Holocaust Envy PDF

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Holocaust Envy:
The Libidinal Economy of the New Antisemitism
1
Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr.*
According to the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, enjoyment, in the psy-
choanalytic sense, should be understood as the paradoxical satisfaction
produced by a painful encounter with an impossible Thing that upsets
the balance of the pleasure principle. Nowadays, the Holocaustor,
more specifically, Jews perceived (fantasized) enjoyment of ithas
become just such a fascinating and disconcerting, seductively irritating
object of obsessive overinvestment for the new antisemitism. In a
Lacanian reading of the foundations of human rights discourse, a patho-
logical Holocaust envy is diagnosed as a symptom of neo-antisemit-
isms rivalrous identification with Jews.
Key Words: Antisemitism, Envy, Holocaust, Jouissance, Lacan,
Psychoanalysis
1. This paper was originally prepared as a pair of talks, and retains some of
that character. First (as Post-Holocaust, Postcolonial Theory), it was part of a
panel presentation, on post-Zionism and the Holocaust, at the Association for Israel
Studies 27th International Conference (organized around the theme of Israel as a
Jewish and Democratic State), Brandeis University, June 13-15, 2011. Second (as
Enjoyment of the Holocaust: The Latest Thing in Antisemitism), it was given
as a lecture at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, September 15, 2011. I wish to thank the
organizers of the Brandeis conference, the attendees, and my co-panelistsEugene
Sheppard (chair), Elhanan Yakira, Bruno Chaouat, and Robert Meisterfor their
insightful comments. I thank Bruno Chaouat additionally, in his role as director of
CHGS, for arranging my visit there, and the wonderful audience on that occasion
for a stimulating discussion of my work. Thanks, however, in one case are not
enough: I wish therefore to dedicate this essay to my teacher and friend of many
years, Robert Meister, who long ago played a priceless role in my learning to
understand the politics of enjoyment (and the enjoyment of political theory). We
may disagree in important ways about Israel and other sub-theoretical details (the
flaws in the argument you are about to read, needless to say, are entirely my
responsibility), but Bobs intellectual curiosity and integrity of mind, at once
playful and serious, remain for me the most pure and infectious I have ever
encountered. For that inspiration, among other things, I am forever grateful. This
paper could not have been written had I not once been privileged to serve as a
teaching assistant in his legendary course, After Evil, nor without his recently
published book of the same name. Individual citations to that text in what follows
cannot do justice to the intellectual debt this paper owes to that rich and important
volume.
489
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490 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:489
The Other is he who essentially steals my own enjoyment.
Jacques-Alain Miller
2
Why is it that American academic anti-Zionism so frequently chal-
lenges, distorts, or seeks to appropriate Jewish Holocaust memory? To
understand this is to understand the way in which a new antisemitism has
arisen, paradoxically, from envy for what in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans
terms can be understood as an imagined Jewish/Israeli enjoyment of their
own past collective suffering. The antisemitic thought process proceeds in
this way: The Other deprives me of my true enjoyment, or, what I most
urgently require, namely my innermost capacity to feel, in my bones, that I
am living fullyand I want it back. So . . . I plan to retake from him this
missing affective substance, my jouissance, in return for the (fantasized)
harm he has done me initially. Thus does one of the fundamental tropes
of racism appear, typically, according to Lacanian cultural theorist Slavoj
Zizek, as the largely unconscious conviction that the Other is alwaysand
alreadyresponsible for my miserable lack of existential heft. If I can
neither feel successful no matter what I do nor even suffer my endemic
failure properly (if, in other words, something is always missing), it is
because my neighbor, who is really an alien and doesnt belong here, is a
metaphysical gonifsomeone from whom, not incidentally, I am therefore
legally, morally, and above all libidinally entitled to steal/reclaim all that I
can for myself.
Racist enjoyment is the (real enough, albeit frustrated) perverse enjoy-
ment of the Others (imaginary, albeit nonetheless alluring) enjoyment.
Racist desire manifests reactively, as a symptom in the form of a fantasy of
the Others desirea necessary misrecognition, constitutive of the racist
subjects very identity. Antisemitic fantasies provide the paradigm case:
In terms of racism, the intersubjective element of fantasy means that,
paradoxically, the racist stages the desire of his victim. The racist, con-
fronted with the abyss of the Jews desire, makes sense of it by construct-
ing a fantasy in which the Jew is at the center of some nefarious plot. . . .
In this way, the desire of the racist to rid the country of Jews is actually a
means of concealing the anxiety generated by the desire of the Jews.
3
2. Quoted in Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the
Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 203. Subsequent ref-
erences to this edition appear cited in the text.
3. Tony Myers, Slavoj Zizek (New York: Routledge, 2003), 98. Subsequent
references to this edition appear cited in the text.
