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Community Views

Editor's Notebook

Simple Answer Sought
To Holocaust Question

Playing Politics With
High School Students

SID BOLKOSKY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

ALAN HITSKY ASSOCIATE EDITOR

In October 1996,
at its annual
conference, the
Social Science
History Associa-
tion included
seven sessions
on Holocaust
scholarship and
research. Its ple-
nary meeting featured Raul
Hilberg, acknowledged dean of
Holocaust scholars, as the
keynote speaker.: The sessions
indicated that the Holocaust as
a subject of scholarly inquiry has
been mainstreamed into the aca-
demic world.
Daniel Goldhagen, author of
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Or-
dinary Germans and the Holo-
caust, was one of the participants.
While his session did not focus on
his work, the room was
filled because of his notori-
ety; and the criticism of his
book was heated, even pas-
sionate and visceral. Not
since Hannah Arendt's
work on Eichmann has
- there been such furor over
an academic book on the
Holocaust.
Mr. Goldhagen claims
he wants to "reconceive"
the perpetrators, German
anti-Semitism and Ger-
man society under the
Nazis. He argues, some-
what astonishingly, that
"little concerted attention"
has been paid to the per-
petrators. Further, most of
those earlier studies, he declares,
show a "poor understanding and
undertheorizing about anti-Semi-
tism."
His fundamental thesis, meant
to correct these oversights: Ger-
man anti-Semitism was the "cen-
tral causal agent of the
Holocaust," which moved all Ger-
mans and created a willingness
on the part of all Germans to kill
Jews if they had had the oppor-
tunity.
He raises such questions as
"Would ordinary people kill with
such enthusiasm? How could they
torture and humiliate when re-
fusal would have cost little or
nothing" — a fact the author

Sid Bolkosky is a professor of

history at U-M Dearborn.

claims no one before has pointed
out.
The answer: Because they were
Germans. German culture was
pervaded with a particular brand
of anti-Semitism — "elimination-
ist" — that convinced "ordinary
Germans" that killing Jews would
be right and just. The Holocaust
was the logical result of this
unique, lethal and singularly Ger-
man eliminationist anti-Semitism
which was built into its political
culture and its social and religious
institutions.
With a sweeping argument,
Mr. Goldhagen has created an aw-
ful ethical, moral and profession-
al dilemma for historians, because
to attack or criticize his thesis, we
seem forced to defend the Ger-
mans.
To say Mr. Goldhagen is mis-

taken is not to rescue the Ger-
mans from responsibility or guilt
— it is to differentiate, to exam-
ine more closely, to ask different
questions than he does. My expe-
rience interviewing survivors
yields subtly different nuanced
conclusions.
To the question of which group
each survivor would identify as
most viciously anti-Jewish, for ex-
ample, one receives different, even
multiple answers: The Poles? no;
the Hungarians? no; the Ukraini-
ans? no; the Germans? — and so
it goes. Has Mr. Goldhagen ex-
amined the comparative nature
of Russian or Polish or Hungari-
an or Romanian anti-Semitism?
He has not. That neglect is one of
several reasons his book is found
flawed and vulnerable.

Mr. Goldhagen's evidence
comes from "case studies" of the
killing institutions apart from the
death camps. His numerous ex-
amples are chilling and gruesome,
nearly overwhelming and often
presented with an emotional and
morally judgmental tone.
Again and again he calls for a
new interpretation that centers
the perpetrators in this new light
and concludes that all Germans
who had the opportunity engaged
in cruelty and killing willingly.
All other explanations are dis-
missed.
It was Nazism's terrible con-
tribution to our century to replace
civilized values and restraints
with terror and indoctrination. It
created an enabling killing en-
vironment, a "warrant for geno-
cide" as it officially loosened
taboos and polluted the
world so that even Jews
and other victims became
caught on the murky, gray
zone it built.
That's the problem: how
to understand the bar-
barous and the civilized to-
gether.
These are among the
many questions inade-
quately addressed by Mr.
Goldhagen. His book has
raised other questions as
well. Why are so many
scholars reacting so emo-
tionally and fervently to the
work and, more strangely,
to the author?
Responses have been
passionate, even hysterical. In
Germany, he received the single-
voiced criticism of historians and
experts while younger people
thronged to his lectures.
My colleagues in other fields
do not understand this; I am not
sure I do either. Scholars have re-
fused to participate in conferences
where Mr. Goldhagen will ap-
pear. Is this a Jewish issue not to
be raised in public?
From the fact that "the killers
were ordinary Germans" (police
battalions), one cannot conclude
that all "ordinary Germans were
killers."
Lucy Dawidwowicz once said
that there is more to the Holo-
caust than Jewish suffering.
There is also more to it than Ger-
man anti-Semitism. ❑

TheaTN@aol . COM

11

What
Do You
Think?"

