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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."

Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:

Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.

The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.

... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...

If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.

One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:

“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Gas Chamber Simulacra

The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.

They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").

The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A way Forward

Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:

The study’s most disturbing finding was that 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.

Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.

it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews

What bothers me about extant accounts of rampant anti-semitism (in the United States) is the same thing that bothers me about claims like "police are murdering unarmed black men by the thousands"--they're just empirically false. Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.

I don't much care about the Holocaust. I don't deny that it happened, I certainly do not share your doubts (as I've encountered them in the past, anyway) about most of the empirical claims made by prominent historians on these matters. But I do think the Holocaust was not special. Wholesale slaughter of ethnic, religious, and political outgroups is the story of human history, and Jews are neither the most recent victims, nor the most numerous. I think it is a better world where we are driven to do that sort of thing less, preferably never, and to whatever extent "Holocaust education" creates that world, I don't have any serious complaints about it. But I do find it absurd to lean on past slaughters in pursuit of present aims. I had nothing to do with slavery in the American South, I had nothing to do with World War II. The people still fighting those battles, from whatever side they fight them, are boring to me.

The thing you think would make it a better world is something I think was goodish in the sense it was a requirement for civilization and humanity to exists at all. At its core it was just evolution. The weaker intelligence, the weaker human, the weaker civilization was slaughtered to make room for more of the higher intelligence, higher human, and higher civilization. Survival competition is at the core of creating everything.

In the last 70-100 years we’ve eliminated it. We will see how that works out. Perhaps we’ve reached a civilization complexity where we can competition games without killing everyone but for most of human history and pre human history it was the driving force.

Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.

I think you're overlooking a rather obvious American demographic - the demographic where anti-Semitism is consistently highest.

Most white Americans view Jews favorably. Most Asians and Hispanics are relatively indifferent to Jews. (Though memorably, I once met a woman in a small agricultural city in Korea who, unprompted, went off on a rant to me about how Jews controlled everything in the West. I doubt she'd ever met a Jew or could even explain how Jews were different from non-Jewish Westerners.) Blacks... well, Kanye might have said the quiet part out loud, but anecdotally, a whole lot of black folks agree with him.

I think in general you are right, that the demand for anti-Semitism in the US exceeds the supply. But there actually is a pretty regular supply of it, it's just one that the ADL prefers not to focus on.

The adl and Allies are pretty willing to notice black antisemitism, though. I mean it’s true that they also notice lots of white antisemitism which may or may not exist in a pattern a lot like gay pride where anything less than constant, untempered praise and focus on Jewish interests is interpreted as antisemitism. But the NoI, 5 percenters, black Hebrew Israelites, etc are definitely noticed even if the SPLC lists them alongside a veritable flood of white Christians who happen to merely not be as enthusiastic about Jewish things as the ADL would prefer.

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