2011] HOLOCAUST ENVY 491
Today, aiming less to rid a given country of its Jews than to rid the world of
the Jewish State, the new antisemitism follows a similar but distinct logic.
For the postmodern antisemite, it is not so much the desire of Jews per
se, but that of Israel, that generates anxiety. The nefarious plot is no longer
whatever it was Jews were supposed to be up to in Europe, but what Israel
is supposed to be up to in the Middle East. The latter, it is believed, is
supported by an inordinate possessiveness concerning the Holocaust and the
privileges this custodianship is felt to confer. Therefore, in a symptomatic
wish to retrieve the memory and meaning of the Holocaust from greedy
Jewish hands, the new antisemite desires the delegitimization of a nation
seen as founded on (illicit) enjoyment of the Holocaust.
Following Jacques Lacan in his later period, Zizek sometimes refers to
this sort of investment in the Others imagined enjoyment as sinthome (in
the antique French spelling of the term), in order to emphasize its structur-
ing role for subjectivity. The subject not only suffers from its sinthome; it
needs to suffer from it in order to be itselfthe subject that it is. In this
understanding of symptom/sinthome, it is important to emphasize that if
the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet,
disintegrates. . . . [A]ll his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended
from his symptom, is externalized in his symptom.
4
Without the structur-
ing effect of a peculiarly central symptom, in other words, there is no
reality as the subject postulates it, and no subject either.
With this in mind, is it hard to see that Israel, in the eyes of its detrac-
tors, serves as the worlds sinthome after the end of the Cold Warfor
what other nation on the map is talked about as if perhaps it doesnt belong
there? Israels unnaturalness is in this regard is a key to the spurious
sense of entitlement enjoyed narcissistically by the rest. In other words:
Since, in fact, as historians well know, all nationalities and perforce all
nation-states and national boundaries are (many of them recent) humanly
made political constructs, to talk about one in particular as if it alone were
guilty of being more invented than the others is to allow the rest the
fantasy of their own ostensibly more substantial identities. Jews who sup-
port the existence of Israel, or even those who are merely associated with it
metonymically, risk embodying racist enjoyment as the symptomatic stand-
in for the evils of the world.
4. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
(Routledge: New York, 1992), 154.
THE NEW ANTI-ZIONISM
Such scapegoating is not entirely new, of course, but it has gotten
worseas I will maintainwith the rise of human rights discourse as the
consensual idiom of an increasingly global legal-moral order. In such a con-
text, the Holocaust plays a crucial role as the imagined source of legitimacy
(or illegitimacy) both of Israel alone, as one nation among others, and also
of the community of nations (the others plus Israel). For only in such an
ideological environment does it make sense that, as Edward Alexander
warned presciently nearly two decades ago, the campaign to steal the Hol-
ocaust from its Jewish victims [threatens to] remove whatever impediments
of conscience may yet stand in the way of the anti-Israel crusade.
5
For
where conscience (or super-ego) is at stake, in a competition over scarce
resources under capitalism, the best way to evade censorship, unleash
desire, and appropriate the desired object is to assert property rights. Thus,
what Alexander spied the roots ofthe self-righteous campaign to redress a
primal Jewish theft of enjoyment from the world at large, a movement
fortified excessively by the indignant perception that too much is made of
Jewish sufferingis now in full swing, thanks in part to the expansion of
an international order that makes everyone, in principle, equally a victim or
potential victim of human rights abuse. And the politics of representation at
a deep level, not only consciously, but at the level of enjoyment as a politi-
cal factor,
6
have never been worse for Israelseen as the victim/survivor
nation par excellence, and therefore the one that gets away with enjoying
this status too much.
Well-publicized fights over the meaning of the Holocaust around the
world,
7
thereforeas what one might call a Jewish and democratic geno-
cidehave implications, affectively as well as cognitively, for the concept
of a Jewish and democratic state (Israels longstanding self-definition). In
each case, those impatient with the first term in the equation (Jewish and
democratic), and who therefore cant see what it has to do with the second
(particular and universal), have important things in common. In influential
sectors of the academy, post-Zionism and postcolonial theory harmonize as
mutually supportive ways of being post-Holocaustin the sense of
5. Edward Alexander, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 1994), 206. Subsequent reference to this edition appears cited in
the text.
6. Enjoyment as a political factor is the subtitle of Zizeks second book in
English. See Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a
Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991).
