Shoah Business

The chapter examines what it calls the Shoah business, in which the Holocaust is being trivialized, merchandised, and—through feel-good Hollywood films and theme-parked museums—Americanized. There’s no business like Shoah business, to borrow the Jewish historian Yaffa Eliach’s mordant one-liner. In Selling the Holocaust, Tim Cole’s critique of the branding and blockbustering of the unspeakable, Eliach argues that “at the end of the twentieth century, the Holocaust is being consumed.” Evidence that the Holocaust is being trivialized, merchandised, and Americanized is all around us, from the revisionist happy endings of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful and the Robin Williams starrer Jakob the Liar to Holocaust-related toys, postcards, and games. Holocaust museums do a brisk business, and death-camp tourism is a common feature of the Grand Tour for Jews and Gentiles alike. More than half a century after the Nazis industrialized genocide, the theme-parking and gift-shopping of the inferno is well under way; at times, it seems as if the Holocaust is becoming an Atrocity Exhibition.