Engraving of Solomon Northup “in his plantation suit” “12 Years a Slave,” based on Solomon Northrup’s narrative of his journey from freedom to slavery (he was kidnapped) and back to freedom, won this year’s Academy Award for “Best Picture.” According to the buzz, this fine film was sure to win because Hollywood liberals love to feel guilty—and to make amends. Certainly, America and Hollywood have a lot to feel guilty about concerning slavery and its depiction on the screen. New World slavery via the Atlantic slave trade was introduced in the Caribbean over a 100 years before the first African was sold in Jamestown, Virginia. Also, the notorious film, “Birth of a Nation” (1915), made by a white supremacist Southerner D. W. Griffith not by the fledgling Hollywood studios, came out two years after two anti-slavery Italian films about the Roman slave rebel Spartacus. “Twelve Years a Slave,” however, is the first serious dramatic film to take head-on slavery in the U.S. because other notable efforts—”Amistad” (1997), Spielberg’s take on a rebellion on a slave ship, “Beloved” (1998), a horror film based on Toni Morison’s novel utilizing memory flashbacks about slavery, and “Django Unchained” (2012), Quentin Tarantino’s macabre melodrama—don’t quite fill the bill. “12 Years a Slave” has been called the dramatization of many things: America’s original sin, its national shame and disgrace, its “heart of darkness”—and its “Diary of Anne Frank” or “Black Holocaust.” All except the two last fit. It’s not that there aren’t “Jewish connections.” After all, the Biblical Joseph’s journey from freedom-to-slavery-to-freedom was the first such iconic account. And actor Kirk Douglas—who was the moving force behind and starred in “Spartacus” (1960)—said: “thousands of slaves carrying rocks, beaten, starved, crushed, dying. I identify with them. As in the Torah, ‘Slaves were we unto Egypt’. I came from a race of slaves. That would have been my family, me.” In the minds of most viewers, “Spartacus” was the story of “a white slave revolt.” Yet in many ways, the picture’s moral center-of-gravity was the African slave-gladiator, Draba who fights Spartacus in the gladiatorial training school, and defeats him, but—rather than kill him—lunges at the Roman aristocrat Crassus who slits Draba’s throat and has his body hung upside down in the slave quarters. Solomon Northrop survived slavery; Anne Frank died in the Shoah. What’s wrong in particular with “Black Holocaust”? Actually, the problem is encapsulated in the words during the film of Solomon Northrup himself: “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” He could afford to make this statement because what was a stake was not the life of his entire people but of himself alone, and because the prospect of his own death was not the greatest threat he faced from the scourge of slavery. A very different situation was faced by the victims of the Shoah. Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum, a Zionist rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto, sought to differentiate between the classical response of Jewish martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the “sanctification of the Divine Name”—and kiddush ha-Ḥayyim: the “sanctification of life.” Rabbi Nissenbaum wrote: “In the past our enemies demanded our soul and the Jew sacrificed his body in sanctifying God’s name. Now the enemy demands the body of the Jew. That makes it imperative for the Jew to defend it and protect it.” Of the 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans put on slave ships to the new world, perhaps 2 million died during Middle Passage. Millions more died as a consequence of being enslaved either before leaving Africa or after arriving in the Americas. But enslavement neither in intent nor effect was a physical death sentence. In fact, the slave population of the U.S.—with most of the growth produced by natural increase not slave imports—grew from around 500,000 in 1790 to four million in 1860. What slavery threatened in the U.S., directly and fundamentally, was not the collective existence of a people but their souls and human dignity. Hence Solomon Northrup’s recollection of his kidnapping “handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington—through the capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we were told, rests on the foundation of man’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!” The victims of the Shoah faced a murderous conspiracy against both their bodies and their souls. We can debate the significance of this difference between American Slavery and the Final Solution, but we should not adopt terms like “the Black Holocaust” that obscure its reality. In the most horrific scene in “Twelve Years a Slave,” the young slave Patsey, who has been repeatedly raped by her owner, is whipped at the urging of the owner’s wife on the pretext that she strayed off the plantation to fetch a bar of soap. What could be more horrible than to know that your great great grandmother was whipped to an inch of her life by a sadistic master? Perhaps only the knowledge that your grandmother was asphyxiated and made into a bar of soap by the Nazi death machine. This was the difference between surviving slavery to have the chance to live a life of dignity, albeit in a racist society, and almost sure death in the Holocaust. The modern world is still full of “debt slaves” and “sex slaves.” It’s past time that Hollywood seriously explored slavery as a crime against human rights and dignity.