National Holocaust Museum launches global exhibition exploring ‘Vicious Circle’ of Jewish hate

In honour of Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, the National Holocaust Museum has launched a new international touring exhibition called The Vicious Circle, exploring and dismantling the recurring delusions that have propelled 2000 years of Jewish pogroms.

Through five stories told via artefacts, texts and video screens in a striking circular installation, viewers will learn about Jewish communities of Germany, Iraq, Poland, Yemen and Southern Israel, exploring the five pogroms that led to the ethnic cleansing of regional communities and the false prophets whose promises of liberation relied on the slaughtering of Jews.

The featured objects, including a German house-shaped tzedakah box, a menorah from Iraq, and a pair of ‘butterfly glasses’ from Israel, reflect the lives of Jewish people and their attempts to integrate into their local communities, but are accompanied by the stories of pogroms which thwarted these efforts.

National Holocaust Museum's new international touring exhibition 'THE VICIOUS CIRCLE’, exploring the recurring delusion behind the anti-Jewish pogrom ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of January 2025. (Photo: David Parry)David Parry

“On Holocaust Memorial Day, we need to do more than remember history; we also need to confront dangerous ideological delusions still at work today,” said Professor Maiken Umbach, the National Holocaust Museum’s Chief Academic and Innovation Advisor and Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham. “Why do Hamas claim, as Goebbels did before them, that the Jews secretly run the world from a fictitious manual? Why did a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, claim, as Hitler did before him, that slaughtering Jews would create a free world? History never repeats itself exactly – but it rhymes. Only when we study ideological delusions across time and space can we break their spell. The exhibition does not preach about how to save the world: it is an invitation to think again.”