Among countless other felines which President Donald Trump has set among flocks of outraged pigeons has been the dismissal of several members of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum board who were appointed by former President Joe Biden.
These include Doug Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris; Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff; Tom Perez, former labor secretary and senior adviser to the president; Susan Rice, who served as Biden’s top domestic-policy adviser; and Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser to former first lady Jill Biden.
The Trump administration removed these individuals because they hadn’t been “steadfast supporters of the State of Israel.”
The Biden administration, to which they had belonged, not only took measures to hamper Israel in defeating Hamas in Gaza but also parroted defamatory falsehoods about Israel’s behavior in that war, falsehoods that played an immeasurable role in fueling the upsurge of antisemitism and attacks on Jews in America and elsewhere.
Moreover, the Palestinian Arabs, whose cause is espoused by the Democratic Party to such an extent that it has bought into its malicious propaganda against Israel, are the heirs of Hitler’s allies during the Holocaust.
Their leader, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, pledged to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East if Hitler won the war. Yet al-Husseini is the declared hero and role model for the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
Emhoff claimed that his removal had made a political “wedge issue” of Holocaust education and remembrance. Indeed, this should never be politicized. However, the unfortunate fact is that it has been—by the very people involved in it.
Former Rep. David Cicilline (D-Md.), another board member who was also dismissed, unwittingly demonstrated this when he said in protest that the work of the museum was “meant to challenge us all to think critically and clearly about our role in society, to confront antisemitism and all other forms of hate.”
That last phrase is the problem. Holocaust education and remembrance have lost their way. Its foundational aim was to ensure that the world would never forget the unique evil of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. While other groups were murdered by the Nazis, it was the Jews alone who were singled out for removal from the face of the earth.
Yet much Holocaust education and remembrance has morphed into eliding the persecution of the Jews not only with others who were murdered by the Nazis but with other “genocides.”
In London, the designers of the Holocaust memorial and learning center that’s proposed for construction next to the Houses of Parliament say it will remember also “the other victims of Nazi persecution, including Roma, gay and disabled people, and the victims of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.”
In an article in 2020 for National Affairs, Ruth Wisse, former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, wrote that the main problem with memorializing the Holocaust lay in teaching that it applied equally to Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis such as the Roma, disabled people, Slavs, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and others.
As a result of this fundamental conceptual error, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, had “depoliticized, de-historicized, and universalized a political and historical process to prevent teaching antisemitism or the war against the Jews.”
This relativization of the Holocaust has had several baleful effects. It reduces the genocide of the Jews to being equivalent to “other forms of hate.” But the Holocaust wasn’t merely a form of hate. It was a singularly evil event. To equate it with “other forms of hate” is to erase that unique significance.
Worse still, the underlying message of such relativization is that anyone can become a Nazi. If this is so, it follows that the Nazis themselves can’t have been uniquely terrible.
And if anyone can be a Nazi, then Jews, too, can be Nazis. That leads straight to the unspeakable calumny promoted by the enemies of the Jewish state that the Israelis have become Nazis and that they’re perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians.
Far from providing a bulwark against rampant antisemitism, Holocaust education and remembrance have thus helped swell it.
Although it was developed with the noblest of intentions, it harbored an even more fundamental flaw. It was based on a misunderstanding of antisemitism in the West. Its developers thought that recording what had happened in the Holocaust would so appall the West that it would resolve never to repeat it.
They didn’t realize that the West had a visceral aversion to hearing about the Holocaust. Since this had taken place at the very epicenter of high Western civilization, even nations not directly involved felt an inescapable and unbearable guilt by association.
The way the guilty West dealt with this was effectively to sanitize Nazism. If it could say everyone could be a Nazi, including the Jews themselves, this would let the West off the guilty hook.
Darker still, the genocide of the Jews challenged the narrative of Jew-hatred that was embedded in Western culture. Although the Holocaust drove this underground, people still widely believed the paranoid, antisemitic tropes of covert Jewish power and malign intent.
They resented the fact that the Holocaust prevented them from expressing these views. Calling Israelis “Nazis”—the demonization lie perpetrated by those who wanted Israel destroyed—enabled antisemites to resume hating Jews once again, sanitized and camouflaged as anti-Zionism so that they couldn’t be accused of the very thing that had produced the Nazi Holocaust.
In her article, Wisse noted the perversity of teaching about hate to prevent hate. Societies that concentrate on their self-improvement, she observed, generally rely on positive instruction and reinforcement. “A pedagogical fixation on hate, by contrast, has been associated with societies like fascist Germany and Soviet Russia that wish to direct blame and hate against designated alien or undesirable groups,” she wrote.
The focus of post-Holocaust education should be not on hatred but on admiration. Most people have never met a Jew, whose numbers make them statistically insignificant.
Rather than confront the wider community with the almost inconceivable horror of the attempt to destroy a people about which they know nothing and care less, the focus should be on educating them about Judaism, the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
People should be taught about the key precepts of Judaism that have been absolutely essential to the development of civilized values in the West, including political freedom, the rule of law and respect for human life.
They should be taught that the Jews are an ancient people whose religion is centered upon the land of Israel; that they are the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom; and that this is why the U.N.’s forerunner gave them alone the right to settle what is now Israel, the disputed territories of the “West Bank” and Gaza.
So many in the West think wrongly that Judaism is only a religious faith, which therefore shouldn’t have a land. So many think wrongly that the Jews are latter-day interlopers into that land from where they displaced its indigenous inhabitants. So many think wrongly that Israel is in illegal occupation of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.
They think this because they only hear Palestinian propaganda to this effect and are never told that these are wall-to-wall lies. As a result, they think that Israel is on the wrong side of fairness, justice and the rule of law, while the truth is the very opposite.
Antisemitism will always be with us. The best that can be hoped for is that it’s shoved firmly back beneath its stone. If there’s any chance of doing so, memorializing dead Jews should give way to celebrating the culture of the living ones.