The Holocaust Was the Fulfillment of Western Civilization

The mass murder of the Jews was inevitable. No one has atoned. Yet Jews still seek redemption in the West.

The Holocaust was not an aberration but the culmination of Western Civilization’s deepest logic. For eighty years, we blinded ourselves to it. Now the veil is burning away.

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The total saturation of anti-Nazi sentiment in Western media and culture never meant what we nice Jewish boys from the suburbs hoped it did. When I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was about murderers of Jews trying to steal and co-opt the ultimate Jewish treasure and G-d literally melted the Nazis’ faces as was more than appropriate. When the world watched Raiders, they saw it as the enemy in WW2 getting involved in occultism, attempting to wage total war, and getting what was coming to them. Since Oct. 7, I’ve kept an eye on Steven Spielberg’s tepid gestures toward the cause of world Jewry and have come to believe that the two films, distinct only in the eyes of the beholders, are a Rosetta stone for decoding why Yom HaShoah now rings so hollow. It is a difference that permeates everything.

I am not speaking about the well-trodden debate between particularism and universalism, Israeli and American Jews, or Magneto and Prof. X in response to the holocaust. I question instead which stories, in principle, can ever be told in a Marvel comic, even if the artist and writer are Jewish. Whether an actual Jewish story has or ever could be told in our culture. I am beginning to feel like Jewish hawks vs. doves is not a genuine debate over how to react to the holocaust but itself a tacit absolution, an explaining away, an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and digest the indigestible.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, and worse, Schindler’s List, are themselves thefts of Jewish treasure in the service of conquering armies. They give the illusion of a civilization dealing with the Nazis, speaking of the holocaust, in order to close a chapter and attain penance. Many Jewish post-war identities exist for the same purpose. For eighty years, we have been old hands and debutantes at a pleasant ball desperately multiplying our patter to move past the moment in the evening when the May Queen was brought out on stage and shot. We were desperate for it not to ruin the whole party. The memory of the Holocaust as it actually was has become lost among our many desperate intervening remembrances. The last thing anyone wants is a reckoning.

It’s deep into the third act, and we’ve cheered the return of the Ark, refusing to believe it has been stolen again, while G-d waits in the wings to melt some faces. Will we even be happy to see Him?

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Since long before Oct. 7 the European attitude toward Israel has been, “We have overcome our hatred, why can’t you?” Not just deranged holocaust revisionists but well-meaning normal Americans tend to frame the holocaust as a “WW2” phenomenon. Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are of a genre; the Jews are sometimes considered war dead; a lot of people died around that time, such as huge numbers of American and Russian soldiers.

Through the Nuremberg Trials and the establishment of the United States European Command, by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the State of Israel, that horror was learned from, protected against, and rendered into history. Debates passionately rage over whether Never Again means force of arms or force of culture, and the longer the debate rages, the more words ward us from the horror of those years.

We can now, after eighty years, declare with confidence that this was all a pleasant lie. The premise for these debates is faulty: that anyone cared about the Jews at the time, and that explaining and parsing the Jew to the mind of Western Civilization helps them care now. The Europeans have not overcome anything. The Second World War was not waged against the holocaust or the depth of Nazi evil. The Nuremberg Trials and the demilitarization of Europe under the American umbrella did not reflect a civilizational reckoning with Auschwitz, but an avoidance of reckoning with Auschwitz. Our post-calamity Jewish identities of liberal Jew, religious Jew, or Zionist Jew do not supersede the horrors, but perpetuate the myth of their expiation.

As I’ve written elsewhere, it is very difficult to see what the holocaust actually was when speaking the language of its perpetrators. There is no need to use that language, of course, unless you are desperate for the perpetrator to understand what they did and for them to grow. This in short, was the choice of many Jews for eighty years, despite the attempt to always place the perpetrators somewhere far away and always be dealing with the nice gentiles. It explains many phenomena. For example, Fichte and Hegel were not just antisemites but also purveyors of inherently antisemitic philosophy. Heidegger, who followed, was a literal Nazi. Arendt comes around to, in effect, explain Heidegger’s Nazism, and Nazism in general, in a way that can salvage her teacher and neatly blame the crimes on a particular program within Western Civilization (call it Modern Depersonalization) in comically tiny proportion to any of these thinkers. Eichmann is offered as a single (almost excessive and pitiable!) scapegoat, and European civilization can adjourn with the Jews for tea.

