Holocaust lessons are a lie we tell ourselves.
Stop using our grandparents' suffering to justify your politics. Holocaust survivors didn't die to be a social justice hashtag.
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This is a guest essay written by Josh Yunis, who writes the newsletter, “The Diaspora.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Of the many indignities Jews have been forced to endure since October 7th, one of the most painful is the very public dragging of Jewish identity, history, and suffering into the cause of a “free Palestine.”
There are the ceasefire protestors adorned in “not in our name” shirts; and the cavalcade of TikTokers who parade themselves “as a Jew” for the consumption of the non-Jewish world’s social media timelines.
One popular social media post proclaimed: “I do not consent to the use of my Jewish traumas to perpetuate this ethnic cleansing & settler colonialism against Palestine.”
Most humiliating of all are the images of Jews disseminated across social media by the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace” (editor’s note: which is neither Jewish nor for peace), holding signs that read “my grandparents didn’t survive the Holocaust for Israel to commit genocide in Gaza.”
The social justice group “If Not Now” speaks in the name of “Jewish values” in organizing for Palestine. At last year’s Academy Awards, director Jonathan Glazer invoked his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust to condemn it’s cynical weaponization by Israel’s Right-wing government.
The playwright Tony Kushner put a finer point on it: “The history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering must not be used as an excuse (for Israel’s war in Gaza),” Kushner said. “It is a misappropriation of, of what it means to be a Jew, what the Holocaust meant ... Who doesn’t agree with that?”
But what exactly is being called upon when these people invoke their Jewishness? Or by “If Not Now” when they invoke their “Jewish values”?
It’s hard to believe they are referring to religious values, which offer a confusing muddle of admirable precepts and ancient, reactionary theology.
Or are they the sum total of the lessons gleaned from our collective suffering and trauma, as groups like “Jewish Voice for Peace” and Tony Kushner seem to suggest when invoking the meaning of the Holocaust? And what do people like Tony Kushner think the Holocaust means anyhow?
If it those lessons we refer to when speaking as a Jew, then there too, we are not left with much to hold onto; indeed, that history is marshaled on a daily basis by Jews (not least among them Holocaust survivors themselves) as evidence that no one will stand up for us in our darkest hour, that:
We will be abandoned to the death squads and gas chambers.
Our desperate ships of refugees will be turned away.
Tolerance is for fools and solidarity is a wager made only by dead Jews.
Expecting Jews to take the same bet that has resulted in their near complete annihilation is an insult to their intelligence, their history, and their humanity.
To insist on recommitting to this wager is the definition of insanity.
Nothing matters but power.
These are the lessons of the Holocaust for many of its victims throughout the world, and especially so in Israel, the nation that rose out of the ashes of the Shoah1 and is the true steward of its memory.
To be clear, these are not poor, pitifully misguided people; these are the reasonable conclusions drawn from the experience of living people. That is an upsetting thought, but it is one I know I must reckon with rather than tell myself some children’s story about all the Good Lessons of the destruction of my people.
And so the problem with making your Jewish identity tantamount to your political activism, and in turn, your political activism tantamount to the lessons of your trauma, is that you don’t have much of a leg to stand on when other Jews draw different lessons from their trauma.
And who can argue with trauma, after all?
If the basis of our politics is “lessons from the Holocaust,” how can we argue with Israel’s government by saying “never again is now”?
That is the sincere feeling of many Israelis right now, and not just those on the far-Right. And so instead of finding a way forward, we find ourselves trapped in a never ending cul-de-sac of trauma with our Jewish brothers and sisters from across the political spectrum.
The truth is, there are no good lessons to draw from the Holocaust. In fact, when you stare into the abyss that is the Shoah, it is a world-historically bad event from which to draw lessons, a litany of betrayals and failures of solidarity.
There is no teleology to our suffering, no ultimate purpose. Jews were not murdered to teach a lesson about tolerance; they were murdered for being Jews. Attaching some kind of lesson to their suffering — whether done by Diaspora Jewish leftists or Israel’s Right-wing government — degrades their memory.
We are not here to be the moral of anyone’s story. And if we are keen on drawing any lessons from the Holocaust, the lesson is just as much, if not more so, “No one will save us, so no one else matters.” than it is, “No one is safe until we are all safe.”
To be more crass, the lessons are just as much “no lives matter, except ours” as they are “all lives matter.” The fact that the Jewish Diaspora Left has tied itself to the latter position, if not the literal words, is one of this war’s cruel ironies; it has, perversely, become the sentiment segments of the Left now demand of Diaspora Jews, and one which some Jews seem only too eager to oblige.
For Diaspora leftists like Tony Kushner and “Jewish Voice for Peace,” Holocaust memory must remain an abstraction. If it were allowed to be understood as anything else, then the same people who so deeply relish the irony of the Holocaust’s victims committing war crimes — “of all people, they should understand” — would have to contend with the disturbing thought that if not by the accident of their birth, they too (ever eager as they are to make meaning of the Shoah) would be invoking its lessons to wage war against Hamas.
In so doing, groups like “Jewish Voice for Peace” and Tony Kushner rob the Holocaust’s victims of their humanity anew — first as victims, then as parable.
If I am being completely honest with myself, the fact that I (like many other young American Jews) am so seduced by enlisting my identity and my trauma in service of progressive “lessons” is more indicative of a series of contingent and material conditions of which I am the product than anything fundamentally true or real about the Holocaust and its attendant lessons.
It feels so good (so intuitive, so courageous) to speak “as a Jew” here in my diverse, professional-managerial milieu in America, where claims to an identity of victimhood are the currency of the day. (And what exactly is being called upon by speaking “as a Jew” if not one’s status as history’s ur-victim?)
