Genocide studies started, quite literally, with a dream. In the 1960s, a Jewish American psychologist named Israel Charny went to bed after passing a licensing exam and had a graphic dream about Nazis throwing Jewish children against a wall, “their brains splattering all over.” Charny, now in his nineties and living near Jerusalem, took this as a sign. “What the dream said to me was, ‘My God, you’re now a specialist in human behavior. You need to understand how and why people do things, and you don’t know a goddamn thing about how and why they did the Holocaust,” he told me. He resolved to devote his life to studying the Holocaust and other genocides.
At the time, the concept of “genocide,” broadly defined as certain acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” had received little academic attention since it was introduced by the Polish Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin in 1944 and codified by the United Nations in the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Cold War international order’s bipolar split prevented any common effort to investigate and prosecute genocide, while the Holocaust itself had not yet been established as a central historical touchstone in the Western narrative. But the 1970s saw the rise of Holocaust memory, aided by the explosive popularity of the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, and prompting a 1979 US presidential commission recommending a Holocaust museum on the National Mall. For scholars like Charny—many of them Jewish political scientists or sociologists with personal connections to the Holocaust—it was an opportunity to think about what links might be drawn between the Holocaust and other instances of mass racialized violence. They found common cause with scholars in the Armenian diaspora seeking to expand awareness of the Armenian genocide, and set out to create opportunities to study the concept of genocide together.
Their early efforts encountered significant political opposition. In 1982, Charny sought to co-organize one of the first international conferences on the study of the Holocaust and genocide. True to his cohort’s political leanings, it would be hosted in Israel, with the Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel acting as conference president. Charny told me that when he relayed the plan to Israeli politician Gideon Hausner, best known as the chief prosecutor in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hausner threatened to call the Knesset police and have him arrested: “How dare you speak of other genocides along with the Holocaust,” Hausner reportedly said. A similar sentiment reigned at the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, which backed out of the conference. Meanwhile, Turkey got wind of planned sessions about the Armenian genocide and pressured the Israeli government to shut down the event; government officials tried to oblige, calling participants and urging them not to come. Wiesel pulled out when the Israeli government told him that Turkey was threatening reprisals against Turkish Jews if the conference went forward—a claim later revealed to be false. But Charny refused to buckle to pressure, and the conference went forward in Tel Aviv.