Holocaust Remembrance Day and the danger of explanation

Commemorating the Holocaust primarily as a warning against hate is too narrow. Hate didn’t create the Holocaust; explanation did. And explanation didn’t begin with violence, but with an interpretive move that accounted for failures. It solved a problem: accounting for the gap between a society’s self-image and its actual record. The answer was comforting because it exonerated those who bore responsibility. This is why it’s important to keep in mind, now, as we remember; not in ritual, but in diagnosis. The real threat is not fury, but sterling explanation. And explanation rarely identifies itself as dangerous. It usually sounds as matter-of-fact as this timeless companion to the Allied advance: “I only did my job, and my job was a big one.”

After World War I, it is easy to see why this kind of explanation was appealing. Germany had lost the war without having felt entirely defeated, so its collapse felt undeserved. The Treaty of Versailles exacerbated that confusion by punishing without inviting collective investigation. The country plunged into economic and political instability, and confusion demanded to be answered. Acknowledging strategic failure or imperial hubris would have required unraveling national myths on which many Germans relied for self-understanding. Antisemitism provided an alternative explanation: Germany hadn’t failed; it had been undermined. This explanation didn’t strike most people as outrageous; it felt illuminating. Disappointment turned into explanation, and explanation into conviction.

Hitler didn’t invent this approach; he intensified and pathologized it. Instead of blaming Jews for specific actions, they were blamed for the fact that progress itself had failed. Jews were imagined as a pathological presence within the social body. All of this was justified with racial science, of course, but also drew on much older traditions of antisemitism. Antisemitism became a matter of hygiene rather than politics. Their presence was understood as infection rather than conflict, making it necessary instead of difficult to imagine the possibility of their absence. Slaughter could be construed as prevention, and above all, as responsibility. This is often dismissed as “madness.” It wasn’t. It was coherence pursued without restraint.

Thus began the policy implementation stage of the “Jewish Problem.” Jews were first removed from citizenship, then from professions, then from credibility, warranting their victimization. Bureaucratic language about relocation and safety made everything seem aboveboard. When the need arose to massacre Jews en masse, the story had been concocted. As the Reich expanded in the course of World War II, millions of Jews came under the control of a system that had already explained them as a problem to which violent elimination was the only solution. The Holocaust wasn’t a failure to explain; it was all too well explained. Killings were justified to the killers as hygiene and necessity from a value system for which questions posed direct threats to order. This is the sound of ethics as organized by duty.

Of course, that mechanism didn’t disappear in 1945; it shifted. Antisemitism adapts to attach itself to whatever framework claims explanatory authority. In some segments of the contemporary progressive left, this manifests in the language of justice. When Jewish presence or self-determination is inconvenient to those moral systems, it is resolved by blaming Jews for wielding power, distorting, and succeeding undeservedly. It does not feel like hatred to those who employ it; it represents an answered question. I know that claim will be dismissed by some as offensive. That dismissal obeys the pulse of the pattern. Explanation is instantaneous, responsibility all but vanishes, and innocence is maintained by exporting internal tension.

In Islamic contexts, antisemitism doesn’t only have its roots in modern politics. Certain polemical Quranic verses, amplified by difficult encounters between Muhammad and Jewish tribes during the development of early Islam, already articulate Jews as figures not of activity but of refusal. Jews are imagined not yet as a problem to be solved, but as the answer to the question of why things don’t go as they should. For most of history, under this system, that explanation ensured Jewish survival through disrespect, not through violence. What changed after 1948 was the challenge to the system posed by a specifically political Jewish survival. A Jewish state overturned a world in which Jews were only supposed to survive pathetically. Instead of adjusting the framework itself, antisemitism ratcheted up to account for a much more serious malfunction of history. That escalation is still excused, in many quarters, as a legitimate political response rather than a catastrophic theological failure.

Antisemitism on the right has returned through a mirror structure: Jewish success is culpable for instability, immigration, and the breakdown of the social order. Innocence, as opposed to being formulated as a progressive value, has become its reactionary alternative: the preservation of whiteness rather than the centering of otherness. But, again, Jews are merely a reflection of breakdown as opposed to agents. Looming institutional failure and the loss of privilege can be rationalized without self-reflection. Once again, responsibility has been replaced by interpretation: antisemitism endures, and the surplus is to blame. This redux should be more frightening than it is.

A coherent ideology does not unite these modes of antisemitism; a unified function does. Antisemitism thrives when self-satisfying moral structures have promised themselves order and salvation, and come up short. Jewish survival reveals that shortcoming just by being around, unaccounted for. Instead of living in failures and messiness, societies read into them, mistaking saturation for clarity, and speedy for well-considered. That’s why antisemitism is always poised and ready, before facts and mourning and unknowing. It answers the question much too quickly.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, don’t remember: distrust your own impulse to interpret. Memory lies exactly in dwelling where interpretation urges solutions, and rejecting those that seem sufficient.