The way that universities "have conceded that they are hotbeds of antisemitism, and that Jewish students are suffering, has fostered a sense of Jewish victimization," Columbia University professor emerita Marianne Hirsch claimed on Friday.
The point was made during a discussion published by the New York Times between the outlet's opinion columnist M. Gessen and Hirsch, who also argued about the relationship between Holocaust memory and the Israel-Hamas war, and how lessons from the Holocaust are being “misused” or distorted in today’s political discourse.
"If we want to speak about Israel as one of the consequences of the Holocaust - not the only consequence, and not solely a consequence of the Holocaust - and if we are critical of how the state of Israel has evolved and is acting in the present and toward the future, then we can easily be seen as fomenting antisemitism. And that conflation kills thinking. It creates fear - among faculty and among students alike," she argued.
She discussed how she taught a class using images from a New York Times op-ed by Lydia Polgreen, which appeared to show dead babies in Gaza, and how a Jewish student was "offended" by the "implication that Israel might be at fault - that it wasn't solely Hamas's fault."
"What it showed me is how easily we can lose critical thinking in this conflation between criticism of the state of Israel and antisemitism," she stated.
Hirsch: ‘Holocaust must be taught alongside Gaza genocide’
Gessen also argued that understanding how the Holocaust is remembered and taught is “key to understanding the way we think about what Israel has done in Gaza,” warning that some scholars fear their work “has been repurposed as war propaganda and justification for committing a genocide.”
Gessen queried about the "strongly articulated position" that the horrors of the Holocaust should not ever be used comparatively. He commented that he has been "accused of relativizing the Holocaust," and asked about the "equally strongly articulated position that the Holocaust has to be placed in a chronology of genocides."
In Hirsch's view, all the genocides and instances of "victimization, of othering, of inequality," while unique, are connected and therefore "need to be compared."
"Not comparing them or not seeing them in relationship to each other can be extremely risky - as I think we’ve seen with the Holocaust - because this uniqueness argument is an argument of exceptionalism," Hirsch said.
"There’s an outsized influence of the Holocaust that then obscures other histories and also obscures what is happening right now: the genocide in Gaza, which the exceptionalism of the Holocaust has fostered denial of other genocides," she added.
Hirsch replied that she agrees on the "importance of analogy," adding that the argument that the Holocaust should not be compared due to fears of revitalization "is part of this argument of the uniqueness of this crime."
Hirsch linking Nakba and Holocaust as one thing
Gessen asked Hirsch how she thinks the Holocaust should be taught.
Hirsch began her answer by asking questions: "Why do so many school districts have mandated curricula on the Holocaust in this country and really all over the world? And why are we building new Holocaust museums right now? What is the thinking behind that if it is the crime of all crimes, and if the Holocaust teaches students the effects of mass violence and dehumanization?"
"I think the idea might be that this could serve as an inoculation against further violence like this - that if we truly understand how much people can suffer, we will try to stop suffering. So the ‘never again for anyone’ idea - maybe that’s what students are supposed to be learning," she answered herself.
"I think we need to go beyond teaching the Holocaust through identification and even empathy. I mean, of course, we need to teach empathy; we need to foster empathy. But maybe not so much identification. Perhaps we need a little more distance - saying, you know, it could have been me, but it was not me. This is the past. We need to leave them in the past," she added.
"We have some distance now; we can think about them, and we can think about what we can do in the world today, rather than treating them as if they are eternally continuing and re-traumatizing generation after generation," she continued.
"One historical phenomenon that is part of the Holocaust is actually the formation of the state of Israel and the Nakba - the expulsion of Palestinians. So I think when we teach the Holocaust now, it has to be somehow part of the history. Our interrelation of Holocaust memory and Nakba memory really has to be taken into account," she stated.
Finally, she then asked Gessen about a previous essay of his in The New Yorker concerning Holocaust memory and its "misuses in Europe," in which he commented that Gaza is not an open-air prison, but a ghetto, adding that "the ghetto is being liquidated."