The Baltic Project to Delete the Holocaust from European History Observations from Lithuania - Prof. Dovid Katz

23 June 2009

The twelfth lecture of the

Eighth Herbert Berman Memorial Series

Tuesday, 23 June 2009, 1 Tammuz 5769, 10:00 AM

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 13 Tel Hai Street

Prof. Dovid Katz

The Baltic Project to Delete the Holocaust from European History

 Observations from Lithuania

A sophisticated template for deleting the Holocaust "as such" from European history, without denying a single murder, has been developed in the Baltics. Far from contenting itself with revisionism locally, the ambitious project seeks to win over the European Parliament and increasingly, the European Union. The strategy is to replace the Holocaust with a new and bogus paradigm of "two equal genocides, Nazi and Soviet." The campaign, well-financed by the state, has many stratagems, including: delegitimization of the anti-Nazi resistance (resulting most recently in prosecutorial campaigns against Holocaust survivors who resisted); delegitimization of the Wiesenthal Center and efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice; extreme embellishment of Jewish participation in Soviet rule; redefinition by law of the word "genocide"; provocation of anti-Semitic moods centered on local Jews and Holocaust survivors; marginalization of valiant local non-Jewish champions of truth-telling, and their replacement by lavishly sponsored "double genocide" commissions, research centers and museums. Discussion of successes to date in the European Parliament.

Professor Dovid Katz is a specialist on the history of the Yiddish language and its dialects. A native of New York City, he founded Yiddish studies at Oxford University where he taught for eighteen years. After a stint at Yale, he relocated to Vilnius, Lithuania, where he is professor at Vilnius University and research director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. His books include Grammar of the Yiddish Language (1987), Tales of the Misnagdim of Vilna Province (1996),  Lithuanian Jewish Culture (2004), Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2007), Windows to a Lost Jewish Past: Vilna Book Stamps (2008) and Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks (2009). http://www.dovidkatz.net/