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    Guilt and Cynicism

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    KateSinha
    This document provides a review of the book "Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York's Holocaust Museum" by Rochelle G. Saidel. The review summarizes that the book details how the proposed Holocaust museum in New York became mired in political controversy and self-interest over its 50+ year development. It grew from a modest memorial into an expensive complex due more to cynical politicians seeking votes than meaningful commemoration of victims. The review criticizes that the museum focuses only on Jewish victims and ignores others, and serves as a monument more to political opportunism than remembrance.

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    Guilt and Cynicism

    Uploaded by

    KateSinha
    44 views4 pages
    This document provides a review of the book "Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York's Holocaust Museum" by Rochelle G. Saidel. The review summarizes that the book details how the proposed Holocaust museum in New York became mired in political controversy and self-interest over its 50+ year development. It grew from a modest memorial into an expensive complex due more to cynical politicians seeking votes than meaningful commemoration of victims. The review criticizes that the museum focuses only on Jewish victims and ignores others, and serves as a monument more to political opportunism than remembrance.

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    New York Holocaust Museum

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    This document provides a review of the book "Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York's Holocaust Museum" by Rochelle G. Saidel. The review summarizes that the book details how the proposed Holocaust museum in New York became mired in political controversy and self-interest over its 50+ year development. It grew from a modest memorial into an expensive complex due more to cynical politicians seeking votes than meaningful commemoration of victims. The review criticizes that the museum focuses only on Jewish victims and ignores others, and serves as a monument more to political opportunism than remembrance.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    44 views4 pages

    Guilt and Cynicism

    Uploaded by

    KateSinha
    This document provides a review of the book "Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York's Holocaust Museum" by Rochelle G. Saidel. The review summarizes that the book details how the proposed Holocaust museum in New York became mired in political controversy and self-interest over its 50+ year development. It grew from a modest memorial into an expensive complex due more to cynical politicians seeking votes than meaningful commemoration of victims. The review criticizes that the museum focuses only on Jewish victims and ignores others, and serves as a monument more to political opportunism than remembrance.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Guilt and Cynicism

    Never Too Late to Remember: The Politics behind New York's Holocaust Museum by Rochelle
    G. Saidel
    Review by: Alice Goldfarb Marquis
    The Review of Politics, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 404-406
    Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of
    Review of Politics

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    404

    THE REVIEWOF POLITICS

    than Machiavelli, Rousseau sees the dilemmas of politics arising from its
    character as the relations among individuals who are mutually dependent
    yet have conflicting interests. Dependence is particularly important for
    Rousseau, and has a psychological facet missing in Machiavelli's work (pp.
    154,176). Rousseau locates the source of hypocrisy in politics in the corruption
    of human nature. Given the psychological basis of Rousseau's analysis of
    corruption and integrity, I wonder whether his understanding of "integrity"
    and the relationship of ethics and politics is not more different from
    Machiavelli than Grant allows. Grant notes the relationship between ethical
    "integrity" and psychological unity or wholeness in Rousseau's thought (see
    pp. 84-86, 95-96, 152-54). If Rousseau's psychological theory of psychic unity
    and corruption is the foundation for his ethical and political thought, then
    discussing the ethical dimension of "integrity" before the psychological
    foundation, as Grant does, obscures the relationship. Grant's most useful
    insight on this issue, that there is a substantive moral content to Rousseau's
    model of psychic unity (p. 86), is correct but needs development. The
    unexpected similarities Grant uncovers between Machiavelli and Rousseau
    should not obscure their differences.
    Finally,Grant's turn to Machiavelli and Rousseau because they illuminate
    the problems of ethics in politics obscured by liberalism makes the character
    of liberalism itself a theme of her work. Grant points to the strange
    combination of unrealistic idealism and idealized realism of this fanciful
    animal. On both scores, liberalism needs a caution against its "overly
    optimistic attempt to overcome the inevitable irrationalities of political life"
    (p. 14). Grant's characterization of liberalism richly deserves elaboration. As
    she says in concluding her challenging and insightful study: "As a political
    matter, hypocrisy will always be with us; it is an inevitable byproduct of the
    mixture of the dependency relations of politics and the necessity of public
    moral principles, neither of which we can do without even if we would. The
    best that we can do is to judge hypocrisy, and antihypocrisy too, with a
    discerning eye, which requires that we keep those images of integrity that
    guide our judgment always within our sight" (p.181).

    -John T.Scott

    GUILT AND CYNICISM


    Rochelle G. Saidel: NeverTooLateto Remember:
    ThePoliticsBehindNew York's
    HolocaustMuseum.(New Yorkand London: Holmes & Meier, 1996. Pp. xiii, 289.
    $30.00.)
    Almost fifty years after it was first proposed, a squat building with the
    look of a warehouse opened its bronze door near the southern tip of
    Manhattan. Contention surrounded even its clumsy name: Living Memorial
    to the Holocaust-Museum of Jewish Heritage. As Rochelle G. Saidel describes
    in intimate-though not vivid-detail, this is a project that virtually nobody

