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 pink@forward.com or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
