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Oral history interview with Robert Willis

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1993.A.0097.11 | RG Number: RG-50.043.0011

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    Oral history interview with Robert Willis
    Transcript
    We often have been moved by her story and her remarkable method
    of survival.
    One of the things she said to me, on the way home,
    was that she felt better to be a victim than a victimizer.
    She said she couldn't have lived with knowing
    that she or other people had been
    responsible for such actions against other people, which
    I thought was a very interesting statement,
    and something which I've been thinking about all weekend.
    But as we have been dealing with the issue of Christianity
    and the Holocaust, several times, of course with Dr. Ross
    and then with several films on the issue,
    I felt it appropriate to bring in Dr. Willis, Dr. Robert
    Willis, from Hamline University, to talk about the same subject
    in a different way.
    Hamline University has a department of religion,
    which we do not have here.
    And he teaches New Testament.
    No.
    No?
    No, not really.
    You don't teach the book?
    No, theology and that stuff.
    Theology.
    Theology-- it's all the same.
    [LAUGHTER]
    (LAUGHING) It's not the same.
    [LAUGHTER]
    That's what happens in state university.
    That's it.
    That's it.
    Anyway.
    He has dealt extensively with the Holocaust,
    from a Christian point of view, especially
    the post-Holocaust theology.
    And he'll bring us some of his information,
    his assessment, here, today, as well as
    some observations on the Adversus Judaeos tradition.
    Thank you, Steve.
    I'm very happy to be here.
    I wish I could see you, but I can't.
    This is a first for me.
    I've never been videotaped before.
    And I suppose it's at least somewhat analogous to one's
    first sexual encounter.
    You're sort of eager to find out what it's like,
    but not quite sure what to do.
    [LAUGHTER]
    So here I am all hooked up.
    And I was asked whether this is enough wire for me.
    And I think it is.
    I usually don't wander out of the room
    at any rate, when I'm talking.
    The handouts I think are--
    a couple of them, at any rate, will
    be for the most part self-explanatory.
    This one is from the book by Lucy Dawidowicz-- ah,
    wonderful, now I can see you.
    Good-- The War Against the Jews.
    And what it gives is a nice, quick, statistical overview
    of the extent of the destruction, which,
    of course, was most concentrated in Poland and Ukraine,
    because that's where the majority
    of the European Jewish community was centered.
    I asked Steve if you had had that.
    And he said you hadn't.
    I thought it might be a useful reference point.
    The bibliography, the list of books
    from both Jewish and Christian thinkers, I thought
    might be helpful in case some of you
    would like to follow up on some of the things
    that we're going to be talking about a little bit today.
    These are all, incidentally--
    I think this is correct--
    available in paperback.
    The only exception to that, that I know of,
    is the book by Alice and Roy Eckardt,
    Long Night's Journey Into Day.
    That came out only two years ago,
    and it might not yet be available in paperback
    but the rest are.
    And if you wanted to pick one volume,
    from that whole list, that would let
    you get into both Jewish and Christian thinking
    on the Holocaust, I guess I would
    recommend the one by Eva Fleischer, Auschwitz:
    Beginning of a New Era?
    Because in that, you have both Jewish and Christian thinkers
    trying to wrestle with this event
    and come to terms with it, not necessarily
    to understand it or make sense out of it but to probe it,
    to wonder where one goes after an event of that magnitude,
    whether within the Christian or within the Jewish tradition.
    The other two handouts were going
    to be talking about in a little bit.
    One contains some passages from the New Testament.
    And I want to talk a little bit about the role
    that the New Testament played in shaping
    certain kinds of cultural attitudes, which
    became eventually identifiable as antisemitic.
    And the other comes from a period slightly beyond the New
    Testament, roughly the second through the fourth centuries,
    when the Church was in the process of forming
    an initial theology, that is in the process of working out
    its own self-understanding.
    And as we'll see, it did this precisely in relationship
    to Judaism and the Jewish people.
    And so that took a polemical turn.
    We can also discern polemics present in the New Testament.
    And what we have is what is now referred
    to as the Adversus Judaeos tradition
    in early Christian theology, the theology of the Church Fathers,
    so to speak.
    And that term is quite appropriate,
    since, so far as we know, there were no church mothers
    writing at that time.
    Or if they were, they weren't published.
    So we have two components, then, of what
    became an ongoing and lengthy development, namely
    the development of antisemitism in the West.
    And I want to concentrate, to a large extent,
    on the contributions of the Christian tradition to that
    without ignoring the fact that there are forms of antisemitism
    other than religious.
    Contemporary antisemitism, for example,
    modern antisemitism, which begins
    toward the end of the 19th century,
    is based on the theory of race and racial superiority
    and racial inferiority that gets tied
    in with a form of social Darwinism,
    survival of the fittest.
    And out of that, one has a slightly different concept
    of race.
    That race obviously operated in the context of Nazi ideology.
    But it was also present, earlier, in the 19th century.
    And in 1880, for example, in the "Antisemites Petition," which
    was which was sent to the German government, at the time,
    to try to curtail Jewish immigration into Germany.
    There was a great concern about that,
    on the part of many individuals in Germany,
    even though the Jewish community in Germany
    had gone through a process of assimilation.
    That is they moved away from an earlier
    identity, as a kind of separate religious grouping,
    within the nation, and had become
    more and more assimilated.
    That is they had left behind certain Jewish traditions,
    certain Jewish motifs, dress, diet, and so forth,
    and had become more and more germanized.
    Despite that, there were very strong negative feelings
    directed toward the Jewish community.
    And so one can talk about a secular or non-religious
    antisemitism.
    And yet in the end, those two are really very closely
    connected, because the Nazis and Hitler,
    in particular, in Mein Kampf and in other writings and speeches,
    built fairly directly on the imagery, the negative imagery,
    the stereotype of the Jew, the theological Jew, if you will,
    that had come out of the context of the Christian tradition.
    And so I want to spend a little time talking about that.
    But I wanted to back up for just a moment
    and raise a prior question.
    And that is why should one, whether Christian or not-- why
    should one spend time focusing on the Holocaust,
    as an instance of evil in the contemporary world, when there
    are so many other possibilities available?
    One might focus, for example, on the Turkish massacre
    of the Armenians in 1915.
    One might focus on the tragedy of Biafra.
    One might focus more recently on what happened in Cambodia
    under the Pol Pot regime.
    There are a lot of candidates for atrocity.
    There are a lot of candidates for genocide.
    One might focus, in our own context,
    on the treatment accorded, systematically,
    over the centuries, to either Blacks or Native Americans.
    So that if we focus on the Holocaust, it seems to me
    one initially has to provide some sort of justification
    for that.
    In other words, it's not self-evidently the case
    that that ought to serve as a kind of paradigm,
    a central example, if you will, of the enormity of evil
    in our time.
    A book was written a few years ago entitled, The 20th Century
    Book of the Dead, in which an estimate was
    made that something in the neighborhood of 100
    million human beings have been killed, violently killed,
    not through natural causes, not through famine or earthquake
    or disease or that sort of thing, but killed in conflict
    situations and killed in genocidal situations,
    since the turn of the century.
    That's an incredible number of people.
    That's a little under half the population of the United
    States simply eliminated.
    Well, it seems to me that there are at least
    a couple of things about the Holocaust that do set it apart.
    And one of them certainly was the role
    played by technology and bureaucracy,
    the systematic nature of the killing, the killing process,
    especially in the death camps that
    were created in Poland, where German engineering
    firms competed, submitted competitive bids to be allowed
    to construct the gas chambers and crematoria,
    where the whole process was run on as a model of efficiency,
    in which various individuals did nothing more than simply carry
    out their job, their normal occupation.
    Trainmasters, civil servants, record keepers of all sorts,
    it was systematically put together.
    It was systematically engineered.
    It was systematically brought off.
    And now, remember this is an event which, in a sense,
    became focal to the Nazi cause, to Nazi ideology.
    I think Lucy Dawidowicz makes that clear in her book,
    The War Against the Jews.
    But if we say, for a moment, that there was a larger
    context in which war was being conducted,
    and that had to do with this whole concept of Lebensraum,
    the need to create greater room for Germany,
    so that Germany might begin to recognize and realize
    its manifest destiny.
    That was not something new with Hitler, of course.
    That piece of ideology is found as far back as Fichte,
    in the early 19th century, and can
    be traced in a continuous way beyond that point.
    But if you look, for a moment, at that setting, which
    began with the invasion of Poland, then
    one has to say that, within that larger context,
    there was this extremely concentrated effort, whose
    only end was the extermination of the Jewish community
    in Europe.
    And there is no indication whatever,
    in the context of Nazi ideology, that it would have ended there.
    I mean it was envisioned as a final solution
    to the Jewish problem.
    And now, one striking aspect of that, and this
    has to do with the reliance on bureaucracy and efficiency
    and rationality, because what Hitler aimed at
    was rational antisemitism not irrational antisemitism, not
    spontaneous outbreaks against the Jewish community,
    not pogroms, not unplanned uprisings, as it were,
    on the part of the populace.
    Not mob action, as occurred in 1938 in Kristallnacht,
    for example, when the synagogues were burned throughout Germany
    and glass was shattered in German shops
    throughout the country.
    That was one of the last examples
    of irrational antisemitism.
    Hitler wanted rational antisemitism.
    We have to remember, within that context,
    life went on in an incredibly ordinary way,
    even within the setting of the death camps, themselves.
    And I brought along an example that I think brings that home.
    This is from a book by Gitta Sereny on Franz Stangl.
    Franz Stangl was the commandant of Treblinka, one
    of the death camps in Poland.
    And this is testimony which she took
    from people who had been involved in that, one of whom
    is named Suchomel.
    I refer to his name in reading this.
    He said the cleaning of the SS quarters
    was done by Jewish girls.
    The cooking, however, by Polish, non-Jewish women.
    I have not seen this fact mentioned in any
    of the histories of the period.
    Oh, yes, Suchomel, there were three Polish girls
    working in the German mess.
    And they lived there, too.
    Of course, they had their days off and could go and see
    their families.
    Oh, yes, they all survived.
    If the mind boggles, Sereny continues,
    at the idea of people having a job at Treblinka, from which
    they had days off to go and see their families
    in the surrounding villages, this
    is perhaps a deficiency in our imagination.
    For the car entrance to the camp and the section where
    the Germans and Ukrainians, too, live was, it would appear,
