Why Did Holocaust Education Fail So Badly?

We are paying the price of turning the Holocaust into a universal symbol of evil

Today it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Holocaust education has totally failed to achieve its objective. The normalisation of antisemitism in many parts of the Western world and growing scepticism about the meaning of the Holocaust -especially among the younger generation – speaks to the singular irrelevance of Holocaust education.

As one commentator noted;

‘Never has the Holocaust been so earnestly and widely “taught.” Yet never has it been so clear that its lessons are unlearned. The cancer of anti-Semitism is spreading, and there is no deadlier symptom’[i].

Perversely it seems that the expansion and institutionalisation of Holocaust education have run in parallel with the growth of Holocaust revisionism and antisemitism. Indeed, institutions of higher education have provided a fertile terrain where amnesia about the historical Holocaust has flourished alongside the normalisation of antisemitism.

The historical Holocaust has been captured by the entertainment industry which transformed this catastrophic event into a Disneyfied morality play that exploits society’s anxiety about victimhood. The unfortunate transformation of the Holocaust into a generic symbol of evil -detached from its antisemitic roots has been encouraged by a variety of moral entrepreneurs who have exploited the moral significance of the Holocaust to promote causes that have nothing to do with this event. Unfortunately, many Holocaust educators have been complicit in universalising this catastrophe to the point that every identity group was encouraged to own a piece of the Holocaust.

It has taken the tragedy of October 7 and the subsequent explosion of antisemitic hatred for supporters of Holocaust educators to begin to acknowledge the total failure of their project[ii]. I still remember when I gave a talk to a UK based Holocaust Educational Trust in the early years of this century and raised reservations about its efforts; my audience reacted to my words with horror. Yet, for a very long time virtually every survey highlighted the lack of influence of Holocaust Education. In 2004 a poll conducted in nine European countries by the IPSO research institute indicated that 35 per cent of those interviewed stated that Jews should stop playing the role of Holocaust victims. Although the western media usually brands East European societies – particularly Hungary – for tolerating antisemitism – it is worth noting that none of these nine countries were behind the old Iron Curtain. They were Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany and Britain[iii].

Scepticism and even the denial of the Holocaust has grown significantly – and in parallel with the expansion public initiatives designed to memorialise it. A report circulated in January 2017 citing Dr Nicholas Terry, a history lecturer at Exeter University, estimated that there are now thousands of ‘low-commitment” Holocaust deniers online[iv]. In December 2016 the top hit on Google in response to a search for the question ‘Did the Holocaust happen’ was a link that claimed that the murder of 6 million Jews was a hoax. It is inconceivable that back in the 1950s or 1960s or the 1970s – before the public sacralisation of Holocaust memory took off – there would have been such an interest in conspiracy theories that suggested that this act of genocide was a hoax.

And so, it continues. A recent survey has shown that one in nine young Germans has not heard of the Holocaust. A quarter cannot name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto. It also showed that ‘nearly half of American adults could not identify any killing sites of the Holocaust’.

A poll carried out by The Economist and YouGov in 2023 made for equally disturbing reading. It showed that more than a fifth of young Americans, aged between 18 and 29, agreed with the statement that ‘the Holocaust is a myth’, while a further 30 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed. That means that less than half of young Americans firmly believe the Holocaust actually happened.

The growth of historical amnesia is worrying enough. But of even greater concern is the way in which the meaning of the Holocaust has been distorted and inverted by our cultural and political elites, and weaponised by anti-Israel zealots. Indeed, Auschwitz itself – a death camp designed for the genocide of the Jews – is fast being turned into something else: an all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. It is becoming Disneyfied, transformed into a gruesome theme park for those looking for an off the shelf moral message.

The regrettable sacralization of the Holocaust

A variety of moral entrepreneurs have sought to opportunistically harness the moral significance of the Holocaust to support their campaigns. Governments throughout the West followed suit and used Holocaust remembrance as a medium for establishing their moral authority. Consequently, during the last two decades of the 20^th century the Holocaust emerged as a constantly used symbol of evil used by moral entrepreneurs.