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    REVIEWS

    405

    in New York wanted. Yet, because of its grim subject matter, American Jews'
    guilt at rescuing too few of their European brethren from the Nazis, and, above
    all, the cynicism of vote-hungry politicians, the project kept inching forward.
    As it crept through the decades, the plan metamorphosed, in Kafkaesque fashion, from a modest, straightforward monument to those murdered
    by the Nazis to a grandiose, expensive pile eerily resembling one of Hitler's
    crematoria. Unfortunately, the final structure recalls the six million Jewish
    victims of Nazism, but ignores the millions of others-gypsies, homosexuals,
    mentally retarded, political radicals, Slavic prisoners of war-who also
    vanished into the Nazis' vicious maelstrom. From the beginning, not a single
    representative of any of these non-Jewish groups was invited to participate
    in the planning, or even asked to contribute money.
    So dominated were the planners by Jewish religious interests that, at
    one point, the proposed by-laws specified that the institution would be closed
    on Saturdays as well as all Jewish holidays. Even the most avid political
    proponents realized that such rules contravened the first amendment to the
    Constitution and forced removal of these provisions.
    While this institution in New York as well as Washington's Holocaust
    Museum may pass on the memory of the Nazis' pitiful victims, they also
    serve as monuments to the unbounded chutzpa of elected politicians and
    their aides in seizing upon one of history's most profound tragedies to garner
    votes, appease interest groups, and actually reward campaign contributors
    with profits. In Washington, President Jimmy Carter set the pace in 1978. As
    Saidel has carefully traced events, Carter named a Holocaust Commission in
    an attempt to placate an angry, well-organized Jewish community for two
    indiscretions: first, selling advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and second,
    an offhand remark at a 1977 Massachusetts town meeting that the Palestinians
    should have a homeland. The building on the Mall in Washington, which
    opened in 1993, smacks of the sort of reward a parent offers willful toddlers
    as a distraction from what they cannot have. While private contributions
    financed construction, the U.S. government provided the land.
    Saidel has found no evidence that any strong pressure existed for either
    the Washington or New York memorial. In Israel, an awe-inspiring
    monument, Yad Vashem, appropriately combines remembrance with
    scholarship, in a nation peopled by those who fled oppression and by many
    Holocaust survivors. In other European countries, including Germany,
    monuments mark the stark fate of local citizens. By contrast, the American
    museums commemorate horrendous events that befell mostly non-Americans
    with ethnic or religious ties to well-organized American interest groups. By
    the reasoning demonstrated in these museums, many other American ethnic
    or religious groups whose forebears suffered persecution-Armenians,
    be entitled to elaborate,
    Greeks, Chinese, to name just a few-should
    expensive monuments on public land.
    Never TooLateto Rememberemphasizes how painfully prolonged the effort
    to build a Holocaust memorial effort became in New York. Time and again,
    the endeavor appeared to be dying from lackluster support, both moral and
    financial. Yet, over half a century, the project swelled from a simple plaque
    installed at Riverside Park in 1947 to an obscene blueprint for a 30-story

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    406

    THEREVIEWOFPOLITICS

    condominium tower atop a Holocaust Museum. Even the museum's most


    avid supporters, developer friends of Mayor Edward I. Koch, grew queasy
    at the notion of selling apartments above such a grim site. Eventually,
    Governor Mario Cuomo, then considering a run for the presidency, thrust
    himself into the project, because, like Koch, he sniffed political profit.
    Between Koch and Cuomo and the constant need to raise more money,
    the dignity and solemnity of what was being memorialized eroded. A 1988
    fund-raiser, for example, was billed as a chance to "Rock and Roll the Night
    Away" at a disco for a $125 donation. Eventually, almost $15 million was
    squandered on failed designs and extended fund-raising; in December 1993,
    even the normally sympathetic TheNew YorkTimesdeplored that$5 million spent
    on architecturaland exhibit design "will end up in the wastebasket" (p. 235).
    Saidel's account of all the shenanigans surrounding a supposedly solemn
    site still includes a number of distracting vestiges of a doctoral dissertation:
    brief expositions of theories developed by other political scientists which
    certain data supposedly support. However, this book's most serious flaw is
    timing. The underlying research ends in 1994; although a hasty reference in
    the final paragraph mentions "steel construction beams rising into the air...
    in the summer of 1996" (p. 246), those words had to be written well in advance
    of that time, since the book was published in 1996. Thus, Saidel drops the
    story just as construction of the museum began. So the reader is left hanging
    around a building site, without knowing the reaction of the press and public
    to the final structure and its contents after it opened in 1997.
    Despite these blemishes, Never TooLateto Rememberprovides a striking,
    disheartening object lesson about how even worthwhile projects can go
    completely astray in the hands of that unholy alliance-special interest groups
    and unscrupulous politicians.
    -Alice Goldfarb Marquis

    PARTY MAN AND REFORMER


    Sean J. Savage: Trumanand the DemocraticParty.(Lexington:The University
    Press of Kentucky,1997. Pp. xiii, 259. $34.95.)
    Associate professor of political science at St. Mary's College in South
    Bend, winner of the Emerging ScholarAward of theAmerican Political Science
    Association for a first book on Roosevelt,the Party Leader(1991), Sean Savage
    now follows with a book on Truman and the Democratic party. "No previous
    book exclusively and comprehensively devotes its content and purpose,"
    the author writes, "to a detailed analysis of Harry S. Truman's relationship
    with the Democratic party and his presidential behavior as a party leader"
    (p. vii). Savage nicely sets out his theme in the preface, that Truman was both
    a regular Democrat and a reformer. The argument is that these two bents or
    beliefs conflicted during his presidency.

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