Volume 41, Number 4 · February 17, 1994
The Uses of the Holocaust
By Avishai Margalit
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
by Tom Segev
Hill and Wang, 593 pp., $27.50
In September of 1942, Mordecai Shenhabi, a member of a kibbutz in Palestine and former delegate to several Zionist conferences, suggested to leaders of the Jewish National Fund that they set up a memorial for the Holocaust with the name Yad Vashem—roughly, 'a memorial and a remembrance.' That September, of course, most of the Holocaust victims were still alive. But the incident, which is reported in Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, suggests that the destruction of European Jewry was being treated by many Jews in Palestine as an event in the past, at a time when it had only just begun to occur.
Review, 4289 words
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