wehmarcht who murdered Jews. As the Holocaust scholar Franklin Littell wrote: “The death camps were designed by professors and built by Ph.D.s.” Civilised Germans – doctors, architects and writers – tortured and murdered Jews while Bach and Wagner played in the background, testing to see what levels of pain could be survived or, as Auschwitz’s chief physician, Dr Joseph Mengele, enjoyed himself, sewing twin children together to create a “Siamese pair” to test their behaviour.

Why does it matter if the Holocaust was unique? For Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, also a survivor, the memory and the potency of the Holocaust have to be permanently renewed because “to forget would mean to kill the victims a second time. We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to be killed again.”

But there is something more obvious, too. As George Santanya put it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Repeat the Holocaust? That is unthinkable. But repeat elements of it? It happened once. That alone ought to be enough to worry us.