We Need to Rethink How We Think About the Holocaust

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:14I'm Em Gessen, a columnist for The New York Times. Throughout the war, Israeli leaders and their supporters in the United States have invoked the Holocaust to justify their actions in Gaza. This is the savagery that we only remember from the Nazi crimes of the Holocaust. Hamas are the new Nazis. Some scholars of the Holocaust, people who have spent their professional lives keeping the memory of the catastrophe alive, are worried. They worry that their work has been repurposed as war propaganda, as justification for committing a genocide. My friend Mariana Hirsch is one of those scholars. She's a professor emeritus of English at Columbia University, and she is known for her research on how descendants of survivors think about the Holocaust.

1:03Up until this year, she was teaching classes on memory and war, but this year that became untenable. It's a loss for her students and for the field. Professor Hirsch's understanding of how we remember and teach about the Holocaust is a key to understanding the way we think about what Israel has done in Gaza. It's helped me make sense of what's happening. I asked her to join me to talk about this.

1:29Mariana, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me. So can we start by talking about how you came to Holocaust studies? It was late, actually, in my career. You know, I was the daughter of survivors of the Romanian Holocaust. My parents were in a ghetto. They were married in a ghetto. But the last thing I really was interested in is to study their history or even to study the region where they came from, even though I was hearing their stories every single day. There was too much about the past. I was interested in the avant-garde. In the future, I was interested in feminism and movements for social change.

2:10But I got caught at a certain moment in the mid-'80s with the publication of Art Spiegelman's Mouse, with the publication of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. And here was the curiosity about a moment in the past that was really not in the past, that was continuing in the present, but from a distance, from a subsequent generation or from witnesses who are vicarious, who are not really there. And I recognized myself in these people somehow, the lack of knowledge, but the ubiquity of the feelings and the sentiments. And somehow it became clear to me that I remembered moments from my parents' narratives, from my parents' histories, more vividly than I remembered some of my own childhood memories.

2:56My old childhood memories were somehow evacuated by the power of these memories that were not really memories because they were about experiences that I had not really lived through myself. So that was the moment. It was obviously not just me. It was a moment when people were very, very concerned about the death of survivors and the disappearance of witnesses. It was also a moment of identity politics in U.S. academia. So everybody had an identity and we really thought very carefully, especially in feminism, about, you know, African-American experiences or Latinx experiences. but somehow Jewish stories were not part of the curriculum.

3:42And I started talking to other colleagues in my field and realized that a number of us were actually children of Holocaust survivors, except that we had never really known each other from that perspective. So that's really how it started. You coined this term post-memory to describe how the children of survivors think about the Holocaust. And you say that traumatic memories are passed down so powerfully and so emotionally that the children of survivors remember them stronger than their own memories. As you said, your own childhood memories were forced out by your parents' stories. Can you explain this idea of post-memory?

4:21Well, it seems really counterintuitive, right, that we can actually feel as though we remember things that we haven't ourselves experienced. But there's something about the transmission through the kinds of stories that I was just talking about that carry traumatic, extremely powerful experiences of the past into the present and that make us feel as though we were actually there. I think the way post-memories works is through identification. It could have been me. So, you know, a lot of my dreams were being chased or, you know, having knocks on the door or, you know, maybe you're Stu, right? Right, exactly.

4:59And many people can really relate to this. And really not just through the Holocaust. It was really my entry point. But as I mentioned, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, I felt at the time, was probably the most powerful Holocaust novel written to that date. But of course, it wasn't about that. I focused on the daughter who was born into freedom rather than into the mother who had lived through slavery. And that daughter really needed to know what happened in the plantation that her mother escaped from. And that curiosity, that obsession with wanting to know, the fragmentariness, the hauntedness, the ghosts that Beloved brings up so well, I mean, that's very much part of this phenomenon of secondary or vicarious memory that I tried to describe, which, as I said, works through identification.

5:49But it's a concept that for me has evolved because even though I situated it in the family to start with, really coming out of my own experience in some of these readings, it really works through mediation. So the images that, you know, are particularly powerful are the ones that we also see in the media. Films can structure, you know, a sort of generational structure of remembrance that's not only situated in the family. It also facilitates the entry for other people. The it could have been me is I could have been that daughter, I could have been that mother. So the it could have been me is mediated through also publicly available images.

6:29I want to come back a little bit to what you were saying about Beloved, because you were doing something that's actually quite controversial. It was very logical, but you were comparing. And there is a very strongly articulated position that the Holocaust should never be compared to anything. I've been accused of relativizing the Holocaust. And there's another equally strongly articulated position that the Holocaust has to be placed in a chronology of genocides. Can I ask you to talk about that? Well, I couldn't agree with you more about the importance of analogy. And yes, I think this injunction, the Holocaust shouldn't be compared because it will be relativized, is part of this argument of the uniqueness of this crime.

