I think Goyim obsession and fetishization of the Shoah on such a massive scale has led to the notion that anything short of strapping a red armband on and shipping Jews to death camps could not possibly be hating Jews. We are unicorns in a story to them, and not an actual still living marginalized group that is dismissed when voicing our grievances and perspectives on oppression we face that, knowingly or unknowingly, is being perpetuated on a much greater scale. What are you talking about, they couldn’t possibly be antisemitic, they’re not a nazi
There’s a Dara Horn about this. Everyone should read Dara Horn
Required reading: Dara Horn's "Is Holocaust Education Making Antisemitism Worse?", published in The Atlantic April 3, 2023
I think a very similar phenomenon, in a specifically American context, is in how racism civil rights are taught and talked about, certainly back in the 1980s-1990s: the KKK and old black and white footage of segregationists gives headspace for the idea that unless someone is actually in the Klan burning a cross at that moment, they’re maybe not a FULL racist.
As an outsider to the dynamic about the Holocaust, it feels pretty familiar. We get all the benefits of despising awful people, and the ‘benefit’ of a clean conscience because we’re not *that.*
some highlights from Dara Horn’s article:
“Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?
I hadn't yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal. […]
Another Texas teacher, who wouldn't share her name, put it more bluntly. ‘The Holocaust happened long ago, and we're not responsible for it,’ she said. ‘Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.’”
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“even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was ‘a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted’ in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism. When researchers interviewed students to press this question, "many students appeared to regard [Jews'] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation." In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews.”
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“Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.”
“‘Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,’ then ‘Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,’ and then ‘Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.’ The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for ‘doing their own research,’ for ‘punching up,’ for ‘speaking truth to power,’ while actually just spreading lies.”
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Holocaust education is rarely about Jews—we’re simply a metaphor for victimhood. But to unpack why it happened to Jews is to force people to confront the thousands of years of bigotry that are so deeply rooted in our society today, that they may have unknowingly internalized.
It’s a lot easier to talk about discrimination as a whole if you don’t actually humanize your example.
