A recent survey of Americans aged 18-39 found that almost two-thirds of them didn’t know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, while in New York nearly 20 per cent believed that Jews actually caused it.
These are shocking results. Ignorance plays a large part in this historical amnesia and prejudice. But how can this be the case when there’s so much Holocaust education and memorialising?
The unpalatable answer is not just that Holocaust education has done nothing to address this but that it has actually contributed to it.
In an article for the American publication National Affairs, Ruth Wisse, the former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, relentlessly charts the dark side of Holocaust education. The potential for corruption, she writes, began with making the Holocaust a universal symbol of evil, Nazism synonymous with “hatred” and Holocaust education a redemptive pursuit.
The main problem lay in teaching that the Holocaust applied equally to Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis, such as such as the Roma, disabled people, Slavs, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and others.
Although these groups certainly were targeted by the Nazis, Wisse says the categories are not compatible. Nazi antisemitism was “an ideology, a movement, and a strategy that organised politics explicitly against the Jews”.
The Nuremberg Laws and the Final Solution were unambiguously directed at the Jews. Indeed, some of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis collaborated with them in the extermination of the Jews, and some produced their own versions of anti-Jewish politics.
As a result of these fundamental conceptual errors in Holocaust education, she writes, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, “depoliticised, de-historicised, and universalised a political and historical process to prevent teaching antisemitism or the war against the Jews”.
So, for example, it featured no acknowledgement of the alliance in the 30s and 40s between Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in their common aim of liquidating world Jewry.
Wisse’s analysis has been echoed by Baroness Deech, a prominent opponent of the proposal to build a Holocaust memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens near the houses of parliament.
In an address during the summer to the Oxford Jewish community, she argued that Holocaust memorials were increasingly being used to promote “a self-congratulatory and sometimes self-exculpatory image of the country that erects them”.
Britain’s memorials, for example, fail to note that, during the Nazi period, the UK government blocked the entry into Palestine of desperate European Jews in flagrant repudiation of the British Mandate to settle Jews there, thus facilitating their extermination in the Holocaust.
Deech observed: “The more the national Holocaust Remembrance Day events are packed out, the more the calls for sanctions on Israel that would result in her destruction, and the more the Holocaust is turned against the Jews. I hear it in parliament —‘after all you people went through, look what you are doing to the Palestinians; have you learned nothing’ etc.”
More than 30 years ago, writes Wisse, the historian Lucy Dawidowicz raised serious concerns about the distorted curricula and questionable outcomes of Holocaust-related projects.
She questioned the wisdom of encouraging “oppression studies” in the absence of any robust teaching of history. The problems she identified ranged from failing to suggest that antisemitism had any history before Hitler to teaching American children “raised in unprecedented freedom and permissiveness” that “obedience to the law is not necessarily the determinant of a moral person”.
What’s more, Holocaust education was being routinely appropriated for activist agendas. Such things have got far worse now.
Wisse astutely notes the perversity of teaching about hate to prevent hate. Societies that concentrate on their self-improvement, she observes, 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.”
Of course people need to be taught about the Holocaust. But the greater need by far is to teach them about the Jewish people, their history in both the land of Israel and the diaspora and about Judaism’s unique characteristics and record of survival.
As it is, the unfortunate fact is that Holocaust education and memorialising have become a kind of fig-leaf, enabling some people to signal their virtue by lamenting dead Jews while displaying indifference or worse to the live ones.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times
