A Holocaust exhibit — and Jewish staffer — are involved in a controversy over the National Archives
A Wall Street Journal story alleges the agency’s leadership is de-emphasizing difficult historical topics
Historical re-enactors pose for a photo at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2024. (NARA Photo by Susana Raab)
(JTA) — In early 2017, a Jewish government employee and former Democratic congressional aide named Ellis Brachman shared a Facebook post featuring a short BBC interview with a Holocaust survivor.
Brachman shared the post one day after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and as the newly inaugurated Trump administration was facing blowback for issuing a statement commemorating the day that did not mention Jews.
The BBC post, quoting the survivor, Susan Pollack, read, “Fight any form of hate propaganda.”
Now, almost eight years later, Brachman is embroiled in another controversy involving both Trump and Holocaust remembrance. As the senior advisor to the archivist of the United States at the National Archives and Records Administration, Brachman was cited in a recent Wall Street Journal investigation of how the federal agency’s leadership has shrunk or nixed public exhibits on difficult historical topics.
Brachman, according to the article, asked that at least three portions of the archive’s galleries tone down unsavory chapters of history. One of his reported requests: to quash an exhibit about the Holocaust.
Brachman, staffers told the Journal, has played a key part in a larger shift away from the Archives addressing subjects like slavery and Japanese internment, and toward lighter historical topics like a meeting between President Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley (a famous photo of that meeting replaced a shot of a civil rights march led by Martin Luther King Jr.). Similar initiatives regarding the policing of difficult historical topics have taken root in several Republican-led states and school districts, sometimes affecting Holocaust education and other Jewish topics.
But unusually, the reported shift at the Archives came not from a Republican official but from the agency’s director, Colleen Shogan, who was appointed by President Joe Biden. The first female U.S. archivist, Shogan assumed her role last year following Republican pushback at a contentious Senate hearing and an unwelcome spotlight related to the National Archives’ role in former President Trump’s classified documents trial.
In the wake of that pushback, Shogan has emphasized preserving the archives’ nonpartisan nature and says her mission is to make the galleries — a popular Washington, D.C., tourist site displaying the country’s founding documents — feel welcoming to a broad spectrum of Americans. In a statement dismissing the Journal report, she said, “I am proud of the work we are doing at the National Archives, and I am unwavering in my commitment to leading NARA without partisanship or ideology.”
She added, “As federal employees, we are not here to promote or share our personal interpretation of the records. That is for others to do. We are here to preserve, protect, and share the records with all Americans.”
According to the Journal, Brachman — whose job description calls him a “confidential aide to the Archivist” — has been a lieutenant in executing Shogan’s vision. The article quotes employees saying that Brachman, while noting his own Jewish identity, scratched plans to spotlight “an example of how public records had been used to return assets to Jews after the Holocaust.”
Brachman also complained that some employees were, in the words of the article, “too woke.” The Journal also reported that in an exhibit on 1940s coal mining communities, Brachman pushed to identify Black sharecroppers who were recruited by coal companies as “Southern farmworkers.” He also reportedly asked to delete references to the environmental harms caused by coal mining.
Brachman declined to comment to the Journal, and did not respond to requests for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A representative for the Archives likewise declined to respond to a list of questions from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the purportedly withdrawn Holocaust artifact or to make Brachman available for an interview.
The National Archives maintains an online hub for Holocaust-related materials in its collection.
Like Shogan, Brachman has Democratic bona fides. According to his LinkedIn profile and prior news coverage, he spent more than a decade working for several Democrats in Congress. At the time of the 2016 election and in the months afterward, around when he shared the BBC interview with the Holocaust survivor, Brachman shared a few posts on social media criticizing Donald Trump.
After his work with Democrats on the Hill, Brachman served for nearly seven years in various positions at the Library of Congress. He is the son of Marshall Brachman, a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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