American
Jewish World the "voice of Minnesota Jewry" May 7, 1999, A
Reply To Stephen Feinstein,
Ph.D.
By Gabriel
Schoenfeld
(copyright 1999) THE April 23 issue
of the American Jewish World
carried a lengthy commentary by Stephen
C. Feinstein, Director of Holocaust
and Genocide Studies at the University of
Minnesota. It contains a heated attack on
me and my work, with terms of personal
disparagement like "no-nothing"
[sic] and "brainless" tossed
around. Needless to say, I found the ad
hominem barrage most disturbing, and all
the more so coming from a professor. I was
also struck by the large number of
mischaracterizations and
misrepresentations Mr. Feinstein's article
advanced. Though I am reluctant to engage
in discussion with such a reckless
interlocutor, so that readers are not left
with a wholly distorted picture of my
views, I will attempt to set the record
straight with respect to three of the more
significant points Mr. Feinstein
raises. First, Mr. Feinstein
characterizes my writings about Holocaust
scholarship in ways that make them
scarcely recognizable, stating, for
example, that I adopt "something like a
quasi-religious attitude sacramentalizing
Jewish victimization and at the same time
insuring that no other genocide or human
rights issue is compared to the Shoah." I
do not see even a twisted reflection of my
own arguments in that summary, but even if
I did, the position he attributes to me
would hardly seem to justify the personal
abuse he hurls my way or, for that matter,
to provide grist for Holocaust
deniers as he
alleges. For readers
interested in understanding exactly what I
have said about the condition of Holocaust
studies in the United States, I recommend
they take a look at my articles
themselves. They can be found in the June
and August 1998 issue of Commentary
magazine available at most libraries or
online by clicking on "back issues" at
Commentary's website.
My op-ed in the New York Times
appeared this past March 18th, and can be
found online at my
personal home page. Second, Mr.
Feinstein notes that some of my articles
have been posted on Holocaust-denial
websites, and he cites two instances. The
articles are indeed there, but at these
very same websites one can also find
writings by such distinguished historians
of the Holocaust and Nazism as Raul
Hilberg, Deborah Lipstadt, Yaffa Eliach,
Werner Cohn, and Fritz Stern.
Holocaust deniers may have reasons for
posting articles by all these Jewish
scholars, but I cannot divine what they
are; it hardly suggests to me that these
scholars are Holocaust deniers or are in
league in any way with extremist
cranks. Finally, Mr.
Feinstein alludes to the pamphlet he wrote
"for" the Scientologists. There are a
number of very troubling aspects about
this publication and the circumstances
under which it came to be written that Mr.
Feinstein neglects to share with readers.
For one thing, Mr.
Feinstein asserts that he wrote the
pamphlet in the service of "human rights,"
but he says not a word about how he came
in the first place to make the Church of
Scientology his cause, an organization
that Time magazine has called a
"cult of greed and power" and "a ruthless
global scam." Whether one agrees with
Time's characterization or not,
surely there were many other more pressing
human-rights concerns that might have
engaged his interest in 1996, the year he
wrote his pamphlet? The mystery of Mr.
Feinstein's involvement in this strange
cause is not hard to solve. As he has
admitted to the Forward, he was paid to
write the pamphlet by the Scientologists
themselves. The Scientologists are known
for being both extremely wealthy and
extremely generous to those who consent to
serve their purposes. Mr. Feinstein has
thus far declined to reveal exactly what
compensation he received but other such
cases involved sums in excess of
$10,000. What is particularly
unsettling is that Mr. Feinstein's
pamphlet appeared while the Scientologists
were in the midst of an aggressive crusade
against the German government, which they
incessantly likened to Adolph
Hitler's Third Reich. As can be seen
from the title of Mr. Feinstein's
publication, "Art as Propaganda Against
Jews and Scientologists in Germany: Echoes
of the Past Reverberate in the Present,"
it fully joins in the spirit of the
Scientology propaganda effort. The essay
is replete with analogies likening the
"victimization" of Scientologists in
Germany today to the Nazi war against the
Jews. Mr. Feinstein is
being disingenuous when he states that the
U.S. State Department has expressed
concerns about Germany's treatment of the
Scientologists. He fails to inform readers
of a crucial fact: the State Department
has unequivocally condemned the very same
Scientology campaign in which he has taken
such an active part. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, for example,
has said that "comparisons between what
happened under Nazism and what is
happening now [to Scientologists]
are historically inaccurate and totally
distasteful." In 1996, the year Mr.
Feinstein's pamphlet came out, the State
Department's official spokesman declared
that the analogies are "outrageous" and
"wildly inaccurate" and that "we in the
U.S. Government feel a responsibility to
defend the German Government from those
charges." The State Department
is hardly alone in this stance. Leaders of
major Jewish organizations like Abraham
Foxman, president of the
Anti-Defamation
League, have
also spoken out. Foxman has called the
analogies "an affront to the Jewish
community." Ignatz Bubis, the
leader of Germany's Jewish community, has
characterized the Scientologists' campaign
as "a smear against the memory of the
victims of national-socialism."
My own view
coincides with Foxman and Bubis's. While I
do not believe, as Mr. Feinstein
incorrectly imputes to me, that all
parallels between the Holocaust and other
instances of genocide are ipso facto out
of bounds, the analogies he has drawn
between the Scientologists and Hitler's
victims are an insult to the memory of the
Jews of Europe who were driven from their
homes and murdered in concentration camps.
For a professor of Holocaust studies to
indulge in such comparisons is bad enough.
That it was done for money and in the
service of a dangerous cult makes it a far
more serious transgression.![](../../std/dings/square.gif) Gabriel
Schoenfeld is the senior editor of
Commentary
magazine. |