    anything but forbidding.
    The street, the mess, the barracks, Stangl's house,
    the munition depot, the garage and petrol station, all of it
    was banked with flowers.
    It was difficult, said Stangl, to describe it adequately, now,
    but it became really beautiful.
    That whole aspect, it seems to me, the systematic attempt
    to eliminate an entire people, an entire community carried
    on as a more or less normal enterprise,
    with all the trappings of an ordinary business occupation,
    is one aspect of the Holocaust that
    seems to me to set it apart from other instances of evil
    or horror or even genocide in our time.
    In that connection, I want to say
    that I think it's a mistake, at any rate,
    to try to talk about evil in general.
    I think that always demeans the victims of whatever evil
    it is that we're talking about, whether we're
    talking about what happened to the Armenians, under the Turks
    in 1915, or what happened to the Cambodians, under Pol Pot,
    or what happened to Jews, under Hitler.
    Evil is always particular.
    And when we focus on evil as simply abstract question,
    then we lose sight of the particularity of suffering.
    So in saying that there are certain features
    of the Holocaust that set it apart,
    I do not mean in any way to suggest
    that the suffering of others, in different situations,
    was any less real.
    I do want to suggest, however, that--
    at least I am persuaded that there is a sense in which what
    happened to Jews during the Holocaust,
    and not only to Jews, to homosexuals and Gypsies
    and others defined as subhuman or as enemies of the state--
    let's keep that in mind as well-- but still,
    the Jews were the target people.
    Hitler talks about Jews in Mein Kampf not
    about Gypsies and homosexuals.
    And the role of Jews in Hitler's ideology is absolutely central.
    Jews were the evil of Germany.
    And they had to be eradicated.
    And so the whole notion of a "Final Solution"
    to the "Jewish problem" was a focused concern.
    It spilled over.
    It included other groups.
    But I want to emphasize the importance
    of keeping sight of the particularity of suffering,
    particularity of evil.
    So in building a kind of case for making
    the Holocaust at least a central paradigm of evil,
    I don't want to suggest that we denigrate or reduce
    the significance or the suffering of other peoples
    at all.
    Now, there's a second aspect to the Holocaust
    that I think is worth noting.
    And that has to do with the lengthy history that led up
    to it and made it possible.
    Because one simply cannot understand the virulence
    of the Nazi hatred of Jews and Hitler's obsession with Jews
    without taking into account the whole long history
    of the interaction, the tragic interaction between the Jewish
    and Christian communities, and what happened to the Jewish
    community within a dominant culture defined,
    to a large extent, by Christianity.
    And so we have to take that into account.
    We have to take into account, then, the legacy of the New
    Testament.
    We have to take into account the legacy
    of the negative image of Judaism and the Jewish people that
    developed within the context of Christian theology.
    We have to see that extended into the Middle
    Ages, the flowering of a Christian culture, which
    brought many strengths and many virtues
    to Western European life.
    There's no question about that.
    Made significant contributions.
    But also, there was this dark strand, this dark thread
    running through that.
    And it had to do, centrally, with the role of Jews.
    One can see what happened under Hitler
    and the outcome of Nazi ideology, in a sense,
    as the coming together of three fairly discernible strands
    within European history.
    One is the one I've just mentioned, the lengthy history
    of antisemitism within the Church, Christian antisemitism,
    Christian hatred of Jews.
    A second strand comes out of the context of the Enlightenment,
    of the humanism of the Enlightenment,
    the humanism coming out of the 18th century,
    the belief in rationality and progress
    and tolerance and equality which produced revolution in France,
    and which permitted the opportunity for Jews to become
    assimilated, to enter into the mainstream of political life,
    as it were, on the assumption that they would be given all
    the rights and prerogatives pertaining to citizens,
    on one condition, namely that they give up
    any distinctive identity as Jews.
    And many in the Jewish communities in the West,
    in England, France, Germany, to some extent, Italy,
    did that, entered into the process of assimilation.
    So that by 1933, for example, when Hitler came to power,
    one finds a Jewish community in Germany
    that is very largely an assimilated community,
    a community in which Jews tended to identify themselves
    as German first and as Jewish secondly.
    There were still Orthodox communities in Germany,
    communities of those who continued
    to remain observant, observant to Jewish law
    and to live out of that context.
    But they were a minority in Germany.
    We look at Eastern Europe, that's a different situation.
    There, Orthodoxy retained a much firmer hold.
    And the process of enlightenment and, therefore,
    the process of assimilation was much more reduced.
    But now, it turned out that the process of assimilation
    simply did not yield what it was supposed to have yielded,
    namely a new status for Jews.
    Because one can also discern, running
    throughout the 18th and 19th and into the 20th centuries,
    an ongoing hostility toward and suspicion of Jews,
    assimilated or not, the suspicion that Jews somehow
    were not really Germans, were not
    really Frenchmen, but constituted,
    as it were, a nation within a nation,
    and, therefore, contained the seeds of subversiveness,
    could not be trusted.
    And one finds this accusation surfacing, again and again.
    And so one thing that the Holocaust does, in that sense,
    is to raise the question about the validity
    and the significance of a certain kind
    of liberal humanism that emerges out
    of the context of the 18th century,
    and the ideals of rationality and tolerance
    and progress that they gave rise to.
    That's another strand, it seems to me,
    that intersects, in 1933 and beyond,
    with the strand of Christian antisemitism.
    And the third strand, of course, much more recent,
    is that of Nazi ideology and the worldview of Hitler,
    itself, which focused on Jews, which saw Jews as unremittingly
    evil, something that needed to be rooted out, totally,
    from German life, and, indeed, from the world,
    and which led Hitler, in the end,
    to describe Jews as bacilli, as germs, as carriers of disease,
    as the major consistent threat to the purity
    and the goodness of German culture.
    The two former strands then come together
    in a significant way in Nazi ideology,
    even though Hitler, of course, was in no sense Christian.
    He'd been raised in a somewhat Catholic environment.
    But he, himself, was not a believer
    in Catholicism or in Christianity.
    He held instead to a kind of resurgent German paganism,
    which celebrated the blood and soil,
    the fatherland, German destiny, rural values, family.
    Hitler was very big on family, ostensibly,
    and sought to return, then, to those values and saw the Jews--
    because Jews represented, from his point
    of view, pacifism, democracy, and internationalism.
    And therefore, they subverted the central values
    of German life.
    That, it seems to me, is another factor to the Holocaust
    that sets it aside, the historical process leading up
    to it, the ideological dimension of it, which
    has to be traced back, finally, if we're talking
    about Christian antisemitism, all the way
    into the context of the New Testament.
    And I wanted to spend a little bit of time
    talking about that with you.
    And I want to say, at the outset,
    that I am not suggesting that Christianity somehow
    caused the Holocaust.
    Because I don't think that case can be made.
    What I do think one can argue, however,
    is that Christianity was a necessary factor,
    in the Holocaust, in that it supplied
    some central ingredients that fueled Nazi ideology.
    It supplied a ready-made set of images, negative images,
    that came directly out of the context
    of the Christian tradition.
    One might argue, it seems to me, that Christianity
    provided a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition.
    That is Christianity, in itself, would not
    have led to the Holocaust, did not ever lead to a Holocaust,
    did not lead to genocide, although it
    led to enough horrors.
    It led to pogroms.
    It led to expulsions, at various points in history,
    from Spain, from England, from France.
    But it did not lead to an outright plan of extermination.
    And the reason it didn't was because Jews still
    played a role, in Christian theology,
    albeit a negative role Jews came to function
    as the negative image of Christians, who would,
    one day, finally be converted.
    When Christ returned, when God's final judgment would be leveled
    upon humankind then, at that point, at the end of history,
    Jews would be converted.
    And those who were not converted,
    like the rest of the world that remained unconverted,
    would then be consigned to final damnation.
    Now, that might sound like a negative point in itself,
    and it is, but it's important to see
    that, as a part of theology, it prohibits, it
    sets a limit to the extent of actual negative hostile
    behavior that the Church can legitimately engage in.
    The Church could not mount, could not underwrite, could not
    support a program of extermination,
    precisely because Jews still continued
    to play a role in Christian theology,
    were still part of the Christian story, albeit a negative part.
    And that's a significant difference.
    Christianity, in the end, stopped short of genocide,
    despite all the negative imagery,
    despite the very real presence of Christian antisemitism,
    it stopped short of genocide.
    It did not sanction that.
    It did not underwrite that.
    Now, I want to look, for just a moment,
    at some of the passages that I gave you.
    And if you look at the ones from the New Testament,
    first, we'll say just a couple of words about that.
    First, one is from the Gospel according to John,
    and that is the latest of the Gospels in the New Testament.
    Probably about the end of the first, early part
    of the second century is when many New Testament scholars
    date that.
    But one can see, in that first passage
    from the fifth chapter, the way in which
    the early Christian community began
    to take over Jewish scripture, which, after all, was
    its scripture at the beginning.
    It was the only scripture it had.
    Because the early Christian community
    emerged from within the context of first century Judaism,
    was not initially a Gentile movement.
    It was initially a movement within first century
    Palestinian Judaism, and only toward the end of that century
    did it begin to spread outside and become more and more
    a Gentile religion.
    But what we can see going on in that passage
    is the use of Jewish scripture, the appeal,
    you see, there to Moses, to make a negative judgment
    on those who fail to respond in an appropriate way
    to the figure of Jesus.
    So in the Gospel of John, Jesus is made to say,
    "Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father.
    It is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope.
    If you believed Moses, you would believe me."
    In other words, if Jews understood--
    that is those Jews who had failed
    to respond, in an affirmative way,
    to the proclamation of the early Christian community
    or the early community of those who gathered
    around the figure of Jesus-- that Jesus was, in fact,
    the promised and expected messiah, the deliverer
    of Israel, if those Jews, who failed to respond
    affirmatively, had understood their scriptures correctly,
    they would have seen that Jesus was, in fact, the messiah.
    That's the use of scripture to make a judgment
    against those who fail to respond in a certain way.
    There's nothing new about that, incidentally.
    There was another community, contemporary,
    which began earlier, began, I think, about the second century
    before the Common Era, the Qumran community, located
    along the north shore of the Dead Sea,
    which also took an uncompromising
