“Selling Suffering: Why People Prefer Dead Jews
One time, I was in a gallery showing the work of Holocaust survivor Yonia Fain. The walls were filled with massive, colorful canvases, but I found myself drawn to a small glass case in the back. Inside were his graphite sketches, scribbles, really. One of them caught my eye. It was not particularly gory or brutal like the other artwork. It was a caricature, a man in profile with a huge face, small, suspicious eyes, and a hooked nose that took up half the page. In his hand, he clutched a scroll. What shook me most was how closely it resembled a Nazi propaganda poster I had seen before, the same pose, the same nose, the same hunched-over posture.
Which begs the question, why did Fain draw that? Art Spiegelman wrestles with this same impossible tension in Maus. His book tells a complicated story about a complicated man. His father, Vladek, is rude, paranoid, and stingy, basically every negative stereotype about Jews, as Art himself complains. And Art hates himself for showing his father that way. At one point, he admits, “I feel so inadequate… I am literally giving people canned memories… And what if I’m just showing him as I want to see him—as some petty, miserly caricature?” (Spiegelman 130–132). He fights this expectation that Holocaust victims must look a certain way: pure, saintly, morally uncomplicated, an acceptable kind of Jewish suffering. Every Holocaust narrative walks this tightrope of how Jewish suffering should be portrayed. In the United States, the dominant cultural hegemony demands saintly victims and neat moral lessons. Jewish victims are flattened into universal martyrs or metaphors, erasing the messy realities of survival, making it easier to minimize or repurpose the Holocaust rather than confront it as a racially motivated genocide carried out by people who wanted living, breathing Jews gone.
Dara Horn explores this perception in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, explaining how American readers often want Holocaust stories to be less brutal and more “uplifting,” because “so many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity” (Horn 68). Which treats suffering as a meaningful, purifying and redemptive experience, headed toward a “moment of grace” (Horn 68–69). Moreover, if suffering is a test sent by an omniscient perfect god, then someone must have needed to learn a lesson, deserved it. Hence “Holocaust justification,” the impulse to “explain” that Jews were guilty of their own destruction (Gerstenfeld 38). Jewish theology differs in that it has a theodicy of protest,” in which belief survives even as God is accused of complicity in evil (Blutinger 274). Horn suggests, Jewish storytelling refuses tidy endings and “does not insist on answers when there are none” (Eckardt 456–457; Horn 70). It does not insist there is a lesson one can learn from the Holocaust, and therefore an excuse for it.
Furthermore, Amos Goldberg explains how in Holocaust scholarship perpetrator accounts are often woven into a cohesive narrative, while Jewish sources appear as isolated “voices” that interrupt rather than shape the story (Goldberg 222). The clearest example is The Diary of Anne Frank. Which ironically, may owe its popularity to the “story line that downplays her Jewishness and turns her into a universal figure representing all martyred innocents…emphasiz[ing] the diversity of the victims rather than focusing singularly on Jewish victimhood.” In effect universalizing the story as that of “the gallant human spirit’” (Rapaport 192). This is not unique to Frank. The most popular Holocaust narratives “rarely contain references to Jewish beliefs or rituals” (Blutinger 273). That omission helps non-Jewish readers, who do not need prior knowledge, but it also means they never learn how the writer suffered uniquely as a Jew (Sorin 121). It is no coincidence that survivor Primo Levi’s memoir is assigned more often than fellow survivor Elie Wiesel’s. Levi, not particularly religious, rarely foregrounds his Judaism, whereas a significant theme of Wiesel’s account is his grappling with his relationship to God (Blutinger 274).
Blutinger continues to explain how much the Jewish victim narrative we have is understandably shaped by a massive heap of survivorship bias. The people whose stories we have were the exceptional cases, what Levi calls “prominents.” In Auschwitz, the average prisoner survived about three months. Survival often depended on securing “extra food and/or better working conditions” by working one’s way into the camp’s hierarchy. Levi insists that survivors existed in a “moral grey zone… somewhere between the extremes of innocent victim and guilty perpetrator” (Blutinger 274-275) (Person 107, 118). Kapos, for instance, were Jewish prisoners who acted as overseers, enforcing Nazi orders on their fellow inmates in exchange for slightly better treatment (Kapos And Other Prisoner Functionaries In Nazi Concentration Camps). Even Maus’ Vladek fits this categorization; he used his pre-war wealth as bribes and drew on a range of practical skills to carve out slightly improved conditions for himself and his wife (Spiegelman).
