The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., exhumes the bodies with minimum ceremony, forcing acknowledgment of the facticity, specificity, and proximity of genocide. Always in the air is the fraught question of exceptionalism; but pressing as that is, resolving it is not the task the curators have assumed. With politicians invoking appeasement to justify militarism, with the Middle East rent by war and occupation, and with the specter of populist fascism again stalking Europe, the museum made me face something I already sensed but only half admitted: Jews are still struggling with the identifications bequeathed by the Nazis, damned to judge and be judged in terms of loss, guilt, trauma, and redemption. Hunted in the past, haunted in the present.

“Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing,” says the Schutzstaffel (SS) Reichsführer.¹ And though at times he could strain for the apposite euphemism, Himmler was famous for choosing his words with precision. Antisemitism is not like delousing; nor is it merely a form of delousing. It is exactly the same as delousing. Does he mean that Jews actually are lice? Or only that the same measures should be taken to eradicate both evils?

The SS commander is a constant presence at the Holocaust Museum. Controlled and confident among his famous colleagues — Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler. The calm within the storm. Downstairs, when I visited in summer 2002, the museum had hung a show by the painter and propagandist Arthur Szyk, student of medieval illumination, savage caricaturist, and activist for the Revisionists, the ascendant militarist wing of the Zionist movement.² Szyk captured Himmler’s clinical impassivity well. In late 1943, just a few months after the U.S. State Department had, for the first time, officially confirmed conservative reports of 2 million Jews killed by the Nazis, Szyk, exiled in New York and aggressively campaigning for an interventionist rescue policy, produced a drawing of characteristic clarity.³ Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and Hitler complain: “We’re Running Short of Jews!” On the table, the Gestapo report: “2,000,000 Jews Executed.” In the upper-right-hand corner: “To the memory of my darling Mother, murdered by the Germans, somewhere in the Ghetto of Poland. . . . Arthur Szyk.” He was only guessing this last part, but he was right: his mother had already been herded onto the transport from Lodz to Chelmno.

A year later, at the end of 1944, with Majdanek already liberated, Szyk again drew his Nazi gang, this time for the cover of the Revisionist journal the Answer. The dead are all present in skulls, bones, and tombstones etched with the names of the camps. The Nazi leaders, towering over the ruined landscape, are tattered and facing defeat, Goebbels at the front, throws up his hands in disbelief and a kind of surrender as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, passes through, grimly grasping the Torah, the emblem of collective survival. Where we see one, many lurk in the shadows. An eternal people, as the caption says.

The Answer was the house organ of the Bergsonites, Revisionist militants in the United States who had thrown themselves into publicizing the plight of the European Jews. Szyk’s drawing — used prominently in the group’s materials — displays his gift for distilling programmatic politics into complex, yet visceral, imagery. The Wandering Jew, that enduring and ambivalent antisemitic icon — he who mocked Christ on his progress to the cross and was condemned to roam the earth until the Second Coming — had already been reclaimed by Jewish artists, and Szyk drew from at least two prominent versions. One, a turn-of-thecentury image by Shmuel Hirszenberg in which a stripped Ahasuerus, victimized to derangement, flees the grisly horrors of the 1881 pogroms, circulated throughout Jewish Europe on postcards and posters. Another, a sculpture, is by Alfred Nossig, whose life occupies the center of this essay. Nossig’s statue transforms Hirszenberg’s traumatized vision with a radically assertive response to suffering, one that — in a profoundly awkward irony that will shortly become apparent — fit well with Szyk’s taste for the heroic.⁴

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Lice are parasites (as are Jews). They suck our blood (as do Jews). They carry disease (as do Jews). They enter our most intimate parts (as do Jews). They cause us harm without our knowing it (as do Jews). They signify filth (as do Jews). They are everywhere (as are Jews). They are disgusting. There is no reason they should live.

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Insects were there in the Holocaust. And not merely as convenient rhetorical figures for what Mahmood Mamdami — drawing parallels between the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda — calls race branding (“whereby it [becomes] possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience”).⁵

“Ordinary” dehumanization of this type — “the Tutsi ‘cockroaches’ should know what will happen, they will disappear”⁶ — requires two associations: the identification of a targeted group with a particular type of nonhuman, and the association of the nonhuman in question with adequately negative traits, traits that are always specific to that time and place. The rhetorical boundary that separates humans and nonhumans is notoriously labile, though it is worth making the obvious point that humans — in the generic — always (almost always?) retain their position at the top of any species hierarchy. Equally obvious, generic humans are more theoretical than lived, and in everyday practice the humanist human tends to be simultaneously universal and not universal, differentiated by all those naturalized markers of race, gender, and class with which it is so impossible not to be familiar. In these terms, genocide is a state of exaggeration rather than a state of exception, a hyperbolization of the familiar story in which universalism is restricted through the naming and instrumentalizing of biologized difference.