Whose Feelings Matter? Holocaust Memory, Empathy, and Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism

This article explores the history and impact, from the end of the Cold War to the present, of the intertwined relationships between increased Holocaust consciousness, the rise of moral pedagogies and political rhetorics of anti-antisemitism, and the emotionalization of Western politics and public discourse. The surge of interest in Holocaust memory in the 1990s was closely connected with the new prominence of feelings in that decade, and particularly with the widespread emphasis on empathy with suffering. Deep-seated traditions within Western culture, including within Judaism itself, of ascribing special meaning to Jewish suffering played an important role in the emergence in this decade of “redemptive anti-antisemitism.” This outlook, which rapidly attained consensus status in public debate and especially in moralized Holocaust pedagogy, enshrined opposition to antisemitism, understood as the key lesson of the Holocaust, as the key gateway to the overcoming of all hatreds and prejudices. After 9/11 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, this universalist optimism became increasingly difficult to sustain. With Palestinians and Israelis engaged in intense competition for international public empathy, the emotional authority of anti-antisemitism became entangled with responses to this conflict. The Israeli military assault on Gaza in January 2009 generated particularly intense arguments over the politics of empathy. Since then, in different but related ways in various Western countries, the political and emotional priority accorded to anti-antisemitism has increasingly stood in a rivalrous or antagonistic rather than a solidaristic relationship with campaigns against other forms of prejudice, especially with respect to Islamophobia. The charged cultural and political resonance of appeals to empathy with Jewish suffering can only be understood through a historical understanding of how the emotional fabric of contemporary Western public debate is shaped by the deep roots of exceptionalist thinking about the Holocaust and antisemitism.