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Continued from preceding page quickest pseudo-spiritual bang that American Jews can get without studying. That means that the obses- sion serves several purposes: It allows a new generation to say that we're better than our predecessors because we would fight back. And they're full of baloney. They didn't fight back on an issue that would have cost them very little; the issue of the Jerusalem embassy. They've run to cover. The American Jewish estab- lishment wishes the issue of Jerusalem could go away. It's mak- ing them uncomfortable." Rabbi Hertzberg said that one of the reasons he returned to the com- mission' was that he hoped he could end the obsession with the Holocaust. He also wanted to place American Jewry's reaction to the Holocaust in the perspective that there was not much more that could be done to help the Jews in Germany once Hitler got things rolling. "As everyone knows," he said, "the Nazi murders were unprece- dented: It was death as an industry. There had been large-scale pogroms before, but there had never been death as an industry. Up until 1938, it was more than arguable that the situation of the Jews in Poland was worse than that of the Jews in Ger- many. That is why. the Jews in Ger- many thought, This is a pogrom. This is uncomfortable, this is bad, but it will go away.' Jews had outlived this kind of thing before. The crucial years for this period are 1942-1943. Those are the years of the major mass killings. I am saying, `Yes, American Jews could have done more, but don't blame them for rea- sons that have very little to do with the actual historical situation.' But the real question is, If the Nazis came to America, what lessons do we derive from the Shoa?' If the Nazis were already in place, if they already ran the police station in Southfield, then I think the one lesson we have derived from the Shoa is the one that everyone ex- coriates Hannah Arendt for: The only thing to have done is never to have allowed them to organize aJudenrat. "Remember, all of the Jewish representatives under the Nazis were organized on the idea that you were giving the pogromchiks an or- ganized body that somehow could shame a bit, buy, off a bit, do business with. That's our ancestral experi- ence. But with the Nazis you can't do business. Therefore, don't have any communal organizations. Leave Jews to hide individually. They'll be better off. "The only thing we've learned from the Shoa is that under the kind of stress we should instantly disband the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish. Congress and all the rest. Let there be absolutely no collaboration. Let there be no organ- ization to collaborate with. Under the Nazis, you simply disappear. Any- body that represents the Jewish community in such an extreme situa- tion is essentially a body that is going to be used by Nazis against Jews. The second lesson is that on an international plane, powerlessness is a disaster. And that's one of the rea- sons that I am a Zionist. The fact that Israel exists means that the Jewish people have a central power some- where, a place where the guns are stashed. And therefore, on an int ,- national plane, we are not tot e helpless. Most important, the fundamen- tal lesson that I derive from the Holocaust is that Jews are safe in untidy, moderate regimes.Ideologi- cal regimes of either the right or the left, regimes that want to create a new heaven on earth, are inhospita- ble to Jews because Jews are always the square peg in the round hole. "That being so, we have a pro- found stake in an American society in which tensions among classes are not exacerbated. "The chief lesson of the Holocaust is that once it's on, you can't affect it. Once the goyim have gone crazy, you can't affect them. Our job is to keep them from going mad." Rabbi Hertzberg believes that . . . Every time some stupid kid puts a swastika on somebody's door, you spend another 100,000 bucks of ADL money .. . "there are two kinds of chief insanity about anti-Semitism abroad in the Jewish world. One is that it's not our problem. It's the problem of the goyim because they are the anti- Semites. Wrong. It is our problem. If there are raving dogs around it's our problem to keep others from becom- ing raving dogs. "The second insanity is that every time some stupid kid puts a swastika on somebody's door, you spend another 100,000 bucks of Anti-Defamation League money to deal with the incident. That's not where the action is. The action is within the very fabric of the society. "If America is pulled apart by the ideological conservatives on one side and the unwashed on the other, we'll catch it. We have a stake in a society that doesn't commit suicide. I believe that I have a stake in creating more Charlie Rangels and me Andy Youngs, even if I don't ag. with them, so that there are fewer possible followers for the Jesse Jacksons. In other words, every guy who acquires a stake in the system is one less potentially angry, semi- educated redneck, leading some king of storm troopers. We have a stake in seeing to it that they don't get so hungry that they want to kill us. If the society goes mad, it will find us first. Every society in the West that has gone mad has found us