When October 7th “happened,” I told my well-meaning friends to stop sending me their emails about the Holocaust (Anne Frank, etc.). I told them, there is a new holocaust happening, why are you still talking about WWII? I received no response. I refuse to talk “theoretically.”
In my teaching, I refuse to address the Holocaust without addressing the history of Judaism much MUCH before it. And I stress that being different requires bravery. Blending into the crowd saves you from wondering about the history of your people, your own identity, and your own destiny. Groupthink is a powerful mechanism often appropriated by those with a clear agenda. And this agenda might (and often is) exclude Jews. Now and many times before.
Here is a piece by Matti Friedman and his work. Share “as is.” I love his work, but it goes without saying.
July 9, 2024 https://www.thefp.com/p/we-misunderstood-the-nazis
Before catching a flight in Tel Aviv recently I perused the English selection at the airport bookshop and saw, laid out next to each other on a table, The Librarian of Auschwitz, The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz, and The Fighter of Auschwitz. Not long before, I’d happened to glance at the list of Amazon bestsellers in the category of Jewish Biography and found The Stable Boy of Auschwitz, The Daughter of Auschwitz, The Dressmaker of Auschwitz, The Redhead of Auschwitz, and The Happiest Man on Earth: The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor. This unscientific sampling doesn’t take into account the glut of Holocaust novels with titles where “Auschwitz” is implied, like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or products using Anne Frank’s name.
It has now been nearly 80 years since the Holocaust, and generations of kids across the West have been taught terms like Zyklon B and crematoria. Films like Schindler’s List have been earnestly canonized. Countless Holocaust museums have been built at a cost of billions of dollars.
Yet never since the Holocaust have anti-Jewish ideologies been so potent, so close to the surface, or so dangerous.
Readers with access to shelves of Auschwitz books find themselves, since last October 7, accustomed to mass rallies against the Jewish state and its supporters; to elite colleges teaching that the world is afflicted by a malevolent force called Zionism; and to mobs outside synagogues and Jewish-owned restaurants in cities like Toronto and Los Angeles.
One of the victors in French elections this week was the leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has called French Jews and their communal organizations “aggressive,” “arrogant,” and “sectarian,” and once worked a mention of Jewish deicide into an ordinary TV interview. Across the Channel, the British election bestowed a seat upon Jeremy Corbyn, who called Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends”; he’ll be joined in parliament by a politician from Yorkshire calling for a boycott of “every brand and every product that has been supporting Israel and Zionism from the beginning of time.”
Learning about the Nazis was supposed to prevent any of this from recurring, or at least help us understand when it did.
Neither has happened.
It was in hopes of gaining some insight into this strange dissonance that I watched the new Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. How, I wondered, is the same culture producing six-hour documentaries about the Nazis also producing everything else we’re seeing?
I don’t believe that we’re currently in a replay of the 1930s, or that Islamists are the same as the Nazis. History is more complicated. But a viewer of Evil on Trial in the summer of 2024 is immediately jolted by scenes of thugs daubing Jewish businesses with red paint, newspapers declaring “The Jews Are Our Misfortune,” or speakers at rallies raving about Jewish influence, versions of which can now be seen regularly in cities around the world and online.
Evil on Trial takes us from the rise of the Nazis from the Munich beer halls through the world war and the Holocaust to the final defeat of 1945. The creators frame the story through the Nuremberg trials, adeptly using colorized footage, dramatic audio recordings from the court, and reenactments. There’s even narration by the great American reporter William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with his writing read aloud by an AI-generated version of his voice. (The real Shirer died in 1993.) The series gives us some people in striped pajamas, other people in long leather overcoats and swastika armbands, lines of tanks, formations of bombers, and piles and piles of bodies.
These images are familiar from hundreds of books, movies, and TV shows that have tried to communicate the story of the Holocaust. But the truth is that all of it—the trains, the gas, the barbed wire—is nothing but logistics. The technicalities of the Nazi genocide may be overpowering, but they’re still technicalities. You can spend six hours watching them on Netflix or six years studying them in university without ever getting any closer to the mental mechanism that led intelligent people to go to all this trouble.
The documentary, in other words, embodies a common problem. We’ve mistaken a fascination with how the Nazis persecuted their victims for an understanding of why they did so, rendering us unable to spot the same mechanism in action in our own times. Looking at the nature of evil itself seems too hard. Or, given the political climate in which creative classes in the West must now operate, too risky.
Understanding the details of Nazi race science might feel like an edifying pursuit, but it doesn’t explain why Jews were hated for ostensibly different reasons in Germany a hundred years before this science was invented, or 900 years before, when they were butchered by Crusaders in the Rhineland; or why they were expelled from Spain in 1492 or from England in 1290; or why Jews were vilified as symbols of capitalism by communists like Karl Marx, and then as symbols of communism by capitalists; or why such intense efforts were made to quarantine them by powers as disparate as the rulers of late-medieval Venice, the Russian Tsars, and Martin Luther.
