Holocaust Museums at a Crossroads

By  Edward Rothstein, The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2024 (print edition)

Image: Installation view from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Photo credit: Miriam Lomaskin

There are more than two dozen Holocaust museums in the U.S. They have welcomed tens of millions of visitors over the past several decades and helped create Holocaust curricula required in 26 states, reaching some 20,000 American schools. Their purpose—stressed in exhibitions, on web sites and in educational materials—is not just to teach about one of the darkest episodes of human history, but also to curb antisemitism, eliminate hate and nurture tolerance.

One might expect, then, that recent generations, dutifully exposed to this history, would have a heightened sensitivity to such matters—particularly to antisemitism. But over the past 10 months, as hate-crime statistics, campus protests and urban disruptions have demonstrated, the opposite is the case. Moreover, the words “genocide” and “Holocaust” have become so profligately applied that the situation seems to illustrate the comically coined Latinate fallacy, “reductio ad Hitlerum”: Any disliked opponent is a “Nazi”; every act of war, a genocide; and any large-scale suffering, a Holocaust. To understand this disjunction between these institutions’ aims and the reality beyond their walls, we need to examine Holocaust museums more closely.

First of all, they place a particular emphasis on survivors, who have spoken to classes and acted as docents. As that generation dies off, museums have had to seek new ways to keep their testimony vital.

This year, for example, the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Mich., opened a new $31 million core exhibit, telling the history through the “lens of the victims.” Nearly every display has a quotation from a Michigan-based survivor. The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum expanded in 2019, adding a display in which a 3-D holographic image of a local survivor “responds” to visitors’ questions aided by a computer linking them to the subject’s interview file. A new incarnation of the Toronto Holocaust Museum, which opened in 2023, is relatively modest and scrupulously focused, but one feature provides virtual-reality goggles that let you accompany Pinchas Gutter, an eloquent survivor, as he visits the killing fields of Majdanek in Poland where his family was murdered.

But this emphasis on survivors has serious limitations. As the writer Dara Horn has pointed out, given their young age when the Nazis came to power, the survivors now encountered are unable to provide much sense of the past; in their accounts, the Holocaust can almost seem to arise ex nihilo. They also ultimately settled in North America, where they thrived on postwar liberalism. They laud tolerance and human rights—qualities they (and the museums) believe would have prevented the Holocaust. In the Zekelman’s introductory film, one survivor says, “It should never make any difference what nationality, what religion, or what color skin a person has.” “You have to decide,” another says, “are you or are you not your brother’s keeper?”

The theme keeps recurring: “Bystanders” passively watched the evil, but virtuous “upstanders” opposed it. In Dallas, an interactive “Beyond Tolerance Theater” tutors the audience in “unconscious bias awareness,” suggesting that we all harbor gender and racial intolerance.

This selection of survivors also precludes a more varied perspective. By contrast, Israel’s Ghetto Fighters’ House—founded in 1949 by participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and perhaps the world’s first Holocaust museum—puts the emphasis not on tolerance but on resilience and determination.

Another result of the American museums’ approach is that more compelling historical lessons are ignored. Here is one: Don’t appease totalitarian states and terrorist organizations. Or another: Take their declared goals seriously, whether expressed in “Mein Kampf” or in the founding documents of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Holocaust museums also need to provide a deeper understanding of antisemitism, which is quite different from garden-variety racial hatred. Traditional antisemitism grows out of the conviction that Judaism is supplanted by Christianity or Islam. The believer sees this as divine revelation, not “intolerance.” Similar is modern antisemitism’s worldview that Jews have secretly colonized the world’s media and money supplies. Here too, antisemitism is felt as a sophisticated metaphysical insight, which may be one reason why, in the 1930s, it quickly established itself at German universities. Its seeming intellectual character also explains its embrace at contemporary American universities, whose dominant ideology sees a world order in which the oppressed are pitted against colonizers. Antisemitism reveals the ultimate colonizers: the Jew and the Jewish state. Holocaust museums do nothing to dismantle these blindly ardent convictions.

But there is an even more profound way in which Holocaust museums have clouded their subject. When we go to a museum about American slavery, for example, we expect to focus on the history and learn its ramifications. It would be startling if the narrative suddenly came to an end and galleries explored other examples of slavery while we were being urged to be an “upstander” against all injustice. Yet that is precisely what happens at Holocaust museums.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington now has a “Center for the Prevention of Genocide” presenting case histories that range from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The Dallas museum devotes half its galleries to human rights, chronicling fights against injustice and surveying other genocides. But no museum I have seen provides enough information to understand any other example in convincing detail. The account of the Holocaust is supposed to suffice. Each example is offered as a variation on a theme, even though every questionable analogy weakens the hold of the original.  

What would be another approach? The Toronto museum is content to present the history and allow us to soberly digest it. It is refreshing to see a museum not acting as if its mission were to spur activism against “intolerance.”

Holocaust museums would also be more compelling if their subject area were reconsidered. During the past few decades, new museums devoted to particular identities (African-American, Hispanic-American, Japanese-American, Arab-American) typically recount a tale of how a group, beset by great trials, triumphed by demanding its rights despite discrimination. But the Holocaust museum, while linked to an identity, isn’t really concerned with it. In fact, the emphasis is less on a coherent Jewish identity than on Jews’ identity as victims. There is no triumph of a people, just individual survivors who are presented less as Jews than as Americans.

The Holocaust is thus cut off not only from a people’s past but also from that people’s future as it unfolded—including the creation of Israel and the genocidal threats of destruction that were promised by invading Arab nations in 1948. Why, for example, shouldn’t Holocaust museums examine the influence that Nazi propaganda had on the postwar Arab world? The narrative about a Jewish plot to dominate the world in the Nazis’ favorite antisemitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” found a second home in the Middle East. It is even a cited source in the Hamas Charter. There is a reason why pro-Hamas demonstrations are saturated with its venom. But exploring such themes would require taking a more comprehensive view and forgoing the desire to generalize into platitude.

Incorporating this material into Holocaust museums wouldn’t bring hatred to an end. But at least it wouldn’t cloud our understanding with feel-good affirmations about “tolerance” and being an “upstander.”  

Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large.

See the fully illustrated article and respond, if you care to, at The Wall Street Journal.