7. For example, in Europe, and particularly France; in the Middle East, and
notably Iran.
being, in effect, over it. The post-Holocaust postcolonial post-Zionist can
thus dispense with the very idea of a Jewish state, because he has revised
his estimation of the proper meaning of the Holocaustin order to trans-
gress a once potent taboo and go beyond notions, seen as myths/ideolo-
gies, of the events uniqueness. Thus, an alt-neu prejudice (does not new
antisemitism sound almost like an oxymoron, given the longevity of Jew-
hatred?) adopts a distinctly anti-Zionist shape, as Israels Jewish-majority
population is pilloried for supposedly mismanaging the memory, meaning,
and significance of their tragedy.
Understood as the ideological cornerstone of post-World War II global
civil society, the memory of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews can both grant
legitimacy and take it away. The philosopher and public intellectual Ber-
nard-Henri Levy articulates the nexus of attitudes that must be under-
stoodventriloquizing todays Israel/Holocaust-obsessed Judeophobiaas
follows:
We have nothing against Jews, the new antisemite protests, as always.
What were against is [1] people who traffic in their own memory . . . and
[2] push out the memories of others . . . for [3] the sole purpose of legiti-
mizing an illegitimate state.
8
These three pillars, as Levy calls them, of the new anti-Zionist antisemit-
ismthe belief that Jews and the Jewish State run a Holocaust industry, by
means of which they monopolize compassion for racist/colonialist pur-
posesare mutually interdependent, and so my analysis necessarily
touches on each. But the heart of the matter, the problem on which I there-
fore concentrate from herethe linchpin joining the restis surely the sec-
ond of the three elements Levy identifies: the accusation that Jews hoard
stockpiles of suffering, thus leaving insufficient funds of pity in circulation
for otherswho are also miserable but havent got access to the libidinal
backing needed to capitalize their suffering and mass-market it to the
worldbecause the Jews have taken more than their share.
THE HOLOCAUST THINGGENOCIDE AND JOUISSANCE
Holocaust envy, or genocide jouissance, is not to be understood as
jealousy concerning the actual events of the Holocaust itself, but rather as
the enjoyment of the memory of the Shoah, perceived perversely as a kind
of privilege accorded to Jews. Since the notion of skimming surplus com-
passionexpropriating, stockpiling, and reinvesting someone elses right-
8. Bernard-Henri Levy, Left in Dark Times (New York: Random House,
2008), 158.
ful quantum of affect, in order to make a tidy moral profit for oneselfcan
only be a fantasy; I have invoked contemporary psychoanalysis to explain
it. Keeping in mind that enjoyment is not to be confused with pleasure, but,
following Zizek, should be understood as the paradoxical satisfaction pro-
duced by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of
the pleasure principle (280), I maintain that the Holocaustor, more
specifically, Jews perceived (fantasized) enjoyment of ithas become just
such a perturbing Thing, the object of an obsessive libidinal investment on
the part of todays new antisemite. It is the antisemites new Thing, and thus
the latest thing in antisemitism.
The Thing, in Lacanese, is whatever incarnates jouissance, or enjoy-
ment. In the post-World War II libidinal economy of human rights, the
Thingthe real thing, what its all about, or, in Zizeks words again,
what gives plenitude and vivacity to our [way of] lifewhat allows us to
live fully as who we really areis the thought of genocide and the world
communitys stand against it, in which we participate as global citizens
(201). This community of civilized nations defines itself in principle by the
exclusion of genocide and genocidal regimes, which are to be counted as
criminal and therefore not regimes whose borders have to be respected.
Those who commit or threaten to commit genocide risk loss of standing as
moral/legal subjectsand, with that, excision from the human race
imagined as the human rights community.
In this context, the fear that the Jewish Other, whose sacrificial burnt
offering founded the community in the first place, has a unique relationship
to the Genocide Thingsome special relationship to its essence that is
denied the rest of the worldis evidently one of contemporary antisemit-
isms driving passions. This fear supplies unseemly affective support for
Holocaust denial, minimization, relativization, and resentment of the Holo-
caust. As Zizek asks rhetorically, Do we not find enjoyment precisely in
fantasizing about the Others enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude toward
it? Do we not obtain satisfaction by means of the very supposition that the
Other enjoys in a way inaccessible to us? (206). In this case, what makes
the Holocaust inaccessible, or seductively forbidden to the antisemite, is the
understandable sense that it was in fact a total human rights catastrophe in
ways that even other genocides cannot quite match; albeit, this is debated.
For, whats not open to debatereally unique tragedy or not, and by
what scientific measure?is that the Shoah is certainly the one man-made
disaster in history that people argue about in a unique way, debating end-
lessly whether or not and how it was or wasnt unique. This obsessive
investment itself makes it unique, therefore, in one very important way at
least: the Holocaust is uniquely discussed for its uniqueness and/or lack
thereof. It appears thus to have been more of a genocide than otherseven
if this more can be difficult to define uncontroversially, or in a way that
achieves full consensus among rational people of goodwill (never mind
antisemites). Should the real more turn out to be less, or a lack, the sym-
bolic and imaginary more would still be formidable. And because point-
ing to what in an object is more than itself is another way of talking about
the Lacanian Thing, we are definitely in the vicinity of human rights dis-
courses Thing-in-itself.