Like many other kids my age, particularly those who spent time in Jewish schools, I was fully equipped to spot an SS officer if I ever met one in Toronto in the 1980s. But at no point in my education did anyone ever sit me down and say something like the following: it is historically quite common for members of a society to identify the evil that preoccupies them and to conflate that evil with Jews, then declare that acting against evil means acting against Jews—and you must be aware that this will happen again in your lifetime.
That explanation is hardly comprehensive. But it does plausibly cover the examples above, and it would have saved me much time and confusion as I was forced to figure it out for myself as an adult.
Unlike reading The Shoemaker of Auschwitz or watching Evil on Trial, this explanation may help a 22-year-old Jewish college student in America, say, understand why millions of her fellow citizens see her as a symbol of white supremacy, while millions of others believe her to be engineering the erasure of white America through non-white immigration. Or why there’s mass sympathy for the idea that her more than six million coreligionists in Israel are genocidal racists, and that if she doesn’t agree she’s a racist, too.
The failure of Holocaust education has been most sharply observed by the writer Dara Horn, particularly in a prescient essay for The Atlantic last spring and before that in a 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews. After visiting numerous museums and speaking to educators who teach Holocaust curricula, she concludes in the essay, “The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against antisemitism. But it doesn’t.”
By turning the Holocaust into a generic story about prejudice, Horn argues, Holocaust education left its recipients without any understanding of the specific problem facing Jews—or even much sympathy for real Jews in the present.
This was the argument she made half a year before the Hamas attack of October 7 and its aftershocks, when any doubts about the accuracy of Horn’s hypothesis were put to rest. The well-meaning donors who’ve footed the astronomical bill for museums, memorials, classes, and films should ask for their money back.
The confusion between knowledge of the how and of the why is illustrated, inadvertently, in the figure of one of the experts interviewed in Evil on Trial, Omer Bartov, a Holocaust historian at Brown who describes himself as a “historian of genocide.” Bartov, who is Israeli, belongs to Israel’s most unfortunate export category—namely, academics who find a home for themselves on an increasingly unhinged Western left by reassuring their comrades that their dark fantasies about Israel are sane. Barely a month after October 7, Bartov wrote a New York Times op-ed accusing Israel of “crimes against humanity” and warning of a possible “genocide” in Gaza, taking the two key terms first invented to describe the Nazis and deploying them against Jews. Then, after visiting one of the college encampments where Zionists are cast as malevolent global villains, he reassured an interviewer from Democracy Now! that he’d seen nothing amiss and that antisemitism on American campuses “does not exist in any significant form.” The protesters may be trafficking in lurid stories of Jewish evil, but the Holocaust professor thinks that this time the stories are true.
Bartov inspires my colleague Shira Klein to use her accusations to build her academic career on the bones of her fellow Jews. She is not alone in this pursuit, though, but I doubt these people succeed by distancing themselves from other Jewish people. She is a historian but seems to miss certain outcomes.
One of the blithe assumptions of Holocaust narrative has always been that no one would identify with the Nazis, but this is wrong. They’re villains, to be sure, but also strong figures, men of action. Just as the best character in Schindler’s List is the Nazi commandant played by Ralph Fiennes, the best character in Evil on Trial is Adolf Hitler, acted with deranged energy in the reenactment scenes by Károly Kozma. When I finished the series on Netflix, I saw that I could continue to Hitler’s Circle of Evil, then to Hitler: A Career, and then to five other movies with title screens featuring Nazis. All of this manages not only to bestow upon the Nazis a kind of dark glamor but also to reassure everyone that if you don’t have a red band on your arm and a skull on your hat, you’re fine.
The Jews, on the other hand, tend to be mostly absent as real characters. They occasionally appear to be marched away with their hands up or shot into ditches in their underwear. But we don’t get a sense of who they are, or why their difference—and particularly their stubborn refusal to adopt whatever ideology is current—has repeatedly turned them into figures of hate. *Very important!
The liberal West may believe itself to be post-Christian, but it’s still the world created by an ideological system that co-opted Judaism and then developed a furious resentment toward its continued existence, thus establishing a civilizational pattern that seems destined to repeat forever.
If Holocaust stories treat Jews as props, they miss understanding what the Jews think about what’s happening to them. And what they think is worth consideration, not just out of courtesy.
Judaism is a religion with a very long memory, and Jewish texts include stories of oppression and extermination stretching back to Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. Europe’s Jews saw the threat as a continuum that didn’t start or end with Hitler. They knew he was a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. It is this insight, unlike the details of SS hierarchy or the sadism of Dr. Mengele, that has the power to help us make sense of the world we see right now.
Great article ILANA , My family didn't misunderstand nazis , Mom was told to leave country just as war started . hugs and peace
Muhammad was shocked when Jews did not join his movement. He felt that what he did was just improving "small imperfections" in Judaism and Jews will be willing to join in. With Christianity, may be it sounds counterintuitive, but it is more complex.