Is There a Dark Side to ‘Never Again’?

The Senate unanimously passed the Never Again Education Act on May 13, and it now is headed to President Donald Trump to be signed. The bipartisan bill allocates $10 million over five years to expand the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s programming to schools across the country.

On May 7, professor Ruth Wisse presented a Tikvah webcast titled “The Dark Side of Holocaust Education.” How could there possibly be a dark side, I wondered. An April 2018 survey conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealed that two-thirds of millennials could not identify Auschwitz.

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Perhaps the best way to sum up Wisse’s talk: Don’t let Holocaust education provide a cover for anti-Zionism. The only way to do that is to teach it in conjunction with historical and current anti-Semitism, as well as the rebirth of Israel.

To some degree, this dark side already can be seen. “The corruption began once Jewish mourning and historical reckoning morphed into the idea of making ‘the Holocaust’ the universal symbol of evil and Nazism the symbol of hatred,” Wisse said.

She went on to say, “When it comes to mass murder, the Soviets in their Gulag and forced famine in Ukraine killed more than the Nazis did in their camps…. Weaponizing the Holocaust against Nazism detracts attention from the other main anti-Jewish and anti-Western destroyers. It conceals the horrors of applied socialism whose teachings gain popularity because there are no museums here to teach its evils.”

“Weaponizing the Holocaust against Nazism detracts attention from the other main anti-Jewish and anti-Western destroyers.” — Ruth Wisse

One detail missing from the Holocaust Museum’s programming is the decision by Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, to join Hitler in Germany, “urging him to extend his eliminationist program to the Middle East, and not to overlook the killing of any Jewish children. Member states of the Arab League invited Nazis into their ranks after 1945, assuming that their efforts were aligned,” Wisse stated, adding, “The refusal of Arab states to recognize Israel and the 72-year war against the Jewish state became the organic mutation of anti-Jewish politics.”

All of this aligns directly with how the “hard” (classical) liberalism of the post-World War II era descended into leftism. “Hard liberalism will always be on the side of the Jews against their enemies, who are always simultaneously the enemies of liberal democracy,” Wisse said, adding, “One could say that defense of the Jews … is the surest test of liberal resolve. When that resolve collapses, we get the rise of anti-Jewish politics.”

Three factors facilitated liberalism’s demise. Wisse listed them as the following:

1. Edward Said, professor of literature at Columbia University, introduced anti-Zionism into higher education. Said’s book 1978 book “Orientalism,” “theorized that Western scholarship about ‘the East’ was essentially a product of the prejudices of the imperialist, colonialist societies that produced it.”

His primary lie? To include Israel as part of Western colonizing culture.

2. “In many elite colleges, the leftist protestors of the ’60s took the reins of higher education. As the theoretical basis for their movement collapsed with the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites, the theory of Orientalism and anti-Zionism replaced it.”

3.  The Arab lobby’s campaign against a Jewish state evolved into a multi-pronged strategy. “These and other developments worked to change the Jew from victim-turned-hero to exploiter and villain.”

By telling only half the story, “the Never Again project does violence to the Jewish people and to moral education, the essence of which is the assumption of responsibility through self-emancipation,” Wisse said. “We don’t want American school children identifying with murdered Jews. We want them standing alongside resolute Jews and Israelis.”

Wisse then pointed to the anti-Zionism that now flourishes in the Democratic Party. “Intentionally or not, this liberal bromide of anti-hate feeds the hideous ideology it pretends to resist,” she said.

Alongside Holocaust education, Wisse suggested that educators teach the history of anti-Semitism as well as Jewish self-emancipation. “It is time to transform Holocaust education into the study of how America and the Jews fought and continue to fight to protect democracy against its destroyers.”

The fact that her suggestion seems so unrealistic merely confirms the truth of her argument.

Karen Lehrman Bloch is an author and cultural critic.