Redemptive Memory: The Christianization of the Holocaust in America (Portz-Prize-Winning Essay, 2005)

There has been a considerable debate among historians concerning the role of the Holocaust in the American collective memory. Since the watershed year 1993, when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors on the Mall in Washington, DC, and the film Schindler's List debuted, the level of awareness of the Holocaust in the public mind has been at an all-time high in the United States. The question at the heart of this academic discussion is how Americans have come to identify so strongly with an experience that occurred over sixty years ago, on foreign shores, to a group of people to which most Americans have no obvious connection. This being the case, the question has been asked whether the Holocaust can be part of the American collective memory at all. (1) This essay will contend that incorporation of the Holocaust into American consciousness has indeed taken place, albeit decades after the event, and that, furthermore, the religious belief system of the majority of Americans has played a central role in this development. Although the last decade has witnessed an increase in secularization, the United States is still a nation in which over three quarters of the citizens identify themselves as Christians while just over one percent identify themselves as Jewish. (2) Although there were many non-Jewish victims of the murderous Nazi campaigns, the fact remains that the vast majority of those marked for deportation and death were targeted solely because they were identified as Jews by the Nazi state. (3) Rather than addressing the significance of the Holocaust to the Jewish minority in America, this work will seek to explain the way in which this event has been woven into a Christian metanarrative in American public life. It will examine how it has been appropriated from its context as a Jewish catastrophe perpetrated by Christians and reconstituted as a saga of Christian heroism and a test of "true Christianity." Through critical analysis of the use of metaphor and imagery in Holocaust representation, it will examine the functions of this approach as both a theodicy and as an agent of triumphalism.