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July 19, 2007 | 11:35 am

Holocaust denial or alter kaker row?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg


Loyal readers know that I wasn’t raised Jewish and that my strongest association with Jewishness is with experiencing anti-Semitism. The potent embodiment of that is the Holocaust. My belief—based on 4,000 years of history—is that the world does not care if you practice Judaism if your last name is Greenberg. To anti-Semites, you’re a “Jew.”

I say this as a preface to what will follow, because I have no interest in spurring Alan Dershowitz to start a campaign to deny me tenure at The Journal. I am not a revisionist. I know the Holocaust happened, and I lament the fact so many Jews my generation want to separate themselves from the guilt of that memory—lest we forget.

And I understood the concern of eastern Ventura County Jews this week as they dealt with what they believed was a Holocaust denier who had used a public facility to spread his hate. From today’s Jewish Journal:

The way Jews in the Conejo Valley describe it, Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the propaganda proffered as academic discourse at the Goebel Senior Adult Center last month. That’s when John Bravos, a commissioner of the publicly funded facility, focused a lecture in his comparative religion series on the Holocaust. The first question asked by a flier for the event was: “Did it happen?”

When about a dozen seniors showed up, Bravos began by talking about deniers who use the phrase “so-called Holocaust,” comparing the atrocities of World War II to other genocides and saying that far fewer Jews were murdered by the Nazis than historians have long believed.

“I was devastated and irate and just very insulted and offended,” said Honey Bencomo, a 67-year-old Jewish woman from Agoura Hills who attended the lecture with her husband, who is Catholic. “He was talking about something that is a very significant part of Jewish history and was saying it didn’t happen.”

But when I talked to Bravos, I wasn’t sure he had been understood correctly. What I heard were the words not of a Holocaust denier, or “revisionist,” but of a confused octogenarian.

And from the rancor exhibited at Tuesday’s meeting—a meeting of more than 200, where Jews attacked the motives of other Jews who defended the accused—it seems that no matter what his intent was, the damage to the Conejo’s Jewish community has been far more substantial than the pain of hearing a “nutcase” (Bravos’ word) like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad call the Holocaust a myth.

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Brad, not sure if i understand what happened.  Was the speaker then not denying the Holocust?  To me it sounds like he was questioning it varacity and the fact is, at the end of the day millions of people lost their lives just simply because of their faith, affiliation, ethnicity and appearance.  I do not think we can tread lightly on this matter.

But if you can, do clear up my mispreception.  I might not be reading (understanding) the post correctly.

Comment by Affad Shaikh on 7/19/07 at 3:25 pm

I agree, Affad, the Holocaust is not a matter to be flippant about. What happened at the lecture is unclear. Some say the speaker, John Bravos, said the Holocaust never happened; others who were there said he said it happened but only about 3.5 million Jews lost their lives.

Without question—and regardless of what Bravos believes—the nature in which the lecture was presented and, particularly, the flier that promoted it exacerbated the potential damage of the speaker discussing the etymology of the word “holocaust” and arguing that the exact numbers were different than we believe.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 7/19/07 at 3:36 pm

A report by the The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies reporting on denial activities in 2007 describes it this way:
“On June 19, John Bravos, an 81-year-old retired social anthropologist and commissioner of the Goebel Senior Adult Center in Conejo Valley, California, said in a speech at the center that “far fewer Jews were murdered by the Nazis than historians have long believed.” A flier advertising the lecture asked about the Holocaust, “Did it Happen?” In a subsequent newspaper interview, Bravos said he believed 3.5-million Jews, not six million, had been killed in the Holocaust”

Comment by Ben Plonie on 4/22/09 at 7:04 pm

Yeah, that “subsequent newspaper interview” was with me. And I quote:

Bravos didn’t claim Jews weren’t killed during World War II. But he insisted that a major statistic historians agree upon—that the Nazis exterminated about 6 million Jews—has been proven wrong by recent research, information he said he found through a Google search.

“For 60 years, we knew those numbers; now new numbers are out,” he said. “Based on the information I read, they said 3.5 million were killed in the Holocaust, which is still horrible.”

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 4/22/09 at 7:16 pm

A Google search? Surely you jest. I use Google avidly but one obviously has to be judicious to understand what it churns up. Here from a brand new interview with Deborah Lipstadt, defendant in the first big David Irving trial who thoroughly exposed and whupped him.
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/04/19/1004269/denying-the-deniers-q-a-with-deborah-lipstadt

JTA: How has the Internet changed the conversation about the Holocaust?

LIPSTADT: What the Internet has done is put a lot of unfiltered information out there, and by so doing it makes it harder for people to differentiate what is legitimate information and what is not; what is fact and what is fiction. The Internet is a wonderful thing—it allows us to spread information in a way we never did before. But it puts out a lot of lies and it’s easy access for people. Someone wrote to me that his son Googled “Jews, Soap and the Holocaust” and the first four sites were Holocaust denial sites. This is a myth. Jews were not made into soap. It never happened—there might have been experiments. Deniers say, “This is another lie that Jews made up.”

There is no such thing as ‘recent research’ on the numbers. The first raw figures added up to about 3.5 million immediately, and it became known later that about two million Jews were shot and buried by Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine before the extermination camps were built. The other half million was accumulated as reports trickled in from seized documents. The Holocaust was not about a blob of six million, it was six million murders of people with names, totally personal to the fragments of families frantically searching the records for their relatives. Yad Vashem has recently put their databases online if there is any doubt about the numbers.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 4/22/09 at 7:56 pm

Yes, I know Deborah and I read that Q&A and I profiled a witness for David Irving in that trial. The question isn’t whether Bravos sincerely accepted what he found on page 10 of a Google search but whether he accepted it at all.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 4/22/09 at 8:38 pm

The practice of endlessly doubting and questioning and reopening issues and adopting alternate viewpoints and values may be suitable certain kinds of investigations where facts are unknown or in dispute. The facts of the Holocaust were never in dispute and are not now in serious dispute. Even such people as Ahmedinajad are speaking from ignorance and a lack of concern for the facts. If there was such a thing as a license to surf the Internet, Bravos would not qualify for one. The question is whether he should be licensed to speak in public with that degree of carelessness and insensitivity.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 4/22/09 at 10:46 pm

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