DIALECTICS OF THE NEW ANTISEMITISM
Thus, holocaust envy is a subspecies of just the sort of prurient suppo-
sition about the Others enjoyment that Zizek famously remarks upon. It
has this two-fold intersubjective structure: It comes about when, first, Jews
are imagined to enjoy (or get off on) their tragedy more fully than others
can; and, second, when Jewish theft of enjoyment (203) is posited as the
reason why others can never enjoy fully, can never seem to get in to
either the Holocaust or their own tragedies sufficiently. Although psychoan-
alytic enjoyment is sometimes said to consist in the kind of satisfaction
to be garnered from picking at your own festering wound (Myers 86), this
is a simplification, insofar as it posits enjoyment as something real rather
than imaginary, something objective about the wound itself rather than
about the subjective fantasy of the wounds appearance for the gaze, or in
the eyes of, (the) other(s) (Myers 86).
For my purposes, then, enjoyment is best defined dialecticallyas the
satisfaction that the other is imagined to derive from his suffering, trans-
lated into the satisfaction that I, as subject-of-enjoyment, in turn derive
from obsessing about my own inability to enjoy as much/well as the
fantasized other. This is an important distinction because, by this definition,
what is perturbing about the Jew finally has nothing to do with the Jew
himself, nor even anything to do with the Holocaust, but rather what per-
turbs is the Jews obscene enjoyment of his festering wound as the
antisemitic mind hallucinates it. What Zizek says elsewhere explicitly of
the old antisemitism is also trueand even more so, thanks to the power of
a globalized human rights discourseof the new:
What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking,
what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but the image/
figure of the Jew which circulates and has been constructed in their
tradition. . . . [T]his image overdetermines the way I experience real Jews
themselves. What makes a real Jew that an antisemite encounters on the
street intolerable, what the antisemite tries to destroy when he attacks
the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension.
9
This fantasmatic overdetermination of Jew-hatred means that not only
what Alain Finkielkraut calls the imaginary Jew, but also the imaginary
Jewish State of Israel (!) is the bearer of a projected Jew-issance or the
supposed enjoyably painful privilege of being Jewish after the Holocaust.
10
With these concepts (and bad puns) in mind, one of the more perplexing
things about the life of Holocaust memory in recent decadesdifficult to
make rational sense of otherwisebecomes suddenly less mysterious. I
refer to the observably proliferating phenomenon of those perverse, intense,
and destructive rivalries, which, seventy years down the line, remembrance
of the Holocaust increasingly stimulatesamong those who would at once
identify with the victims of the worst cruelest, most systematic, thorough
and senseless genocide in history,
11
and who, at the same time, seek to
displace those victims. Indeed, this double whammy of empathy/rivalry is
what one expects from identities based on identification, as Jacques Lacan
explained in his seminal essay The Mirror Stage.
12
Today we see this
Lacanian jubilation of self-discovery in those subjects who ambivalently
find themselves held up to the mirror of the Holocaust by human rights
discourse.
13
9. Cited in Kenneth L. Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism (unpublished
manuscript). Slavoj Zizek, On Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 66-7. Marcuss
impressively well-informed investigation was helpful as I was revising this paper
for publication.
10. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1994).
11. For a well-informed discussion of those properties that make the Holocaust
unique, see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale, 2001).
The Holocaust, writes Bauer, has assumed the role of universal symbol for all
evil because it presents the most extreme form of genocide, because it contains
elements that are without precedent, because that tragedy was a Jewish one and
because the Jewsalthough they are neither better nor worse than others and
although their sufferings were neither greater nor lesser than those of others
represent one of the sources [along with Athens and Rome] of modern civilization
(270).
12. Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, trans. Bruce Fink, Ecrits (New York:
Norton, 2006).
13. Though tightly held by some prop, human or artificial, Lacan writes of the
young child entering the mirror stage, she or he overcomes [feelings of helpless-
ness] in a flutter of jubilant activity, testing even the constraints of his prop [the
mother/Other] in order to adopt a slightly leaning-forward position and take an
instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind (Ecrits 76).
