Plans are well advanced to build a Holocaust museum in Manchester. Daniel Libeskind, the much-praised architect of the Jewish museum in Berlin, who is also disigning the planned Imperial War Museum of the North in Manchester (the sister of the Imperial War Museum in London), has already built the models. About ?8m is to be raised towards the project. The national lottery, the EU, private donors (both Jewish and non-Jewish) and trusts will be approached.
Meanwhile, the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London is due to open in May 2000, for which some ?20m was raised. Does Britain need another Holocaust museum? Today, many big cities, from Los Angeles to Washington to Berlin (and soon London), have one. Why not Manchester, home to the largest Jewish community in provincial Britain (with approximately 30,000 Jews)?
I would certainly visit the Manchester museum, just as I rushed to the Holocaust museum in Washington on my first visit there. But what are Holocaust museums for? Places of remembrance, where we commemorate those who died in the most barbaric event of our century. But they are also meant to teach us the lessons of history, to ensure that the victims did not die "in vain." We must remember the past in order not to repeat it.
The war in Kosovo, and the parallels which have been drawn between Hitler and Milosevic, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, could be taken as evidence that Holocaust "awareness" has indeed taught us the lessons of history: the Holocaust stands as a metaphor to alert the wider public to present evils.
But the evidence is uncertain. What about Rwanda? What about the continuing persecution of minorities in large parts of the world? Will the far right's appeal in Germany diminish now that the Jewish museum has opened in Berlin? How many museums would it take to achieve this?
If the pedagogical arguments in favour of Holocaust museums are inconclusive, there is, it seems to me, one conclusive argument against. Holocaust museums, by definition, portray Jews primarily as victims. In a world in which international support and sym-pathy are likely to determine whether your cause prevails or not, it is perhaps not surprising that the status of victim has proved so popular. By deciding to build a Holocaust museum in Washington, hasn't the most powerful Jewish community in the world decided to make victimhood the central element of its identity?
But the popularity of Holocaust museums among Jews is symptomatic of a deeper malaise: a crisis in Jewish identity. Those Jews who no longer feel they can identify with the Mosaic Law have turned to the Holocaust as a substitute for expressing their Jewishness. But might there be a third way? A way which is neither strictly religious nor fixated on the Holocaust? Fifty years after the Holocaust, might the time not have come to look to the future as well as to the past?
I was recently a judge for the Jewish Quarterly book prize. More than half of the books in the non-fiction section were about the Holocaust. The winner, Edith's Book, was the moving diary of a woman who had been hidden by a non-Jewish family in Holland. It was a good book. But, I wondered, what will Jewish culture look like at the beginning of the 21st century, once all the books, memoirs and diaries about the Holocaust have been written?
America points the way. In the US, thanks to people like Philip Roth, David Mamet and Woody Allen, there is a distinctive non-religious Jewish culture which has penetrated mainstream American culture. But who are the Woody Allens of Britain? I can think of Jewish artists (Lucien Freud), playwrights (Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Patrick Marber), writers (Anita Brookner), but none of them have made Jewish identity a feature of their work.
I recently attended a conference about "European Jewish Culture in the 21st Century," organised by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research. The idea of a Jewish equivalent to the Arts Council was floated. Wouldn't the ?8m earmarked for Manchester's Holocaust museum be better spent on that?
