Denial and the Evasion of Empathy
When I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University from 1978-1982 a tenured mechanical engineering professor named Arthur Butz published a book called “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century” denying the Holocaust. Every once in a while a small group of students – mostly Jews, but not exclusively – protested outside his classroom, demanding his dismissal. I joined the protests a few times. The administration, not surprisingly, mostly ignored us. Northwestern’s president denounced the book, but defended the professor’s academic freedom. Amazingly, at the age of 92, he’s still listed as a tenured faculty at Northwestern.
My senior year, I was curious enough to check the book out of Northwestern’s library. I plowed through the turgid prose and the confusing graphs and tables, but the only evidence I remember now (I’m not about to read the book again) is the remarkable first chapter, where he quotes from ancient sources – mostly the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud – to demonstrate that Jewish texts chronically exaggerate Jewish casualties. In other words, Jews lie about their losses and exaggerate their wounds. They’ve been doing it for a long time.
That first chapter clarifies the solid link between Holocaust denial and antisemitism. If the Holocaust is a hoax – who perpetrated it? Obviously, the Jews, for their own nefarious reasons. After all, Butz says, they have a tendency to lie and exaggerate. Antisemitism is one of the world’s oldest and most enduring conspiracy theories. What kind of people would make up a monstrous story about gas chambers, mass graves, the deaths of millions of children – and get the world to believe it? A dangerous, slippery, conniving people – the Jews. To deny the Holocaust is to hate and fear Jews.
When I attended Northwestern, I never considered Butz a threat. Aside from myself, I didn’t know anyone who actually read the book, much less purchased it. And the evidence for the historicity of the Holocaust was overwhelming. It irked me that the university continued to employ him, but, in a place of serious learning, he seemed more like a clown, an oddity, not a serious teacher.
But times changed. While Holocaust denial never made it to the mainstream of academic culture, it has certainly spread past Northwestern University. Twenty-five years after Butz’s book, a well-known British historian David Irving denied that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. A British court determined that he’d engaged in Holocaust denial. And, as a few quick searches demonstrate, the internet today is awash in Holocaust denial, mostly, but not entirely, in the web’s growing antisemitism corner.
I thought about Butz and David Irving recently when a friend sent me a video clip of University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer denying that Hamas slaughtered close to 1200 Israelis on October 7 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA5MbJn-XiY&t=323s). Instead, Mearsheimer claims, most of the civilians were killed by Israeli Apache helicopters. Hamas, he says, “did not murder most of those civilians.” If so, why does much of the world believe that Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities? “Israeli propaganda,” Mearsheimer explains, manipulating Western media. Like Holocaust deniers Arthur Butz and David Irving, Mearsheimer invokes sneakily clever Jews who exaggerate, deceive and manipulate.
At first glance, Mearsheimer’s claims seem as ludicrous as Butz’s. After all, October 7 is one of the most documented war crimes in history. Besides the voluminous survivor testimony of cruelty, massacre and sexual assault, the perpetrators themselves filmed their crimes in hundreds of hours of gory video clips. But conspiracy theories find a welcoming ecosystem in today’s internet culture, and they spread rapidly. As of the day I watched the Mearsheimer video, 488,000 viewers had seen it. I wondered how many books Arthur Butz sold in the past 45 years. 100? 1000? But nowadays a hateful, pernicious denialism catches the attention of hundreds of thousands – and almost certainly more – in a day or two. In one way at least, Mearsheimer and other October 7 deniers outdo Arthur Butz. Butz denied the Holocaust but he didn’t claim that the Jews did it to themselves.
I blame antisemitism for both of these denials – of the Holocaust and October 7. But there’s a parallel human compulsion at play, equally common and equally pernicious: an evasion of empathy. Humans don’t want to see the pain of their enemies. To truly witness the trauma of an Other, is to engage with their narrative – and that’s something we’d often rather avoid. A year and a half ago, I wandered through the anti-Israel encampment at the University of California in San Diego. I tried to engage with some of the students – to share narratives and stories. And I succeeded with a few. But many – most of them masked – refused. For them, there was only one story, only one place to look, one way to feel. It’s always so much easier to turn away.
It pains me to admit that this evasion of empathy also exists in the Jewish community. Lost in our own suffering – or our specific joy in the return of hostages – we don’t often engage with the Palestinian narrative. Israeli media focuses very little on the horrific suffering of the Gazans or the brutality of some Jewish West Bank settlers or the traumatic consequences of the occupation. As both Israelis and Palestinians – Jews and Arabs – move slowly toward a possible peace, one of the first steps must be to move from speaking to listening, from denial to acceptance. With the release of the remaining hostages and a cease fire, there will be plenty of new stories to hear on both sides. True stories.
