BOOK REVIEW: The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space, by Avril Alba. 2015. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-45135-4. 272 pages.
Among its many incarnations the Holocaust has been “Americanized,” “indigenized,” “nationalized,” and “politicized.” (p.193) In her bold, often elegant, and highly significant 2015 book Dr. Avril Alba, a Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical, and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney, adds eternalized to the incarnation list, and thereby raises profound questions about the accuracy, depth, and worth of the conventional list. No informed consideration of the meaning of the Holocaust can hereafter exclude this matter.
“Eternalized” refers to a little-known, ongoing, and transformative effort being made by three path-breaking Holocaust Museums – the United States Holocaust Museum (USHMM), the new Historical Museum of Yad Vashem (NHM), and the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM). Each in its own distinctive way goes beyond the time-honored secular “what” of Holocaust history to also explore its timeless sacred metahistory. The three museums ask what transcendent meanings and myths of the Judaic past – as applied to the history of the 1933-’45 Holocaust – might mean for the present and the future of all humankind for all time.
Dr. Alba’s research has discovered that to their ever-lasting credit the three museums in recent years been “transforming a series of discrete historical events that might perhaps be described as nihilistic, cruel, and essentially meaningless, into a timeless and sacred metahistory.” (p.5) Although ostensibly secular institutions they have discretely begun to draw on sacred ancient narratives in their educational efforts, visual exhibits, and publications. This is making possible the veiled development and transmission of an awesome mythical vision of the Holocaust, one that would have it newly understood as a redemptive watershed event that heralds and shapes an ever-finer tomorrow.
In this regard the three museums are responsive to what some scholars believe is the prime question Jewry (except for the ultra-Orthodox) asks of the memory of the Holocaust, namely, “Do the flames of Auschwitz negate the promise of Sinai?” (p. 4) Does the systematic murder of two-thirds of European Jewry signal the loss by the Chosen People of a cherished covenantal relationship with an all-powerful God? After 3,000 or so years of earnest worship (inexplicable persecution and suffering not withstanding), has Jewry now become just another befuddled and factionalized tribe? What might be the sacred meaning(s) of the single greatest modern tragedy to befall Jewry?
Dr. Alba hopes that her bringing to light the cloaked nature and content of sacred narratives in three major Holocaust museums can help address such anguished theological questions, even as it also foster improvements in museum use of metahistory. Her deep ongoing study of Jewish history and its ancient myths, rituals, symbols, and narratives has her persuaded their creative employ can imbue secular history with new meaning or design, and thereby aid its bearing on the present. This could change the meaning of the Holocaust from a litany of suffering to an “unprecedented opportunity for personal and universal transformation … a renewed sense of moral and political agency … a new touchstone for a universal morality.” (pp. 63-64)
At its farthest reach the imaginative employ by Holocaust Museums of sacred narratives may enable the redemption of the genocide of European Jewry, the re-affirmation of Jewry’s vital covenantal relationship with God, and the development of an eternal vision of the Holocaust: ever a realist, however, Dr. Alba writes – “Of only one thing we can be certain; to do so will require an undertaking of truly “mythic” proportions.” (p. 196) The Hebrew word for “memory,” she points out, includes an obligation to act, as by struggling to turn history into a “moral endeavor.” (p. 61)
To help get us there from here Dr. Alba provides revealing, though also diplomatic and constructive case studies of museums-in-motion. A reader learns their complex history, and meets key agents of change (direct survivors, their offspring, major museum benefactors, relevant government officials, etc.). In her own inimitable fashion she even interprets architecture and décor in making sense of their employ of what she calls “built theodicy,” a defense of God in light of evil, especially the evil of willful genocidal destruction.
Attention goes to long-standing controversies between museum proponents of particularism (keep the Holocaust “Jewish”) or universalism (accent the relevance of alleged Holocaust “lessons” to preventing or alleviating modern-day genocides and their presumptive antecedents, such as anti-Semitism, bullying, discrimination, hate-mongering, homophobia, prejudice, racism, sexism, and the sinister like). The veiled significance of predominantly Gentile attendance is considered. Toping all is the question of how to prove endlessly relevant to Jews and Gentiles alike while also keeping faith with Jewish history, memory, and tradition. Dr. Alba offers pragmatic, and yet also exacting advice in this and related matters, as much to her credit she has reservations about key aspects of all three museums.
Naturally, the book, much as do all such publications, has its shortcomings. Prime among them is the impediment of inexcusably long anti-reader paragraphs, a fault that alert editing should have remedied (see, for example, pages 10-11, 14, 42-43, 63-64, 87, 102-103, and far too many others). Also regrettable is the absence of attention to non-militant Jewish victims who merit the salutatory designation – “Upstander.” Although now getting long-overdue recognition in two of the three progressive museums highlighted by Dr. Alba (save for the USHMM), they are conspicuous by neglect in almost all other such sites worldwide (save for the Ravensbruck and Theresienstadt Camp museums). Hopefully a warranted new edition of this pioneering book will redress these two matters, and also sharply reduce the book’s retail price, which in 2016 at $100, Hardcover; $80, eBook, undoubtedly impedes the wide circulation the book so amply deserves.
Taken all in all, Dr. Alba’s book is an outstanding contribution to the ongoing discussion of what can and ought follow the imminent arrival of the post-participant stage in Holocaust memorialization. Soon the last of the direct victims (and evil perpetrators, militant resistors, non-militant Upstanders, and pathetic bystanders) will have passed away, and their experience will be transformed into memory. If Dr. Alba’s far-reaching analysis proves prescient, and sacred “built theodicy” narratives soon gain sway in the world’s Holocaust museums, a symbiosis there of history and metahistory may achieve the transformation of the Holocaust into a redeeming spiritual vision. Ever the realist Dr. Alba cautions that its depth and complexity “will ultimately dictate what and whom, exactly, these secular redemptions will redeem.” (p. 195) Hopefully, if humankind deserves it they will allow all of us – Jew and non-Jew alike – to come “closer and closer to a redeemed and transcendent future,” much as sacred myth has always held out as achievable. (p. 195)