Dear Guest, Grose, and OJFP ;-) the first time I was in an on-line chat and someone mentioned the link between assimilation and the holocaust, I was convinced I was talking to a nazi. (This is merely a fact, I take you both at face value). My reaction is two-fold:

On a surface level this falls right into the argument that the anti-semites of that day and this were making, mind you, their accusations against Jews are not simply that Jews were 'assimilating'. They were accusations of degeneracy, criminality, and poor hygiene. From their point of view, any statement that Jews admit responsibility for the Holocaust will immediately lead to their statement "oh, so you accept that Jews are degenerate, criminal, and filthy?"

The perpetrators of the Holocaust killed a huge number of non-assimilationist Jews, those isolated communities such as depicted in the world of Sholom Aleichem (or Fiddler On The Roof). In fact, it pretty much ended that world, and left the assimilated Jews of the United States, Canada, and the ethnically Jewish but culturally non-Jewish population of Russia.

On a more humorous note, I'm reminded of the verse about God's judgement on San Francisco in 1906:

If God had meant to toast the town for being over-frisky-
Then why'd He burn the First Church down
And leave McCullough's whisky?

Similarly Voltaire railed against those religionists who insisted that the Lisbon earthquake was a penalty wrought from Heaven.

Likewise, finding purpose in any great indiscriminate disaster, from nature or from persons, is to my mind a logical crime of the first order. This is what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson did soon after 911 and makes no more sense in this thread transferred to Jews and The Holocaust.

I find that the argument that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves by assimilating, to be an argument fitting the thought patterns of National Socialism.