Tomorrow, Oprah will broadcast her visit to Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel:
Christopher M. Leighton, a Presbyterian minister who has served as executive director of the Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland for the past 20 years, writes in “Oprah, Elie Wiesel, and My Fellow Christians” in the current issue of Commentary that “[a]ny Holocaust curriculum that does not move beyond Elie Wiesel’s Night will fail to teach mainstream American Christians the falsity and dangerous arrogance” of an unfortunate stereotype:
I wonder how many of Oprah’s viewers will misread this destruction [of European Jewry] as a proof of the Jewish people’s immutably tragic destiny.
In the early pages of the book, Wiesel presents the Jews of his town as skilled in the practice of denial and avoidance, habits that seem to have blinded them to the Nazi program of mass murder. Rather than mounting a campaign of armed resistance or pursuing strategies of escape, they continue to trust in the underlying goodness and rationality of humanity. The suggestion seems unmistakable that an irrepressible aptitude for hope has historically bred a dysfunctional passivity. . . .
No doubt many readers, empathizing with Jewish suffering, will see a certain grandeur in the ability to endure and to survive a long history of affliction. But the role thereby assigned to God’s chosen people hardly meshes with the record of . . . Israel, which has successfully stood up to the onslaught of its Arab enemies in the conviction that only military might and political grit will secure its future. . . .
Today, in the querulous reactions of many European and American Christians to Israel’s unblinking refusal to submit to Arab terrorism, we have seen all too clearly the distorted moral priorities of a world prepared to welcome Jews only when they follow an ancient script, achieving tragic nobility through impotence and passivity . . . .
Sooner or later, we will need to travel the road out of Auschwitz. One can only hope that Oprah’s visit to Wiesel’s camp of ultimate horror will signal a beginning and not an end to that journey.
From an interview in yesterday’s National Review Online between the great K-Lo and David Brog, former chief of staff for Sen. Arlen Specter and author of “Standing with Israel:”
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Which Christians in the U.S. are most Zionist and why?
DAVID BROG: The evangelicals. No contest. Their Zionism comes directly from their theology. But, as opposed to what most people think, this theology is driven by the biblical promises of the Book of Genesis, not the biblical prophecies of the Book of Revelations. . . .
LOPEZ: How are Christian Zionists obsessed with the Holocaust?
BROG: When it comes to the Holocaust, Christian Zionists remind me of Jews. The Holocaust is the point of reference, the great calamity against which all actions and threats are judged. Yet the obsession may even be greater among certain Christians because they feel guilty about the fact that people claiming to share their faith permitted this atrocity. Thus they seize every opportunity to stand up for the Jews and in so doing demonstrate how true Christians behave.
A longing to make amends for the Holocaust often figures prominently in Christian Zionist speeches and fundraising literature. And the desire not to permit a second Holocaust drives their mounting alarm over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. No other community — with the possible exception of the Jews themselves — stresses the parallels between Hitler in the 1930s and Iran’s President Ahmadinejad today as do the evangelicals. . . .
LOPEZ: Whom do you want to read your book?
BROG: I want Jews to read my book so that they will get over their fears of evangelicals and embrace our friends. I want Christians to read my book so that they will understand both the imperatives of supporting Israel and the wary reaction they will receive from the Jewish community. And I want people who are interested in politics and foreign policy to read my book so that they can better comprehend the birth pangs of what in time will be a very important alliance.