7:20and for me, I think the relationality, the relationships between all these different histories, not just genocide histories, but histories of victimization, of othering, of inequality, I think for me, each of these genocides and each of these experiences is actually unique. They're really not the same at all, but they are connected and therefore also need to be compared, and therefore 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. This is the most exceptional crime of all crimes, which lends it a very particular status.

8:07And there's an outsized influence of the Holocaust that then obscures other histories, but also obscures what is happening right now, the genocide in Gaza, which the exceptionalism of the Holocaust has fostered denial of other genocides. And I think that creates a real crisis. If victims of genocide perpetrate genocide, and one can deny that, I think we're at a moment of real crisis. So what do you think about how the Holocaust should be taught? Well, let me first just say that why do so many school districts have mandated curricula on the Holocaust in this country and really all over the world?

8:54And why are we building new Holocaust museums right now? What is the thinking behind that? You know, if it is the crime of all crimes, and if the Holocaust teaches students the effects of mass, you know, violence and dehumanization, I think the thinking might be that that could be an inoculation against further violence like this, that if we only learn how much people can suffer, we will try to stop suffering. So the never again for anyone, you know, idea, maybe that's what students are supposed to be learning. But I think we need to go beyond teaching the Holocaust through identification and even empathy.

9:31I mean, of course, we need to teach empathy. We need to foster empathy. But maybe not so much identification, but a little more distance and saying, you know, it could have been me, but it was not me. This is in the past. We need to leave them in the past. We have some distance. We can think about them. And we can think about what they can do in the world now rather than thinking of them as eternally continuing and re-traumatizing generation after generation. And because personal identification and post-memory, as I conceived, is so powerful, it can also be easily misused. So I think how to prevent that kind of misuse and that kind of rampant contagion of fear that is so much part of the way that the Holocaust lives on in memory is to really create ways of thinking of it in the past, to contextualize it within other histories, and to relate it to other historical phenomena that it's really part of.

10:35And one historical phenomenon that's 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, I think that has to be somehow part of the history. And our interrelation of Holocaust memory and Nakba memory really has to be taken into account. Do you think that's possible in an American university today? I think we have a crisis in universities. And I think there are many ways in which universities right now are preventing genuine teaching and learning and freedom of expression and critical thinking.

11:27Because there are things that are disallowed. So, first of all, the way universities, including my own, Colombia, have conceded that their hotbeds of anti-Semitism and that Jewish students are suffering and are fostering Jewish victimization, the feeling of Jewish victimization prevents us from making the kinds of connections that I've just been talking about. But I think at this moment, when comparison is seen as relativization, it would probably be very difficult to do this because if we feel like we need to speak about Israel as one of the consequences of the Holocaust, it's not the only consequence and it's not only a consequence of the Holocaust, right?

12:11If we need to speak about that and we are critical of how the state of Israel has evolved and is carrying out its future, its present and its future, then we're easily can be seen as fomenting anti-Semitism. And that conflation, it just kills thinking and creates fear among faculties and among students. And you're speaking from experience here. You have been at Columbia for, what, about 20 years? And until recently, you were teaching a memory seminar? Yeah, and I'm officially retired, but I've agreed to keep teaching one course a year, which I've kind of suspended for the moment. Why? Well, I think the atmosphere that I've just described is part of it.

12:58I think it's, you know, it's very, very difficult to create an atmosphere of trust in a classroom, which, I mean, you teach, you know, how precious that is that you get a group of students from many, you know, many different backgrounds who don't know each other and don't know the same things and haven't learned the same things. And you create an atmosphere in which you can float ideas and maybe be wrong and make mistakes and learn from each other. And often it doesn't go well, but, you know, you just keep trying. You know, I've spent my career teaching very difficult subjects, but my mission has been how we can actually talk about these very difficult subjects that often touch students and touch me very personally, but still talk about them with enough reflection to actually learn something about history and also about ourselves and how we process this kind of difficult knowledge.

13:52I think that's very hard to do now because there's so much that's disallowed and that's confusing. I mean, the adoption in many universities or the incorporation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has a number of examples that call certain criticisms of Israel or comparisons anti-Semitic, makes it very difficult to bring certain things into your syllabus and into your classroom. without then being open to complaints about discrimination and anti-Semitism. And you've had that happen to you, right? Yeah, I had it happen in a course that I taught in the fall of 2023. And we spent quite a bit of time in that course talking about images of atrocities.

