The Holocaust Industry

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book by Norman Finkelstein arguing that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain and to further Israeli interests. According to Finkelstein, this "Holocaust industry" has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust.

The book was controversial, attracting praise and criticism. While supporters describe the book as a substantive engagement with issues such as the politics of memory, critics argue that it either reuses antisemitic tropes, empowers them, or does both, and that the book's style is harsh and not respectful enough considering the delicate subject.

Conception
The book began as a journal review of The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick.

The Holocaust industry
Finkelstein follows the Holocaust’s standing in American life from the postwar years to the end of the 20th century. Before the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, he argues, the Holocaust took little part in the lives of American Gentiles and Jews. There was, for example, at that time only a small number of books and films on the Holocaust and few works of scholarship. Not until the late 20th century, especially after the 1967 War, did the Holocaust take up its role as the foremost historical event in the American mind – so Finkelstein argues.

Finkelstein views this growing American fixation with the Holocaust through a materialist lens. After World War II, he claims, the leaders of American Jewish organizations (like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee) understood assimilation and access to elite power to be in their own interest. Thus these organizations distanced themselves from Israel, moderated their demands for German denazification, and collaborated with McCarthyite investigations. In the 1960s, however, the American government began a friendlier relationship with the Israeli government; and the interests of American Jewish leaders changed. Their organizations began openly to support Israel and espouse a Holocaust ideology that emphasized (1) the Holocaust as a unique historical event and (2) the Holocaust as the climax of an eternal anti-Semitism. Finkelstein argues that this Holocaust ideology does not fit with academic Holocaust scholarship. Rather it serves to defend Israel and American Jewish leaders from criticism.

Bad history and fraudulent memoirs
Many popular Holocaust books by contemporary writers have, in Finkelstein’s view, little scholarly merit. He faults Deborah Lipstadt’s 1993 book Denying the Holocaust for expanding the definition of Holocaust denial to include questioning its uniqueness. He writes that Daniel Goldhagen, in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, inaccurately characterizes the entire German people as eager Jew murderers driven by pathological hatred.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1993, gets sharp criticism from Finkelstein. Why, he asks, did the victims of the Holocaust get a national museum but not the victims of American slavery or the American Indian extermination? He also argues that the Gentile victims of the Holocaust – especially the Romani victims of the Porajmos – got only token recognition in the museum. More generally he claims that museum’s leadership is committed to political support of the Israeli state, pointing to its praise of pro-Zionist literature and its condemnation of anti-Zionist literature.

Finkelstein takes book reviewers and historians to task for praising two Holocaust memoirs that were later revealed to be fraudulent: The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński (1965) and Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski (1995).

Swiss banks
In 1995 the World Jewish Congress initiated a lawsuit against Swiss banks to recover the assets in accounts left dormant by victims of the Holocaust. Finkelstein accuses the leaders of Jewish organizations of exaggerating the size of the assets and of using Swiss payouts to fund their own pet projects. He is equally critical of a similar lawsuit directed at German banks and of attempts to get monetary compensation from the Polish government.

Reviews and critiques
The book has been controversial, receiving a number of both positive and negative reviews. It was reviewed positively in The Nation by Neve Gordon. The Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg said: "Today [Finkelstein] is rather unpopular and his book will certainly not become a best seller, but what it says is basically true even though incomplete. It is more a journalistic account than an in depth study on the topic, which would need to be much longer." Referring to the part of the book that deals with the claims against the Swiss banks and to forced labor, he noted: "I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy. He is a well-trained political scientist, has the ability to do the research, did it carefully, and has come up with the right results. I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough."

Israeli historian Moshe Zuckermann welcomed his book as an "irreplaceable critique of the ‘instrumentalisation of the past’ and underlined its ‘liberating potential’".

Oren Baruch Stier reviewing the book for the journal Prooftexts summarized the book as a "small and pungent manifesto" and concluded his review by writing that "there are worthwhile arguments here, if one can stomach the bile in which they float".

