OPINION:
In March 2022, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt was confirmed by the Senate to serve as our nation’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. While her role primarily focuses on combating anti-Jewish hate abroad, the noticeable absence of the antisemitism czar during the pro-terror protests engulfing our college campuses and cities suggests that Ms. Lipstadt’s decision to maintain a distance from the current unrest mirrors the actions of President Biden, whose appeasement of pro-Hamas protesters is motivated by electoral concerns.
To her credit, Ms. Lipstadt has enjoyed a distinguished career, which includes publishing acclaimed works on the Holocaust. Still, far from discounting critical efforts in raising Holocaust awareness, it bears mentioning that in the United States and overseas, antisemitism is most prevalent within progressive leftist arenas and manifests from a demonization of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
Mr. Biden’s choice of Ms. Lipstadt as envoy confirms a liberal consensus of adapting Holocaust memory as the primary vehicle to address antisemitism. It is a paradigm that is both deliberate and misguided and results in more antisemitism, not less. A preoccupation with perpetuating a Jewish narrative wedded to victimhood serves the dual purpose of advancing antisemitism at home and paternalizing Jews abroad.
Indeed, the Biden administration’s appeal to Israel’s government that it act with restraint while absorbing missile and drone attacks from Iran and its proxies is a sentiment repeatedly conveyed by liberal-leaning politicians. Mr. Biden’s request that Jewish Israelis suppress decisive action against their enemies would likely not be leveled against any other country facing threats to its survival. Images of Jews exercising their power, whether when operating in the Gaza Strip or responding to Iran, render many Democrats squeamish.
Blunting the Jews’ capacity to achieve their country’s wartime objectives reflects a cosmopolitan discomfort with Jewish strength, with Democratic lawmakers preferring to promote memorializing the death of 6 million Jews while hamstringing efforts to defend against the destruction of millions more.
At times, policymakers have appropriated the Holocaust to deflect from their faulty policies. In his address marking the 80th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto uprising, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced government plans to secure $1 million for a virtual museum-type tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The secretary’s remarks were made within one month of the Biden administration committing to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian funds. Since Mr. Biden took office, his decision to appoint several new members to the Holocaust Memorial Museum Council who hold controversial positions on Israel is further proof of the Democratic Party’s attempts at refashioning Holocaust memory to comport with progressive positions.
Rather than decouple the Holocaust from the fight against antisemitism, attaching Jewish Americans to a powerless space is one of the first pillars listed in the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
Unveiled last year, the plan affirms its first strategic goal to “Increase School-Based Education about Anti-Semitism, Including the Holocaust, and Jewish American Heritage.” More states are requiring Holocaust education in schools than in previous years, with Dara Horn, author of the insightful essay collection “People Love Dead Jews,” noting in 2023 that before 2016, “only seven states required Holocaust education. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates.”
Ms. Horn’s assessment follows Harvard professor emerita Ruth Wisse, one of the first intellectuals to debunk claims that expanding Holocaust education stems the spread of antisemitism. In a piece for National Affairs almost four years ago, Ms. Wisse accurately recognized that “Antisemitism in the United States has spread in tandem with increased teaching about the Holocaust.”
Evidence revealing this troubling trend continues to unfold at our nation’s universities, which are awash in violent anti-Jewish riots, with many of those participating in the hate-fueled protests hailing from states that demand its schools teach about the Holocaust.
The intensification of Holocaust instruction in high schools is occurring apace, with a generational divide involving anti-Jewish attitudes, as studies find that younger Americans display higher levels of antisemitism than prior generations. Their hatred is anchored to an intersectional dogma, a toxic agenda that reduces society into identity groups. Israel and by extension all Jews are labeled as privileged White colonizers, and Palestinians are categorized as oppressed victims.
At the same time, Jewish particularism has slowly been plucked from chronicling the Holocaust and replaced with a universalization that links Islamophobia and activist causes such as the Black Lives Matter movement to the Nazi Final Solution. These two defining pedagogies, one resting on an insidious doctrine of oppression and the other on an absence of Jewish specificity, are complementary and assist in accelerating antisemitism.
Holocaust education is most impactful when survivors share stories and educators limit teachings to historical recordings based on an understanding of facts. The proliferation of Holocaust education restricts Jews to their past moments of weakness.
Contorting its commemoration to suit a narrative that conflates accuracy with activism also evades the immediate dangers facing U.S. Jewry. The most effective avenue for preserving the memory of the millions of Jews who perished during the Holocaust is for this administration and all Americans to redirect more of their energies toward ensuring the security of Jewish citizens who are alive today.
• Irit Tratt is an independent writer living in New York. Follow her on X @Irit_Tratt.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.