Is Holocaust education letting today’s anti-Jewish racism off the hook? When it became compulsory in 1991, Britain was largely in remission from the ancient disease of anti-Semitism. Life was stable. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Liberal democracy was the only future — indeed, Francis Fukuyama infamously wrote how the 1990s would mark ‘the end of history’.
How we Fukuyama’ed it all up. Times are now bad and bad times demand scapegoats. So anti-Jewish conspiracy theories thrive on a global scale Joseph Goebbels would lust after. It creates the conditions for the next Jewish genocide. And yet Holocaust education has barely responded. A different kind of Britain today calls for a different kind of Holocaust education. Below is what must change.
Holocaust education begins and ends with the Nazis, but anti-Jewish racism has continued for 2,000 years. We cannot excuse ourselves from that continuum. After being colonised and expelled from their own country by the Romans, Jews formed diasporas both eastwards (where they have remained dark-skinned) and westwards (where they have not). They have always been the other in these societies, which largely failed to accept their dual identity as peaceful contributors who, at the same time, have a distinct religious and cultural tradition. It embedded four anti-Jewish libels into civilisational thinking: money, control, disloyalty, children’s blood. Holocaust education often lets people imagine the Nazis invented these libels.
The Holocaust is not just a horror movie. Gregory Stanton said there are ten steps to genocide, but if we skip straight to the climax (the Nazi killing machine) we create the possibility for it to happen again. Holocaust education craves the moment where the victims become the ‘upstanders’ – the moment Jews were sent to concentration camps – but the path to genocide started long before that. We are in those early stages again today. Jews are demonised and cancelled in universities, the arts and the NHS.
Germany lost many of its finest scientists, doctors and entertainers. Iraq lost its flourishing trading culture. Yemen lost its famed filigree silversmiths
Holocaust education often suggests that anti-Jewish racism exists only on the right and among white supremacists. But the far left is monomaniacal about Jews today, something it has in common with radical extremist Islamism. In her book Outcast, Camila Bassi says British Marxists obsess about ‘the Jewish question’. Squirm they might, but that puts them in bed with the Nazis. And squirm they would, if Holocaust education taught it.
Holocaust education must be single-minded. When it lumps all genocides together, it dumbs each one down. Platitudes don’t change attitudes. Nor universalising the Shoah to the point of distortion. A tree was planted outside the British Library to memorialise Anne Frank ‘and all the children killed in war and conflict.’ But she was murdered in Belsen, a Holocaust death camp, for being Jewish.
Holocaust education must pull focus from victimhood to perpetratorhood. Pity has not worked as a pedagogy. Can we try looking at perpetratorhood? What drives millions of ordinary people to go along with the Nazis or Hamas or any other butchers? Does the capacity for both good and evil to co-exist in the human heart? What does it take to flick the switch? Let’s not duck the question by looking only at piles of corpses.
The focus of Holocaust education on European Jews can reinforce the falsehood that all Jews are ‘white’ and ‘settler colonialists’. What about the 1941 Farhud pogrom of Baghdad, Hitler’s alliance with Amin al-Husseini, or the non-white Jews of 15 Arab countries before they were ethnically cleansed? We at the National Holocaust Museum have created a new exhibition called The Vicious Circle. It examines the recurring delusion behind the anti-Jewish pogroms of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa alike.
Holocaust education has failed to address hostile post-truth thinking such as critical race theory. It comes not just from social media but ‘reputable’ academics too. They misappropriate Jewish history into their decolonisation agenda. Their reinforcement weapon is cancel culture. It forced the eminent Free University of Berlin to cancel the very exhibition I mention above. Holocaust education must expand from classroom learning into conversations with the thought leaders of our academic and other civic institutions. It’s what our Racism Response Unit does.
Holocaust education must help people decode when anti-Israelism becomes anti-Jewish racism (and when it does not). When you say ‘the Zionist Lobby’, you mean Jews. When you falsely depict the Israeli army as blood-hungry, organ-harvesting child killers, you invoke the blood libel. When you hold British Jews accountable for events in the Middle East, you invoke the control libel. (Do you hold British Muslims responsible for the tyrants of Syria, Iraq or Iran?) Of course, you may not realise what you’re doing. That’s where Holocaust education should come in.
Holocaust education can re-instil critical thinking in our society. It is a life skill that can counter all forms of misinformation today. Ultimately it’s not about Jews. When we learn to enquire, decode and discuss, we are learning to reject conspiracy theorising as a belief system.
Holocaust education should offer a vocabulary lesson. According to a 2019 Deltapoll survey, 53 per cent of over 2,000 adults did not understand the word ‘antisemitism’. We at the National Holocaust Museum adopt a term that people (a) understand and (b) know is bad: anti-Jewish racism.
Thankfully, anti-Jewish racism is no longer top-down in the West. It is bottom-up from malcontents and would-be overthrowers of the West (fed by top-down actors, notably Iran). It targets Jews as the head of the serpent; the ‘serpent’ itself is democracy. Holocaust education can ask questions of them, citing precedent. Why do they blame everything on 0.2 per cent of the world’s population? What positives can they offer besides blame? Could the problem be them?
Conspiracy theorising creates nothing but losers. Germany lost many of its finest scientists, doctors and entertainers. Iraq lost its flourishing trading culture. Yemen lost its famed filigree silversmiths. The Holocaust is part of a doom loop that we need to break. We just need educating.
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