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The Dark Side of Holocaust Education

(National Affairs) Ruth R. Wisse - This reasoning that hate groups promote hate and that studying the Holocaust will prevent hate prompted the establishment of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1980 and continues to undergird Holocaust education. But is there any evidence that Holocaust education decreases hatred of the Jews among those Americans who are susceptible to it? Already 30 years ago in Commentary, noted historian Lucy Dawidowicz raised serious concerns about the outcomes of Holocaust-related projects. Her study identified problems including a failure to suggest that anti-Semitism had any history before Hitler. What's more, Holocaust education is routinely appropriated for activist agendas. The destruction of European Jewry was not about hate. The mass murder of 6 million Jews began as part of an electoral process in which a party came to power by organizing politics against the Jews. Hitler ran on this platform and used it in the conquest of other nations, inviting their citizens to join in the killing and plundering of the Jews. Some people organized against Jews without hating them. Holocaust education distorts by equating evil with Nazism. The Soviets in their Gulag and forced famine in Ukraine killed more than the Nazis did in their death camps. Weaponizing the Holocaust against Nazism detracts attention from other ongoing anti-Jewish and anti-Western forces. American students are learning about the Jews first and foremost as victims of the Nazis. Yet, historically speaking, Jews are demonstrably the opposite of victims - they are builders, creators, innovators, facilitators, perpetually adaptive, the model of entrepreneurial resilience under circumstances beyond imagining. The Jews applied their energies to doing what had been considered impossible and resurrected their sovereign country. Any true "Never Again" project should trace this instead of telling only half the story. The writer is Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University.
2020-10-01 00:00:00
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