Don’t mourn the Holocaust while supporting the genocide of living Jews

What does it say about a country where some rudimentary knowledge about the Holocaust is commonplace, but where misleading analogies about it are a routine occurrence in public discourse?

You can ask the same question about the use of the most important term to come out of the Shoah.

The word “genocide” was coined in its aftermath to describe the systematic mass slaughter aimed at the extermination of a single people. But in a country where it is estimated that about three-quarters of American K-12 students get lessons on the murder of 6 million Jews by the German Nazis and their collaborators, it is regularly misapplied to the efforts of the descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust to defend themselves against an attempted genocide.

What has been taught?

As the world commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day this week on Jan. 27, the most important question to be asked about public discussion is not so much how to expand education programs devoted to the subject. Rather, it is whether Americans are being taught anything that will help them to understand the subject or what it means today. Even more to the point, it may be necessary to acknowledge that much of what is being taught in schools or said at the ceremonies that will mark this day may actually be doing more harm than good.

As a result, the reaction of the Jewish community to the fuss made about the date ought not to be gratitude for the undoubted efforts of many educators and public officials for keeping the memory of the Six Million alive. Rather, it should be to doubt not only the value of these efforts, but to tell many of them that we’d appreciate it if they simply stopped talking about it.

The point being: If you are promoting memorialization of the Shoah while at the same time dishonouring the memory of the heroes and martyrs of the Holocaust by appropriating their fate to promote some entirely unrelated cause or to express particular displeasure with someone or political foes, the response of the Jewish world should be to tell them to stop.

Even more important, those who cry crocodile tears about the suffering of dead Jews who were slaughtered by their persecutors more than 80 years ago, while smearing live Jews with false charges of genocide, have forfeited their right to speak about the subject.

Unfortunately, that is the proper response this year to all too much of what will be said at countless commemorations of the Holocaust. The subject has been weaponised for political purposes or even to buttress the surge of antisemitism that has spread around the globe since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

One fact that should be noted is that the Jewish people have still not recovered demographically from the disaster of the Holocaust, during which approximately one-third of all Jews alive in 1939 were murdered. Today, the global Jewish population is still far smaller by a factor of about 3 million people than it was in 1939, with half the Jews alive today living in Israel.

Yet many of those who will publicly beat their breasts on Jan. 27 in sorrow about the Six Million are effectively neutral or even in support of the war that Palestinians—backed by much of the Arab and Muslim world, and fashionable opinion elsewhere—are waging against Jews.

Rather than joining them alongside political leaders, journalists, scholars and celebrities who have been part of a growing effort to demonise the one Jewish state on the planet, the response of the community to such events should be a loud and emphatic, “No, thank you!” Honouring the memory of the Holocaust is a sacred obligation. Yet it cannot be done effectively or have any real meaning in a context divorced from the current struggle for Jewish survival against a rising tide of bigotry, hatred and violence.

Denial and false analogies

It is entirely true that Holocaust deniers are not only still among us, but that their visibility and ability to reach the ignorant and ever-gullible consumers of conspiracy theories is greater than ever. For that, the internet can be thanked for the way it has enabled fringe figures once confined to the fever swamps of public discourse to be visible to large audiences. The willingness of podcasters, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, to mainstream hateful figures like faux historian Daryl Cooper and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes plays a large part in this.

But as much as the promotion of these hate-mongers’ lies about the past remains problematic, far too much discourse is distorted among those who don’t believe such falsehoods, though still decide to traffic in Holocaust language and references.

When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared efforts by federal officials to enforce existing laws against illegal immigrants, especially those who have committed crimes, to the efforts of Nazis seeking to capture Jews like Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, the problem isn’t just the cynical appropriation of her memory to pursue a political agenda. Walz is far from the first to behave in this manner. Some on the political right have done the same thing when it comes to opposition to abortion. But in recent years, opponents of President Donald Trump have made false comparisons of him to Adolf Hitler or claimed that he is a Nazi or fascist. It has become so ubiquitous that it almost isn’t worth it to single any of the offenders out.