We should have thrown tomatoes at Arendt and left the Germans to rot at the margins of history. “But how can you study and understand Western thought without studying Fichte, Hegel, or Heidegger?” Precisely. That is exactly the question.

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The holocaust is unique because it was the fulfillment and culmination of Western Civilization. This simple truth is still so dangerous today that I suspect most Jews won’t even admit it to themselves. If we protest calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, it’s because we accept that genocide is a general category in which the holocaust is merely a stand-out member. But this is arguing about the score after the game has been forfeited. “Zionists are Nazis” is the most nail-spittingly offensive thing I’ve ever heard, precisely because I’ve conceded that the Nazis are defined by a certain atomized set of behaviors rather than the entire time, place, and tradition in which they arose. All of this is self-absolving fiction, wallpaper over the writing black.

There can be no other Nazis because their crimes were the result of centuries and millennia of progress in every sense sitting specifically at the culmination of Western Civilization, from Rome through Christendom to modernity. We cannot say this because it is an indictment of that civilization. To admit it would mean seeing that our philosophies, our sciences, our arts, and our democracies all culminated not in freedom but in murder. That the greatest project of the human mind, as the West imagined it, ended not in enlightenment but in gas chambers.

There is no magical sieve, no simple way of containing the evil. The entire post-war order was built in an extremely magnanimous attempt to move past it. We admire the courageous acts and self-sacrifice of the Allies, hoping they love us the way we have loved them. But the entire course of the West’s history, the entire direction of its spirit, indicates we will be disappointed. It’s not that they failed to reach their ideals; it’s that their ideals succeeded. Even the sincerest, purest ideals of liberalism, democracy, and humanism in Europe were built with the Jew as an outsider, the Other, and a problem to solve at every step of their development.

We have already discussed German philosophy. But what of the Catholic Church, whose complicity survivors knew well? What of the Protestant churches? The Enlightenment and its offshoots, whose anti-religious materialism armed the Nazis' slaughtering mind? Communism, no true opposite but a sibling? Monarchical nostalgia crowned the Third Reich. Democracy and liberalism nursed it. Artists sang to it, intellectuals bathed it in myth, high culture thickened its blood, and low culture raised its banners. The sciences fueled it with Zyklon B; the universities provided it doctors and anthropologists. Bureaucracy was its bones. Rationalism was its breath. It is as if every strand of the Western tapestry was waiting for Hitler’s weaving. As if Auschwitz was the image they were always meant to draw.

For a Zionist to commit the holocaust, they would have to be not the outcast of civilization, but its champion. That’s why Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes, for example, horrific and unfathomable mass murders, still have nothing to do with the holocaust. However, because this is almost unbearable and presents a dichotomy even the Jews, beaten and decimated and in grief, have been unwilling to deal with for eighty years, we have had to invent the “holocaust,” in which the call was not coming from inside the house, in which not everything was tainted. I think, after Oct. 7, we should be ready now. We should refuse to look away. We should say: Every high ideal and low pastime, every cultural artifact, every dimension of European civilization that had oppressed Jews for millennia was a contributor.¹ The holocaust was the furthest progress, the ultimate destination, the apotheosis of Christendom. Europe’s every good had been contrasted with a “Jewish” bad for many centuries, and the death camps represent its holy, destined purification. And this, precisely, is the shame that our talk of the holocaust, all our “remembrance” since, has attempted to avoid.

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What of the Allies?

This, of course, is the great hope, the heroes of Jewish boys everywhere for eighty years. For there were those who resisted, and even as part of the civilization culminated in the extermination camps, other parts fought it hammer and tongs, and were ultimately victorious. I have stood upon the hallowed ground of Omaha Beach and paid witness to their sacrifice.

However, my idealism, my appreciation, and my love of this great courage have been severely tested over the years. The sober light of adulthood paints quite a different picture: heartbreak for Jewish boys like me. It was the reaction to Oct. 7 that finally did it. The world is not what I had thought, and we heard our stories differently.

