New York (JTA) – Holocaust Remembrance Day will be observed in many parts of the world on Jan. 27, thanks to a landmark 2005 United Nations General Assembly resolution designating that day.
One might say, “It’s about time,” as it took 60 years for the U.N. to memorialize the Holocaust; or “perfect timing,” given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s public denials of the Holocaust, which is not unrelated to his desires to obtain nuclear arms and wipe Israel off the map.
Holocaust remembrance is important for many reasons, from recalling the enormity of the tragedy that befell European Jewry to reminding us all how easily the human capacity for hatred can lead to genocide.
But we must not delude ourselves. Neither Holocaust remembrance nor education should be considered an antidote to contemporary anti-Semitism.
In recent weeks some commentators, noting the recent Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, have pointed to teaching about the Holocaust as an answer for this type of anti-Semitism.
But the medieval charge that Jews poisoned wells was not about water quality. It was a libel asserting that Jews were conspiring to harm non-Jews, and gave an explanation for troubling events.
Likewise, Holocaust denial is not about the Holocaust. It is about charging Jews with making up the Shoah as part of a conspiracy to harm non-Jews and, in Ahmadinejad’s view, Palestinians in particular.
Imagine a young Muslim man in Paris listening to imams describing Jews as the offspring of apes and pigs, infidels who have no right to live on — let alone claim — the “Arab land of Palestine.” Your image of Israelis is of outsiders who are defiling the Holy Land and oppressing Palestinians.
Will learning about dead Jews somehow change his views about live ones, who he believes are harming his Arab and Muslim brothers today while controlling a land to which he believes only Muslims can claim?
Intellectual disconnect
Recall the anti-Semitic orgy that was the 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban.
The hate-mongers were not skinheads and neo-Nazis. They were representatives of anti-racist groups from around the globe who believed demonizing Israel and its Jewish citizens was the best way to combat racism.
Was their problem lack of knowledge about the Holocaust? They likely had more Holocaust education than the norm.
Yet in Durban they regularly equated Ariel Sharon and Adolf Hitler, and Israel and Nazi Germany, while using the Holocaust-produced lexicon of genocide, terms such as “ethnic cleansing,” to anti-Semitic ends.
True, the Holocaust was a key event in 20th-century history that offers important lessons. But it is dangerous to suggest that Holocaust education is a tool — or as some say, “the” tool — to combat anti-Semitism.
Consider the U.S. State Department’s treatment of Sweden in its “Report on Global Anti-Semitism.” It noted a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes and the perception of the Jewish community and that these incidents were linked to immigrant populations, leftists and events in the Middle East.
Yet the report observed approvingly that Sweden’s government “took steps to combat anti-Semitism by increasing awareness of Nazi crimes and the Holocaust.”
Not only is the intellectual disconnect troubling, but such a stance is too easy a way out for governments that do not want to deal with the sources of contemporary anti-Semitism.
Many things can and are being done to combat today’s hatred of Jews. Human rights organizations must be challenged when they do not sufficiently assert that freedom from anti-Semitism is a human right.
Governments must be engaged to ensure that they investigate and prosecute anti-Semitic hate crimes fully. Monitoring groups must catalog not only the old-fashioned forms of religious and racial anti-Semitism, but also the more contemporary forms that treat the Jewish state in the same bigoted manner that traditional anti-Semitism regards the individual Jew.
Campus administrations need to uphold the highest academic standards and make certain that while debate is encouraged, intimidation is prohibited.
These and other steps, including education-based programs, can help fight against anti-Semitism. But they must all be guided by testable theories and available facts to demonstrate how and why they are likely to work.
In the next generation the Jewish community in the United States and in Europe will shrink, in real numbers and proportionally, and resources they can draw upon to combat anti-Semitism also will likely diminish. We can no longer afford to rely on presumptions, past practices or wishful thinking.
Kenneth S. Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s expert on anti-Semitism, is the author of the newly released “Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It is Different, and How to Fight It.”
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