Victims everywhere, from housewives under patriarchy to Bosnian
Muslims to members of the Audubon Society,
14
ask to identify/be identified
with/as Jews, in order to take their place as the real Jewsthe real vic-
tims, the victims whose suffering matters, about whom one properly should
care. As Robert Meister states in his extraordinary study, After Evil: A
Politics of Human Rights:
The global politics of human rights after Auschwitz is still about the
Jews. Today oppressed groups can qualify themselves as bearers of
human rights by recognizing what happened to Jews during the Holo-
caust and asserting that another holocaust might happen to them. They
are often said to disqualify themselves as bearers of human rights by
denying the Holocaust and declaring themselves enemies of the Jews.
15
But this recognition and identification, the mandatory price of admis-
sion to todays global culture of human rights, as Meister clearly sees, does
not yield entirely wholesome results in every case, and can by no means be
relied upon to redound to either Jews or Israels benefit over time. Given
the complex motivations of human beings, the vicissitudes of moral psy-
chology, and the cynical ways in which the rhetoric of human rights is often
deployed in the service of a thinly veiled will-to-powerthe sweet recogni-
tion that Meister adverts to can and frequently does in fact turn sour, giving
way to scandalized condemnation. This is particularly so among aggrieved
groups who feel themselves unrecognized or under-recognized when its
their turn to be the Jews. This is even more the case when the under-
recognizers are said to be, of all people, the Jews themselveswho should
know better, given their access to a surplus genocide-jouissance.
As the particular standard bearers for what it universally means to be
oppressed, in other words, post-Holocaust Jewrys privileged symbolic
position opens it to charges thateven or especially in a secular age that
sees itself as transcending the old antisemitismcould only be leveled at
Jews. The new antisemitism thus lays down one of its platform planks,
carved out of the sturdy cedar of resentment against Jews per se for failing
to learn the lessons of the Holocaust that they, of all people, should have
learned best but somehow didntor, more diabolically still, which they
learned quite well but refuse to apply to others, holding on to their delicious
14. Alvin H. Rosenfeld documents thoroughly the spread of both trivial and not-
so-trivial analogies to the Holocaust in his important book, The End of the Holo-
caust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2011.
15. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2010), 175. Subsequent references to this edition appear cited
in the text.
Jew-issance for themselves. Meister again puts it brilliantly, with reference
in particular to Palestinian Holocaust envy (my term, not his):
In a world that has learned to feel good about itself by feeling bad about
the Jews, one can take special umbrage at Jews who refuse to apply the
Holocausts lessons to their own treatment of Palestinians. These Jews
are to be criticized for thinking that they are the only real Jews, and that
the Holocaust confers special privilege on actions they take to protect
themselves from those who, as enemies of the Jews, become the moral
equivalent of Nazis who would bring about the Holocaust again. This
attitude has become a seemingly new offense that Jews, and Jews alone,
can commit now that their victimary identity has been universalized.
(175-176; my emphasis)
Put another way: who are the literal Jews, after World War II, to say that
they are the Jews when everyones a metaphorical Jew nowadaysin the
age of never again, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and its mandate to stop genocide anywhere and everywhere across
the globe?
In a democratic age that abhors inherent distinctions of rank, even as it
positively valorizes everyones victimary identity, encouraging people to
see themselves as constitutively injured subjects and rewarding them for
doing soin such a moral universe, is not everyone entitled to an equal
share of, or in, suffering, as the essence of subjectivity? Picking at your
own festering wound is something were all entitled (commanded) to do
nowadays, by the logic of multicultural political correctness. To be a mul-
ticultural subject is to be the bearer of just such a wound. So why then do
the Jews do it (pick at theirs) more? Can they be allowed to get away with
it? They do it too much, and so the rest of us cant get to do it enough as a
result. Moreover, their wound, if it was ever as bad as they say, is surely
healed by now and a thing of the past. While ours yet bleeds. . . . So, in
effect, operate the gears of the new antisemitic unconscious. Perhaps this
also helps explain why Jews are not generally included on the syllabus as a
subculture, when the topic is ostensibly ethnicity-based multiculturalism on
American campuses. That, and the fact that they are now successful as a
groupa circumstance leaving Jews simultaneously both too wounded and
not wounded enough for multiculturalisms egalitarian freemasonry of the
injured and in-need-of-affirmative-action.
DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE
Applied to genocide, the logic of affirmative action means that every-
one is entitled to a piece of the Holocaust, understood as the universal sym-
bol of Radical Evilan evil taken to operate on at least the principle of
equality-of-opportunity if not a more egalitarian, Rawlsian, rough equality-
of-results
16
Although it is Jews and Jews alone, as Meister notes, who
are in a position to be regarded as capable of missing this fact, uniquely
tempted as they are to seek to monopolize for themselves the properly
shared significance of the defining event of the 20th century. Moreover, the
Jewish State and the Jewish State alone can beisaccused of instru-
mentalizing the ultimate example of suffering to serve its national self-
interest. Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira thus meticulously dissects the
myth of an Israeli Shoah chauvinism in his recent book, Post-Zionism, Post-
Holocaust.