    position toward those other Jews who failed to see things
    its particular way.
    So the Qumran community, the community of Essenes
    ended up leaving the larger Jewish environment
    and going off and founding a separate community--
    very strict discipline, exceptionally strict
    interpretation of law and condemnation
    for those who failed or who saw things differently.
    So there's a pattern that gets repeated, in that sense,
    on the part of the early Christian movement.
    If you look at the second passage,
    you encounter one of the most violent, if you will,
    and also one of the standard judgments
    leveled against the Jewish community.
    "You are of your father, the devil,
    and your will is to do your father's desires.
    He was a murderer from the beginning
    and has nothing to do with the truth.
    The reason why you do not hear them
    is that you are not of God."
    There again, the charge of Jewish falsehood.
    Where do those Jews come from who reject Jesus?
    They come from the devil.
    Your father is the devil.
    That became a very popular image during the Middle Ages.
    There are various woodcuts depicting Jews
    in precisely that role, as satanic, evil figures,
    capable of unlimited evil, a constant presence and threat
    to the Christian community.
    So later on, one finds Jews being
    accused of all sorts of things, poisoning of wells
    during the plague, desecration of the host, and so forth.
    And of course, the charge of blood guilt
    that comes out of the third passage, from Matthew's Gospel,
    "His blood be on us and on our children."
    And that entered into the mainstream of Christian thought
    and became a consistent basis for alleging the total guilt
    of all Jews, everywhere, at all times, universal guilt.
    Not even limited guilt, not even guilt limited to those who
    were present at the trial of Jesus,
    and who may have had something to do with the fact
    that he was put to death, but a universal charge of guilt,
    presumably acceded to by the Jewish people, themselves.
    "His blood be on us and on our people."
    And in the next passage, from the Book of Acts,
    from the speech of Stephen, "Which of the prophets
    did not your fathers persecute?
    And they killed those who announced beforehand
    the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed
    and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels
    and did not keep it."
    Judaism has failed, first of all, to keep the law--
    it has always been disobedient in that sense-- the law given
    to Moses at Sinai, the law which formed
    the basis of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh.
    And secondly, it is systematically
    killed those who rose up within the ancient Israelite community
    to call them back to obedience, the prophets.
    And so one has a consistent pattern set up there.
    In that sense, that Jews put Jesus to death
    should come as a surprise to no one.
    If you read Stephen's speech, the obvious question is, well,
    what else would one expect?
    The Jews have always been a disobedient people.
    They have always put the prophets to death.
    Therefore, Jesus, the final prophet,
    would unavoidably have been put to death.
    There was no way this people, this stiff-necked people,
    uncircumcised in heart and ears you see, not really yet
    within the covenant so far as hearing is concerned,
    could possibly have heard and understood
    and responded to the figure of Jesus.
    Now it's true enough that, in the prophetic literature
    of Jewish scripture, one finds some very harsh judgments,
    indeed, being leveled against the people of Israel.
    There's no question about that at all.
    But you should note what's happening here.
    What's happening is that the early Christian community
    takes that negative aspect of the prophetic literature,
    the aspect of judgment, and levels it
    exclusively on the Jewish people and leaves no opportunity,
    then, as the prophets always did, for restoration,
    for repentance, for turning back to God, and for obedience
    to the law.
    Those are excluded now.
    And so we have only the negative aspect applied to Judaism.
    Where does the positive aspect go, then?
    Well, it goes to the Church.
    It goes to the Church, because, remember,
    the whole of Christian scripture is predicated
    on this fundamental distinction between the Old Testament
    and the New Testament, the old covenant and the new covenant.
    And Christians understood themselves, then,
    to have replaced the people of the original covenant,
    because the people of the original covenant
    were consistently disobedient, murdered the prophets,
    and eventually murdered the final prophet, who
    was interpreted by Christians as being the figure of God,
    himself, and so were guilty of the charge of deicide,
    had actually put God to death as a final testimony
    to their disobedience.
    And so you have this movement, from disobedience to obedience,
    from an original covenant now set aside, no longer
    having any force, and the people, along with it,
    equally rejected and set aside, and a new people called
    into being and a new covenant issuing
    from the figure of Jesus.
    And the last passage gets at that point,
    directly, from the Book of Hebrews.
    "The covenant he mediates is better," that is Christ,
    "since it is enacted on better promises.
    For if that first covenant had been faultless,
    there would have been no occasion for a second."
    In speaking of a new covenant, he
    treats the first as obsolete.
    And what is becoming obsolete and growing old
    is ready to vanish away.
    One could not ask for a more precise or explicit statement
    of the status of the original covenant
    and the people of that covenant in contrast to the new.
    the old is vanishing away.
    From the point of view of the writer of the Book of Hebrews,
    it's obsolete.
    It is no longer binding.
    Now, when you move on to the subsequent developments
    in Christian theology, from the second to the fourth centuries,
    the so-called Adversus Judaeos tradition,
    one can see that some of these same themes
    are picked up and continued and extended.
    And what you have is a theology, which, on the one hand,
    is an attempt to think through certain central issues
    for the Church.
    The relationship between Jesus and God, for example,
    what is that relationship precisely?
    It led, eventually, to the doctrine of the Trinity.
    And the nature of Jesus-- how is it
    that Jesus is both human and divine, both God and man?
    And along with those concerns, also
    a concern to position the Jewish community, to identify Jews
    as those who consistently rejected and continued
    to reject the truth made manifest
    in the figure of Jesus.
    And so we find all sorts of accusations
    being made during the development
    of this theological period.
    In that first selection from Tertullian, for example,
    Jews are accused of, idolatry "because they
    did degrading service to idols and, abandoning the divinity,
    surrender to images.
    They did, again, worship gold and kine and groves
    and enslaved themselves to Baal."
    That's the one side.
    The other side is that, "our lesser and posterior
    people quit the idols."
    That is those who now form the Church, those who now
    form the Christian community.
    "And converted to the same God from whom Israel departed."
    That's an important point.
    Tertullian is not arguing that Christians
    worship a different God.
    He's arguing, rather, that Christians worship the same God
    but in an appropriate way.
    Christians then are, by definition,
    those obedient people who now form the new covenant
    community.
    And Jews are, by definition, the disobedient people
    which forms the rejected covenant
    community, the old covenant, which is now becoming obsolete.
    In the third passage from Hippolytus--
    this is from the third century--
    we find the opening of a rhetorical question.
    "Why was the temple made desolate?"
    He's referring, there, to the destruction
    of the second temple in the year 69 or 70 of the Common Era.
    And Hippolytus has an answer.
    And you should note carefully what kind of answer it is.
    It's a theological answer.
    Hippolytus is not asking any sort of empirical question.
    He's not asking about the relationship
    between the Jewish uprising and the destruction of the temple.
    His answer is couched exclusively
    in theological terms.
    "It was because they killed the son of their benefactor
    for he is co-eternal with the Father."
    Now that nails down the charge of deicide
    in an even more precise way than what
    one finds in the Book of Matthew, Gospel of Matthew,
    or the Gospel of John in the New Testament.
    That phrase, "co-eternal," is a significant phrase that
    identifies Jesus as having the status of God and, therefore,
    as being co-eternal with the Father.
    We're on the way, here, to what will become finally
    the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.
    Father and Son are co-eternal, alike in substance.
    To that was added the doctrine of the Holy Spirit,
    and then you have the completed doctrine of the Trinity.
    So that, in putting Jesus to death,
    it was not simply an action whereby
    a human being was executed, was brought
    to trial on false accusations and done in.
    It was an act whereby God, himself, was put to death.
    And so what Hippolytus does is to make
    the charge of deicide explicit.
    Jews are guilty not only of killing Jesus,
    Jews are guilty of killing God, of murdering God.
    And finally, in the selection from Prudentius,
    from the fourth century, we have one of the favorite images
    to enter into Christian consciousness.
    And that's the image of the homeless Jew, the "Wandering
    Jew."
    We even have a plant by that name, right?
    So we probably have a plant in your home
    called the wandering Jew.
    I can't help but cringe mildly every time
    my wife talks about needing to water the wandering Jew.
    [LAUGHTER]
    Even though I know she's not antisemitic.
    Still, one has to ask the question,
    how do we ever come up with a name like that?
    That's a weird name.
    Why not the wandering Swede?
    The wandering Norwegian?
    It's only Jews who wander?
    Why do Jews wander?
    Because they're supposed to.
    Because they're homeless.
    And in back of that phrase, you see,
    is a whole sort of subverting of history,
    namely the notion that, after the destruction
    of the second temple, all the Jews
    were expelled from Palestine.
    They began to wander.
    Where did they wander?
    They wandered all over the world.
    Why do they wander?
    They wander, because they have been made homeless by God.
    "Suffering the penalty for murder
    and having stained his hands with the blood of Christ,
    this noble race is scattered and enslaved.
    It is in captivity under the younger faith.
    It is in captivity under the younger faith."
    That's a very potent phrase.
    That's a very potent phrase.
    And it's significant that that was
    penned in the fourth century, because it
    was in the early fourth century that Christianity
    achieved at least quasi-official status within the empire.
    It was about 313 or 312 that the Emperor Constantine
    was converted.
    He had a vision one night, on the eve of a battle.
    A great cross appeared in the sky.
    And on it were, written in Latin, of course, the words,
    "with this sign, conquer."
    And so he went out to battle the next day and used the cross,
    and he won.
    And he decided that there must be something to Christianity.
    And so he converted.
    And in that context, when the emperor converted,
    that pretty much signaled to people, generally,
    that it would be a good thing if they thought seriously
    about Christianity.
    So Christianity automatically gained a kind of ascendancy
    and a kind of power and was on its way
    to becoming an official religion.
    It hadn't been official before that time.
    And I might say, incidentally, that alongside the polemic
    from Christians that we've been looking at,
    directed towards Jews, there were equally sharp retorts
    from those within the Jewish community.
    But after 313 of the Common Era, one
    can begin to see that shift.
    Because Christianity becomes more and more the official
    religion and gets tied up with the state
    and, therefore, gets tied up with political power
    and, therefore, can literally make life and death
    decisions about people who remain marginalized.
