Coinciding with Holocaust Remembrance Day last week (Yom HaShoa), the Atlantic magazine published a very important article by Dara Horn. It addresses the growth of anti-Semitism in the United States and throughout the world over the past years, despite the proliferation world-wide of Holocaust memorials and days of Holocaust remembrance. She asserts the fact that anti-Semitism is increasing despite the existence of more and more Holocaust school curricula throughout the country reaching more and more children at all education levels than ever before.
Horn is an acclaimed writer of a number of fictional books with underlying Jewish themes, who wrote a small volume of non-fiction in 2021 entitled, Dead People Love Dead Jews: Report From a Haunted Past. In this short book, she described her travels around the world visiting sites where Jews once lived, thrived, and now have disappeared. The thesis of her book was that the world enjoys recalling the activities of formally vibrant and interesting communities which have vanished. Horn suggests that it is the history of "dead Jews" which attracts observers and scholars of history. Living Jews, Jewish life, and Israel --home for more than half of the Jews of the world--are not nearly as "interesting" to most people today. Underlying this theme is her not so subtle assertion that were Jews to disappear, the world would be very happy to record and even venerate the activities of an ancient civilization. Implicit in her not very subtle book constitutes evidence that anti-Semitism is well and alive today.
The substance of this new article is about the failure of Holocaust education, despite its continuing increase in school curricula. Much of this has occurred in some places due to a political environment which constrains and controls how educators are to teach the Holocaust. It is also based on the failure to discuss anti-Semitism as the source for understanding the Holocaust.
Horn observes that even Holocaust Studies and related University programs have failed to stem the alarming growth of anti-Semitism. Jewish Studies and even Holocaust Studies are focused exclusively on the ancient civilization and the texts or on modern history and the events surrounding the Holocaust itself. She observes that these programs fail to provide adequate focus on the world-wide discrimination against Jews, from where did anti-Semitism evolve, and the need for educators to address this growing disease.
Dara Horn’s observations are spot-on, but inadequate. She correctly explains the educational problems that well intentioned teachers and educational administrators encounter. She details numerous examples of local and state educational systems creating roadblocks for well-intentioned teachers—most of whom are not Jewish. These same educators are restricted in explaining why Hitler’s determination to exterminate the Jews could fall on such willing ears. The source of hatred for Jews and the acceptability of a policy to annihilate the Jewish people is never contextualized in schools. Judaism and anti-Semitism are never explained as if the Holocaust appears as a singular, horrific, historical event.
In her article, Horn only passingly addresses the failure of educators, especially those at the university level, to recognize the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its evolution from a hatred of Jews and the Jewish religion. It is this fact that demands that “teaching” about the Holocaust requires dealing with the origins of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, efforts to homogenize the Holocaust with other forms of genocide throughout history and even today are wrong.
Many institutions and many academic scholars in the field of Jewish history and Holocaust studies persist in trying to equate and examine the Holocaust within a program composed of other forms of genocide and discrimination. Horn demonstrates that teachers trained in this field fail to engage the subject of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism directly. Often there is too much effort employed to extrapolate from the study of the Holocaust to universal themes of prejudice, discrimination and intolerance. This is a further affirmation that proves Horn’s earlier work correct: no one is interested in Jews except when they are “dead”.
The uniqueness of the Holocaust and its deep historical roots in anti-Semitism and hatred of the Jews is different than the universal themes of prejudice and discrimination. It is part of this study, but it is sourced differently. The memory and the study of the Holocaust can only truly be understood if one first addresses the problem of anti-Semitism.
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