Blutinger stresses that truly honest Holocaust testimonials “not only challenges students intellectually, but also psychologically, emotionally, and even spiritually. Students need to be prepared to read, see, and discuss very disturbing images and accounts” (277). To avoid that, educators often simplify, erasing the grey zone (Person 107–108). This problem, he notes, “is not unique to the Holocaust; it occurs whenever one is teaching the history of the oppressed.” We end up creating “a false dichotomy between oppression and resistance, implicitly disparaging those who, for whatever reason, did not resist but who suffered and died nonetheless.” Such a model also erases people who tried to cooperate or collaborate with oppressors simply “to stay alive or better their condition,” because they do not fit the heroic narrative (Blutinger 269).
The worst thing the Nazi’s did was make the Jews complicit in their own suffering (Horn 23). It made it impossible to separate the victim from the perpetrator; the concentration camps were built through Jewish slave labor, so the prisoners literally built their own prison. Sonderkommandos were prisoners in charge of clearing out the gas chambers and cremating the corpses, not to mention Kapos (Marrus) (Kapos And Other Prisoner Functionaries). Nobody’s hands were clean.
This climate of victim-blaming can be tied directly to Christian hegemony and the martyr. If the religious ideal is dying faithfully rather than compromising, then survivors, especially those whose survival depended on moral concessions, start to look suspect. Judaism certainly has some martyrs, but it does not attach the same pressure or romanticism to them. In Jewish law, one is generally required to break even sacred commandments rather than die, because the “sanctification of life” is the highest value (Goldberg 224). Furthermore, this narrative of the passive Jewish victim who went to their death like “sheep to the slaughter” also distorts the reality and ignores those who did fight back. Retroactively, Jewish scholars applied the term amidah, which loosely translates as “spiritual resistance,” to any act of resistance, as well as to any action taken to “enable individual and group survival.” Even those who operated in the grey zone, bargaining, bribing, or serving as Kapos, can be understood as participating in this broader religious mandate (Goldberg 225).
Goldberg argues that choosing terms like amidah and other specifically Jewish concepts shows how some scholars buck the trends and deliberately construct “the Jews as a collective historical subject with its immanent internal language and concepts.” (224–225). That stands in sharp contrast to the broader conception of the Holocaust as a story in which Jews have no agency at all. At the same time, Goldberg admits that a heavy focus on resistance can flatten the Holocaust in its own way, by emphasizing the “positive aspects of Jewish existence under Nazi power,” sanitizing the horror from another angle (Rapaport 191) (Goldberg 226).
After liberation, the trauma did not simply evaporate. Many survivors experienced crippling shame and survivor’s guilt. Especially women who exchanged sex for food or protection, who were criticized as “prostitutes” rather than recognized as people struggling to stay alive. Their community often treated them with “contempt and disgrace,” assuming there had been an element of choice in their actions, and “even survivors were at times complicit, criticizing the women harshly and self-righteously” (Person 104).
To make this material bearable and accessible, educators and the culture at large smooth it into something more digestible (Person 113–115). In essence removing the antisemitism from the Holocaust. This is a nearly inescapable problem faced by anyone who wishes to teach the Holocaust or any other mass atrocity, the tension between “allowing the dead to have their voices heard” and a historical framework that still centers the perpetrators (Blutinger 269). History by definition silences the victim,” because the embodied reality of suffering is “intrinsically inaccessible” to it (Goldberg 228).
This minimization reshapes how Jewish suffering is understood in the present. In moments of crisis, societies look for someone to carry blame, and Jews have long filled that role. They stand visibly outside the dominant ideological bubble, making them easy targets when public rage needs direction (Holmes 59–60). They embody the unsettling proof that a community can refuse assimilation and still survive “and even flourish” (Horn 82).
The conspiracy theories that drive antisemitic violence express a fear of freedom…and a desire to offload responsibility for complicated problems (Horn 89). At the same time, Jews are cast as institutional power, so speaking about antisemitism is reframed as evidence of this disproportionate power, their concerns over-exaggerated (Holmes 246) (Gerstenfeld 49). As Horn notes bitterly, “there is a swastika on a desk in my children’s public middle school, and it is no big deal.” (Horn 143) This systemic minimization of Jewish suffering, feeds the urge to universalize the Holocaust or to turn it into a generic parable about intolerance, rather than acknowledging it as a uniquely Jewish catastrophe.(Rapaport 189; Sorin 227).
