Holocaust Education Was a Waste

We have wasted at least a generation, and untold millions of dollars (probably billions), on Holocaust education. By this I mean trying to teach the rest of the world about the Holocaust. This is a realization I came to after October 7, but I couldn’t figure out how to express it until Ayaan Hirsi Ali did it for me in this interview:

I want to draw attention to two points she makes in the interview. Number one, and the biggest, is that everything which enables Islamic militants and specifically Islamic antisemitism in the West is a direct reaction to the Holocaust by those thinking they’re preventing a future one. The second is that the worst thing Jews can do – and the thing we’ve been doing for the last 80 years – is to try to get the rest of the world to recognize us as victims.

To understand Ms. Ali, you have to know that she suffered female genital mutilation as a child in the Muslim culture Somalia. You also have to know that while this practice is not officially part of Islam, it is common to all Muslim cultures. Yet, as she describes in the video, when she would try to warn her adopted country about the dangers of the Muslim immigrants’ culture – her native culture – it was specifically the Jewish mayor of Amsterdam who would point at her accusingly and say “be careful about not repeating history.”

The problem with Holocaust education is not that it didn’t work; it’s that it did. Everyone, especially in Europe, has become afraid that a minority group will be persecuted or that it will be denied entry at a moment of need or that it will be forced to assimilate in order to survive. They’ve solved these “issues”: Everyone from the Middle East and Africa is allowed in and there is no pressure at all to conform to Western values or norms.

In an effort to create a new morality to reach these aims they used the lesson we Jews taught them, the Western non-Jews, that the problem of the Holocaust was that the Jews were oppressed. If one wants to be righteous, all you have to do is stand up for the oppressed, the victims. What we didn’t see happening was that in the intervening 80 years, we became white and oppressors and the Muslims out-victimed us, at least in their propaganda.

None of this considers at all the meritoriousness of the “oppressed” or “victim”. If you shoot someone trying to kill you, you’re alive and he’s dead, and therefore he’s the victim and you’re the oppressor. This is a fight we can’t win. In that fight, only numbers matter and we can’t produce enough dead Jews. But this is the lesson we taught them, “remember the 6 million”. And because of that, someone like Macron of France can come to Israel, visit Yad Vashem and return home to announce recognition of a Palestinian state with a clear conscience.

What should we have done? Or, at least, what should we do? We need to make the Holocaust like Passover.

The seder is a time when we tell our story to ourselves. Despite what is done today, this is really the last observance that would be appropriate to a non-Jewish guest. When there’s a Paschal sacrifice – G-d willing soon – non-Jews couldn’t participate if they wanted to. Even during today’s celebrations, this is the time when we tell G-d to “Pour out your wrath on the nations who do not know you.” We don’t worry about the world’s reaction because this is about “Tell YOUR son…”

Yom Hashoah, Tisha B’Av and Yom Hazikaron are incredibly important. WE need to remember. We need to remember the massacre at York in England. We need to remember the Ukrainian (Cossack) massacre of “Tach veTat”. We need to remember the Hebron massacre of 1929. We need to remember the Holocaust. We need to remember the Simchat Torah massacre of 2023. We need to remember the fallen of our country. We need to remember the destruction of the Temple. Allies are great, but they will come and go. We need to work on us.