ABSTRACT
The subject of the Holocaust has become a seething cauldron of controversy. The disparagement of Holocaust studies and the depiction of the majority of its practitioners as unscholarly, trivial, and mercenary, have become smelly little orthodoxies of the Jewish studies establishment. Numerous broadsides against what is variously described as “the centrality of the Holocaust,” “the Holocaust industry,” “Holocaust Zionism,” and “Holocaust Judaism” have appeared in most Jewish and several secular journals. The Haggadah commands that every Jew view himself as having gone forth from Egypt. Jewish folk identity in Eastern Europe was preserved by what Maurice Samuel described as “an ingenious charade, which governed their religious life, which in turn interpenetrated their secular life. Modern poetry about the Holocaust is entirely traditional in its insistence that all Israel was present in the death camps because every Jew was potentially present at Mount Sinai.
