The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

• Author: Montanye, James A.
• Position: Book Reviews

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

By Norman G. Finkelstein New York: Verso, 2000. Pp. 150. $23.00 cloth.

The suffering of European Jews during the 1930s and 1940s gave rise to a stock of moral capital that was a measure not of exceptional moral actions by Jews as a group, but of acts committed by their Nazi oppressors. The holocaust label evokes that suffering and those acts. The Holocaust, distinguished by initial capitalization (a distinction I maintain throughout this review), is an ideology that has grown up around these interactions. The holocaust created moral capital. A "Holocaust Industry" (1) exploits it by making a market in the suffering of "needy holocaust survivors."

The disadvantages of moral capital are that it is less productive than most other forms of capital and that its value depreciates quickly as memories fade and the public sense of guilt and compassion wanes. Its highest value lies in its capacity to be transformed into more enduring political (rent-seeking) capital. The transformation process requires entrepreneurship as an input and spawns an industry that produces entrepreneurial returns for its creators and patrons.

These points are the foundations of historian Norman Finkelstein's slim volume, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The book complements a short list of recent works by Jewish scholars (several of which Finkelstein critiques) that reflect on the upturn of interest in books, movies, and television documentaries about the holocaust and that ask (some skeptically): "Why here, and why now?" (See, for example, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999].) Finkelstein argues, against the grain, that this interest is "a tribute not to Jewish suffering but to Jewish aggrandizement" (p. 8). He documents economic exploitation by the Holocaust Industry, which he calls an "outright extortion racket" (p. 89). He also documents the U.S. role in facilitating the extraction of holocaust rents (which he inexactly terms "profits"). He argues that the Holocaust Industry would not exist without international bullying by the United States, which is why this country is not a target of rent extraction despite having a record on holocaust issues that is scarcely distinguishable from that of the recently extorted Swiss.

A positive economic analysis of this aspect of postwar economic behavior has yet to emerge. Not even the "revisionist" literature analyzes the public economic behavior of Zionist groups and other Jewish factions. This lacuna is puzzling. Economists have tackled other aspects of religious organization using the positive method of industrial organization and public choice (see, for example, Robert Ekelund and others, Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996]). Surely the existence of Holocaust rents has not entirely escaped the...