Emory’s Tenenbaum Lecture Focuses on Holocaust
University also co-hosts three-day conference on the same topic.
The memory of the Holocaust and its growing importance in Israel’s existence and its daily life was the theme of this year’s Tenenbaum Lecture at Emory University.
Israel’s emphasis on the Holocaust as one of the keys to its modern history was slow in coming, according to this year’s guest lecturer, Avinoam Patt, who teaches at New York University.
It was not until Israel’s right-ward turn in 1977 that the use of the Holocaust in the country’s life accelerated. Under the leadership of Menachem Begin, who became the first prime minister from the Likud party, the Holocaust, as Patt descried it, “solidified the memory of [it] as a central cornerstone of Israel political life and foreign policy.”
Begin, who lost his brother and both parents in the Holocaust and who was imprisoned in a forced labor camp in the Soviet Union, emigrated to Palestine in 1942.
Under his leadership, Holocaust education became a required part of the educational system, and the March of the Living brought thousands of Israeli teenagers for visits to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe.
But it fell to his successor in the Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has served longer than any previous prime minister, to solidify the importance of Holocaust memory as a political initiative.
“Under Benjamin Netanyahu,” Patt said, “Israelis have internalized a much closer relationship to the Shoah, and references to the extermination of European Jews have become commonplace in the political sphere.”
Today, particularly, after the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the memory of the Holocaust has quickly become political shorthand for the threat that Israel faces.
“We see the Holocaust serving as a reference point that is constantly invoked,” Patt emphasized. “Indeed, the memory of the Holocaust has come to be used as a rhetorical tool that assumes great familiarity with the symbols of Jewish weakness during the Holocaust, warning of the dangers of one government policy or another.”
The Israeli holiday of Yom HaShoah, which commemorates the more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its allies, has similarly grown in influence over the years. The observance, which is commemorated on the 14th of the Hebrew month of Nisan or April 24th this year, has also grown in importance as the number of living survivors of the wartime tragedy have dwindled.
For those political leaders, like Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, who were born into families of Holocaust survivors, and are opponents of the present Israel administration, the Holocaust, according to the Emory lecturer, “is central to their own identities,” as well as “the frame of reference and primary association for most segments of Israeli society.”
“The memory of the Shoah holds a central place in Israeli collective national identity,” Patt said. “And it increasingly becomes the prism through which Israelis understand both their past and the nature of their present relationship with their Arab neighbors and the wider world. Immediately after Oct. 7, many Israelis began to talk about their traumatic experiences of Oct. 7 through Holocaust references.”
Patt, who last year was appointed as a professor of Holocaust studies at NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, believes that Holocaust memory and the events of Oct. 7 have created a new consciousness for Jews.
The memory of the Shoah holds a central place in Israeli collective national identity
“It’s clear that in the aftermath of this catastrophic day and the war that followed, Israel will never be the same. The notion that Israel exists to protect the lives of Jews from murderous violence has been shaken as the state seems to have failed in its mission, and yet it seems clear that for Israelis and many Jews and non-Jews alike around the world, the memory of the Holocaust serves as the strongest reminder for why Israel must exist and defend its citizens.”
Dr. Patt, who is also the inaugural director of NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, was also a participant in a three-day conference on “Holocaust Memory in the 21st Century” at Emory. It was co- sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
The Tenenbaum Lecture series, which is now in its 28th year, was founded in memory of Meyer Tenenbaum, a 1932 Emory Law School graduate, who started the Chatham Steel Corporation in Savannah. According to Hazel Gold, interim chair of Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, which hosts the annual series, the lecture and the conference are particularly important events this year.
“Unfortunately, because there is much misinformation and Holocaust denial circulating on places like social media, it is important that the academic study of the Holocaust continue in a robust form.”
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