Excerpted from "The Iron Lady of The American Jewish Right" an interview with Ruth Wisse in this wekend's Wall Street Journal:
Much of her extended family was murdered by the Germans, but “the investment in Holocaust education has been a huge mistake,” she says.
“We should remember it every day of our lives, and we do. We still mourn the Temples of Jerusalem.”
She sees the public Holocaust education effort, however, as a Jewish gesture to Christians: “Show them the crucifixion of the Jews, as if it could be redemptive for the rest of us.”
Even accepting the Christian framing, Ms. Wisse says, “we left out the resurrection. Not in three days, but in three years.”
From the end of the Holocaust in 1945 to Israel’s 1948 founding, “the Jewish nation resurrected itself— and that is a miracle.
“It’s not that the waters parted,” she says. “The Jews had to part them.” The Arabs had succeeded in choking off the Jewish escape from Europe to Palestine when it counted most, and then rejected the U.N. partition plan for a Jewish and an Arab state. After nearly 2,000 years of exile, the Jews had to fight off the invasion of five Arab armies to win independence.
“The resurrection of the Jews is the greatest story ever told,” Ms.
Wisse says, “and while our enemies were hard at work uglifying it, we told the story of the Holocaust.”
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