    And Jews remain marginalized, within a dominant Christian
    culture, precisely because they refused to convert,
    even though there were ongoing and countless efforts
    throughout the whole development of the culture of the Middle
    Ages.
    Forced disputations, in which Jewish thinkers
    were brought before Christian theologians
    and asked to defend their views--
    one can find this beginning as early
    as the dialogue between Justin and Trypho from, I think,
    the third century.
    Trypho is a Jew.
    And Justin's a Christian philosopher.
    And guess who wins?
    Obviously, Justin demonstrates the superiority
    of Christian faith to this would be Jewish thinker.
    And that pattern was repeated down through the centuries.
    There were also occasions of forced baptism,
    many such occasions, when Jewish communities
    were given the option either of converting or being expelled.
    And so within the context in which Christianity is not
    only the dominant religion but allied very closely
    to the power of the state, the position
    of the Jewish community, as a marginalized community,
    became much more precarious, much more subject to threat
    from without.
    And all of this was undergirded--
    this is an important point to see, folks.
    All of this was undergirded by the dominant Christian
    theology, which positioned Jews and the Jewish community,
    in a certain way, in a negative fashion.
    Steve said that he had given you the sheet from Raul Hilberg's
    book, The Destruction of the European
    Jews, which parallels Church legislation
    with Nazi legislation.
    I think that's a very good thing to go back and look at.
    If you haven't studied that closely,
    you ought to look at it more carefully.
    Because one of the things that happened after 1933,
    in Germany, was a subversion of the law.
    The law was defined in a certain way.
    It was used as a tool to exclude, to harass,
    to persecute.
    And one finds, in the development
    of Christian culture and Christian societies,
    similar efforts to use the law to circumscribe
    the legitimate sphere within which Jews
    would be allowed to operate.
    And so one finds restrictions on intermarriage,
    one finds restrictions on the use of the Talmud,
    one finds restrictions on who Jews are able to hire.
    They cannot hire Christians as servants nor have Christians
    as slaves and so on.
    All of that legislation enacted by the Nazis--
    and students are always shocked to realize this--
    had its predecessor in the practice of Christians
    toward Jews much earlier.
    Once again, what the Nazis did not come out of a vacuum.
    There was a model.
    There was a pattern, ready to hand, that could be followed.
    Well, Christian antisemitism is a very black stain
    on the history of the Church.
    So too, is the Church's treatment of women,
    but that's another story, isn't it?
    It's enough for the moment to note the treatment of Jews
    at the hands of Christians.
    And the fact that Christianity prepared
    the way, significantly, for the advent of something
    as horrendous as national socialism
    and the ideology of Jews that it contained.
    Now, the question is, of course, what can be done about it?
    Is there any hope that that sort of thing can be overcome?
    Steve also said he read the passages to you
    from Luther's diatribe against the Jews,
    written in 1543, "Against the Jews and Their Lies."
    And he also pointed out that 20 years earlier, in 1523, Luther
    had written what seemed, at the time,
    to be a conciliatory tract, "That Jesus
    Christ was Born a Jew."
    And in that earlier tract, you might recall,
    he counseled patience and kindness
    on the part of Christians in dealing with Jews.
    Whereas Luther believed that the reason Jews hadn't converted up
    to that time was because they simply
    had been led astray by all of the evils and falsehoods
    of the Roman Church, which Luther was
    in full revolt at that time.
    But that once they heard Luther's new understanding
    of the gospel, which he also thought
    was proper understanding of the gospel--
    the notion of justification by grace
    through faith, that we don't earn our way to favor with God.
    We can't sort of work our way into grace.
    Grace is given us a gift.
    All we can do is receive the love of God
    and live out of it accordingly.
    Luther was pretty sure that once Jews heard that, they
    would say, well, yeah.
    That's right.
    That sounds good to me.
    And it was just the Papacy, and all that money going out
    of Germany, down there, to rebuild Saint Peter's, and all
    of this nonsense about indulgences and so forth.
    Yeah, let's give Christianity a chance.
    But unfortunately, they didn't, of course.
    What happened was that Jews, in effect, listened, thought
    about it, and said, well, thank you very much, but no thanks.
    We'll stay Jews.
    And so by 1543, Luther turned bitter
    and issued this diatribe, in which, if you read it--
    and it's a very long writing.
    And for many, many years, it was not published, at all.
    I mean it wasn't translated, rather, for what
    might seem a good reason.
    But it's published now.
    It's available in a brand new translation
    of all of Luther's works.
    And there it is, "Against the Jews and Their Lies,"
    takes up an entire volume.
    It's a very long piece of writing.
    The little excerpt that you have or that I
    have, in this volume, The Jew in the Medieval World--
    it's a very good book, incidentally,
    a very nice collection--
    is very short.
    But what it indicates is that, in Luther's writing,
    is laid out a program for dealing with Jews, which is
    tantamount to a final solution.
    Because Luther calls for the elimination of Jewish property,
    forbidding of Jewish prayer and the use of the Talmud,
    travel by rabbis, and on and on, none of which
    was enacted in his time.
    Luther sent this off to the princes, appealed to them
    to put it into operation.
    But they didn't.
    They ignored it.
    But it was there.
    It was there.
    And it was enacted, eventually, by the Nazis.
    The Nazis, in that sense, had a very nice blueprint
    for what to do with the Jews.
    Did Luther cause the Nazis, then?
    Of course not.
    Of course not.
    But if you're asking how or what hope is there
    for eliminating this infection of antisemitism,
    can we get rid of it?
    The answer is probably not.
    Probably not.
    I'm not overly hopeful about that.
    Steve?
    I just wanted to relate something
    that Hinda brought up, afterwards.
    She mentioned that she occasionally,
    when she speaks to groups, she starts off
    with a statement or an alleged statement
    that someone had suggested a law killing all bicyclists
    and Jews.
    And she asked people to respond to that.
    And the usual response is, why the bicyclists?
    Right.
    Not, why the Jews, but why the bicyclists.
    Yeah.
    And I think this is what you're suggesting,
    that for centuries you have this conditioned response.
    Right.
    And it can be simplified to that degree.
    Yeah.
    In fact, I used that story in an article that I wrote.
    And in my version of it, someone is at an early Nazi rally,
    where Hitler is speaking, and asks
    that very question of Hitler.
    I think it was something like this.
    Hitler's going along at a good clip.
    And suddenly, this questioner comes along and says,
    and what about the bicyclists?
    Because Hitler's been ranting about the Jews.
    And so this question comes, what about the bicyclists?
    And Hitler says, why the bicyclists?
    And the question is, why the Jews?
    Of course, it's a little misleading,
    because it suggests that there is no more
    rationale for focusing on the Jews
    than there is on the bicyclists.
    And in sort of an absolute way, that might be true.
    If you're asking what had Jews actually
    done to merit the attention that they received,
    the answer is nothing, you see.
    And any more than they had throughout the development
    of Christian history.
    I mean it's simply not the case that Jews were actually
    poisoning wells during the plague.
    Jews were dying just like everyone else.
    Nor is it true that they kidnapped children
    on the eve of Passover to use the blood of a Christian child
    to make the Passover wafers with, but millions of people
    believe that--
    still continue to believe that, incidentally,
    in Spain and some other places.
    Sounds strange, doesn't it?
    But yet, in another sense, I mean.
    If you take the history of antisemitism,
    as developed within the Christian tradition,
    into account, then one has to ask the question, what
    other target was there?
    I mean, if you're trying to mobilize people
    around an enemy, who's the enemy going to be?
    And remember, it has to be sort of a universally significant
    enemy.
    And it has to be an enemy that will suffice
    to account both for the threat of Bolshevism
    and for the threat of runaway capitalism.
    The image of the Jewish banker, right, the Rothschilds?
    And the threat from the East, communism?
    Well, Jews were responsible for both of those in Hitler's mind.
    And he said, well, how can that be?
    They cancel each other out, don't they?
    I mean, it's either or.
    I mean either Jews are good capitalists
    or they're communists.
    They can't be both.
    I mean if they're mounting both those threats,
    then they're not as shrewd as we have given them credit for.
    But to make that appeal, you see is
    to become far too rational in your analysis,
    far too rational.
    What you have to see is the way in which an ideology can
    take over one's consciousness and remove the possibility
    of rational analysis.
    One simply believes things.
    Now, it would be unkind to suggest
    that, in the present administration,
    there might be some parallels in that process,
    in terms of our view of the threat of communism
    in our own hemisphere.
    So I invite you to think on that, because I'm not going
    to say anything about that.
    But you can think about that, right?
    I mean, there's a communist under every rock, right?
    Or almost every rock, certainly behind every wastebasket.
    So if one asks whether we can get rid of antisemitism,
    my answer is no, probably not.
    Antisemitism is going to be with us.
    I brought along an article from the Minneapolis Star.
    This is from February 10th, 1982.
    But it's an article on Poland scapegoats.
    Jews take blame for economy, as always.
    And also for Solidarity--
    why is there such a thing as Solidarity?
    Well, it's a Jewish plot.
    Now, something you should know about the Jewish community
    in Poland today.
    There were about 3 and 1/4 million Jews
    in Poland before World War II and before the annihilation
    process.
    Today, there are about 6,000 Jews in Poland.
    6,000 Jews and not a single rabbi in Poland.
    And yet, who gets blamed?
    It raises an interesting question, it seems to me.
    What if there were no Jews at all
    in Poland or maybe anywhere?
    What if there were no Jews anywhere in the world?
    Well, the answer, it seems to me, is clear.
    We'd have to invent them, right?
    We'd have to conjure them up.
    If there were literally no Jews, because Poland is close enough,
    as it is, to having literally no Jews.
    But there's antisemitism in this country, as well.
    It's been present for a long time in groups,
    like the Ku Klux Klan, white nativist political movements.
    It's present now in groups like Posse Comitatus
    and some of the fringe political groups, the survivalist groups,
    that operate out in the hinterlands,
    in Idaho and Wyoming.
    Wild stuff, really wild stuff.
    There's an interesting article, I
    think, last month's issue of the Atlantic magazine,
    an article about those folks out there, and how
    they view the world.
    And how they view the world is peculiar.
    It's strange.
    It's frightening.
    It makes me glad I live in the Twin Cities.
    I don't know how things are here in River Falls.
    But in Twin Cities, folks, for the most part,
    view the world in what I think are ordinary ways.
    That is they don't see a plot every time
    they look over their shoulder.
    But people who get caught up in these groups do.
    And the chief fomenters of those plots
    turn out consistently to be Jews, Jewish bankers,
    Jewish businessmen, Jewish television and movie
    personalities and producers.
    Jews are everywhere.
    Jews control this country.
    That's an old canard.
    That's an old argument.
