Holocaust media is part of the problem

Attending high school in South Florida gave me unparalleled access to Holocaust education.

Two out of the three class field trips I took involved a Holocaust museum. Every English class went over at least one piece of Holocaust literature. History class detailed Germany’s descent into Nazism. From what I gather, my experience was the ideal one, the one that Jewish community leaders are advocating for students to experience across the entire United States.

Yet shortly after October 7th, I caught one of my former classmates liking multiple antisemitic posts… on LinkedIn. Not even the business/professional social media platform is safe from this tyranny!

This phenomenon isn’t limited to one of my high school classmates. Despite Holocaust education being woven into the curricula of several US states, Generation Z is much likelier to endorse racist views of Jewish people. In one poll, more than half endorsed Jewish death directly by celebrating Hamas. The antisemitic encampments and hate marches on college campuses aren’t aberrations: they’re the new normal. Yet our generation is the most likely to receive Holocaust education by law!

There are many reasons why today’s American youth endorse Jewish death. But the increase in American Holocaust education is clearly part of the problem, because the implication of Holocaust education in the West is that Jews are meant to die for other people’s sins.

In her masterwork, People Love Dead Jews, Dr. Dara Horn describes the differences between Western Holocaust media and Jewish-centric Holocaust media – explaining how Jewish media focuses heavily on the deep human suffering inflicted by the Nazis, while Western media focuses on “shared humanity” between all peoples; how Jews spoke about their 2,000 year-old hope for our return to our Indigenous homeland, while Western media isolates the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history; how Jews seethed with rage at their fates, while Western media focuses on the necessity to “love one another.”

It was only after reading Dr. Horn’s book that I realized my Holocaust education was not the same as my classmates’ Holocaust education. When they went to the Holocaust museum with me, they didn’t see the culmination of thousands of years of exile and Diasporization; they saw an example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Only, as Elie Wiesel protested, “No! It was man’s inhumanity to Jews. Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers, they were not human beings! They were Jews!”

The West’s mischaracterization of the Holocaust makes even more sense when you remember the other time in Western history where Jews prominently died: the execution of Jesus. The entire doctrine of Christianity is that while Jesus’s murder was bad, his death was good, causing believers to learn about their own capacity for sin and their capacity for subsequent redemption. So it is with the Holocaust: while the murder of six million Jews was evil, their deaths were good, causing the West to learn a lesson about their own capacity for evil and their capacity for subsequent justice.

This brilliant article from David Bernstein elaborates further:

In the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews’ role was to use their martyrdom to be a prophetic voice for peace, indeed pacifism, and to work for humankind’s redemption… Jews refusing to be victims is, ironically, seen as a betrayal of Christian ideals. This is why Christian critics of Israel so often accuse Jews of not learning anything from the Holocaust; in their mind, the Holocaust is a story about Christian sin and possible redemption via the actions of the victims; the fate of the Jewish people as a people is at best irrelevant.

Even when Holocaust media doesn’t mention Christianity explicitly, it implicitly endorses these ideas about Jewish people through its rhetoric about the Holocaust. When American students receive this “Holocaust education,” what they actually receive is sanitized drivel that excuses the West for its active participation in the Holocaust, erasing America’s (and Canada’s) rejection of a boatload of Jewish refugees (the US even sent a Coast Guard vessel to escort the ship away from America. Both countries apologized in the 21st century); the active refusal of European countries to accept Jewish refugees (the only country to accept any Jewish refugees was the Dominican Republic); and other numerous examples of local cooperation with Nazis. The end result? Anti-Israel protestors who describe Jews as “colonists” or “genocidal” in Israel.

The solution isn’t to replace whitewashed Holocaust history with Jewish-centered Holocaust media. That’s because students raised in the West have already ingested stereotypes about Jews which lead them to believe that dead Jews are good Jews. Instead, we need to educate American students about living Jews, not dead ones.

There’s already plenty of interest in schools teaching critical thinking as a focused discipline, so why not add a critical thinking class that encourages students to link myths and lies about Israeli Jews to the blood libels from medieval Europe they’re based on? Schools have recently tried to incorporate current events into classroom history discussions, so why not incorporate hate marches against Jews and encourage students to connect them to the historic assaults on Jewish people they draw from? Critical thinking is, after all, the historical antithesis of Jew-hatred because antisemitism is fundamentally a conspiracy theory about Jewish domination.

For that matter, why not teach students the history of the Jewish people directly, instead of just one horrible chapter of our almost 4,000 year long history?

If we focus on the positive aspects of Jewish existence – our incredible Nobel prize record and the contributions to science we’ve made; our inventions which have helped create the modern technological landscape; and our extreme resilience in the face of utter destruction – then maybe we can convince Generation Z that they should support Jews over their murderers.

If we want Americans to support Jewish life, we need to start by dismantling the sanctification of Jewish death.