The historical fact is:

Western civilization never waged war on the holocaust. If Hitler hadn’t also been bent on world domination, he could have industrially mass murdered all the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia with nary a peep. Escaping Jews would have been turned away from safer shores, and the train tracks certainly wouldn’t have been bombed. And the world that still appeased Hitler after Munich and didn’t care to save Jews during the war, except as part of other objectives, would have called any Jew who complained too loudly a troublemaker and a warmonger.

The world wishes to say it gave a damn about the Jews at the time and that WW2 was waged against the deepest moral horrors of the Nazis. It needs to expiate its unique, civilization-level indifference to the extermination of its Jews. It is clear from the way that Europe has always spoken to Israel that it considers its sins well-compensated, and from the way the US does that it never had any doubts—cultural, military, spiritual—in the first place. Many brave soldiers may, at a personal level, have fought to save the Jews. Their governments did not. Western Civilization went to war not to save the Jews, but to save itself from the world-conquering monster it had midwifed, the man who invaded Poland, whose allies bombed Pearl Harbor. The camps were liberated and documented in the best spirit of, “See what the war enemy is like.” Thus anti-Nazi sentiment became a civilizational self-absolution. The Nazis were declared the enemy without having to pay a dime. And the Jews were admitted, magnanimously, as evidence.

The often-genuine empathy of the individual toward the holocaust is natural, spontaneous, and totally uneducated. As soon as they ask, “But how did this happen?” a thousand “educators” step in and start talking about things they invariably would have opposed anyway had Jews never existed. They say it was nationalism, or populism, or right-wingism, or anti-communism, or dehumanization, or a bad Treaty of Versailles unleashing powerful economic forces, or the alienation of modernity and the death of G-d. Whatever it was, you see, we, the right-thinking, we whose minds are shaped by the same ideas and swim in the same waters, we, the creators of the One True Rational Hermetically-Sealed Dichotomy, are not to blame. It was not the culmination of our civilization. The holocaust was aberrant, and so obviously aberrant that everything other than the one side of the True Dichotomy can be forgiven as a bad turn down a wrong road. The project is good. Heidegger, and the churches, and art, and liberalism, and enlightenment humanism, and communism, and family values are not to blame for this. What’s that, Jew? Oct. 7 is a Nazi crime? Because it’s obviously mass Jew murder? Why would a Jew have any say about what a Nazi is? In fact, muddying the waters and crossing the dichotomies and saying this type of person could be a Nazi makes you the disgraceful one, Jew. You’re misusing the holocaust, whose lessons about universal human brotherhood and giving peace a chance are well known. You obviously don’t care about the memory of the six million. The Jews have sunk so far since the holocaust…

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“The Holocaust” (tm) means anything other than Western Civilization taking responsibility for what it has done to the Jews at every step of its spiritual, intellectual, and cultural development since the time of the Roman Empire. It has been laundered, often with the help of well-meaning Jews, into a founding myth of the postwar order, into another sacrifice of our people on behalf of a civilization that made us dream.

I am not writing now for non-Jews but for my brothers and sisters. We have loved this civilization so much that our own identities, since the catastrophe, have also assumed its roles. If the entire structure of Western Civilization was directed, turn after turn, toward an attempt to murder the entire Jewish people, and you, as a Jew, consider that civilization core to your own identity, then there is an immense pressure to buy into the absolution of compartmentalization. (This is why Jewish boys aren’t educated away from their hopeful read of Raiders, why my innocent assumptions lasted so long.)

Over time, what began as the slightest buy-ins postwar have driven wedges deep into our various Jewish identities. Each sat at a different table, drinking from the same poisoned well.

