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Holocaust scholar says deniers stir him to research

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/4942/full/4942/holocaust-scholar-says-deniers-stir-him-to-research/ Holocaust scholar says deniers stir him to research Friday, January 24, 1997 | by SARAH COLEMAN Michael Berenbaum is no stranger to this issue. As director of the research institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington from 1988 to 1995, he spent about 20 percent of his time dealing with the problem of Holocaust denial on campuses. Typically, requests from student editors came with a condition: "If we can give you the money," they said, "we'll run the ad." Along with a surge in public Holocaust awareness in the 1990s, the decade has also seen a tidal wave of Holocaust denial, Berenbaum told an audience of 100 Sunday at San Francisco's Congregation Sherith Israel. But the upswing of denial may have had one positive effect, said Berenbaum. "Holocaust deniers have forced us to do better research. There are things we might not have wanted to know, because they're gruesome and ugly and despicable, but now they're known." Berenbaum, a renowned Holocaust scholar, recently moved from Washington to Los Angeles to assume directorship of Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Established in 1994, the foundation's mission is to videotape interviews with 50,000 Holocaust survivors by the end of 1997. The scholar's lecture, titled "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," was sponsored by Sherith Israel, the Emanuel Gelbart Memorial Fund to Combat Holocaust Denial of the Holocaust Center of Northern California and the Jewish studies department of San Francisco State University. That evening, he also addressed an East Bay Friends of Jewish Education dinner at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette. Discussing his concerns about denial at the San Francisco talk, Berenbaum said that while institutions such as Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and films like the Academy Award-winning "Schindler's List," have brought the Holocaust into the mainstream, the Internet has given Holocaust deniers a powerful new weapon. It is now easy for a Holocaust denier to disseminate material worldwide, and texts can easily be downloaded from an online source and printed. Documents from North America thus make their way to Germany, where Holocaust denial is outlawed. Claims by Holocaust deniers take many forms, said Berenbaum. The least extreme include allegations that survivors are exaggerating, that "it wasn't as bad as all that." At the other end of the spectrum are those denying that it happened at all. But the most pernicious form of denial, he said, took place during the war itself. Though records show that early and accurate information circulated about what was happening in the death camps, individuals consciously denied the information or "chose not to let it reach the threshold of knowledge." How can Holocaust denial be combated today? Berenbaum offered suggestions: Scholars must continue to conduct research and ensure that they do not validate deniers by appearing in public debates with them. "If people hear a radio or TV debate between us, 90 percent might say, `Berenbaum won the debate'; and 10 percent might say, `He lost the debate.' But 100 percent will say, `The issue's debatable,'" he said. "And once you say that, the debate's lost." In addition, he said scholars must maintain their dignity in the face of provocation. Sometimes that's a challenge, said Berenbaum, who was visited by neo-Nazi Canadian denier Ernst Zundel at the Holocaust Museum. "Congratulations," Zundel told him. "You've created a phenomenal museum to an event that doesn't exist." In light of such challenges, Berenbaum said, it's critical to expose the racist, supremacist agenda that is often hidden behind the denier's screen of pseudo-science. Returning to the college newspaper editor's dilemma, Berenbaum said one strategy is to debate the issue in the pages of the paper. He also recounted several small victories of his own. "You think that this money is tainted, yet you want me to take it," he told one student. "Is that really going to help?" The student ultimately decided not to run the denier's ad. Berenbaum recalled the words of his father: "If the money doesn't feel good in your pocket, it doesn't belong there."

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