Amid a record-breaking spate of antisemitism since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, one institution is particularly well-placed to help combat the new-old Jew-hatred in America: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet it has remained almost entirely on the sidelines.
Last October, the museum issued a statement noting it “is gravely concerned about the unprecedented antisemitism erupting—sometimes violently—on college campuses; city streets in the United States, Europe and beyond; all over the Internet … creating an environment of intimidation and threat to all Jews all over the world.”
Continued the museum’s chair, Stuart E. Eizenstat, “ … we are witnessing a horrific rise in antisemitism. College students, leaders and the broader public need to learn the history and lessons of the Holocaust—the dangers of unchecked antisemitism, the power of propaganda, and potential for complicity in group-targeted violence.”
In April, the museum issued a press release calling on universities to address rising Jew-hatred. “The shocking eruption of antisemitism on many American college and university campuses is unacceptable, and university and all other appropriate authorities must take greater action to protect Jewish students,” it asserted.
Where did those “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators chanting “Hitler didn’t finish the job” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” get their lessons of the past? Why does the power of their propaganda pivot on the destruction of the Jewish state and marginalization or worse of its supporters?
Opened in 1993 in Washington, D.C., and dedicated to educating the public about the genocidal nature of Nazi Germany’s antisemitism, the museum is a leading tourist destination. Its permanent exhibition and temporary displays have highlighted many aspects of the destruction of European Jewry, both as a major element in 20th-century history and as a warning about the lethal potential of intolerance. It has used other more contemporary examples to help educate, for example, with a temporary exhibition spotlighting Myanmar’s (Burma) genocidal repression of its Muslim Rohingya minority.
Nevertheless, emails and calls to the museum asking about exhibitions, speakers’ series, publications or films focusing on Soviet and Nazi propaganda, and Arab nationalist and Islamist hostility to Israel and Jews yielded little. Yet the DNA of today’s anti-Zionist antisemitism links the Soviets, Nazis, pan-Arab nationalists and Islamists.
According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in the first three months after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, joined by other Palestinian Arabs, raped, mutilated and murdered Israelis and foreigners, “anti-Israel protesters called supporters of the Jewish state ‘pigs’ and chanted ‘gas the Jews’ at pro-Hamas rallies worldwide. Many pro-Palestinian rallies held across the United States and elsewhere are as much about intimidating and purging Jews from the public square as supporting Palestinians.”
Such demonstrators are descendants of the Kremlin, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Third Reich. In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly rewarded Arafat, leader of the Soviet bloc-supported Palestine Liberation Organization, with passage of the infamous Moscow-inspired, PLO-promoted “Zionism is racism” resolution.
The 1930s wants its antisemitism back
Responding to true believers in “Zionist racism” by opposing “hate” and calling for “tolerance” avoids the bedrock of contemporary Jew-hatred: Antisemitism was and is central to the anti-democratic left. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels drew on classic Jew-hatred to advocate “scientific socialism.” In his 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question,” Marx updated Martin Luther’s 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies by elevating money, not the devil, as the Jews’ god. To advance a utopian workers’ paradise, Engels desired the annihilation of Europe’s many small “reactionary” minorities, none more reactionary than religious-nationalist Jews. The Bolsheviks deployed anti-Zionism—as at the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in then-Soviet Azerbaijan—to try to incite Arab-Islamic rebellions against British and French colonialism.
Promoting its “final solution to the Jewish question,” Nazi Germany used the same playbook. Nazi-Islamist cooperation included World War II Arabic, short-wave radio broadcasts to the Middle East from Berlin. Most notable among such broadcasters was Haj Amin al-Husseini, a virulent anti-Western antisemite and the “George Washington” of Palestinian Arab nationalism. At their 1941 meeting, al-Husseini, the British-created grand mufti of Jerusalem, asserted to Hitler that Nazis and Arabs had the same enemies: Great Britain, Jews and Communists. Al-Husseini was also a font of early Islamist agitation. One of his countless listeners was a young Iranian whom the world later came to know as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
But with 1930s European-style antisemitism echoing today rhetorically and sometimes in deeds, the museum has remained nearly mute on its primary causes. The museum, not surprisingly, embodies a liberal Western assumption that knowledge of the evils spawned by intolerance and hatred, exemplified by Naziism, will minimize the appeal of such deadly bigotry. But what if the assumption is wrong?
