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In defense of Natalie Portman

Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman is taking a pretty good beating in the Jewish community for her remarks on the Holocaust during a recent interview with a British newspaper, The Independent, to promote her directorial debut, “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”
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September 2, 2015

Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman is taking a pretty good beating in the Jewish community for her remarks on the Holocaust during a recent interview with a British newspaper, The Independent, to promote her directorial debut, “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”  Her sin? She raised thought-provoking questions about how much educational emphasis to put on genocides other than the Holocaust, especially as part of a Jewish education.

[RELATED: Portman should be commended, not criticized]

In 2007, Portman went to Rwanda for a gorilla trek and, while there, visited a museum devoted to the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, which she had not been taught about in the Jewish schools she had attended in the United States at that time. As she told the interviewer, “I was shocked that the [genocide] was going on while I was in school. We were learning only about the Holocaust, and it was never mentioned and it was happening while I was in school.”

Portman’s paternal great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, she was born in Israel and, as a young actress, she played the title role in a revival of “The Diary of Anne Frank” on Broadway. Nonetheless,  she was essentially accused of being an airhead from Hollywood who didn’t understand the unique nature of the Holocaust. Colette Avital, the chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, accused her of having a “limited” understanding of the Holocaust, which “cannot be compared with other tragedies.” Auschwitz survivor David Mermelstein charged her with dangerously “minimizing the importance of a Holocaust education.” Aaron Goldstein opined in The American Spectator, “If an Israeli-born Jew whose ancestors were killed at Auschwitz doesn’t understand what separates the Holocaust from all other acts of genocide then we have a very big problem.”

With all respect to her critics, I think Portman was attacked for something she didn’t say. Fairly read, Portman only argued that we must be sure to educate Jewish students about other genocides. That’s a long way from saying that other genocides are comparable to the Holocaust; indeed, she stated that she was not making “false equivalences.” In fact, there is no equivalence between the Holocaust and other genocides. The Holocaust is different in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin. For me, the key distinguishing feature from other genocides is that never before or since has a state harnessed every human, scientific and industrial resource at its disposal for the purpose of eradicating an entire people from the face of the Earth, down to the last baby. Or, as writer Adam Gopnik put it in The New Yorker a few years ago with reference to Anne Frank: “That a modern state was searching, at great expense and at a cost to its own war effort, to find a fifteen-year-old girl in an attic in Amsterdam in order to get her on a train bound for a concentration camp in Poland showed something new in the theatre of human action.” If properly taught, the significance of the Holocaust will not be diminished even if, at the same time, high school students also are told that, in the span of little more than three months, an ethnic group in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 people solely because they were from a different ethnic group.  

Now, I don’t think Portman’s critics are literally advocating that other genocides should not be on a Jewish school’s curriculum. Rather, where I think Portman hit a nerve is the deep fear that Jews will lose ownership of the Holocaust through its universalization as a symbol of man’s inhumanity to man when, as Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel put it, it was about “man’s inhumanity to Jews.” The way to address that concern is not to scorn Portman but to begin a dialogue over how we can have it both ways: teaching a new generation about the truly distinctive and Jewish nature of the Holocaust while also ensuring that students know about the Rwandas and Srebrenicas. Said another way, I think “Never Again” can retain its uniqueness even while we draw upon the Holocaust to remind ourselves why we must stop genocides wherever they occur. 

So, thank you, Natalie Portman, for starting an important discussion.


Gregory Wallance is a writer, lawyer and human rights activist.  He is the author of “America’s Soul in the Balance:  The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy.”

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