One of the consequences of the sacralisation of the Holocaust was that it became torn from its historical context and turned into a preachy morality play that could be opportunistically used to assist the cause of forging a shared European memory. A former European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Máire Geoghegan Quinn justified the teaching of the Holocaust on the ground that it was a ‘good way to have future generations understand the importance of fundamental rights, which are one of the central pillars of ‘European’ citizenship’[v]. Her exhortation to adopt the Holocaust as a useful teaching aid, illustrates the instrumental and fundamentally social engineering use to which its memory was put. Consequently often, the remembrance of the Holocaust has little to do with a genuine act of grieving or remembering. Instead, it often works as an official ritual that allows sanctimonious politicians and public figures to put their superior moral virtues on public display.

The belated transformation of the Holocaust into a transcendental sacred value in Western Europe was not so much an act of sincere atonement but an attempt to manage the moral malaise afflicting society. The absence of moral clarity, which has led to so much conflict over values has created a demand for symbols and rituals that confer a measure of coherence on the social order. In a world where society finds it difficult to clearly differentiate between right and wrong it is important that some kind of line is drawn between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Without a moral grammar to express ideas about right and wrong ethical guidance often has a forced and artificial character. For institutions like the EU and various governments the sacralisation of the Holocaust has served as an important resource for supporting its moral authority

The sacralisation of the Holocaust has also provided society with a powerful taboo. Not being against the Holocaust is probably the most ritualised and institutionalised taboo operating in western societies. Numerous countries now have laws against Holocaust denial. In some countries the denial of the Holocaust is a crime, that in some cases carries a prison term of up to ten years. Preaching about the horrors of the Holocaust helps society avoid working out its own moral view of the world. Its transformation into a universal symbol of evil has helped promote the simplistic moral formula: to be against it is good and to be for it is evil. It is worth noting that these laws have proved to be singularly ineffective. Arguably they have contributed to the creation of a climate of scepticism regarding the historical Holocaust.

The Holocaust has become one of the most overused metaphors for evil in contemporary times. Animal rights activists in Canada refer to a Holocaust of seal. Anti-abortion campaigners in the United States have denounced the Holocaust of foetuses. In Australia there is talk about the Holocaust against Aborigines. Then there is the African-American Holocaust, the Serbian Holocaust, the Bosnian Holocaust or the Rwandan Holocaust. The label Holocaust can be appropriated to attack just about any target. Thus, everything from the erosion of bio-diversity to a loss of jobs can be denounced as a ‘Holocaust’. Moral entrepreneurs constantly embrace the Holocaust to lend legitimacy to their enterprise. They also insist that anyone who questions their version of events should be treated in a manner that is similar to those who deny the real Holocaust. The expansion of the usage of the Holocaust metaphor has the unintended consequence of gradually diminishing its moral impact.

The demand that we ‘learn the lessons of the Holocaust’ has become a regular refrain that is adopted to promote a bewildering variety of causes. Frequently, warnings about a particular problem or threat are concluded with the assertion of ‘it is just like the Holocaust’ or ‘just like the Nazis’ or ‘it may lead to a Holocaust’. Such statements offer a claim for moral authority and can be deployed in the most unlikely of circumstances. When the Australian feminist Germaine Greer walked out of Celebrity Big Brother House in January 2005, she attacked her housemates for refusing to support her defiant stand against the “fascist” bullying of Big Brother. ‘Persecution is what happens, holocausts are what happens when good people do nothing’, she lectured the public[vi].

Greer’s thruway remarks exemplified a widespread tendency to instrumentalise the sense of sincere guilt and horror that images of the Holocaust can provoke. Unfortunately, this rhetorical strategy often led to the cynical manoeuvre of guilt tripping.