American Jews, left out of the identitarian rat-race for so long, can finally cash in their chips on the social justice Left, in condemnation of the very Jews excluded from American power and privilege. How convenient for us Diaspora Jews that the ethical point-of-view neatly aligns with the self-interested point-of-view, which neatly aligns with the outwardly virtuous looking point-of-view.
But deep down, I know that by the luck of the draw, the choices of my ancestors, the roll of the dice, I ended up in America, rather than Israel, and that if the chips had fallen slightly differently, I too might be a traumatized Israeli invoking the Shoah to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza.
This thought doesn’t compel me to change my politics, but it does fill me with a profound sense of humility about different Jewish experiences, and the vastly different kind of politics they might entail. I am not against collective punishment as a weapon of war because of my Jewishness; I am against it because it is wrong. To insist otherwise, as Diaspora leftists seem so keen on doing, is to make a mockery of my Jewishness, in every sense of that word.
The fact that some Jews themselves can be as unreflective about our history, that they too are looking for the easiest and cheapest answers to make sense out of the senselessness of our suffering, should not come as a surprise, since they are people too after all, and can be as thoughtless and unreflective about themselves as any non-Jew can be about us.
Nor does their Jewishness give them any more or less legitimacy to opine on this question; on the contrary, their lack of reflection, and the very public performance of it, only exacerbates the bottomless pain and humiliation we are already experiencing.
Organizations like “Jewish Voice for Peace” are unable to see us as anything more than victims or oppressors, but I can; they confuse their good fortune with virtue, but I will not.
I refuse the cheap siren call of enlisting my Jewish suffering to this cause. It is a trap. So tie me to the mast of this Jewish ship. “Not in my name,” as they are so keen to say these days.
Holocaust in Hebrew
This is a very confusing article written by a very confused author. And I am being generous when I use the word confused, because the many lies presented as self-evident truths turn what on the face of it seems a denunciation of left-wing Jews' invocation of the Holocaust to justify their denunciation of Israel into a criticism of Israel, if not Judaism itself, from an equally tendentious perspective. One example: " At last year’s Academy Awards, director Jonathan Glazer invoked his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust to condemn its cynical weaponization by Israel’s Right-wing government." Reading this sentence one would think the author agrees with the statement that Israel's government is best described as "Right-wing," and that being "Right-wing" with a capital R of course "its cynical weaponization of the Holocaust" is a fact not to be disputed. What the author does dispute is Jonathan Glazer's use of the Holocaust to denounce Israel.
Another example: "The playwright Tony Kushner put a finer point on it: “The history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering must not be used as an excuse (for Israel’s war in Gaza) Kushner said. “It is a misappropriation of, of what it means to be a Jew, what the Holocaust meant ... Who doesn’t agree with that?” And the author goes on to write: "But what exactly is being called upon when these people invoke their Jewishness? Or by “If Not Now” when they invoke their “Jewish values”? It’s hard to believe they are referring to religious values, which offer a confusing muddle of admirable precepts and ancient, reactionary theology."
To this I would say the first point to take issue with Kushner is that Jewish suffering, especially as exemplified in the Holocaust, is not used to justify Israel's war in Gaza. Palestinians' invasion of Israel and their wanton slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens, men, women and children, is the justification. Only progressives are quick to drag the Holocaust into the equation, though the author himself seems to think that many Israelis invoke the Holocaust in the sense of Never Again when thinking about the war In Gaza and understandably, if not rightly, so. Israel, until Trump arrived on the scene, had been abandoned by the West in the conduct of its war in Gaza, and the author would have done well to point that out. But in addition to that is the strange phrase of the author about Jewish religious values being nothing but a "confusing muddle of admirable precepts and ancient, reactionary theology." In fact, the Hebrew Bible is the template of western literature and the founding document of the Jewish people, with many a political lesson for Jews and the modern West.
And so we come to the nub of the article, which is to point out that "there are no good lessons to draw from the Holocaust." And the nub for the author being that he is free as a Jew to reflect on the fate of history which landed him in America, thus enabling him to be as progressive as he likes without any indebtedness to his Jewish ancestry, traumatic or prophetic. I must confess that I too think the Holocaust is not necessary for a Jew to identify with Israel and for any normal decent person to be on Israel's side when it comes to the war in Gaza. I also certainly do not think the Holocaust should enter into the logic of Jews who denounce Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza. I do think, however, that the trauma of the Holocaust is so deep for Jews they have not yet begun to plumb its depths, and this trauma shows up in the less than ruthless campaign the Jews in Israel have conducted with respect to their Palestinian enemies in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. That statement may surprise some readers, but any normal country would have decimated Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for their murder and duplicity long ago. That the author thinks that under other conditions he "too might be a traumatized Israeli invoking the Shoah to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza" is simply a phrase as trite as it is slanderous.
The author clearly thinks of himself as a progressive Jew and wants to be able to act thereon without having to bear and plumb the weight of Jewish history, Holocaust included. Bully for him. But he is wrong on Israel, wrong on the war in Gaza, and like so many people has no idea what to think about the Holocaust. Understandably on the latter point, for it is in so many ways unspeakable even when one has studied it. Perhaps one takeaway is that the Holocaust wrecked western civilization and we are living that wreckage, to which the stupid and insipid moralism directed Israel's way by the elites of western democracies testifies.
I'm having some trouble understanding what you mean when you speak of "... a traumatized Israeli invoking the Shoah to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza."
What actions in Gaza do you believe are vile and being justified by the memory of the Shoah?