In ways cognate with and supportive of my argumentthough he
eschews my sort of deep analysis of motivations, which he says frankly
dont interest himYakira focuses on the cadre of post-Zionist academics
inside Israel, identifying there what he calls an opprobrium community or
tight-knit club of hyper-intellectuals who cite each others books, all pas-
sionately dedicated to trashing Israel from the inside. In my view, this
kvetchers network can usefully be understood as another manifestation of
what American sociology conceptualized in the 1970s more broadly as the
adversary culture of the intellectualsa product of comfortable bourgeois
societys tendency to give rise to an influential segment of alienated
pseudo-bohemians that rejects the culture in total and in principle (as
opposed to the liberal voicing of more modest criticisms aimed at reform).
In Israel today, this apparently means rejecting Zionism (the idea of a Jew-
ish and democratic state) by first, claiming falsely that Israels only-ever
source of legitimacy flowed from being the alternative to the Holocaust,
and second, insisting that it forfeited this passkey to the club of nations by
mismanaging its privileged status as the survivor state, almost from the
startparticularly if one follows Hannah Arendts influential condemna-
tion of the Eichmann trial as less the prosecution of a mass-murdering fiend
than a poor piece of pedagogy.
17
16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press),
1971. In Rawlss termstranslated into the present discussion in a way I cannot
imagine he would approvein an unequal distribution of misery, privileged vic-
tims are entitled to relatively more suffering than underprivileged ones only if the
surplus jouissance of the former helps supply, in absolute terms, more enjoyment
of suffering for the latter. Otherwise, it needs to be redistributed.
17. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). The popularity to this day of this befuddled
textby far the worst thing written by one of the great minds of the 20th century
is a mystery for sociology, or psychoanalysis, to explain.
The problem once again is that the Jews and the Jews alone think
theyre the real Jewswhen today in fact (so say the members of the
opprobrium community) the Jews themselves behave more like Nazis and
the Palestinians, therefore, have become in effect the Jews that matter. The
prevalence of such grotesque analogies leads Yakira to protest what he calls
forthrightly the systematic, simplistic, tendentious, and utterly baseless
way the Holocaust is used to lambaste Israel. Whats more, discerning
continuities between post-Zionist uses of the Holocaust and outright Holo-
caust denialthe latter claiming of course that Jews were never the real
victims of the Nazis in the first place, but have always opportunistically
exaggerated their suffering to gain leverageYakira writes:
The way the Holocaust figures in quite a number of essays, articles and
books written in Hebrew, the way it is used as a central tenet in scathing
criticisms of Israels conduct in the occupied territories or of the moral
and historical justification given for the establishment of a Jewish state
all this reflects a perversion quite similar, if not identical, to that of which
Holocaust denial . . . is the most extreme symptom.
18
And symptomas I have suggestedis the right word here, as we are
dealing with a kind of cultural pathology, or perversion. Without realiz-
ing it, Yakira, in his devastating deconstruction of the post-Zionists, has not
only revealed the conscious intentions of those he criticizes, but provides
the empirical basis for the psychoanalysis of this strange movement as well.
For what deniers and the opprobrium community have in common, as the
philosophers psychoanalytically tinged vocabulary hints, is a symptom
indeed, in the precise sense of a libidinal investment in the perturbing Thing
that embodies enjoyment. Symptoms, by definition, are what the subject
perversely enjoys suffering from. It appears that, just as Woody Allen once
joked, Im the only man ever diagnosed with penis envy, the fact that the
post-Zionists whom Yakira disputes with are Israeli Jews does not prevent
them from feeling a vicarious Holocaustneid on the part of castrated
others.
THE HOLOCAUST-ENVY INDUSTRY
Holocaust envy, in sum, is that slimy libidinal ooze that palpably coats
Holocaust relativization and Holocaust resentment, as well as outright Hol-
ocaust denial. Moreover, with respect to the growing problem of campus
antisemitism in particular, the obsessively invested symptom of post-Holo-
18. Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 86.
caust post-Zionism is also part of the basis of postcolonial theory as an
academic subdiscipline. For how can a theory based on epochal grievance
fail to envynarcissistically identify and compete with, seek to emulate
and displaceJewish sufferers as the bearers of a surplus Jew-issance?
Diaspora is a ubiquitous term in postcolonial theory, for example. And as
the Jews have their capital-H Holocaust, so too shall the Palestinians have
their capital-N Nakba. From the postcolonial point of view, therefore, it is
especially easy to see that the Palestinians are now the Jews, and the Jews,
by becoming Israelis, have become (worse than) Nazisa claim that goes
back to the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism (later
revoked, in 1991), and before that to Israels victory in the Six-Day War of
1967, and before that even to the founding of the State of Israel.
