Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday November 8, 2010
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SIMON WIESENTHAL: The Life and Legends
Tom Segev
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385519465
482 pages
$35
Reviewed by Susan Jacoby
Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter and impassioned loner, is a legendary figure for his role in helping track down hundreds of Nazi war criminals, the most famous among them Adolf Eichmann. Wiesenthal's death in 2005, at age 96, was a coda for an entire generation of Holocaust survivors who are now passing from the earth. What more could there be to say?
Plenty, as it turns out in "Simon Wiesenthal," by Israeli journalist Tom Segev. A columnist for the newspaper Ha'aretz and the author of numerous books, Segev is one of the world's great investigative reporters -- in a class with bloodhounds like Seymour Hersh and the late David Halberstam.
In this biography, the subject is not only Wiesenthal but the shifting relationship since the end of World War II of American, Israeli and European culture to what is now known as the Holocaust but was never called that in the first two decades after the war. Segev places Wiesenthal's life within a context almost unthinkable to Americans under 50 today, for whom Holocaust memorialization is a given. That the singular fate of European Jews under the Nazis was downplayed for many years after the war and that the U.S. government was none too eager to pursue Nazi war criminals who had taken refuge here is not widely known (even among young Jews). Segev notes that the Holocaust was also "wrapped in silence" in the young state of Israel and that many Israelis who had emigrated to Palestine before the war had denigrated survivors for "remaining in Europe instead and waiting to be slaughtered without doing anything to prevent it."
Against this background, Wiesenthal emerges as a man of contradictions: a lone detective with close ties to Israeli and U.S. intelligence; a Zionist who chose to settle in Vienna, not Israel, after the war; a man who fought to extend the statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes in Germany and Austria but befriended Albert Speer -- the only defendant in the Nuremberg trials to plead guilty -- after his release from prison in 1966.
Above all, although no one was more relentless in his pursuit of Nazis who murdered Jews, Wiesenthal was a humanist who rejected the idea of collective guilt and attributed his own survival partly to the help of individual "good Germans."
Perhaps the most revealing fact in this biography is that within less than three weeks of his liberation from Mauthausen concentration camp, Wiesenthal submitted a list of 150 war criminals -- known to him personally -- to American authorities. This was the first paper in a file that grew to more than 300,000 documents. A revealing photograph taken in his native town of Buczacz in eastern Galicia, now a part of Ukraine, shows Wiesenthal, the leader of a Zionist youth movement, in an ordinary jacket and tie surrounded by boys in uniforms. Even as a child, he recalled, he hated uniforms.
One reason Wiesenthal became controversial in Jewish establishment circles is simply that he exaggerated achievements that needed no exaggeration. Segev, drawing on previously classified Israeli intelligence material, demonstrates convincingly that Wiesenthal told Israeli authorities in 1953 -- seven years before the Mossad caught up with Eichmann -- that the Nazi criminal was in Argentina. But many Israelis considered Wiesenthal a publicity hound who took credit for bringing Eichmann to justice that should have gone to the government -- even though Yad Vashem, in charge of Israel's Holocaust memorialization, congratulated him on his "brilliant achievement."
But there is a deeper reason for the ambivalent attitude of many international Jewish leaders toward Wiesenthal. In the long-running debate about whether the Holocaust was a unique crime to which nothing can be compared, he falls on the side of those who, while never denying the particularity of Jewish suffering, take a more universalist position.
During the 1970s, when Elie Wiesel headed up a council planning what is now the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he and Wiesenthal were on opposite sides in a debate over whether gypsies -- also targeted for extermination -- should be represented on the council. Wiesel opposed such representation. Segev's account of the very personal, often petty nature of the rivalry between the two (the author quotes directly from letters that reflect badly on both men) will give no comfort to those who believe in secular saints. But perhaps it is just as well -- and the real achievement of this warts-and-all biography -- to accept that truth, justice and memory are the province not of saints but of flawed human beings.
