"Dare to Compare": the American Holocaust Denial and American and Zionist Exceptionalisms

Many Jewish writers have often compared Jews to American Indians, before and after the Holocaust. To take but one example, "Raphael Seligmann has gone on record stating that the Jews are 'the Indians of Germany'” (Friedberg, p. 354). However, the reverse has not been deemed acceptable, particularly since the birth of what Norman G. Finkelstein calls the Holocaust Industry in the Six Day War. For instance, "Rabbi Irving Greenberg, founder of the Holocaust Resource Center and first director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Commission, has described the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust with other acts of genocide as 'blasphemous'” (Friedberg, p. 35). Why the predominance of one-way comparison? The main cause is American exceptionalism: not only It Can't Happen Here, but It Couldn't Have Happened Here. American exceptionalism is accompanied by another exceptionalism at work in the United States because of its utility to US foreign policy: Zionism. For Israel to justify its existence as the Jewish state, the Holocaust of Jews must be a unique event, separable from Nazi massacres of other groups and incomparable to any other atrocity in history -- so it alone demands the establishment of an ethnically exclusive state for its victims to compensate for it.