Holocaust Man

I’ve always had a weird feeling about the whole notion of Holocaust studies. I mean, 6 million Jews were murdered — how much more do I need to know? I can read 100 books on the subject — analyzing the who, what, where, why and how of this unspeakable atrocity — and still, I don’t think anything I read will come close to equaling these five words: Six million Jews were murdered.

I don’t need more knowledge to make me rise up and say, “Never again!” Or to understand that the best way I can honor the 6 million dead is to proudly live out my Judaism.

It’s true, of course, that academia works differently. It lives to question, dissect, dig, analyze and understand. But it’s also possible that a subject can be so emotionally overwhelming that it can get dehumanized and trivialized if it doesn’t receive special treatment — even in academia.

The Holocaust might be such a subject.

It’s with such thoughts swirling in my mind that I had lunch at Pat’s the other day with professor Michael Berenbaum of American Jewish University.

Berenbaum is one of the premier scholars of the Holocaust, having written or edited more than 15 books on the subject, produced or consulted on several award-winning films, overseen the design and building of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C., and served as head of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. As if that weren’t enough, he was also the driving force behind the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Unless you want to feel guilty about leading an unproductive life, do not Google him.

Berenbaum, who’s in his early 60s and looks like he could have been a junior-weight boxer, is a tough nut to crack. One of his former students at Georgetown University, the entertainer Pearl Bailey, wrote of him: “He is young, aggressive, tough, wise as some sages of yore, and as brilliant as a diamond. When class ended, you felt filled, drained, and filled again.”

After a long lunch with him, I felt filled and drained, but also wanting. I tried several times to tease a personal anecdote out of him that might explain his relentless drive and passion, but failed. He gave me long, articulate answers, but nothing, I sensed, that he hadn’t said many times before.

Thankfully, we had a follow-up meeting at the Coffee Bean, where his tough-guy image cracked a little. Under a hot sun, he showed some raw emotion as he spoke about one of the major turning points of his life: his decision to skip his college graduation ceremony in June 1967, and, with a few friends, fly to Israel at the start of the Six-Day War.

“We are going to drive the Jews into the sea,” he remembers hearing from Israel’s enemies.

He didn’t get to fight in the war, but he volunteered and did whatever he could, including collecting garbage. He remembers that the war was “so close to everything” that a soldier, living at the same place in Jerusalem as Berenbaum, would come home for a quick shower and then go back to fight.

When he got back to America, Berenbaum’s academic interests changed. A graduate student of philosophy at the time, he became consumed by theological and historical questions around the idea of God and evil in history, as well as by the ability of a people to prevail against all odds.

But his ’67 experience had done more than redirect his intellectual passions. It gave him a primal rush, a sense that he was on the street, “living history.” Since that time, he has felt a constant pull between the life of letters and the world of action — between writing scholarly volumes and being an activist for causes like Soviet Jewry; between researching the Holocaust and building a memorial to it.

Berenbaum’s great challenge has been to marry these two sensibilities in his work. It’s clear when you talk to him that he feeds off both, that he needs and values both.

Maybe that’s why he wasn’t defensive when we spoke about the potential trivialization of the Holocaust. He believes the field of Holocaust studies will be a rich and evolving one for many years to come, but his motto, as he quotes a colleague, has always been: “Handle with care.”

One way he exhibits this care is by reconciling what may be the defining paradox of the Holocaust for Jewish people: Can we be victims and still be strong? For Berenbaum, the answer is subtle — and clear.

Yes, he says, Jews were tragic victims, and in many ways, we still are. But we are also strong. The two are not mutually exclusive. We can spend decades and millions of words to mourn and analyze the horror that fell upon us, but we can also move forward with the power and immediacy of a few words.

For this hard-nosed scholar who blew off his graduation to join a war, those few words go beyond “Never Again.”

They’re closer to, “We’ll Never Give Up.”