As Jonathan Tobin explained the moral authority of the Holocaust was promoted through a narrative that ‘sought to make its lessons palatable to non-Jews by universalizing its lessons’[vii]. Unfortunately, the social engineering project of universalizing the lessons of the Holocaust detached the Shoah from its historical context. Its connection to antisemitism became increasingly minimized, which meant that any form of violent conflict could be branded as a Holocaust

The Holocaust has been ripped out of its historical context. So much so that its historical meaning has now been thoroughly inverted by assorted anti-Israel activists. After Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023, ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters quickly characterised Israel’s self-defence as Nazi-like aggression. On their marches, they waved placards featuring a Star of David inside a swastika. They compared Israel’s siege of Gaza to Nazi concentration camps. They cast Israeli soldiers fighting to defend their nation as Nazi stormtroopers. In the most grotesque inversion of all, they cast the Hamas terrorists responsible for the atrocities of 7 October in the role of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims.

Today the war in Gaza is often equated with Auschwitz itself. In May 2024, pro-Palestine demonstrators went so far as to disrupt an Auschwitz remembrance march with a ‘Stop Genocide’ protest. According to Maung Zarni, a supposed genocide expert, Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is a ‘repeat of Auschwitz’, and a ‘collective white imperialist man’s genocide’.

This willful warping of the historical record is breathtaking. If Gaza is the new Auschwitz, then where are the packed trains transporting their ‘passengers’ to their death? Where are the deadly gas chambers? Where is the routine violation of the corpses of the dead? Anti-Israel zealots are not merely robbing the Holocaust of its horrific reality, they are also hollowing out its moral significance.

Holocaust inversion is rife among the anti-Israel crowd. As Lesley Klaff explained, it involves both ‘an inversion of reality’, casting Israelis ‘as the “new” Nazis and the Palestinians as the “new” Jews’, and an ‘inversion of morality’, in which the ‘Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of, “the Jews”’.

An instrument of guilt tripping

Over two decades ago I argued in my book Therapy Culture(2004) that the main accomplishment of Holocaust education and the formal schemes designed to memorialize the Holocaust was to turn a genuine inquiry into this catastrophe into a moral ritual. One important reason why Holocaust education had such little impact was because it was underpinned by a therapeutic imperative that overlooked the demands of detached historical analysis. Advocates of Holocaust education promoted remembrance as a form of emotional healing or moral instruction. In this way educators displaced understanding with feeling. As I noted in Therapy Culture: ‘Holocaust education has become less about history and more about the cultivation of emotional literacy’.

Regrettable, the Holocaust also became the target of moral inflation, which led to its loss of meaning. Moral inflation- the hackneyed overuse of the Holocaust as a universal moral benchmark - served to empty its remembrance of genuine meaning. When so many social problems are framed through the narrative of the Holocaust it becomes stripped of its historical and moral depth.

It is time to give Holocaust education a rest. We need to shift our energy from educating the world about the Holocaust and challenge the ideological underpinning of antisemitism. What should really concern us is not so much the victimization of Jewish people by the Nazis as the threat they face in the 21^st century. It is necessary to cease hiding behind the denunciation of a universal form of racism and focus on the particularity of antisemitism. Unless we radically transform our response to the threat posed by the new, 21^st century barbarism we will continue to fail to grasp the real lessons of the historical Holocaust.

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[i] See for example https://www.jns.org/yom-hashoah-after-oct-7-how-holocaust-education-failed/

[ii] See for example https://www.jns.org/yom-hashoah-after-oct-7-how-holocaust-education-failed/

[iii] http://www.haaretz.com/35-of-europeans-say-jews-should-stop-playing-the-victim-1.112128 .

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/22/online-conspiracy-theories-feed-holocaust-denial .

[v] Della Sala(2016)

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/jan/12/bigbrother.broadcasting .

[vii] https://www.jns.org/yom-hashoah-after-oct-7-how-holocaust-education-failed/