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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35021 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.

Your thesis is quite coherent if one believes, as you do, that the Holocaust is a hoax and Jews are waging a shadow-war against Western civilization.

If one doesn't believe that, well, you still make a convincing argument that the Holocaust is overemphasized in American education and that Jews still suffer from a neurotic fear of persecution that is dramatically disproportionate to the actual level of threat offered to them. (I actually do believe this.) But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?

But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?

I don't question that the motive is sincere, similar to DasindustriesLtd's point. And although I do not believe the main big ticket items of the orthodox narrative are true, I do acknowledge it was a traumatic experience in which the Jews truly were at the complete mercy of non-Jews. They suffered for it and they do not want to be in that position again. I would go so far as to say even if some of them know the narrative is substantially false, they would still have that sincere motive to avoid what actually happened from ever happening again. As an example, Simon Wiesenthal is claimed to have been the progenitor of the deprecated claim that five million non-Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but apparently Wiesenthal privately admitted that this was a lie to make non-Jews care about Jewish suffering. I don't doubt his motive, but I do acknowledge his willingness to lie in order to achieve his goals.

The entire problem is that the motivation for all this theater and religion is not contingent on historical truth. So your point only opens up the recognition of a genuine conflict of interest: Jews have a motive to propagate a message that promotes their own defense, even if parts of the narrative are substantially unture. An important part of the mechanism for ensuring their ethnic defense is weakening the ethnic defenses of non-Jews. You might consider that controversial, but this was basically the overt program of the critical theorists and psychoanalysts in their effort to cure Gentile psychopathology of the authoritarian personality. So we have a genuine conflict of interest in which historical truth is a lower priority than pursuit of cultural self-interest.

The problem with that sincere motivation, and the real reason anti-Semitism is so persistent- I would even say anti-fragile, is that the harder they fight against it the more they validate it and give it a greater force of truth and credibility. Let's say Dara Horn succeeds in mandating every child experiences some AI-powered VR/AR experience that is engineered to improve their perception of Jews. What rational person would deny at that point that the anti-Semites were right? Your average high-brow anti-Semite would blush to suggest that Jews will compel your children to consume AI-generated, Virtual Reality experiences to brainwash them into loving Jews. But this is being seriously proposed by Dara and some form of what she is suggesting will almost certainly be implemented as the lower-tech solutions are already being used on thousands of students every day.

The entire problem is that the motivate for all this theater and religion is not contingent on historical truth. So your point only opens up the recognition of a genuine conflict of interest: Jews have a motive to propagate a message that promotes their own defense, even if parts of the narrative are substantially unture.

Again, you're just taking it for granted that the narrative is substantially untrue. This is what you believe, but my point above is that if it's not untrue, then their motives are not only sincere but more or less rational. People actually tried to exterminate them. They actually have good reason to fear this. People like you who campaign on a platform of "It didn't happen, but if it did, they deserved it" hardly make them look less less rational or more deceptive.

Let's say Dara Horn succeeds in mandating every child experiences some AI-powered VR/AR experience that is engineered to improve their perception of Jews. What rational person would deny at that point that the anti-Semites were right? Your average high-brow anti-Semite would blush to suggest that Jews will compel your children to consume AI-generated, Virtual Reality experiences to brainwash them into loving Jews.

That's quite a clever bit of wordplay, but if AI-generated VR experiences become a standard delivery system for educational materials, this sounds a lot less scary than "High-tech dystopian Jew brainwashing." Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

Again, you're just taking it for granted that the narrative is substantially untrue.

No I am not, I am saying that the motive for Holocaust remembrance is real, powerful, and valid even if the narrative is substantially untrue. The motive for Holocaust remembrance is not contingent on the historical truth of the narrative as challenged by Revisionists. I fully recognize that and always have, but that fact only uncovers a much deeper conflict and presents larger problems in ascertaining the truth of the matter.

but if AI-generated VR experiences become a standard delivery system for educational materials, this sounds a lot less scary than "High-tech dystopian Jew brainwashing." Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

The point I am trying to make, in the spirit of JTarrou's thought experiment, is that the line between culture/politics/religion or education/brain-washing is purely semantic. The critique I am making is not that it is brain-washing per se, it's that it is specifically brain-washing (or education, however you prefer) with a motive to influence children's perceptions of Jews in a particular direction. It's the religion I oppose, not religion itself or even its imminent technological innovations.

I am not grandstanding against VR brain-washing, I am saying to pay attention to the curriculum that gets mandated, the identities and narratives that get constructed into post-modern mega-churches, the messaging and content that is prioritized for adoption. What counts as education and what counts as brainwashing? The prevailing religion. Again, I'll reiterate that JTarrou suggests:

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.

And I am saying that we already have this, and it's the Holocaust narrative. You can call it education, but that's what it is all the same.

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