This perception is sustained by a shallow understanding of antisemitism itself. If antisemitism is imagined only as violence, graffiti, slurs, obvious hatred, then Jews who speak about it can be dismissed. In reality, antisemitism, like racism, is deeply enmeshed in the dominant culture, operating largely invisibly, but never without consequence (Holmes 246, 248). For example, Christian hegemony, and the enduring belief that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus, casts Jews as the “absolute evil,” while offering conversion as a supposed solution. If only Jews would convert, the logic goes, discrimination would stop. As Horn observes, “converted” Jews are trotted out to demonstrate good intentions, proof that a government “isn’t antisemitic,” so long as Jews are willing to “publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered” (Horn 23).
All of this creates the perfect storm for what scholars call Holocaust justification, the belief that the Jews deserved the Holocaust, but some take it one step further, claiming that Jews were never victims at all but were actually the real perpetrators behind WWII, the Holocaust, last week when you stubbed your toe, everything. It is victim-blaming taken to its logical extreme, driven by the same fantasy that Jews are always secretly behind the scenes (Gerstenfeld 51) (Holmes 246). All of this is to demonstrate how quickly people turn on Jews, how eagerly they are blamed for life’s failures and the world’s evils. The moment Jews step out of line, the narrative twists itself inside out, until, somehow, Jews are no longer the victims, but the ones responsible for their own destruction.
So how should the Holocaust be portrayed? The obvious answer, to tell the complete truth, without any redactions, is more difficult than it looks. In Maus II, Spiegelman confronts the success of his book: film deals, money, and academic praise. He literally pictures himself, his success built on top of a mountain of Jewish bodies (Spiegelman 41). Nothing exists in a vacuum; even Holocaust testimony circulates in a capitalist society that rewards people for marketing their trauma. After years of being silenced and embodying a victim status that evoked pity, Holocaust survivors were suddenly in the 1960s asked to render precise accounts of their experiences and encouraged to disclose even the most horrifying details” (Rapaport 194).
This irrevocably changed the ways in which the Holocaust was discussed; the veil of silence was finally lifted, and gave way to the “era of witness” when first-hand testimonies became widely available (Goldberg 223) (Sorin 217). These survivor testimonies shocked audiences and disrupted the usual way people consumed history. While Anne Frank, the 1978 Holocaust miniseries, Schindler’s List, and even Wiesel’s appearance on Oprah brought attention to the Holocaust and its victims (Goldberg 229). These highly emotional, staged, or performative moments became turning points in how the Holocaust was remembered (Rapaport 200). Instead of focusing on the tragedy, Holocaust representation steadily shifted toward melodrama, which eventually became the dominant way the story is told (Goldberg 229).
We now live in the full-blown “era of the witness,” where almost every major event is mediated to the public through victims and eyewitnesses. Melodrama flourishes in this environment because it “acknowledges the disaster but at the same time immediately reassures one that everything is in order”. It restores authority and moral clarity so quickly that the feelings it produces often seem shallow or insincere. Good is good, bad is bad; black is black, white is white (230-231). They ask us to “listen to the victims’ voices,” but in an automatic, uncomplicated way. Victims are no longer seen as disturbing “Others” but as familiar protagonists onto whom audiences can easily project empathy, a kind of “unearned” identification. In this model, victims become cultural symbols we identify with, not unsettling presences that force us to confront uncomfortable truths (Goldberg 229-231).
Anne Frank might be the most famous case of this melodramatic framing. She is held up as the universal “embodiment of the gallant human spirit” (Rapaport 194). Children identify with her and see themselves in her diary. Horn notes the cruel irony. Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely to have been anywhere near as universally embraced (Horn 21).
The instinct is to take the antisemitism out of the Holocaust, to make its “characters” universal, palatable, and sellable (Person 103–105). To strip away the compromises, betrayals, and grey zones. Additionally, melodrama makes it easy to pour all our tears into one carefully chosen figure while ignoring “the greater suffering that prevails all around.” It creates an identification that “does not demand any real moral action.” It is much easier to empathize with a single dead Jewish girl safely contained in a book than with millions of Jews alive now, insisting on their own history and safety. As evidenced, “when speaking about Anne Frank…a German woman…reacted by saying that at least this girl should have been saved, implying that the others could have perished” (Goldberg 234). Horn pushes this idea further, noting that Frank’s most famous line “I still believe… that people are truly good at heart” is beloved precisely because it offers “grace” and “absolution” for a society that allows “piles of murdered girls…and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true… the exact gift that lies at the heart of Christianity.” She adds that “It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace” than to confront the obvious fact that “three weeks after writing those words, [Frank] met people who weren’t.” (Horn 189)
This is very different from classical tragic storytelling. Greek tragedy also evokes strong feelings, but those emotions are complex, shifting, and intentionally disruptive. It asks the audience to experience discomfort on behalf of people far removed from them and to think critically about the moral ambiguities. It combines the emotional impact with an intellectual challenge. When a story lacks this complexity and simply produces straightforward emotional identification, it becomes something closer to melodrama or “bad tragedy,” sensational rather than illuminating (Goldberg 231). Possibly, a tragedy would be a healthier way to view the Holocaust survivor.