The unmoored depravity of the left-of-center American Jews, some of them reciting kaddish for Hamas or simply silent before “more diverse voices” or other grammatical atrocities, is well documented. They thought the holocaust was locked behind a particular political view, rather than in plain sight as the culmination of the entire civilization, for so long that by Oct. 7, they enacted political purity tests solely to determine which Jews could or could not be mass murdered. They are only a famous example, however, and others are little better. For many Zionists, the holocaust is locked behind Jewish statelessness and disarmament, and the state means Jewish survival will never again be dependent upon other nations, unless one receives a strongly worded phone call from America or political expediency depends on it. Religious Jews, the Orthodox, are quicker to state their disdain for non-Jewish culture and ideas but expect shelter in “Judeo-Christian values” and quickly find reasons to part with secular Jews even on matters of life and death about which Jews need to be defended. The Jewish academic elite, an identity unto itself, sees the ivory tower as salvific and ignorance as the great well of Jew-hatred, even as their campuses are overrun by unfathomably ignorant students baying for Jewish blood. The more right-wing or business-oriented American Jewish homeowner still believes that America is magically exempt from its own civilization, as things get worse and worse, and trust in the sobriety and good sense of their gentile neighbors, which was the rock-solid foundation of Weimar.

My goal is not to cast aspersions or catastrophize about the past, present, or future. My goal is for the Jews to stop believing that this “holocaust” business is far behind us, that these structures of meaning will hold back the teleological arrow of Western Civilization. I also once believed that things had truly changed, whether through Vatican II or the Nuremberg Trials. Closer examination reveals that what has occurred is not repentance but memory-holing of the great catastrophe and assigning what faint memory remains to someone else. But there is no one else. The courses at Yeshiva University teach the same Heidegger, within a frame noting his political predilections, so it’s all OK. Orthodox Jews bask in the love and admiration of their Christian neighbors. Ardent Zionists daily surge against the frustration that non-Israeli non-Zionist Jews are also Jewish. We have all chosen champions from among those who did this to us.

And we still expect our love requited. We still think that with enough reason, enough beauty, enough gifts of our attention and commitment to speak the world’s language, the world will love us back. That the holocaust was some kind of mistake.

The post-Oct. 7 lessons cannot be that more liberalism, more conservatism, more Jewish statehood, more integration, more Judeo-Christian values, will save us. It cannot do to arbitrarily blame the holocaust on some players in the Western pageant and then rage against them with all our might. These are not Jewish fights. We have a civilization that was never theirs to destroy, that they have never understood. Their battles are not our battles.

Jews are Jews, not Europeans, Americans, or even Israelis. We can live as Jews or die as Jews. We cannot, must not live or die for non-Jewish truths. It is now a cliché that to the civilization that built the ovens, there is no secular Jew, no religious Jew, no Zionist, no leftist, no rightist, but only the Jew, and we will stand or fall together. But our memory of Jewish unity and belonging is constantly besieged by the forgetting of choosing sides within the world. The further we drift from the holocaust, or from Oct. 7, the more amnesia threatens to pull us back into the world.

I am not claiming that any civilization is free of betrayal, failure, or moral blindness, or even that Western Civilization is the worst perpetrator. I am claiming that we still expect redemption in terms that Western Civilization can understand. I am not arguing that the United States is G-d forbid like Nazi Germany. I am arguing that there is nothing in its essence preventing it from being a Weimar. I am not denying that Western civilization produced real good things for the Jews. I am urging us to realize that those goods are structurally intertwined with its hatred of the Jew at every level. I am not even arguing that we must not watch Raiders, only that we must recognize that our particular mythopoetic read of it was always wishful thinking.

It is time to stop relying on “the holocaust” to save us and see the holocaust for what it was. We are not the West’s tragedy. We are not the West’s conscience or apologizers. We are not the West’s survivors and need not seek its penance. We were dumped, and since that day in October, we now know that the signs we were getting back together were fake and she is never coming back. The world will fight its wars with or without us. The Jews have our own civilization with its own definitions, its own destiny, even our own epistemology and intellectual universe. We are not other than the holocaust by dint of a Greek syllogism. We are the children of the Midrash and the maaseh, the Law and the Land. Our words are not defined in English nor should we translate without a wince. The day our distinct civilization dies is the day Hitler wins, no matter how many Jewish Nobel prizes we’ve won. No matter how many Oscars for Schindler’s List.

1. For a scholarly account of how opposition to Judaism permeates Western civilization’s ideals at every stage, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition.