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Notes -
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:
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.
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:
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:
Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:
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:
[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]
Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.
While it is true that Judaism believes that jews and non-jews have souls of different types, the characterization of that belief as "only a Jew can be a full-formed person" is inaccurate. The "animal soul" that you speak of is common to both jews and non-jews, and is more properly rendered as "the animating spirit." In addition, the word which you translate as "apostates," is more properly translated as "informers."
The kelipah is the source of both the Jewish and gentile soul “animal” soul, but the “kelipah nogah“ is unique to Jews, while all gentile souls come from lesser kelipot. This is found in chapter 1 of the Tanya which you can find on chabad.org.
Googling while wondering if you misspelled Talmud ... this is a religious philosophy book published in 1796, whose general philosophy is subscribed to by nearly 0.7% of Jewish people? The Book of Mormon is nearly as old, and represents approximately the same fraction of followers of Jesus. That doesn't prove you wrong (hey, there are tons of Book of Mormon verses that most non-Mormon Christians would agree with, too, even if they think the reason was just "Joseph Smith wrote Bible fan-fiction"), but supporting a broad claim would require citing a broader source.
If you're not making a broad claim, that's fine too, but "extremists of X can't coexist with non-X" is a depressingly broad claim in another way: you can't say it's anything special about Judaism. Muslims who think apostasy should be a capital crime are currently supermajorities in whole countries. Modern Christians are mostly better, but that seems to be a result of exhausting the alternatives first (the European Wars of Religion killed millions; some German states would have seen less population loss if they'd had another Black Plague instead) and remembering their problems (they now know that the next step beyond "we all have to be Christian" is "yeah, friend? which kind?"...). There are some religions that specifically disclaim violent and extremist ... wait, no, not Buddhists too? If you step away from religion completely, it's true that atheists have needed to find some other
holysacredall-important cause to kill millions of people for, and this seems like an improvement because then the cause at least isn't directly tied to the atheism, but it does make me fear that there's some nearly-inextricable tie to human psychology.Chabad is a wildly influential center of Jewish culture in America. There are Chabad houses on many major college campuses and they influence Jewish culture at large. There are 2900 Chabad “houses” of influence in America. Their official membership is not the extent of their influence. This is something I ought to have clarified in my comment, which is my mistake. Just quoting from the Wikipedia, which you are free to disagree with but hopefully for a reason,
Yes, that Alan Dershowitz. We’re not talking about a few devout Amish-like Jews. Chabad has huge, growing influence on the Jewish world.
Further reading
https://yasha.substack.com/p/the-weird-world-of-chabad-an-influential-a54
https://m.jpost.com/opinion/pew-us-jewry-is-shifting-profoundly-chabad-is-on-rise-669549
Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.
Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?
We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.
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