Shortly before his death in 2015, Robert Wistrich—professor of European and Jewish history at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and head of the school’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism—wrote that “even today, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora are fixated on the dangers of far-right traditional antisemitism—whether racist, religious or nationalist. While neo-fascism has not altogether disappeared, it is in most cases a secondary threat.”
Further, he continued, “There is an illusory belief that more Holocaust education and memorialization can serve as an effective antidote to contemporary antisemitism. This notion, shared by many governments and well-meaning liberal gentiles, is quite unfounded. On the contrary, today ‘Holocaust inversion’ (the perverse transformation of Jews into Nazis and Muslims into victimized ‘Jews’) all-too-often becomes a weapon with which to pillory Israel and denigrate the Jewish people.”
Failure of Holocaust education
The more than two dozen Holocaust museums in the United States have attracted tens of millions of visitors and developed curricula for 20,000 schools, according to Edward Rothstein. So, “one might expect, then, that recent generations, dutifully exposed to this history, would have a heightened sensitivity to such matters—particularly to antisemitism.” But, he noted in The Wall Street Journal in August, “over the past 10 months, as hate-crime statistics, campus protests and urban disruptions have demonstrated, the opposite is the case. Moreover, the words ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ have become so profligately applied that the situation seems to illustrate the comically coined Latinate fallacy, ‘reductio ad Hitlerum’: Any disliked opponent is a ‘Nazi’; every act of war, a genocide; and any large-scale suffering, a Holocaust.”
U.S. President Joe Biden said in a speech at the museum on May 7, properly linked Nazi Jew-hatred with the Hamas massacre. But he went no further in highlighting the leftist-Islamist alliance. The White House’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism released in May 2023 illustrated the conundrum Democratic Party leaders face. Tucked into its 60-page pudding: “The hatred of Jews shares much in common with other forms of hate, such as racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny; it also has unique characteristics that require tailored responses and can manifest distinctively.”
Those “unique characteristics” yield political bedfellows such as Nihad Awad, a leader of the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR. News media misrepresent the council as a civil-rights organization, but Awad praised the Oct. 7 murders. For that, CAIR lost its bizarre role as one of the organizations recruited to promote the national strategy.
The museum’s mission statement asserts its responsibility “to remember the [Holocaust’s] victims and to stimulate leaders and citizens to confront hatred,” as opposed to confronting Jew-hatred. This reflects its difficulty in transcending U.S. politics. The president appoints museum board members. Congressional appropriations fund the institution’s operating budget, $65 million for fiscal 2023.
The political difficulty of anti-antisemitism was displayed at a Senate hearing on Sept. 17. After minority Republicans finally compelled majority Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to hold a hearing on contemporary antisemitism, committee chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) began by saying: “Since the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, we have seen an increase in attacks on Jewish Americans, Palestinian Americans, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans.”
To support the struggle against resurgent Jew-hatred, the Holocaust museum must confront the old-new roots of anti-Zionist antisemitism. These roots are why pan-Arab nationalists like the Ba’ath (Renewal) parties of Syria and Iraq translated Mein Kampf into Arabic. They are why the Hamas charter reads like a sequel to “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a czarist-era forgery.
A museum timeline notes that Iran’s Islamic Propagation Organization published an English-language version of “The Protocols” in 1985, an Egyptian satellite TV network ran a 41-episode series based on them in 2002, and Syria’s Ministry of Information authorized a 2005 edition that claimed “the elders” coordinated Al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. However, the museum does not deal with the wide dissemination and continuing popularity of “The Protocols” in Arab-Islamic states.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum can perform an urgent service combating escalating anti-Zionist Jew-hatred. It could connect the dots from early Bolshevism through Adolf Hitler’s Berlin to post-World War II anti-Israel, pan-Arab nationalism, and neo-Marxist left and anti-Western, anti-Jewish Islamic fundamentalism. Will it?
An earlier, longer version of this article appears in the October issue of the online New English Review.