Susan Jacoby is the author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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C STREET: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
Jeff Sharlet
Little, Brown
ISBN 978-0316091077
344 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by John G. Turner
Two years ago, Jeff Sharlet published an expose of the Fellowship (also known as the Family), by far the most influential evangelical ministry in the nation's capital. In his latest book, "C Street," Sharlet extends his investigation of the Fellowship to a string of Republican sex scandals, anti-gay legislation in Uganda and a purported evangelical takeover of the U.S. military.
Much of his firsthand reporting is brilliant, even courageous. Sharlet lived in a fellowship-owned house in Arlington, Va., several years ago, giving him unique access to the organization's shadowy nexus of activities. More recently, he traveled to Uganda and met with political and religious leaders who want to execute gay people. He also tracked down the story of a U.S. unit in Iraq which spent Easter morning watching Mel Gibson's "The Passion," inscribed "Jesus Killed Muhammad" in Arabic on one of their Bradleys and proceeded to use disproportionate force against offended locals.
While Sharlet's approach is unusually resourceful, it is not all that difficult to condemn bigoted and hypocritical evangelicals, who are among the most inviting targets for journalists. Where Sharlet falls short is in connecting these fascinating and sometimes horrifying dots to either the Fellowship or a "fundamentalist threat to American democracy," as the subtitle of his book puts it.
In some instances, the Fellowship's role is clear enough. Sharlet begins his story with the religious bedfellows who have occupied the Fellowship's C Street boarding house in Capitol Hill over the years, politicians such as Nevada Sen. John Ensign and Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn. Ensign lived at the C Street residence while he had an extramarital affair with the wife of a close friend and political aide. Coburn, after urging his fellow senator to end the relationship and save his marriage, tried to broker a financial settlement for Ensign's now-former aide.
Sharlet documents the connections that Fellowship members have formed with dictators and thugs around the world, focusing in particular on the ministry's activities in Uganda. In 2009, Uganda's parliament began considering a bill that would condemn to death persons who committed "aggravated homosexuality," such as multiple acts of homosexual sex. Sharlet assigns substantial blame for this barbaric idea to American evangelicals and, in particular, to the Fellowship. "The Family didn't pull the trigger," he writes, "(but) they provided the gun." While Sharlet finds Fellowship connections with a number of Ugandan politicians (including Member of Parliament David Bahati, who introduced the bill), the extent of the Fellowship's influence on political developments in Uganda remains opaque.
The Fellowship has only a tangential connection to the book's final section, in which Sharlet explores the influence of Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. He explains, however, that his worries are not confined to the Fellowship but rather extend to a "monolithic vision of fundamentalism always threatening to subsume the many lowercased ideas that constitute democracy." The Fellowship, he maintains, with its desire to inculcate an anointed elite, is merely one example of an authoritarian desire to replace government by the people with government by God's chosen few.
Sharlet sounds almost unhinged in his conclusion. He envisions a future United States lacking legal contraception and public schools and in which fundamentalist military commanders launch invasions of places like the Philippines and Venezuela. "C Street" would have been more fashionable circa 2006 when Kevin Phillips garnered considerable praise for his book "American Theocracy."
Today, however, Sharlet's scenario seems wildly overblown. While there are plenty of Washington elitists who would prefer to govern without the nuisance of democratic accountability, not that many of them would fit any ordinary definition of Christian fundamentalism. Moreover, for all the electoral strength and political influence accumulated by the Christian Right during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, it accomplished precious little of its agenda. While likely to enjoy yet another political resurrection, the Christian Right will not fulfill Sharlet's overwrought nightmares.
In recent years voters have delivered bipartisan punishment to American elites. An explosion of grassroots sentiment removed many entrenched Republicans in 2006 and 2008, and conservative activism -- not especially monolithic or authoritarian -- is cleaning house in 2010. Sharlet rightly documents evangelical abuses of power at home and abroad, but his subjects pose no credible threat to American democracy.
John G. Turner is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Alabama and the author of "Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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