Immediately after World War II, the feeling “never again” arose in many contexts, from a multinational community of united camp in anti -fascist solidarity to Jewish survivors who organize self -defense and revenge. As the Holocaust Museum learned last week, that slogan has become explosively controversial.
On September 4, the Holocaust Museum was published by an Instagram carousel now eliminated with a seemingly banal message: “The Jews were raised to say” Never again. “That means never again. An accompanying graph Of our past silence our conscience “and” being Jewish is to remember and act. “
This message is not radical in the world of institutional commemoration of the Holocaust. But the response in social networks was apoplectic. Hundreds of Hirviente comments accused the museum of the trivializing Jewish suffra, compared the position with the statements of “all lives import”, or insisted that “never again” had always been and remained some kind of Jewish property. In two days, the museum capitulated, apologizing for publishing an “article … easily open to a wrong interpretation” as “a political statement that reflects the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” The involvement behind such euphemism was that the message “never again for anyone” could have encouraged reflection on violence currently inflicted by the Israeli State about the people of Gaza.
This dust between a holocaust institution and the warriors of social networks too confidential but little informed was more than another case of online indignation. It reflects a deeper change of the universalist approach that has been in the heart of the institutional culture of the Holocaust memory since the 1990s. The 2000 Stockholm Declaration, which founded the International Alliance of the memory of the Holocaust, unequivocally declares that “the unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always have a universal meaning.” Elie Wiesel himself framed the Holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy with universal implications and applications.”
As the historian Amos Goldberg has argued, the memory of the Holocaust since the 1990s has contained a contradiction between a universalism oriented to human rights and an empathy oriented to Israel by the final victims of the Nazis, the Jews. This contradiction has exacerbated with the Israel War in Gaza, where the Holocaust memory is displayed to protect the state from criticism and justify the massive atrocities.
With its publication, the museum probably pretended anything more to take advantage of the inclusive identity policy to attract a broader audience of visitors. But in the paranoid, possessive and competitive interpretations of the commentators, the suggestion of solidarity with others meant a denial of Jewish suffering and, what is worse, the concern for violence in Gaza. A transgression grave.
The truth is that there is not a single history of origin for the ubiquitous motto “Never again”, nor has there been a consensus about its meaning. Some Instagram users quickly pointed to the Zionist epic poem of the Jewish poet Yitzhak Lamdan in 1927 who proclaimed: “He will never fall mass!” However, already in the first years after World War I, “Note Wieder Krieg” (“War War”) had become a central slogan of mass demonstrations against war in the Weimar Republic.
Other online people pointed out Buchenwald's release in April 1945 when former prisoners showed signs with the slogan “Never Again”. However, most Buchenwald inmates were political prisoners, and the phrase probably meant their anti -fascist convictions; In the first commemorative ceremony held on April 19, 1945, the survivors “read an oath of commitment to a world of peace and freedom” and “the former inmates resorted to the initial documents for the creation of a democratic Germany, as well as the 'manifesto of the democratic socialists of the Buchenwald camp,” according to the Buchenwald memorial.
Without a doubt, according to the reports, a vindictive and insular interpretation of the slogan was already pronounced in September 1945 by Abba Kovner, a survivor of the Holocaust and leader of a Jewish paramilitary organization that sought lethal revenge against the Germans. And Meir Kahane, the godfather born in the United States of the extreme Israeli right, claimed the slogan for the title of his 1971 nationalist manifesto. But the publication of the reaction of the Holocaust Museum shows how completely this interpretation has become the mainstream. What was once an inclusive moral and political agenda on preventing and resisting persecution, racism and genocide has been reformulated as an exclusive property, exercised to deny recognition of the suffering of others and defend Israel at all costs.
The irony is that many of the liberals and progressive who attacked the museum position would probably be restless to discover how closely their identity rejection of universalism reflects the public diplomacy of the current Israeli government, increasingly addressed to the Jews who deviate from their ethnonationalist agenda. In April, the Israeli embassy in Berlin aggressively pressed Buchenwald Memorial to cancel a commemoration speech of the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, mocking X that Boehm sought to “dilute” the commemoration of the holocaust “with his speech about universal values.”
Holocaust survivors like Wiesel often insisted that the dead are not honest not commemorating only to Jewish suffering but by avoiding future atrocities against others. But the violent reaction of the position and the subsequent consent of the museum shows how much land is assigned to narrow ethnonationalism. They also reveal an imminent conflict between the premise of commemorative museums and their professional imperatives to increase visitors and attract the new public, on the one hand, and the identity policy of reaction that extends throughout the world, on the other.
Certainly there is much to discuss the limits of a universalist approach, and academics and practitioners have done so for decades. But if a public museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles cannot close its collection to broader lessons on solidarity, human rights and the prevention of persecution, hatred and violence, or worse, if such a museum feels obliged to apologize even for trying, then, what is the point?
Ben Ratskoff is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice in Western College. His current research interrogates the policy of memory and the representation of the Holocaust and the relationship between anti -Semitism, colonialism and white supremacy.
