Can a museum – any museum – ‘eliminate hate?’

Edward Rothstein, published an article on August 7, 2024 in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Holocaust Museums at a Crossroads.” An important critic of historical museums, Rothstein’s writings have been insightful, informed, and imaginative, and even when his criticism is stinging, it is well worth considering.

Yet, this column was less than persuasive. Here’s why.

Rothstein sets up a straw man when he described the auxiliary functions of a Holocaust museum as curbing antisemitism, eliminating hate and nurturing tolerance. I have worked in the field of Holocaust museums for 44 years and never heard the words “eliminate hate” as a task that a museum, any museum, could accomplish. The other goals are more modest, more achievable and there is considerable empirical evidence that museums have succeeded in the humbler task.

He is uncharacteristically unfair: without informing his readers that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent exhibition has remained exclusively Holocaust-centered since its opening 31 years ago, Rothstein makes an unbalanced attack on its Center for the Prevention of Genocide without even mentioning its more central tasks: its Center for Education and Advanced Holocaust Studies and its multiple archives with unparalleled collections of books, documents, photos, film, video testimony, music, and artifacts. These archives and resources are indispensable to scholars and students, and to all who do creative work on the Holocaust globally. They remain central to the Museum’s efforts. They are the priority in terms of budget and impact.

The Center for the Prevention of Genocide fulfills a mission first articulated in the President’s Commission on the Holocaust’s Report to the President on September 27, 1979. It was the fourth of its recommendations to President Jimmy Carter as to what constitutes a “living memorial to the Holocaust.”

The USHMM’s Permanent Exhibition features an important film on antisemitism, created in the 1992, at a time when, after the collapse Communism, the work of Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II, as well as the acceptance of Jews in American society, seemed to indicate that antisemitism was on the decline. We were too optimistic and thus, the film, however powerful, is now inadequate because it did not deal sufficiently with the impact of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and conspiracy theories in general. Yet the Museum corrected that omission some time ago with a special exhibition on the Protocols and their influence, past and present.

I think that Rothstein’s comparison to museums devoted to the Holocaust with other ethnic museums misunderstands something about the role of the Holocaust and of the role of Jewish identity—or at least the Jewish identity of those men and women I worked with over the past half century who helped create Holocaust museums, most especially survivors of the Holocaust themselves.

After a long silence, in part because non-survivors were unwilling to listen –survivors responded  to the Holocaust in the most deeply Jewish way of all: remembering suffering and transmitting that memory in order to fortify conscience, to plead for decency, to strengthen values and thus to intensify a commitment to human dignity. That is how the Biblical Jews taught us to remember that we were slaves in Egypt and that is why the Biblical experience has framed the struggle for freedom ever since.

They did not shy away from a commitment to Jewish identity, to the promise of Israel, and to rebuilding Jewish life personally and communally.

In Jewish identity, the particular must remain particular, but its significance must be universal. The Holocaust was an atrocity, not a tragedy. In tragedy what is learned roughly balances the price that is paid for such knowledge. Atrocity offers no possibility of balance, and thus no inner space in which to bury the event. At most, it leaves us searching through the ashes to find meaning in an event of such magnitude, it defies our very sense of meaning.

The Holocaust implicates the core of Western civilization. Germany had the most advanced literature and science, art and music, philosophy, and poetry. The Holocaust implicated two of three of the great monotheistic religions – Islam was far less central. It was an act of government — and governments –and demonstrates the capacities of people men and women for evil and for good; for destruction yet also resilience and rebirth. At first, evil won out.

I thought perhaps Rothstein would have asked the more important question, which visitors to Holocaust museums and memorials, even students in courses on the Holocaust now ask about the world in which they live. Holocaust museums must deal more centrally with the period of the formation of Nazism between 1919-1933, the attacks on democracy, the impact of polarization, the intensity of violence, rhetorical and then physical; the ineffectiveness of paralyzed democracy, the grievances of the masses, and the nature of charismatic leadership that divides a nation and turns its citizens against one another. These issues echo in our country and in our world.

One cannot undo what has happened. Historians can answer the question how; theologians, writers, artist, poets and philosophers have not answered the question why. Yet we can answer the question of what to do with this history. Embrace it, study it, wrestle with it and ultimately transform it into a weapon for the human spirit to enlarge our sense of responsibility, to alleviate human suffering and strengthen our moral resolve, and to recognize the process and stop it when it starts.

No one imagined that this memory could end hatred or even antisemitism. No one imagined that a museum, however central to its community or country, could overpower the pervasive forces of our current political climate, the images of war that appear daily on news programs, and on social networks, the rhetoric that we hear from political leaders, professors, and their students, from leaders of Iran, from Hamas and. Shamefully, even from members of the government of Israel. Or the ideologies and tools that propel the venom infecting our world.

On the most personal level, I wish that everything I learned from the past could remain in the past and not echo in our world. Would that Holocaust museums could become restricted to remembering the past. Sadly, tragically, they cannot.

As originally posted in Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/holocaust-museums-are-at-a-crossroads-just-not-the-way-edward-rothstein-thinks/