One could then say that Maus is more of a classical tragedy than fitting with the familiar tropes of the Holocaust genre. It challenges the reader’s perceptions and serves as a test of sorts. Vladek Spiegelman is radical precisely because he refuses to cooperate within the familiar survivor narrative. He is bitter, racist, miserly, obsessive, not remotely a role model. He pushes against idealization. Spiegelman seems to ask, You can empathize with Anne Frank, but can you empathize with this man? Will you decide, consciously or not, that his unpleasantness makes his suffering somehow less tragic, less real, less worthy of your sympathy?
What is more, the book also refuses to sand down his Jewishness into universal symbols. Vladek is a secular Jew, but his story is threaded with specifically Jewish references, like the POW camp dream of the biblical Jacob, linked to Parshas Terumah, where he is wrapped in Jewish religious regalia, a tallit and tefillin (Spiegelman 58). He is not a blank metaphor for all victimized humanity. He is a particular Jew in a particular catastrophe. The rats are not just any persecuted minority; they are Jews.
That is the real risk Maus takes, the moment Jewish victims are shown as flawed. The reader is no longer being asked to cry for innocent lambs but to confront the fact that no one in the camps had the luxury of morality. The existence of Holocaust minimization, inversion, and resentment at imperfect Jews proves how quickly people will pounce once victims fail to perform saintliness.
Years after walking through Auschwitz at fifteen, Horn describes her rage at being lectured by a museum exhibit about the “importance of love.” The Holocaust did not happen because the world lacked love, she declares. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own failures and projected that burden onto the people who had long represented the terrifying idea of obligation and accountability…Jews were cast as “civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead.” As if “the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor.” She writes, “I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.)” (Horn 149)
I cannot know exactly why Yonia Fain made that sketch. It was explained to me at the gallery how Fain struggled with the burden of representing Jewish suffering and identity in art. His work often wrestles with memory, guilt, grotesque transformation, and the violence done to Jewish bodies and images. So, I believe this caricature is a representation of that much in the same way that Spiegelman co-opts Hitler’s metaphor of Jews as rats, Fain’s sketch represents how the Nazi’s dehumanized the Jews so much they may have begun to see themselves as exactly how their prosecutors saw them, less than human. In the propaganda poster Fain’s sketch echoes, the “Jewish” figure smirks with smug confidence, suggesting control, dominance, conspiracy. In Fain’s drawing, the eyes are wide, frightened, almost childlike in their vulnerability. His head is also pulled sharply backward, as if yanked by invisible strings, a puppet manipulated, not a mastermind pulling them. And in his hand, he grips not a coin but a scroll. Greed is a stereotype; learning is a Jewish value. Jewish identity, at its best, is built on questioning, wrestling, and refusing easy answers.
I do not think that the co-opting of these metaphors is necessarily empowering, so much as it exposes how survivors were forced to continuously grapple with their trauma. I suggested earlier that a more nuanced understanding could come from looking at the Holocaust as a tragedy. However, as one survivor insisted that “tragedy” was far too mild a word, what she lived through was an event that shattered language itself, a “blood-freezing horror” for which no existing category was adequate. She argues that calling the Holocaust a tragedy “reduces it to the normal”, preserving the dignity of protagonists when the camps stripped that dignity away (Goldberg 232). There is no neat arc here, no lesson, no divine providence. If you’ll excuse me —because any gentler term would be inappropriate—it was a fucked-up catastrophe that broke people. Yes, some survivors rebuilt, stitched themselves back together with whatever scraps they had left. Nevertheless, there is no version of this story in which it was “for the best,” or “made them stronger,” or “taught them something.”
Survivors are not metaphors. Dead Jews are not metaphors. The moment we force them into tidy boxes, innocents, saintly martyrs, universal symbols of “hope,” we betray the truth. As Horn writes of Frank, “the entire appeal…to the wider world—as opposed to those who knew and loved her—lay in her lack of a future.” (20) Dead Jews can be whatever you want them to be. Real Jews, flawed, complicated, alive, make people uncomfortable. Empathy becomes conditional: either Jewishness must be scrubbed away, or the victims must be polished into spotless saints. What Maus insists, what Dara Horn insists, what Yonia Fain insists, is simple and profoundly inconvenient. The victims of the Holocaust were neither empty metaphors nor perfect saints. They were human beings.
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