Why are so many people talking about the “lesson of the Holocaust” like Jews, the Holocaust’s predominant victims, failed Genocide School?
IT WOULD BE SO INAPPROPRIATE
...to say that,
- Black people did not “learn their lesson” from slavery.
- Indigenous people did not “learn their lesson” from colonialism.
Those are absolutely outrageous and incredibly offensive statements, are they not? And yet, for so many people, it’s become entirely second nature to accuse Jews – Holocaust survivors themselves, even! – of “not learning their lesson” or “learning the wrong lesson” from our very own genocide.
But just as slavery and colonialism were not “lessons” for their victims by any stretch of the imagination, neither was the Holocaust.
We do not teach people morality by suffocating them to death in the gas chambers.
HITLER WASN'T TRYING TO TEACH US A LESSON
The Nazis did not persecute the Jewish people because they intended to teach us a lesson. The Nazis persecuted the Jewish people based on pseudoscientific ideas about the so-called inferior Jewish “race.” The Nazis persecuted the Jewish people based on a foundation of 2000 years of European antisemitic conspiracies, stereotypes, and tropes. The Nazis persecuted the Jews people because antisemitic scapegoating is an effective, tried-and-true weapon to mobilize entire populations.
When parents or educators intend to teach their children or students a lesson, they don’t murder the child or student. Dead individuals can’t learn lessons, because they are no longer with us. They can’t do better next time, because there is no next time. Hitler intended to exterminate all of world Jewry…and nearly succeeded. Had his evil plans fully materialized, Jews would have no do over, because there would be no Jews left.
THE HOLOCAUST WAS NOT A TEACHABLE MOMENT
This is what the Zionists were doing as the Holocaust unfolded: they were the partisans, fighting the Nazis and their collaborators in the forests of Eastern Europe or in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto. They were the Hannah Szenneses of the world, parachuting into enemy territory to save Hungarian Jewry. They were the Golda Meirs, David Ben-Gurions, and Chaim Weizmanns, pleading the Allies to intervene on behalf of their Jewish siblings. They were the Haganah fighters, risking the British blockade and the Nazis to smuggle Jewish refugees into the Palestine Mandate. They were the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, battling the fascist forces under the future Israeli flag.
Here’s what the Zionists were not doing: taking notes in a genocide studies course.
THERE ARE THINGS TO LEARN FROM THE HOLOCAUST
There are zero morality lessons to be learned from experiencing the Holocaust. There are, however, lessons to be learned from studying the Holocaust (especially for unaffiliated, third-party observers with no personal, intergenerational, or communal Holocaust trauma to speak of). For some curious reason, antizionists and antisemites seem to confuse the former for the latter.
Studying the history of the Holocaust can teach people many things, such as:
- Identifying fascism, totalitarianism, and other repressive systems of government.
- Antisemitism! Antisemitism! Antisemitism! Identifying antisemitism should be central to Holocaust education, because antisemitism drove all of Nazi ideology.
- The politics of scapegoating and the weaponization of antisemitism to mobilize populations.
LESSONS FOR THE PERPETRATORS, COLLABORATORS, AND BYSTANDERS
Implied in conversations about the “lesson of the Holocaust” is the question: what should I have done differently?
So let’s make something very clear: there is nothing that Jews should have done differently. Six million Jews – 2/3s of the European Jewish population – were not brutally exterminated because they misbehaved. There is, however, a long list of people that should have acted differently.
- The Nazis and their allies, who systematically annihilated most of European Jewry over the course of six years. They could have acted differently.
- The 5% of Nazi-occupied Europe that were active collaborators of the Nazis (that’s around 10 million people). They could have acted differently.
- The 99.9% of Europe that were bystanders as the Nazis decimated Jewish communities.
- The Allies, that persistently ignored the Jews’ pleas for help.
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