What's the proper way to learn about Jewish people?

An author makes the case for decentralizing the Holocaust

A Hamantaschen cookie I had in Israel.

I asked a friend in his mid-20s, “Why did the Holocaust happen?”

He replied, somewhat hesitatingly, “Hitler stirred up hatred of Jews in order to build his political power.” 

I believe that answer — which establishes Hitler as the active subject — would more-or-less satisfy Dara Horn, whose 2023 essay for The Atlantic on the failures of Holocaust education was recently reupped as part of the magazine’s recognition of the anniversary of October 7. 

Horn’s article is bracing. She evokes a medley of uncomfortable emotions — distress, frustration and sharp judgement — in the service of one of the great passions of her life: making people learn about the Holocaust the right way.

I once attended a lecture on the Holocaust at my university’s Hillel House. The speaker was a Jewish professor and he provocatively opened his speech by declaring the Holocaust “controversial.” Not in the “did-it-happen-or-not” sense that Horn notes has become a disturbingly central component of cultural knowledge on the topic — but rather in the “what do we do with this information” sense. Horn’s answer, the answer she wants at the centre of all education on the topic, is that the facts of the Holocaust must be used to teach an explicit story about the horrific consequences of anti-Semitism — the ancient and irrational hatred of Jews.

Jew-hatred has to be taught as the defining fact of the Holocaust because these days, it’s often not. Instead, Horn notes that in our multicultural age the Holocaust is often simply treated as a metaphor for prejudice more broadly, the Nazi death camps just one case study among many in the history of man’s cruelty to man. The consequence is to numb our curiosity about antisemitism as a unique evil, and with it, an indifference to Jews as people deserving unique concern. Somewhat ironically, she explains this indignity through metaphor:

[W]hen one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting it. That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters. It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.

At the same time, Horn agrees with an educator who declares “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” 

For those of us who did not grow up with or around many Jewish people, anti-Semitism is indeed often the first concept we learn in relation to Jews. When I started hanging out at Hillel House in college, I confess I partially did it because I felt there was something noble in doing so; that showing even superficial interest in Jews was charitable and kind, because of course so many people were the other way. I learned some things about Jewish culture and learned more when I went to Israel, but my education often felt backwards; I had sympathy before familiarity. 

Horn closes her essay imagining a world in which the opposite is the case, a world in which we learn about the richness of Jewish culture and identity —“Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs” — before the Holocaust. To make the Holocaust our entry to Jewish identity, by contrast, is to invite ignorant curiosity about Jewish culpability in it; curiosity she sees in the young students of today who often presume the Holocaust had something to do with German reactions to Jewish money and power — language she characterizes as basically Hitlerian.

That strikes me as a bit uncharitable, but her point is important, if nuanced: Jewish people should not be understood as basically unremarkable but persecuted for political reasons, as that assigns them a “controversial” identity to be explained. A better strategy is to learn about Jewish difference early, and on Jewish terms, so the Holocaust becomes a story of the persecution of a recognizable people whose history of uniqueness we already appreciate.

I did find myself wondering a bit about the fundamentally prescriptivist nature of Jewish identity Horn seems to favor, however. Curbing contemporary antisemitism may indeed be helped by fostering appreciation for the ways Jews are different (and that’s OK), but it’s also the case that many modern Jews do not necessarily see much of themselves in the great traditions of Jewish culture Horn describes. This can be seen as implying a scale of judgement towards Jews who are and aren’t honoring the distinctness deemed necessary to help fortify their contemporary safety.

But I suppose debates over what needs to be done to maintain identity is an aspect of Jewish culture worth learning unto itself.