Re-examining Holocaust Education After the Hamas Massacre

The murderous attack by thousands of Hamas terrorists on the Israeli border that triggered the Gaza War has leveled the thin fence between civilization and barbarism, and with it many conceptions and misconceptions, military doctrines, and national security policies. It did not take long for Israelis and, instantaneously, for Jews around the world, to place what we were witnessing in context — not that of the most recent Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, but rather, Nazi Germany’s war against European Jewry.  

While placing the Hamas assault in the context of the Holocaust might seem detached and anachronistic, a deeper dive into its nature clearly illustrates why the traditional framework of Middle East carnage lacks viability. The unprecedented nature of the violence on civilian men, women, and children, the brutality of the killers, the sense of helplessness experienced by Israelis, the targeting of innocent human beings for the sole crime of being Jewish – these are more aligned with a part of Hitler’s Final Solution than they are as another episode in Israel’s endless war with Hamas. 

In ordinary times, linking current events with the chronology and events of the Holocaust is what good educators do not do. In Holocaust education, we insist on the imperative to teach about it as a singular event, to explain, using photographs, history, literature, diaries, and testimonies, that Auschwitz was another planet, that the destruction of European Jewry was sui generis – not compared or equated with what came before or after. 

But these are not ordinary times. Now, we find ourselves confronted by scenes of graphic carnage — sickeningly familiar and now visible instantly — as they happen. Now savagery is projected before our wide-open eyes on Telegram, Instagram, X, and Tik-Tok. These murderous scenes make many of those captured in old black-and-white Holocaust photographs pale in comparison. They break the veneer of civilization that has for decades led us to believe that we would never again confront such unbridled sadism. When the question is not “how many” but “how” and “what have they done,” we realize that we are witnessing attacks and rampages that meet and far exceed the Nazis and their collaborators in cruelty.  

Yoav Galant, Israel’s Minister of Defense, promised that the IDF response will reverberate in the minds of our enemies for generations to come. The Israeli government’s massive and strong reaction is where, fortunately, comparisons with the Holocaust end. We have a national homeland, and our enemies know that a high price will be paid by those whose life mission is to shed innocent Jewish blood. Yet the Hamas attack, and not only Israel’s response to it, will affect the way Jews read their own history and understand their place in the world. Holocaust education can no longer be what it has evolved into. 

For some time now, general education about the Holocaust has moved from the story of the Jews and the scourge of antisemitism to a general concern for human rights, a vehicle for teaching about the necessity to treat all humans with respect and dignity, and the noble call to stand up to racism, violence, and genocide wherever they occur. Holocaust education has often become, for a variety of reasons, a universal touchstone for peace and justice. Today, though, the utility of this grand civil, lofty, and quasi-pacifist lesson must be called into question. As Jews today find themselves confronting the reality that a pogrom on a scale hitherto reserved for Hitler’s followers can happen here and now, education on the Holocaust must undergo a transformation if it is to remain viable.

The stance of relative tranquility from which we have viewed the Holocaust can no longer be divorced from its original and crucial Jewish context. 

The stance of relative tranquility from which we have viewed the Holocaust has shifted. It can no longer be divorced from its original and crucial Jewish context. It can no longer be merely a historical overview of facts and statistics, assessed by the requirement to name and spell correctly the death camps. It can no longer be merely a sequence of gray images from the past that become a universal gold standard of evil, of man’s inhumanity to man, of victims and perpetrators, with no mention of Jews or the racial antisemitism that helped to make the Holocaust possible. Today, such universalist packaging has become impossible to defend.

Now, Holocaust education – in museum tours, in classroom instruction, in state mandates, in survivor and second-generation testimonies, in films–must return to what it should have always included – a call to safeguard the lives, well-being, and future of Jews in the world and, first and foremost, in their ancestral homeland. Holocaust education that deviates from this call, morally questionable yesterday, must today be declared dead. Holocaust education must be life-affirming for world Jewry, for the Jews and for all peace-loving citizens of Israel, and, of course, for all those still wishing to embrace humanity and condemn and reject antisemitism in this terrifying new world.

Dr. Shay Pilnik is the Director of the Emil and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University in NY.