Revering the Nazis and Blaming the Victims

The idea of Jews revering their persecutors or blaming the victims for the Holocaust is anathema to many Jewish scholars, yet these issues are depicted in Holocaust theatre. In René Kalisky’s Jim le téméraire (Jim the Lionhearted), the premise is Jewish complicity with the Nazis, as Jim, the Jewish protagonist, hallucinates about consorting with National Socialism and identifies with its mystical origins. Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth becomes a diatribe against the idea that Jews are ‘the chosen people’, as Arthur Goldman, brought to trial in Israel as suspected notorious Nazi Adolf Karl Dorff, willingly testifies to expiate his guilty conscience as a Jew. Goldman’s message during the trial is that Jews perished like sheep during the Shoah, largely because of Jewish compliance with Nazi orders. Christopher Hampton’s George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., a fictionalized account of Israeli agents fulfilling a 30-year quest to bring Hitler to justice by extricating him from the Brazilian rain forest, culminates in a trial of Hitler. Hitler’s speech, a 25-minute tour de force that ends the play, mocks the Jews as the chosen people, equates Jews with Nazis, and then gives Hitler an ineluctable, divinely inspired rationale for genocide. This essay argues that these plays, which conflate Judaism with Nazism, represent an enigmatic subset of Holocaust drama that devalues the antisemitic roots of Nazi genocide while provocatively posing questions about the universal aspects of the banality of evil

Antisemitism · Art · Genocide · Jewish question · Judaism · Literature · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies

• From Stereotype to Metaphor

  Ellen Schiff•From Stereotype to Metaphor•1982

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• From Stereotype to Metaphor

  Alisa Solomon, Ellen Schiff et al.•Performing Arts Journal•1983

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