Reflections on Yom HaShoah

By Allen Menkin, MD, CAMERA/Naples Christians and Jews Project Coordinator

Stange as it may seem in our Tik Tok/Instagram era, “Holocaust,” as a definite noun, did not come into common usage until almost two decades after WWII. However, by the beginning of this century, “The Holocaust” was the benchmark against which all evil was measured, and its remembrance a touchstone of identity for many American Jews.

We have dedicated time, talent and vast resources to “learning the lessons of the Holocaust” on the assumption that understanding this monstrous crime would somehow suspend the churn of history and make the world a safer place.

The Oct. 7 atrocities and the ensuing war, the tsunami of systemic Jew hatred and the Western betrayal of Israel have challenged that assumption and, in the words of Bari Weiss, “the holiday from history is over.”

We rediscovered that antisemitism was not dead, only dormant. It has been resuscitated and thrives on campus, in media, government and the public square. While we universalized and contextualized the Holocaust, our enemies trivialized and weaponized it against us.

Much of the post-Christian West wants the Jews out of its headspace and out of its conscience. The democracies of Europe and America do not like to be reminded that they hosted and abetted the Holocaust. For them, it is an unwanted ghost from a fading past; and an independent Jewish state rising from its ashes is as welcome as a successful Jewish merchant in Venice.

“Never again” has a very different meaning in Arabic. For the Muslim world, the final solution was fully compatible with Islamist theology and an understandable part of Europe’s 20th-Century tribal wars, in which they inveterately aligned with the losing side. Then, as now, they were ready and willing to solve their own Jewish problem.

The world has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust for a simple reason, it does not want to.

Several years ago, I had the privilege of touring Auschwitz with the iconic survivor, Eva Mozes Cor (z”l). She never forgot what she endured at the hands of Josef Mengele, but later in life, she very publicly forgave him, and the rest of the Nazis, in order to get them out of her mind and save her sanity.

We will remember the Holocaust until the last Jew departs this world, but it was a mistake to let it define us, and it is a mistake to count on our enemies “learning its lessons.”