    And it's still present.
    So I don't think antisemitism is going to go away.
    On the other hand, there is some hope.
    Because, at least some within the Christian community--
    and I think it's a growing number of Christian thinkers--
    have begun to take seriously the significance of the Holocaust
    for Christian faith.
    And not only that, but church bodies, as well,
    have begun to think things in a somewhat different way
    as a result of the Holocaust.
    There was a statement from the Second Vatican Council,
    for example, on religious liberty.
    The Second Vatican Council was held from 1962 to 1965.
    And it came out with a declaration
    on religious freedom, which was striking,
    because it allowed the validity of other traditions
    beyond Catholicism, beyond that version of Christian faith.
    And in particular, it pointed to the long relationship
    between Jews and Christians, between Judaism
    and the Church, that had endured over the centuries.
    And it deplored outright acts of hostility and antisemitism.
    Now, a lot of people said, well, that didn't go very far.
    But it was a start.
    It was a start.
    In 1983, there was a meeting of the World Lutheran Federation--
    Lutheran World Federation in Stockholm,
    which came out with a statement rejecting
    Luther's theology of the Jews in that one pivotal writing
    of his.
    And they said, at one point, "we hold
    that an honest historical treatment of Luther's attacks
    on the Jews takes away from modern antisemites
    the assumption that they may legitimately
    call on the authority of Luther's name
    to bless their antisemitism.
    We insist that Luther does not support
    racial antisemitism, nationalistic antisemitism,
    and political antisemitism.
    Even the deplorable religious antisemitism
    of the 16th century, to which Luther's attacks
    made important contribution, is a horrible anachronism
    when translated to the conditions
    of the modern world."
    So there are some signs of hope.
    And in terms of what Christian thinkers are trying to do--
    and I brought some of this material along with me today.
    You're welcome to have a look at it, after class, if you'd like.
    Some of the books are on the list I gave you.
    It seems to me that one can talk about some key concerns that
    have emerged on the part of Christian thinkers.
    Because this whole notion that the Holocaust is an event that
    is equally significant for Christians and for Jews and,
    I would argue, for liberal humanists, as well--
    | mean, I think anyone who still clings to the notion
    that human beings are somehow possessed of an eminent reason,
    rationality, and that, therefore, they
    can get a clear cut handle on the world and move it forward,
    as it were, the whole notion of progress,
    that we are rational beings, and, because we're
    rational beings, we can sort out the world in an appropriate way
    and move it forward, has to be looked at rather sharply
    given the conditions of our time.
    Because, if one can make the case that reason,
    in the context of science and technology, politics, perhaps,
    have brought benefits, that democracy is an advance,
    when it appears and is maintained over totalitarian
    or fascist forms of government-- and I think most people would
    agree with that--
    at the same time, we have to look
    at the downside of that, that is at the incredible problems
    that technology brings.
    If if brings solutions, it also brings problems.
    But even beyond that, it seems to me
    that the kind of liberalism that grew out
    of the 18th and 19th centuries was
    one which made the position of Jews at best ambiguous.
    And it's not by accident, perhaps,
    that some of the most virulent antisemitic statements
    can be found emanating from the context of that sort
    of liberal humanistic outlook.
    So that's something that liberal humanists have to answer to,
    have to try to take into account.
    And while I wouldn't want to identify myself
    as a liberal humanist, there's a sense
    in which we're all liberal humanists,
    because we're all children of the Enlightenment.
    I mean we live in a period a post-enlightenment period,
    for example, some might even say in a post-Christian period.
    But, nevertheless, we still live in a period
    in which a great deal of hope is placed on the virtue,
    on the power of reason, rationality,
    when extended into the context of technology,
    to solve the problems that we face today.
    And I think we need to examine that.
    It's clear, of course, that the Holocaust is a crucial event
    in the Jewish community.
    There is no question about that, whatever.
    In fact, there are two crucial events
    in the contemporary history of that community.
    One is the Holocaust, and the second
    is the re-establishment of the State of Israel.
    And those form, as it were, the two
    foci around which a good deal of contemporary Jewish thought
    revolves.
    Jewish thinkers approach those issues, in different ways,
    and the Holocaust in particular.
    And I suppose, just to make a comment, for a moment,
    on that point, if I had to indicate where the breaking
    point is, it seems to me that it lies in the question
    whether the Holocaust really represents something radically
    new, in the experience of the Jewish community,
    or whether, in a sense, it is simply
    a continuation of the sort of catastrophe and tragedy
    that the Jewish community has known over the centuries
    beforehand.
    And on that point, not surprisingly,
    one finds some strikingly different positions emerging.
    One Jewish thinker, Richard Rubenstein--
    I brought one of his books along, I think,
    The Cunning of History.
    Well, it was really his earlier book, I think,
    a collection of essays, entitled After Auschwitz,
    which explored that whole question.
    And Rubenstein simply came to the conclusion
    that, after Auschwitz, it was no longer possible to believe
    in the God of the covenant or, indeed, to believe in a God who
    somehow controls history and moves it providentially,
    from beginning to end, to some sort of appropriate conclusion.
    That if the Jewish people went up
    in smoke during the Holocaust, so, too, did the covenant.
    And one cannot believe any longer in a covenant,
    in the God of the covenant, in the chosenness of the Jewish
    people.
    Although Rubenstein also recognizes that,
    psychologically, it's next to impossible
    to get rid of that notion, the notion of having been chosen,
    having been called to a certain kind of task and responsibility
    within the context of history.
    But what Rubenstein proposed is, in its own way,
    somewhat interesting.
    He proposed, nevertheless, a retention
    of the tradition, a retention of the tradition
    of Judaism, the holidays, the festivals.
    Because those give individuals an identity.
    They root them in a community.
    And they are, therefore, important.
    They are psychologically and historically important even if
    not theologically important.
    That is they don't link us to any transcendent reality.
    They don't link us to God.
    Because after Auschwitz, one cannot believe any longer
    in the God of the covenant.
    The concept of peoplehood remains central.
    The concept of family is important.
    And individuals grow to some kind of maturity and identity
    only within the context of the community
    not as isolated autonomous beings.
    And so Rubenstein retained the tradition at that level.
    He even talked about a kind of neopaganism
    that is a celebration of the Earth, a celebration
    of the givenness of life, a celebration of the dynamics
    that enters into that and set within the context
    of community.
    But the problem or the irony, it seems to me,
    is that, in appealing to a kind of neopaganism,
    he veers uncomfortably close to the sort of thing
    that one found emerging in Nazi ideology.
    That, too, was a kind of neopaganism.
    That, too, was a celebration of blood and Earth
    and soil and identity within community.
    And the parallels, in that sense, are rather striking.
    But now, there are other thinkers
    in the Jewish community who say, well, the Holocaust is
    significant, yes.
    But it's not significant in the sense
    that it requires a total recasting
    of the tradition, a total rethinking of the tradition.
    People like Jacob Neusner, for example,
    who teaches at Brown University, wrote an article
    a number of years ago, in The Journal of Religion,
    titled "The Implications of the Holocaust."
    It was a very interesting article,
    because what Neusner did was to argue that the Holocaust, that
    is Holocaust theology--
    and Holocaust theology, in either Jewish or Christian
    form, didn't emerge until toward the end of the '60s, early part
    of the '70s.
    It was a delayed reaction as it were.
    It took time for people to assimilate that event.
    First of all to come to know about it in any thorough way.
    I mean during the event, itself, there were certainly
    people in all the Allied governments who knew about it,
    because they were told, again and again.
    And they did not act.
    But it was not known, generally.
    It was not known, generally.
    And so it took a while for the event
    to emerge and become assimilated.
    It took even longer for people in the Jewish and Christian
    communities to begin thinking about the event,
    to begin to see that, here, is an event that
    has theological implications, that
    requires theological thought.
    And when that occurred, it was toward the end of the '60s
    and into the '70s, when both Christian and Jewish thinkers
    began to focus on the Holocaust and, in a sense,
    to make that a kind of point of departure
    for theological reflection and construction.
    Well, you also know that what was going
    on in the society at that time.
    Because we're talking, here, primarily about American
    thinkers within the Christian and Jewish communities.
    We were involved in the civil rights movement.
    We were involved in massive protests
    against the Vietnam War, a debilitating war that
    seemed simply to drain resources and human lives,
    endlessly, on both sides, without any perceivable outcome
    and, therefore, in the minds of many,
    to be an unjustifiable war, an unjust conflict.
    Now Neusner ties that to the rediscovery
    of a kind of self-identity on the part of American Jews
    because of the State of Israel.
    What does that mean?
    It means that, finally, Jews have a place that is really
    their own, that they define, and where they are not
    beholden to or dependent on the goodwill or good wishes
    of any other group to sustain their rights.
    Israel is a Jewish state, which does not
    mean that other people can't live there.
    Other people do live there.
    Other groups live there.
    It does mean, though, that it is defined primarily
    by its Jewishness.
    And that, too, is something of a problem,
    because there are tensions, at the moment,
    between Orthodox Jews and so-called secular
    Jews, that is Jews who no longer live
    within the context of the tradition.
    Now, what conclusion did Neusner draw from that?
    Well, he said that we can understand
    this upsurge of interest, in the Holocaust and this attempt
    to build a theology on it, as a reflection
    of the general unrest and ennui that
    is present in American society at the present time.
    In other words, it's a passing thing.
    But he also argued that it was a mistake.
    Because you don't need to do anything, really,
    to come to terms with the Holocaust.
    Jews have known how to deal with catastrophe
    since at least the year 70 of the Common Era
    and the destruction of the second temple,
    and certainly down through the resulting pogroms
    and expulsions that made up a good portion of their history
    within the context of the Christian culture.
    So in that sense, what Neusner argues
    is that the tradition suffices.
    Jews already know how to deal with catastrophe.
    And the Holocaust, then, is not unique.
    The Holocaust is simply another instance
    of what Jews have lived through countless times before.
    And so at the end, as if to answer the implicit question
    in the title of the article, "The Implications
    of the Holocaust," Neusner said--
    --this book, The Tremendum.
    And The Tremendum is simply a lengthy essay
    on the radical nature of the Holocaust and the challenges
    that it poses to Jewish belief and outlook.
    For Cohen, the Holocaust is something radically new.
    The near destruction of a people, in his mind,