19
Thus,
while the use and abuse of such repugnant rhetoric appears to be on the
increase today, in fact the taboo analogy between Zionists and Nazis proved
an irresistible frisson for some from the moment it became conceivable, and
has not in fact depended on the Palestinians weakness or Israels growing
might by comparison. Indeed, it is a Hitlerian inventionalready a symp-
tom/sinthome of the old-fashioned antisemitism, it turns outfrom the
start. As is well known, Hitler himself projected blame for starting World
War II onto the Jewsfamously displacing Nazisms plans for world domi-
nation onto its victims.
This same obscene equation of antisemite and Jewso symptomatic
of a perverse libidinal investmentis made by postcolonial theory, preva-
lent on todays university campuses, in one of its founding gestures. Indeed,
according to the godfather of postcolonial theory, Edward Said, in his semi-
nal 1978 text Orientalism, post-Holocaust antisemitism is best understood
as the prejudice that Arabs [sic] suffer from at the hands of Jews [sic]. At
the end of World War II, Said explains to his followers:
The transference of a popular antisemitic animus from a Jewish to an
Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the
same. . . . Thus the Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the
Jew. In that shadowbecause Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semitescan
be placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towards
the Oriental. For the Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has bifurcated: what we
have now is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a reconstructed cult of the
adventurer-pioneer-Orientalist [ . . . ] and his creeping, mysteriously fear-
some shadow, the Arab Oriental.
20
19. Norman Podhoretz, The Abandonment of Israel, Commentary (July
1976): 23-31.
20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 286; my emphasis.
So it appears, just as Meister says, that today oppressed groups . . . qualify
themselves as bearers of human rights by recognizing what happened to
Jews during the Holocaust and asserting that another holocaust might [have
already!] happen[ed] to them, preferably at the hands of the survivors of
the first Holocaust and their descendants. As Alvin Rosenfeld powerfully
documents in The End of the Holocaust, the practice of analogizing the
Holocaust promiscuously has become widespreadwith not only Palestini-
ans suffering from genocide (while increasing in population), but also
Native Americans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, AIDS victims,
and fetusesall suffering from their own holocausts.
When there is no denying the reality of far too much human misery,
the sad point that has unfortunately to be made is that where there is a
holocaust there must be a Hitler. According to the same logic as that by
which victims everywhere become metaphorical Jews, oppressors across
time and space become, in a reductio ad Hitlerum, not just gifted evil-doers
in their own right, but morph inevitably into virtual Nazis. As Pascal Bruck-
ner observes:
Nazism is supposed to have begun on the day that the white man,
whether Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch, set foot on the shores of Africa or
America, sowing death, chaos, and destruction. It is as if the Third Reich
had literally swallowed, one after the other, the centuries that preceded it,
this becoming the key to violent or atrocious phenomena that occurred
several centuries earlier. . . . People find it hard to realize that barbarity is
plural, that not all massacres are genocides, that not all genocides resem-
ble each other, that there are degrees and diversity of horror as well.
21
What Bruckner colorfully calls Hitlerizing history applies not only to the
past, however. And this matters greatly. For the present (and future?) is also
swallowed up and Hitlerized when, as Rosenfeld explainsfocusing on the
American reception of the Holocaust in light of the identity politics that has
been so characteristic of the last thirty years on campus:
This tendency to relativize and universalize the Holocaust has been a
prominent part of the American reception of Holocaust representations
from the start. It is strong today and seems to be growing, especially
within those segments of American culture that are intent on developing a
politics of identity based on victim status and the grievances that come
with such status. (69; my emphasis)
21. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 125-126.
The politics of identity, in other words, are so often anti-Jewish because
they are so saturated in Holocaust envy.
ANTISEMITIC AGALMACAMPUS CHRISTOLOGY
By way of conclusion, it seems important to note the (even) big(ger)
picture. As Rene Girard points out, we live today in the Age of the Victim:
Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was.
Even if it is insincere, a big show, the phenomenon has no precedent. No
historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we
do. We can detect in the recent past the beginnings of the contemporary
attitude, but every day new records are broken. We are all actors as well
as witnesses in a great anthropological first.
22
Under such novel conditions, the Holocaust as universalized revela-
tion becomes not so much a crime perpetrated by some against others, but a
new Golgotha, as Bruckner sees it, the gold standard of suffering (113).