The problem is not that Walz is unaware of the Holocaust. We know he is not. He is like so many people who have come of age in an era when most Americans possess at least a rudimentary understanding of the basic facts about what happened under the Third Reich. And yet, he and the many others who invoke Frank’s name or use epithets linked to the Holocaust when attacking political foes apparently don’t understand it at all.

Far too much of what passes for Holocaust education is rooted in an attempt to universalise it—to render it not merely more understandable to contemporary audiences but to separate it from its context and the history of antisemitism. In that way, some otherwise well-meaning educators have sought to use it to teach everyone to be nicer to each other and to avoid slipping into racial or religious prejudices. But as scholar Ruth Wisse has taught, antisemitism is not a garden-variety form of hate or intolerance. And it is not merely the oldest hatred. Rather, it is specifically used as a political weapon over and above the way imperfect human beings are prone to slip into unkind or even mean behaviour.

The cost of universalising

The universalisation of the Holocaust and the way students are taught a slimmed-down summary of this chapter of history—in brief lessons crammed into the school year—has had unforeseen consequences. It has led to something that survivors, whose numbers are fewer and fewer every year, never envisioned when they began the campaign to spread knowledge of their experiences.

The Holocaust has become a metaphor for anything that people dislike. The predilection to treat anyone with whom we strongly disagree as if they were Hitler is not just a product of the hyperpartisan tone of 21st-century politics or the extreme polarisation of the Donald Trump era. It is also the result of the way it has been universalised to the point where many, if not most, ordinary people think it was just a bad thing that happened a long time ago—not the specific result of millennia of Jew-hatred and the powerlessness of nearly an entire people.

Equally unfortunate is the way much of the educational establishment has embraced toxic leftist ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism. So-called “progressive” teachings have largely captured primary, secondary and higher education to the point where a generation of Americans has been indoctrinated into believing not merely in concepts that exacerbate racial divisions, but ones that promote the idea that Jews and Israelis are “white” oppressors.

This movement produced the pro-Hamas campus mobs that have targeted Jewish students for intimidation, discrimination and violence since Oct. 7 at universities around the world. Participants are shockingly ignorant of the history of the Middle East, even as they chant slogans endorsing Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalise the intifada”). What they have also done is to appropriate the word genocide, which Holocaust survivor and lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined to describe the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people.

Their claim that Israel’s just war of self-defence against Hamas terrorists is “genocide” is a blatant lie. If applied to any other conflict, it would mean that every war that has ever been fought, including the one waged by the Allies against the Nazis, would be considered genocide. That not only drains the word of its actual meaning. It is, like the libellous efforts to smear Jews as Nazis, a classic trope of antisemitism.

Yet many on the political left, which has embraced this lie about Israel, are also prepared to join in mourning the Holocaust. Some, including that small minority of Jews who, for distorted reasons of their own, join in these antisemitic denunciations of Israelis and their supporters, even claim that they are inspired by the history of the Shoah to speak out against Israel now. Some even support efforts to eradicate the Jewish state—a result that could only be accomplished by the sort of genocidal war that Hamas and its allies are waging.

Our answer to them and others who are either silent about the misappropriation of the Holocaust or join in the blood libels against living Jews while lamenting the fate of dead Jews must be unequivocal.

Prioritise the defence of living Jews

We must tell those, like Walz, who misappropriate the memory of the Six Million, or utter such falsehoods about genocide, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others on the intersectional left wing of the Democratic Party, that Holocaust commemorations should be off-limits to them.

The same applies to global organisations like the United Nations, which in 2005 voted to establish International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. These agencies that claim to speak for human rights and justice for all countries in the world have become cesspools of antisemitism and engines of the war against the Jewish state.

For too long, members of the Jewish community have treated the promotion of Holocaust education or ceremonies honoring the dead as more important than efforts to defend the living.

It’s also true that, as important as teaching young Jews about the Shoah is, it must be linked to learning about the importance of Israel, as well as the life-affirming nature of their heritage and faith.

Above all, we must stop allowing the memory of what happened 80 years ago on Europe’s soil to be used by those who support or are neutral about those seeking to carry on the Nazi project of Jewish genocide. The failure to call an end to this misuse of Jewish history will only contribute to more tragedy.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.