    cannot be easily compared or paralleled with the expulsion
    of a people.
    That's different.
    There's a progression involved that sets the one event apart
    from the other.
    Raul Hilberg, in his book, The Destruction
    of the European Jews sets up a kind of process of exclusion,
    if you will, as regards the Jewish community,
    that goes in three stages.
    And the first had to do with what Christians
    said to Jews, historically, which was that you have no
    right to live among us as Jews.
    That was the word from Christians.
    The word from secular rulers was, you have no right
    to live among us--
    the expulsion process.
    And the third came from the Nazis--
    you have no right to live, period.
    Now there's a progression, there,
    that embodies significant differences in moving
    from the first to the last.
    There's a significant difference between saying, to Jews,
    you have no right to live among us as Jews, therefore convert.
    Or you have no right to live among us, therefore leave.
    And you have no right to live.
    The last undergirds a policy of genocide,
    legitimizes a policy of extermination.
    The preceding two do not.
    And so in that sense and also in view of the very large degree
    to which the Nazi program succeeded
    in ridding Europe of Jews, Cohen sees it
    as something that is radically new
    and, therefore, that requires a rethinking of the nature of God
    and of what can be said about God in relationship
    to that event.
    Because what can be said about God in relationship
    to that event will contain implications
    as to what can be said about Jewish belief, about
    the Jewish people, about the covenant,
    and what can no longer be said.
    In contrast to that, again, another thinker,
    who argues that the Holocaust can be contained
    within tradition, is Irving Rosenbaum,
    who wrote this very interesting book, The Holocaust
    and Halakhah.
    Halakhah has to do with the kinds of legal decisions
    or judgments that are made on the basis of Jewish law.
    What may Jews do in this or that particular situation?
    And what Rosenbaum argues, in a very fascinating way
    in this book, because he gives example after example,
    is the way in which, even within the context of the ghettos,
    which was the preliminary stage to being deported to the death
    centers in Poland, and indeed, even in the death camps
    themselves, even at Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz
    and so forth, Jews continued to rely on halakhah for deciding
    how they were to live and what they were to do.
    For example, may Jews ignore the requirement
    of fasting on Yom Kippur if they already face starvation?
    May they ignore that requirement?
    And whom does one go to for an answer?
    Well, one goes to the rabbi.
    One goes to one trained in Jewish law to give an answer.
    Another question-- if women know that becoming pregnant
    means that they will be automatically put
    to death, if they become pregnant,
    is it then legitimate to perform an abortion?
    That was another question that emerged.
    And this emerged within the context
    of the camps themselves.
    And again, the community went to rabbis for an answer.
    Now, Rosenbaum's point is that the halakhah did not
    collapse during the Holocaust.
    The rule of law continued to be what it had always been,
    namely that focal point within the context of Jewish identity
    that sustains a community, through whatever catastrophe
    it faces, and enables it to emerge on the other side.
    So Rosenbaum mounts a fairly strong argument
    for the consistency and the validity of the halakhah.
    Indeed, his opening statement, I think,
    is very interesting on that point.
    It comes in the very first chapter.
    "It has become almost an article of faith
    that the Holocaust was without precedent in Jewish experience.
    It was not.
    But the mistaken assumption that it was
    has not only spawned an entire literature of Holocaust
    theology but also has been responsible for an almost
    total unawareness of the role played
    by the halakhah in the lives and deaths of the Holocaust
    victims."
    What Rosenbaum, then, is saying that the Holocaust was not
    unique, in that sense, just as Neusner
    argued that in his article.
    And when we turn to the context of Christian reflection
    on the Holocaust, then we encounter, obviously,
    a different set of circumstances.
    Christians are not asking whether the tradition
    was one that enabled them to cope with the Holocaust.
    They have a different sort of burden.
    Namely, they have to deal with the fact
    that their tradition contributed, indirectly
    at least, to making the Holocaust possible,
    that the negative view of Judaism and Jewish people,
    Christian antisemitism, was a factor in the attempt
    to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
    That's what Christians have to deal with.
    And so this has given rise to a somewhat different agenda.
    Christians need to reexamine their tradition,
    from the ground up, and to enter into a sustained process
    of reconstruction at various points.
    And let me just mention four, that I
    think are absolutely crucial, and the fifth
    that is also important but that has not
    been taken up by as many.
    The first thing that Christians need to think about
    is their fundamental relationship to Judaism.
    What is the relationship between those two traditions?
    How are Christians to understand Jews?
    And more pointedly, how are Christians to understand
    the fact that, for over 20 centuries, now,
    Jews have refused to become like them,
    have insisted on remaining who they are,
    on retaining their own identity?
    How can we make sense out of that?
    Now, they don't mean how can we make sense out of it
    from any kind of empirical point of view,
    as though there might be some sort of hitherto undiscovered
    historical or psychological or sociological
    explanation that will unlock the key to that mystery
    and let us get on with the business
    then of converting Jews.
    But the question is rather different, namely,
    how can we understand that theologically, in a positive
    rather than a negative way?
    Is it possible, is it conceivable
    that there might be a positive reason why Jews have refused
    to convert, despite the best efforts of Christians
    down through the centuries?
    Why do Jews insist on remaining Jews?
    And various thinkers have addressed themselves to that.
    One of the earliest was an Anglican theologian,
    James Parkes.
    That name is spelled P-A-R-K-E-S.
    Parkes wrote a number of studies, the best of which is--
    I think it's "The Struggle Between the Church
    and the Synagogue," but it deals with
    the early historical development of Christianity
    as over against its parent religion.
    But he wrote a number of other books, as well.
    And one thing that he argued for, very strongly--
    same sort of thing that Rosemary Ruether argues
    for in her book, Faith and Fratricide,
    and that A. Roy and Alice Eckardt argue
    for in their book, Long Night's Journey Into Day,
    and that A. Roy Eckardt argued for in his earlier books,
    namely that Christians ought to stop trying to convert Jews,
    stop trying to make Christians out of them.
    Why should they do that?
    Well, because Jews don't need to be converted.
    Jews are already with God.
    Jews already have a relationship with God.
    And they have that in and through the original covenant,
    which has not been set aside or abrogated
    but is still in force.
    How do they justify that?
    Well, by a careful reading of Romans 9 to 11,
    those chapters in which Paul wrestled with the fact
    that most of his fellow Jews did not
    acknowledge Jesus as the Christ but stayed Jews.
    And Paul uses the image, there, of the root and the branch,
    Christian faith being the branch that has now
    been grafted onto the root of Jewish faith,
    out of which it comes, by which it is nourished and sustained.
    And these thinkers argue in a similar way,
    that the Jewish people had the primary,
    the original relationship with God, the God of the covenant,
    the God of history.
    Christians are privileged to have
    a place, within the context of that covenant,
    through the figure of Jesus.
    Jesus is not one then who sets up discontinuity
    between Jews and Christians, between the synagogue
    and the church, but rather one who
    opens up the original covenant to Gentiles, to non-Jews.
    Jews are already with God.
    Why would we convert them?
    It is Christians who need to be brought
    into the household of God.
    Its Gentiles who need to be brought
    into the household of God in and through the figure of Jesus.
    And so there can be no legitimate agenda
    of conversion.
    Christians have no need to try to convert Jews
    to their particular outlook.
    Now, that raises some interesting possibilities
    for the notion of dialogue, which,
    it seems to me, in the case of the relationship
    between Christianity and Judaism is quite different
    than it is in the case of the relationship
    between Christianity and Buddhism
    or Islam or Hinduism or Daoism or any
    of the other major religious traditions of the world,
    in part because of the lengthy history
    that has developed between those two faith communities.
    We can't just ignore that.
    Christians have not been intertwined, historically,
    with Buddhists the way they have with Jews.
    Buddhists have not been placed, identified,
    given a role in the context of Christian theology
    in the way that Jews have.
    Jews were given an identity by Christians, a largely negative
    identity, except at the end of history, if you will.
    But that didn't happen in the case of Buddhists
    or Muslims or Hindus.
    So that the fundamental context of dialogue, it seems to me,
    is charged in a completely different way.
    And the other thing that makes dialogue between Jews
    and Christians different, it seems to me,
    is the fact that Christians still
    draw from and are nourished by certain key aspects of Judaism
    and the Jewish tradition.
    And here, I'm talking about Jewish scripture,
    which is still the larger part of Christian scripture.
    That's worth remembering.
    It's the larger part of Christian scripture
    or what became Christian scripture.
    39 books in the Old Testament.
    And together, they comprise a body
    of writings that are much lengthier than the 27
    writings, produced by the early Christian community, that
    make up the New Testament.
    The language about God, the imagery, the concepts,
    all of those are drawn from the Jewish tradition.
    Christians didn't invent anything.
    They borrowed, later.
    They borrowed from Greek philosophy.
    They borrowed from Plato and later from Aristotle.
    They had to.
    If you're going to talk theology,
    you have to have some kind of conceptual framework in which
    to do it.
    And philosophy provides a conceptual framework.
    And in that context, it was Greek philosophy
    that provided the concepts.
    But that's a different issue.
    If we're talking about fundamental concepts,
    like God, human, heaven, hell, covenant, grace,
    all of those concepts come straight out of Judaism.
    Christians didn't invent them.
    The right to pray, to give praise,
    adoration, where are the models for those taken from?
    From the context of Jewish worship.
    So in that sense, again, there is a unique dynamic present
    in any kind of encounter between Jews
    and Christians, any possibility of dialogue.
    But now, at the same time, one has
    to say that the hardest thing to get rid of, the hardest
    thing to get rid of for Christians,
    because it keeps coming back, like Banquo's ghost,
    to form a hidden agenda, is this old conversionist
    motif, this old conversionist motif, that finally, somehow,
    some time, Jews really ought to think seriously
    about becoming Christians.
    Very hard to get rid of that--
    extremely hard to overcome that.
    But at least, some within the Christian community
    are beginning to think about that.
    Not everyone.
    It was only a few years ago that the Missouri Synod
    of the Lutheran Church--
    are any of you involved in that, incidentally?
    Any Missouri Synod folks here?
    Any Wisconsin Synod folks here?
    The last thing I want to do is offend anyone.
    The Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church
    produced a brochure.
    And it was a brochure that was designed to provide guidance
    in interacting with Jews.