In the Christological appropriation of history, the gassed Jew, like the cruci-
fied one, is no longer simply a Jewand yet, tragically, shamefully, so
exquisitely disappointingly once again, it is the Jews themselves (of all peo-
ple) who fail to get the message. Not only that, but in some of the more
aggressive post-Zionist scholarshipsuch as that of Idith Zertal, who fol-
lows in the footsteps of Arendt to focus on the role of Jewish councils in
supposedly helping to make the Holocaust more efficientit is once again
the Jews themselves who murdered Christ (the gassed, shot, and starved
millions) or at least handed him over to the Romans.
23
In the numismatic
reading (with regard to the metaphor of the gold standard): Who are the
Jews to hoard their imaginary shekels, thus threatening to destroy an other-
wise booming symbolic economy of human rights, which now more than
ever, after the end of the Cold War (not to say the End of History), depends
upon the smooth convertability of every kind of depoliticized injustice (viz.
human rights violation) into every other kind?
So, the new antisemitism draws strength from the old, after all, it
seems, as fascination with these perennial tropes would indicateeven as it
revitalizes itself by enjoying genocide symptomatically, in new post-
Zionist and postcolonial modalities that would have been impossible pre- or
post-Holocaust (if I may so inelegantly put it). It all points to a denial that a
22. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Press,
2006), 161.
23. Idith Zertal, Israels Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
specifically Jewish genocide can also be a democratic one, in the sense of a
shared object of veneration that nonetheless concerns a particular group of
people in a special way. Instead, Auschwitz has become a monstrous
object of covetous lust, as Bruckner says, [w]hence the frenzied effort to
gain admission to this very closed club and the desire to dislodge those who
are already in it (114; emphasis added). Or, as Alain Finkielkraut says,
The model you wish to resemble becomes the rival you must supplant in
order to feel alive yourself [to extract your jouissance]. The metaphorical
principle (be like the Jews) leads to the violence of this murderous princi-
ple: Its us or them.
24
And the all-too-literalnot only metaphorical
conclusion? If there cannot be a Jewish and democratic genocide, then there
can/need be no Jewish and democratic stateits one or the other, us or
them. Forgetting that barbarity is pluralas are nationalitiesthe new
antisemitism winds up sounding much like the old, only more so.
What is not to be underestimated, however, is the virulence of contem-
porary neo-antisemitisms Jew-issance-ridden manifestations in the form of
a metastasizing Holocaust envy. If there is a long-term menace to the way
Israels miraculously imagined community is imaginedand, with G-ds
help, continues to be realizedthis is part of it.
25
For, as Edward Alexander
said in his courageous 1994 book, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas:
The campaign to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims expresses a
deep-seated wish to transform the Nazi murder of the Jews, a crime of
terrifying clarity and distinctness, into a blurred, amorphous agony, an
indeterminate part of mans inhumanity to man. It subserves the designs
of those who wish to release the nations of the West from whatever slight
burden of guilt they may still bear for what they allowed or helped Hitler
to do to the Jews of Europe, and so remove whatever impediments of
conscience may yet stand in the way of the anti-Israel crusade. (206)
In keeping with Alexanders foreboding, my concern is that in order to
steal the Holocaust from the Jews in good conscience, and so help release
the brakes on a disgustingly moralized campaign against Israel as uniquely
illegitimate among all the nations because of its impure founding, the
anti-Zionist antisemite first fantasizes the treasure (in Lacanese, agalma)
of the Holocausts significance as primordially stolen from innocent man-
kind as a wholedefiled luxuriantly by corrupt Jewish thieves to begin
24. Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of
Genocide (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 113.
25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), cited
in Zertal, Israels Holocaust.
with. From such preternatural thieves, naturally, one has every right to
steal it back in returnwhile enjoying doing so.
*Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr. is a research fellow in Israel studies at Brandeis Univer-
sity, and assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University. His latest
book (co-authored with Catherine Carlstroem and Forrest G. Robinson) is The
Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud and Marx
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011). Contact: gbrahm@nmu.edu.
REFERENCES
Alexander, Edward. 1994. The Holocaust and the War of Ideas. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.
Bruckner, Pascal. 2010. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Finkielkraut, Alain. 1994. The Imaginary Jew. Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press.
. 1998. The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Girard, Rene. 2006. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Press.
Lacan, Jacques, Bruce Fink trans. 2006. Ecrits. New York: Norton.
Levy, Bernard-Henri. 2008. Left in Dark Times. New York: Random House.
Marcus, Kenneth L. The Definition of Antisemitism. Unpublished manuscript.
Meister, Robert. 2010. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Zizek. New York: Routledge.
Podhoretz, Norman. 1976. The Abandonment of Israel. Commentary (July): 23-
31.
Rosenfeld, Alvin. 2011. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2011.
Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.
Yakira, Elhanan. 2010. Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Zertal, Idith. 2005. Israels Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of
Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press.
. 2008. On Violence. New York: Picador.

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