Teaching Antisemitism
By Erica Nadelhaft
And so at the HHRC we will continue to confront antisemitism and to teach the Holocaust. We will teach the individual and the communal, the unique and the universal. Our team will continue to do the work with honesty and courage, sadness and joy. And we will hope to make a difference.
In May, 2023, The Atlantic published an article by Dara Horn titled “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism worse?” The article led to much thought and many conversations both within and outside of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine community. I found myself going back to it numerous times. It is distressing, honest, and, I think, spot on in many places. I have been thinking about it both in relation to my life as a Jewish woman in America and also in relation to my role as the Education Coordinator at the HHRC (although it is not always easy to separate those pieces of myself).
The article opens by talking about the vague sense of dread that exists in many American Jewish communities. Antisemitism is widespread and, if not increasing, certainly becoming more overt and violent over time. Just a few days ago, the FBI arrested a man in Michigan for stockpiling weapons and identifying a date and a synagogue in East Lansing. Big news items like this tend to get media time. But the regular and fairly constant level of antisemitic slurs, harassment, and other indignities suffered by American Jews on an almost daily basis don’t. Horn notes that American Jews seem to feel that they have no right to complain about them. “After all,” she writes, they aren't “the Holocaust.” (p.26).
Horn questions how best to respond to contemporary antisemitism and writes that, “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.” (p. 26)
Is teaching the Holocaust the best response to antisemitism? I agree with Dara Horn. Teaching about the Holocaust is not the best or the only way to respond to antisemitism. That is not to say that Holocaust education is not critical. It is, for many reasons. You cannot address antisemitism without teaching about the Holocaust, but that on its own is not enough.
At the HHRC, Holocaust education is at the core of much of what we do. We offer six different programs on various aspects of the Holocaust as well as sponsoring exhibits, guest lectures, workshops and teacher training seminars. The Holocaust infuses our building, our work, and our consciousness. It is part of who we are. We believe that the Holocaust should, indeed, must be studied for a number of reasons. First and foremost, simply for its own sake: to acknowledge the event, the victims, the survivors, the trauma and the history. Those who experienced the Holocaust deserve to have their story told. They existed and they were slaughtered and tortured because they were Jews and that is reason enough to learn.
There are also lessons we can learn when we study the Holocaust—in particular what it means to make ethical and moral decisions that carry immense risk; what it means to speak up against hate; and what it means when we choose not. We walk a fine line here, because studying the Holocaust is not a means to an end—the Holocaust did not happen so that we could use it to learn general lessons about humanity and what human beings are capable of. It’s not simply a teaching tool to help us learn about ourselves. It is a singular event that happened to a specific group of people, the Jews, for very specific reasons. We need to acknowledge both the universality of some of the lessons while focusing on the uniqueness of the event.
But why is teaching about the Holocaust not the answer to the increasingly overt, socially acceptable, and violent antisemitism in this country? Because, after all, the Holocaust could not have happened without the two thousand years of antisemitism that led, perhaps inexorably, to it. If the Holocaust is the ultimate expression of antisemitism, why is knowing about it not enough?
As Dara Horn notes in the article, the Holocaust is too often taught in a vacuum. When it is taught without the context of that two thousand year history of antisemitism; when it is taught without the context of thousands of years of vibrant and rich Jewish history; when it is taught without an anchor in history, it is difficult if not impossible for people to connect it with the antisemitism that exists in the world today.
Horn writes of an experience she had at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center and hearing the docent talk about how prior to the Holocaust life for Jews in Europe was normal and how “all of a sudden, things changed.” The Jews were living happy, normal, and ordinary lives and suddenly: “things changed.”
The problem is that things didn’t just suddenly change. The Holocaust drew upon a two thousand year history of antisemitism. To say otherwise ignores reality and suggests that the Holocaust was an aberration that came out of nowhere.
And was Jewish life normal in the sense that it reflected the norms of non-Jewish European society? While in a number of European countries Jews were increasingly assimilated, or at least acculturated to the majority society, they often retained differences—in language, dress, religious observance and culture. And the article argues that “teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews because Jews are ‘normal,’ only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of ‘normal,’ then it’s fine to hate them.” Rather than teach that Jews are “normal,” we need to teach that Jews are human - and that humans have differences—and that these differences are part of what makes us human.
If we are going to do that, we have to teach about both the unique and the universal in Jewish history and experience. And this is what we are doing, and have been doing for a number of years, at the HHRC. We teach about long, vibrant, and rich Jewish history and what life was like for Jews in Europe and elsewhere before the Holocaust. Six million dead is just a number if one has no understanding of what and who was lost. How do children, and adults, appreciate the significance of the loss if they don’t know who the Jews are? It’s not enough to simply teach how the Jews died. We have to teach how they lived.
Teaching about Jews’ humanity is important, but it is still not enough to combat today’s antisemitism. We also need to take a deep and honest look at the history of antisemitism—where and why it began, how it spread, and how it led almost inevitably to the Holocaust. Then, perhaps most importantly in the fight against antisemitism, we have to teach how antisemitism did not disappear after the Holocaust. One would like to think that it would. But it didn’t. And if the Holocaust was not enough to end antisemitism, teaching solely about the Holocaust won’t end it either. At the HHRC we teach not only about the history of antisemitism, but how antisemitism has continued in both old and new guises into the present day. And that includes tackling uncomfortable and frightening issues—including anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel.
When we reduce Jewish history to the Holocaust, we minimize Jewish history. And when we reduce our discussion of antisemitism to the Holocaust, we minimize both the antisemitism of the past as well as the antisemitism of the present. And this allows antisemitism to continue to grow and flourish - in our schools, our communities, our political institutions, the media, and many other places.
And so at the HHRC we will continue to confront antisemitism and to teach the Holocaust. We will teach the individual and the communal, the unique and the universal. Our team will continue to do the work with honesty and courage, sadness and joy. And we will hope to make a difference.