What not-so-obvious seder message do
you try to get across to your friends and
family?

To respond: "So, What Do You Think?"
27676 Franklin Road, Southfield, MI 48034

Statistics can
lie!
Throw them
into a political
debate and
they can get
downright pho-
ny. Mix in your
local public
schools and ...
well, you get the picture.
I was dragged kicking and
screaming into the equation
this week at a state education
task force meeting at Groves
High School in Beverly Hills. A
panel of state senators, repre-
sentatives and members of the
state board of education were
the lightning rod for disgrun-
tled parents and teachers at a
public hearing on the new High
School Proficiency Test.
I fit into the disgruntled par-
ent category. My son was failed
by the state of Michigan on the
reading portion of the test. His
co-president of the National
Honor Society at Groves was
also failed.
We have been told that a Na-
tional Merit Scholarship Fi-
nalist at Troy High was also
failed. And a Brighton resident
told Monday's hearing that her
National Merit Finalist daugh-
ter failed the writing portion.
I am proud of my son's aca-
demic and extracurricular
record at Groves. I'm also proud
that he went to Monday's hear-
ing and presented some inter-
esting statistics of his own: He
failed the reading section ini-
tially with a 382 score. With no
feedback from the first test or
preparation for the second, he
took the test again and passed
with a 466 out of a possible 644,
an 84-point improvement.
That would be like improv-
ing his ACT reading score from
28 to 33 (out of a possible 36),
or making a 208-point jump on
the 1600-point SAT.
That much improvement
sounds implausible, doesn't it?
We thought so, as did two
members of the Berkley Board
of Education.
I may have been loud at the
hearing, but Bruce Klein was
politely blunt. The president of
the Berkley board said the
High School Proficiency Test
(HSPT) is just one more "smoke
screen by the governor, one
more attack on public educa-
tion." He called the process, and
the hearings, "wasting time ar-
guing about a test that is
worthless in value instead of
talking about how we fund ed-
ucation."
Berkley board vice president
Marc Katz listed a litany of the
test's flaws, including the 500
minutes of class time that is
wasted to take the HSPT, the

fact that there is no feedback
to the students, parents or
teachers, and that only public-
school students must take it —
private school and charter
school students are exempt.
He pointed out that the
Berkley School District is pro-
jecting increases of 7 percent
next year in the cost of fringe
benefits, and 3-4 percent in the
cost of utilities. "How," Mr.
Katz asked, "do we improve ed-
ucational quality with the min-
imum number of dollars
coming back from the state" in
the wake of Proposal A? Public
schools are expecting a 2-per-
cent increase in the basic foun-
dation grant from the state.
But it was Mr. Klein who re-
ally woke me from my HSPT-
bashing revery. The diploma
endorsement that students
earn by successfully passing
the HSPT "means absolutely
nothing," he said. "It is ignored
by the colleges." And the busi-
ness community that was push-
ing for it is backing away,
possibly because of the 17 per-
cent of students with grade
points at 3.5 or above who
"failed" it.
So why has the state spent
all that money to develop an ex-
amination and pay $16.5 mil-
lion to score it? If it's part of
Gov. John Engler's campaign
to dismantle the public schools,
it may have backfired.
The key is that the state of
Michigan and its residents
have been talking about im-
proving education for years.
Unfortunately, a host of sub-
agendas have taken center
stage in that debate: cost of ed-
ucation, equitable school fund-
ing, property tax vs. sales tax,
family values, religion in the
schools. Quality education
seems to be at the low end of
the list.
If private schools and char-
ter schools and home schools
are the answer, why is the state
reluctant to have them tested?
If vouchers are the answer,
why not a thorough study of
their impact on the public-
school system?
My children have received a
great education via the public
schools of Michigan, from
kindergarten through college.
Others have not, and I agree
that the problems need to be
addressed. We need to stop try-
ing to prove that the schools are
failing. We need to talk about
how to make them better.
I don't think the answer is a
multimillion dollar political
boondoggle that labels students
— who have been academical-
ly recognized on nationally ac-
cepted examinations — as
failures. ❑

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