    And the outcome of such interactions
    was to be the possibility of conversion.
    The only thing is, it didn't quite come off.
    It was a horrible thing.
    It was terrible.
    It used cartoons for one thing.
    And in those cartoons were present
    many of the traditional stereotypes of Jews, the notion
    that Jews, universally, have a certain kind of appearance
    and speak in a certain way and leer.
    Jews leer.
    Everyone knows that, right?
    I remember the first time I went down to Vanderbilt University.
    It was a workshop on Judaism, a 10-day workshop on Judaism.
    And one Friday evening, we went to services
    at one of the local synagogues.
    And I remember.
    And I thought myself enlightened at the time.
    We all like to think of ourselves as enlightened,
    don't we?
    No one would ever identify himself or herself
    as unenlightened.
    So we automatically assume we're enlightened.
    But suddenly, here I was in the midst of these Jews
    for Friday evening service.
    And I realized, with a shock, that they
    had blonde hair, lots of them, and they
    spoke in Southern accents.
    That was shocking.
    I mean, I assumed that, even though it was the South,
    Jews would still sound the same.
    They sound the way they do in Minneapolis and Saint Paul,
    right?
    I mean that's the way Jews are supposed to sound.
    But that's the way people are supposed to sound, isn't it?
    I mean everyone sounds strange if you go
    South of the Mason-Dixon line.
    So we all have these stereotypes locked fairly deeply
    in our psyches.
    And they're ferreted out at the oddest times
    and the oddest ways.
    For the Lutherans of the Missouri Synod,
    they came rolling out when they wanted to put together
    this little brochure that would help folks go out
    and encounter Jews.
    But the old agenda was still there,
    the old agenda called conversion.
    Some thinkers, at least, are beginning
    to move away from that.
    A second area of concern has to do with the negative images
    of Jews in the New Testament.
    And we looked at some of those passages.
    What can be done about that?
    What do you do when every Holy Week--
    and this happens because--
    My wife and I like to go up to Saint John's University
    for Palm Sunday services, because I
    spent some time up there at the Ecumenical Institute.
    And I even went up and lived with the Benedictines
    for a month, which my wife thought was a little strange.
    But she let me do it anyway.
    So we went up for services.
    And the reading, for Palm Sunday,
    was the entire story of the arrest
    and trial and crucifixion of Jesus
    from the Gospel of Matthew.
    And it was read straight without any commentary of any sort.
    Now, the question that one has to ask,
    the question the Christian community has to ask
    is what happens when we continue to use scriptures, which embody
    negative attitudes and hostility toward Jews,
    what happens when we continue to use those, straight,
    without any accompanying remarks that set those in a context,
    you see?
    The context being that of the tension between two groups,
    within Judaism, in the first century,
    where one can understand that it was a political situation.
    And there were polemically charged comments
    floating back and forth.
    What we have, in the New Testament, is in a sense
    a record of one side of the polemics.
    The other side didn't get in.
    The other side didn't make it.
    How do we deal with that?
    It seems to me that we have to begin
    to rethink the whole context of liturgy,
    the whole process of worship.
    We have to become morally attuned to the problems created
    for the Christian community by its own scriptures,
    and the degree to which those scriptures have supported
    and extended, over the centuries, an attitude
    of antisemitism within the Church, which is not
    quite the same as saying that the New Testament, itself, is
    antisemitic.
    I think one can say that portions of the New Testament
    are anti-Judaic, if, by that, one means the larger
    context of Judaism that was contemporaneous
    with the emergence of what became the Christian community.
    But I don't think you can quite say
    that the New Testament, itself, is antisemitic.
    After all, the first Christians were, themselves, Jews.
    What I think you have to look at is
    the difference between the impact of those writings
    in their own immediate context and what
    happened, historically, when those passages get
    lifted out of context and used as ideological weapons.
    Fortunately, there are scholars who were also
    concerned with that, who are working
    on approaches to worship that will attempt
    to use those passages, yes.
    I mean, we're not talking about the sort of thing
    that Thomas Jefferson did.
    You may know the story.
    Jefferson didn't believe in the resurrection.
    So what Jefferson did was simply to take his New Testament
    and snip out all those passages that talk
    about the resurrection.
    That's one way of dealing with the problem.
    But that's not likely to happen.
    We need to take the scriptures, as they are, but think
    about them and have that process of thought
    reshape our whole attitude toward liturgy in addition.
    And some people are beginning to work on that.
    And there are also some very good studies
    that are emerging about the New Testament period
    and about the figure of Jesus, that set Jesus firmly
    in the context of his Jewish environment,
    that re-identified Jesus, as a Jew, if you will.
    How far people have moved away from that is indicated,
    I think, by a remark made by Julius Streicher
    during the Nazi period, one of the outstanding Nazi
    propagandists of the day.
    He published something called Der Stürmer.
    Streicher said, at one point, that Jesus Christ
    was the greatest Aryan who ever lived.
    How would one say that?
    The only way one would say that is
    if one has somehow become convinced
    that Jesus was not a Jew.
    He wasn't a Jew.
    He was an Aryan.
    And if you've seen some of the paintings that
    have been done of Jesus, one can see why one might believe that.
    Jesus is not usually painted--
    well, I mean, flowing hair, usually sort of gold,
    light features, Nordic-type.
    And one can come to believe that Jesus really wasn't a Jew.
    EP Saunders, English New Testament scholar,
    has written a book recently called Jesus and Judaism.
    It's a wonderful book, well worth reading,
    which tries to reset Jesus in the context of the Judaism
    of his day and tries to identify the central ingredients
    in the message of Jesus that might
    have antagonized the Jewish religious leaders of the day.
    Why was he put to death?
    It makes no sense on the face of it.
    Why was Jesus put to death?
    Saunders tries to answer that question.
    A third question that Christian thinkers are dealing with--
    let me just mention two more, fairly quickly.
    One is the whole area of Christology.
    That is how is Jesus Christ to be understood today,
    theologically?
    What is the significance of Christ?
    And that gets into the question of the original and subsequent
    covenant.
    Is Christ the ending of the first covenant?
    Do we begin, now, with only one covenant?
    And one gets then into theologies of discontinuity
    and theologies of continuity.
    Some Christian thinkers still maintain theologies
    of discontinuity, that is Jesus represents
    a breaking, total breaking with the old covenant
    and the institution of a new.
    And there is no continuity between them at all.
    The problem with that approach is
    that it's very difficult, then, to eliminate the kind of latent
    hostility toward the original covenant that's
    likely to creep in.
    But people, like Rosemary Ruether and A. Roy Eckardt,
    argue for a theology of continuity,
    in which the covenant established by Jesus
    is seen as an extension and confirmation
    of the original covenant, not a breaking with it.
    And that raises the possibility of a positive interaction,
    then, between the Jewish and the Christian traditions.
    If you'd like a good, quick summary of approaches
    to Christology, this is a good book
    by Michael McGarry, Christology after Auschwitz.
    And what McGarry does, in that, is just
    to summarize all of the different approaches
    to an understanding of the figure of Jesus
    that have emerged, within the context of Christian theology,
    since the Holocaust or since the advent of Holocaust theology,
    and the way in which thinkers are wrestling
    with this key question, who is the figure of Christ, today,
    and how can we understand that figure, theologically,
    in such a way as not automatically to end
    by excluding the legitimacy of Jewish faith and life?
    Another issue is the question of theodicy.
    That is, how can we justify the reality and nature of God
    in view of the suffering that was
    manifested in the Holocaust?
    What sort of a God can we believe in?
    Is it possible to believe in God at all?
    Christian thinkers are wrestling with that sort of question
    as well--
    Jewish thinkers, also.
    People like Emil Fackenheim, for example,
    wrestle with that question.
    In the Christian context, some of the writers in the Auschwitz
    volume that I brought, Beginning of a New Era,
    raise that question also.
    That's another issue.
    Can we believe in a God, who is both all powerful
    and all loving and in control of history?
    Can we believe in that God, any longer, after Auschwitz?
    That's the key issue.
    And let me mention one final issue, because I
    know I've run on too long.
    And there isn't much time for questions.
    The State of Israel--
    Christian thinkers are trying to come up
    with a theological understanding of the State of Israel,
    without seeing it as a kind of easy success answer
    to the tragedy of the Holocaust.
    I mean there's a tendency to do that,
    isn't there, if you think about it?
    And then you can almost see the parallels
    to traditional Christian theology coming
    into view, crucifixion and resurrection, Holocaust
    and State of Israel.
    Elie Wiesel has argued strenuously
    against that sort of transition.
    But it has to do with the place of the land in Jewish theology.
    What sense can Christian thinkers
    make out of that story and its fulfillment, which,
    according to mainstream Christian theology,
    in its anti-Judaic form, was not supposed to have taken place
    but did.
    I mean, the re-establishment of Israel, you see,
    flies in the face of the notion of the "Wandering Jew."
    Because, in Israel, Jews have come home.
    They have a home, a place of their own, a space.
    Now, the hope for the land has always been there.
    It wasn't envisioned as coming through a movement,
    like Zionism, out of the 19th century.
    It was envisioned as coming about through an act of God,
    which is one reason why many Orthodox Jews, even those who
    live in Israel, deny the legitimacy
    of the State of Israel.
    There's some interesting ironies tied up with that.
    But that's another thing that Christian thinkers
    have tried to sort through, the legitimacy
    of the State of Israel.
    Finally, let me just indicate, in my judgment,
    there's a host of moral issues, as well,
    that come out of the Holocaust, having
    to do with professional ethics.
    Remember, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, all these folks
    became involved in the process of killing.
    And we need to be concerned about that
    and think about that.
    The establishment of moral norms, the setting
    of moral limits, all of those are
    questions that come on the moral side,
    it seems to me, out of the context of the Holocaust.
    And I don't mean to suggest that one
    can separate, in any neat way, theology from morality.
    I think they're very closely connected.
    And the notion of a kind of universal rationality
    that we can appeal to, as a foundation for morality, I
    think that's called into question by the Holocaust.
    If we had more time, I'd say more about that.
    But we're out of time, now.
    Thank you very much.
    You've been very patient.
    I'd be happy to try to respond to any questions,
    if you have them, for a little bit.
    I'd like to officially thank you,
    since we're sort of out of time.
    I'd just like to say, officially, thank you.
    And if have questions, maybe we can handle it individually.
    Sure.
    That'd be fine.
    Stay and spend a few minutes.
    Thank you.
    Thank you very much.
    [APPLAUSE]