Genocide scholar Omer Bartov wrote that "Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious."

Enzo Traverso reviewing the book for the journal Historical Materialism wrote that the book has proven controversial, concluding that it "contains a core of truth that must be recognised, but it lends itself, due to its style and several of its main arguments, to the worst uses and instrumentalisations." He suggested that the book should be seen as an opportunity for stimulating public debates about difficult topics related to "the politics of memory and on the public uses of history"

Donald D. Denton, reviewing the book for Terrorism and Political Violence journal, noted that it "will be valuable as an historical piece of research and of interest to those who now attempt to deal with the contemporary genocides and the subsequent generations of children of those who endured such horrors".

Wolfgang Benz stated to Le Monde: "It is impossible to learn anything from Finkelstein's book. At best, it is interesting for a psychotherapist." Jean Birnbaum publishing in the same venue added that Norman Finkelstein "hardly cares about nuance" and Rony Brauman wrote in the preface to the French edition (L'Industrie de l'Holocauste, Paris, La Fabrique, 2001) that some assertions of Finkelstein (especially on the impact of the Six-days war) are wrong, others being pieces of "propaganda".

Historian Peter Novick, whose work Finkelstein described as providing the "initial stimulus" for The Holocaust Industry, said in the July 28, 2000 issue of London's The Jewish Chronicle that Finkelstein's book is replete with "false accusations", "egregious misrepresentations", "absurd claims" and "repeated mis-statements" ("A charge into darkness that sheds no light"). Finkelstein replied to the allegations by Novick on his website, replying to five "specific charges", and criticizing his opponents' "intellectual standards". Jonathan Freedland in a column for The Guardian wrote The Holocaust Industry does not share Novick's book's "sensitivity or human empathy - surely prerequisites of any meaningful debate about the Holocaust". Freedland accused Finkelstein of having constructed "an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which the Jews were pushed from apathy to obsession about the Holocaust by a corrupt Jewish leadership bent on building international support for Israel".

Historian Hasia Diner described Peter Novick and Finkelstein of being "harsh critics of American Jewry from the left," and challenged the notion in their books that American Jews did not begin to commemorate the Holocaust until after 1967.

Andrew Ross, reviewing the book for Salon, wrote: "On the issue of reparations, he barely acknowledges the wrongs committed by the Swiss and German institutions &mdash; the burying of Jewish bank accounts, the use of slave labor &mdash; that gave rise to the recent reparations drive. The fear that the reparations will not wind up in the hands of those who need and deserve them most is a legitimate concern. But the idea that survivors have been routinely swindled by Jewish institutions is a gross distortion. The chief reason why survivors have so far seen nothing of the $1.25 billion Swiss settlement, reached in 1998, is that U.S. courts have yet to rule on a method of distribution. On other reparations and compensation settlements, the Claims Conference, a particular bete noire of Finkelstein, says that it distributed approximately $220 million to individual survivors in 1999 alone."

Alvin Hirsch Rosenfeld wrote that The Holocaust Industry "is representative of a polemical engagement with the Holocaust" that places it in line with a number of other works by "critics of Holocaust consciousness, all of whom stress the utilitarian function of memory", and who see many modern references to The Holocaust as "means of enhancing ethnic identity and advancing political agendas of one kind or another". Rosenfeld also noted that the book presents those ideas in a very "harsh and inflammatory way."

It has been suggested by the editor of  Terrorism and Political Violence journal that the book "probably cost [Finkelstein] ... tenure at DePaul University".

Finkelstein's response to critics
Finkelstein responded to his critics in the foreword to the second edition (published in 2003), writing "Mainstream critics allege that I conjured a 'conspiracy theory' while those on the Left ridicule the book as a defense of 'the banks'. None, so far as I can tell, question my actual findings."

Selected publication history

 * 2000; First edition, Verso Books (London) 150 p. Hardcover, ISBN 1-85984-773-0
 * 2003; Second edition expanded, Verso Books (London) 286 p. Paperback, ISBN 1-85984-488-X