Hundreds Of Historians Tell Holocaust Museum To Reverse Anti-Analogies Stance
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Image by Phil Kalina/flickr
By Aiden Pink July 2, 2019
Hundreds of historians have signed an open letter asking the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to reverse its opposition to analogies between the Shoah and modern events.
The letter, which was published in the New York Review of Books and delivered to the museum on Monday, was prompted after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared migrant detention facilities on the southern border to “concentration camps” in an Instagram livestream, attracting both support and criticism from politicians, historians and Jewish organizations.
After one of the Washington museum’s historians posted a Twitter message supportive of Ocasio-Cortez’s stance, the organization issued a statement saying it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”
The historians who signed the open letter, many of whom said they had relied on the museum’s archives and resources for their research, said that stance “makes learning from the past almost impossible.”
“The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task,” they wrote.
Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