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Robert Willis discusses teaching theology and the Holocaust from a Christian point of view; how the Christian tradition contributed to the theory of racial inferiority; massacres and genocides in history; the role played by technology and bureaucracy in the Holocaust; the Christian history of antisemitism; and antisemitism in the United States.
    Interviewee
    Robert Willis
    Date
    interview:  1982 June

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

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    Keywords & Subjects

    Geographic Name
    Europe. United States.
    Personal Name
    Willis, Robert.

    Administrative Notes

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    Provenance
    The interview with Robert Willis was conducted in June 1982 by the University of Wisconsin, River Falls in conjunction with a summer teacher's workshop taught at the school. The video contains a spoken testimony in front of an audience followed by a question and answer session filmed in the university's TV studio. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum received a copy of the testimony in October 1993.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:08:55
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    Oral history interview with Gloria Fredkove

    Oral history interview with Gloria Fredkove

    Oral History

    Gloria Fredkove (née Yolanda Bass), born in Italy in May 1943, describes growing up on the lower East Side of New York; her mother dying in 1971; moving to Colorado at age 29; getting married; moving to Minnesota in 1975; her mother’s upbringing as an ultra-orthodox Jew in Poland before World War II; her mother making a living as a singer in France during the war and escaping to Italy during the German occupation of France; her mother’s siblings perishing in concentration camps; how she, her grandparents, mother, and brother are the only survivors of her family; her mother’s imprisonment in Italy; blocking a lot of the information her mother told her; having a sister who had been adopted; her mother giving birth in 1945 in a shelter in Oswego, NY; life after coming to the United States; feeling isolated and ostracized; her mother being a rebellious youth but retaining her faith; her reluctance to talk about the Holocaust; experiencing survivor’s guilt; attending a meeting of children of survivors; writing about the Holocaust; what her mother told her about her father; being in contact with Ruth Gruber, who wrote a book (Haven) that includes a picture of herself with her mother and brother; her mother’s love for the US; changing her name when she became a citizen; trying to locate her sister Susanah; feeling that she missed out on her childhood; antisemitism; and not telling her children much about the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jacob Freier

    Oral history interview with Jacob Freier

    Oral History

    Jacob Freier describes his views on the origins of the Holocaust; being taken with others to clean trucks for two days; returning home (Łódź, Poland); being given soup surreptitiously by one of the SS officers; having to evacuate to the ghetto on various occasions; the shooting of 80 Jews in the ghetto; his middle class family being deported to a textile factory on the Czech border; later being taken to Chancelehow (phonetic spelling); being chosen with his brother to work in the mines; the death of his mother, sister, and brother on August 22, 1942; his work in the ghetto; his Kapo, who was responsible for him corning and going to work; meeting Jewish resistance forces; the brutality increasing after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; being selected for deportation to Treblinka; jumping from the train with others; hiding in barns; sneaking back into the ghetto; being liberated January 1945; and his escape from the Skarzysko ghetto.

    Oral history interview with Hinda Kibort

    Oral history interview with Hinda Kibort

    Oral History

    Hinda Kibort, born in Lithuania, describes her Latvian parents; attending a German-speaking private school in Riga, Latvia; being transferred to a Hebrew high school in 1933 because her parents were boycotting German schools; attending a university; the beginning of the war; attending school in Vilnius, Lithuania; the Russians arresting whole families and transferring them to Siberia; the German invasion; antisemitism in Lithuania; losing their citizenship and having to wear yellow stars; her father being taken then released; being put into a ghetto; the creation of the Jewish council; her work in the ghetto; radios in the ghetto; the ghetto being surrounded on November 5, 1943 and the Romanian SS being brought in; the removal of the children, elderly, and sick; hearing bombardments in January 1944; being deported to Stutthof concentration camp; the selections upon their arrival; her work digging anti-tank ditches; being marched in January 1945 to a smaller town, where they were told to run into the forest; being shot at by the guards and the death of her mother; surviving with a few other women; hiding in a barn; being liberated by the Russian Army; being taken by truck to Lithuania after a few weeks; receiving passports in October 1945 along with her father and brother, who had survived Dachau; joining an underground organization and going to Brest-Litovsk (Brzesć Litewski, Poland) then Warsaw, Poland; antisemitism in Poland; crossing into Czechoslovakia; going to Austria then Munich, Germany; remaining in Germany until 1950 when they immigrated to the United States; visiting Dachau in 1974 with her family (she shares photographs and films from this trip); and her husband surviving Dachau.

    Oral history interview with Robert E. Matteson

    Oral history interview with Robert E. Matteson

    Oral History

    Robert E. Matteson describes capturing Obergruppenführer Ernest Kaltenbrunner; being in the Third Army head of a counter-intelligence unit under the 80th Infantry Division; coming upon the concentration camp Ebensee; the conditions in the camp; his travels through Austria looking for Kaltenbrunner; tracking Kaltenbrunner to a remote cabin in the mountains; being in charge of security at the Nuremberg trials; visiting some infamous Nazis in their cell blocks, including Herman Goerring and Julius Streicher; the hanging of Kaltenbrunner for his crimes; meeting Albert Speer in Heidelburg, Germany in 1978 and his discussion with him; his 1947 trip with Harold Stassen to Moscow, Russia and meeting with Stalin; and his most recent diplomatic mission trying to open up communications between the US and Cuba.

    Oral history interview with Kay Bonner Nee

    Oral history interview with Kay Bonner Nee

    Oral History

    Kay Bonner Nee describes being in Europe during World War II as an entertainer in the special services; being a civilian attached to the 5th Corp. of the First Army Special Services Division; driving around with another woman (Katie Cullen) in a truck that became a stage; spending some time in England before being sent to Utah Beach in Normandy, France 15 days after D-Day; performing even when V-1 rockets were flying; being present at the liberation of Paris, France; being mistaken as a German because her hat was similar to Nazi hats; staying several days in Eupen, Belgium and the death of her companion (Katie Cullen); being part of the second group that entered Buchenwald; conditions in the camp; bringing the towns people to the camp; and the importance of being aware of injustices.

    Oral history interview with Rosa Nissenholz

    Oral history interview with Rosa Nissenholz

    Oral History

    Rosa Nissenholz, born in Grobrovo, Poland, describes her parents and older brother; the invasion in 1939; having to wear a yellow star; the anti-Jewish laws; being taken when she was age 15 in January 1940 to a textile factory in Greenberg (possibly Grünberg concentration camp); being in shock when she arrived at the camp and remaining there for four year; the female inmates no longer menstruating; her work in the factory; visiting a factory in Sweden after the war; food in the camp; methods for survival; writing postcards home, but only in German; how on Sundays the prisoners would lie in their bunks and talk about their lives before the war; stealing yarn from the factory; her brother being taken six months after her to a men's forced labor camp; feeling lucky that she never got really sick in the camp; being forced to march for four weeks in the winter; being taken in cattle cars to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated by the British; learning of her brother’s death; going to Sweden on a boat and having gangrene in her foot from the death march; being in the hospital for seven months; antisemitism before the war; moving to the United States in 1947; meeting her husband Paul in St. Paul, MN and how he also survived the Holocaust; survivors in the Twin Cities area; and her thoughts on Israel.

    Oral history interview with Henry Oertelt

    Oral history interview with Henry Oertelt

    Oral History

    Henry Oertelt, born in 1921 in Berlin, Germany, discusses the rise of the concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; Hitler’s rise to power; book burnings; being excluded from school activities because he was Jewish; antisemitism and the discrimination of Jews; apprenticing as a furniture maker at age 14 in 1935; Kristallnacht in 1938; the beginning of the war and being forced to do manual labor; working on road building; being put in a factory to make furniture; being taken to Theresienstadt; being taken to Auschwitz; conditions in the camp; his work making furniture; being marched to Birkenau and Flossenbürg; and being liberated in April 1945.

    Oral history interview with Robert Ross

    Oral history interview with Robert Ross

    Oral History

    Dr. Robert Ross (the minister of the American Baptist Church and a professor at the University of Minnesota) discusses his research on the American Christian during the Holocaust; the underground religious presses in the 1930s; death camps being named in religious publishing in 1943; the Roman Catholic Church during the war; the myths regarding Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler; antisemitism in the United States, particularly Minneapolis, MN; how the US could have responded differently; the Evian-Le-Bain Conference in 1938; revisionists and Holocaust deniers; Apartheid; stories of religious perseverance in Dachau; the Depression; and the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

    Oral history interview with Felicia Weingarten

    Oral history interview with Felicia Weingarten

    Oral History

    Felicia Weingarten, born in Poland in 1926, discusses losing her entire family during the Holocaust; antisemitism in Poland; having two siblings; the German invasion and the immediate persecution of Jews; being made to wear the Jewish star; being placed in a ghetto; deportations and deaths in the ghetto; rationing; being deported to Auschwitz; arriving in the camp; the selection process and managing to stay with her mother; being taken to Birkenau; being sent to an underground airplane factory; being marched for three days from Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland) and taken to another camp; being liberated by the British in April 1945; being too weak to eat; finding out about the deaths of her family members; going to New York, NY in 1948; resistance during the war; current antisemitism; and ways she coped with her experience.

    Oral history interview with Dora Zaidenweber

    Oral history interview with Dora Zaidenweber

    Oral History

    Dora Zaidenweber (née Eiger) discusses Holocaust denial; a story from a book by Alexander Donat, Holocaust Kingdom; being liberated by the British from Bergen-Belsen; the influence of propaganda on antisemitism; growing up in Radom, Poland; the German invasion; anti-Jewish laws; mass deportations; ghettoization and conditions in the ghetto; the Einsatzkommandos, which were employed in Eastern Europe for mass executions; continuing her education in the ghetto; hearing rumors of Jewish resistance; being deported to Auschwitz; telling her children about her experiences; the woman who was in charge of their barrack; her work mending clothes; being taken on a death march; going to Gross-Rosen briefly; her interactions with Poles; and her approach to teaching the Holocaust.

    Oral history interview with Jules Zaidenweber

    Oral history interview with Jules Zaidenweber

    Oral History

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