Liberal Anti-Judaism and the Victims of Modernity

Abstract

William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1979) has long been a subject of adverse criticism within Holocaust studies, and it was initially generated by Cynthia Ozick's prepublication polemic against Styron, Liberal's Auschwitz (1975), in the spring edition of the aptly entitled journal Confrontation. Ozick's delegitimation of and his novel was, in turn, exhaustively taken up by Alvin H. Rosenfeld in an essay for Midstream, Holocaust According to William Styron (1979), and was developed further in Rosenfeld's A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (1980) and Imagining Hitler (1985). As this argument has been recently contested in Sue Vice's Holocaust Fiction (2000), I heartily recommend a reading of Vice's chapter on next to Jews Without Memory and its earlier incarnations. Professor D. G. Myers adds little to these decades-old attacks on and ignores virtually all of the critical material on Sophie's Choice in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be found in Holocaust Fiction. Nor does he add anything of substance to the manifold deliberations on Jewish uniqueness and the Holocaust which have been usefully summarized by Michael Marrus in The Holocaust in History (1988) and by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Professor Paul Breines is right to concentrate on the underlying assumptions that underpin Myers's essay and I will follow his lead in this regard. At the same time, I believe that it is essential to move beyond the identity politics-whether neoconservative (Myers) or liberal assimilationist (Breines)-which have unfortunately set the terms of their exchange. The key point is not to replace one version of American-Jewish identity with another, as Breines has done, but to shift the debate away from the futile question of identity While I disagree wholeheartedly with Myers (there is barely a sentence of his essay which I would not wish to challenge), he has certainly raised some important issues: namely the question of Liberal