14:42So, of course, the images coming out of Gaza were very much part of the conversation. You know, what I tried to do is lay the groundwork in which students could ask the questions that they would want to ask about it. And, you know, one thing I did was sent the class an op-ed from The New York Times by Lydia Polgreen that had about a photograph. And we were talking about images and it was a photograph of babies, dead babies in Gaza wrapped in white. and there was one student who was very offended by that and was very offended by the implication that Israel was at fault and that it wasn't all Hamas' fault and we had long correspondences about it with each other and long conversations, she and I, as fellow Jews as, you know, people who had close family in Israel and, you know, she accused me of discrimination eight months later, filed a formal claim against me So it was very painful, but also a little bit absurd as a charge.

15:42And what it shows me is that how easily you can just lose critical thinking in this conflation about criticism of a state, Israel, and anti-Semitism. That's not why I've suspended my teaching. It's not that particular incident. But it's, you know, you don't need to adopt the IRA definition to create an atmosphere where it's very difficult to teach certain subjects. You've written a lot about Hannah Arendt. And, you know, I regularly teach Hannah Arendt. But, you know, she was very critical of Israel and kind of almost predicted what this militaristic state would become if Israel wins the war of 1948.

16:24and that's an essay that I've written about and taught. Could I teach it now? I really don't know. And if you could teach a course now in an ideal university, what would that course be? You know, my main object right now is to write and think against militarism and the inevitability of war. this idea of the inevitability of cycles of violence, of trauma that can never be healed and that leads to violence, which I think is one of the problems with the way the Holocaust is being invoked, the unhealability of it, and then the continual perpetuation. How do we interrupt that? That's really what I really want to think about.

17:11But I also feel that in some ways I would like to reteach some of my courses from the past because I feel like I would teach them differently. There hasn't been enough about Palestine. You know, I taught a course called The Voice of the Witness, and we had Holocaust testimony, testimony from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and so on, but Palestine was not in that course. And I feel like that was a really big failure and my own inability to figure out how to fold these histories that are so intricately connected into each other. So, yeah, I'm wondering if I could ask you something, because we're sitting here across from each other, and, you know, one of the events that followed the October 7th attack and beginning of the war was an essay that you wrote in The New Yorker about Holocaust memory and its misuses in Europe.

18:08And that's where you made your, you know, now very famous analogy, saying Gaza is not an open-air prison. What's an open-air prison? Gaza is a ghetto, and you compared it to the Warsaw Ghetto, and you said something that was so memorable and really kind of devastating, and the ghetto is being liquidated. How are you thinking about this now? It's still being liquidated. As you know, we were talking about that essay when I was writing it, And then soon afterward, I went to Germany, which provided a lot of the reporting material for that essay. I went to Germany a second time, supposedly to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, which was almost taken away from me for making that comparison.

19:01And so, yeah, it was interesting that a lot of people who decided to debate me in Germany because it turned into a big public scandal and reporters would ask me how I could possibly dare to make that comparison because obviously it wasn't the ghetto and obviously it wasn't being liquidated. And they were fascinating conversations because I learned just how little they knew. I think the most important thing that they didn't understand and that we often fail to understand is that genocide is a process. But it's been interesting because I've been reporting a series on international justice and war crimes.

19:46And I realized that legally one of the most important distinctions between genocide and, say, crimes against humanity is that genocide is a process. Crimes against humanity is when you kill lots of people or you kill civilians intentionally or just blatant disregard for life. But genocide is that process that evolves from setting the conditions for genocide, engaging in propaganda, creating a climate in which many people can be killed, and then creating the conditions, eliminating the conditions for life gradually. So starvation is very much a part of this genocide. But listening to you today, I was also thinking that seeing the genocide is also a process.

20:32and that it's almost uncanny now to think about that early writing, my own and other people's that came even earlier, sort of using the word genocide long before many people came to see that, yes, indeed, that's what's unfolding. And maybe that's part of the nature of this phenomenon that unfolds over time. So if you could have a say in how this moment should be remembered, can be remembered, what would you imagine? Well, I'm very sensitive to the fact that memories of that trauma is happening right now. People are being severely traumatized. Children are being traumatized. and you know I can't tell Palestinians how to construct their memory and what kind of memory institutions there will be but there will be I'm hoping that the kinds of solidarity networks that are being built right now the activism the attempt to make space for a Palestinian story and to imagine Palestinian life in the future.

21:47I hope that that will be part of the memory, the memory of solidarity and not only memory of devastation. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. Thank you so much for inviting me.

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