QUESTION ASKED: Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?
We finally moved to the museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”
My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature. Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
“A religion,” one kid answered.
“Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.
“Normal,” a girl said.
“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
All of a sudden, things changed. Kelley Szany, the museum’s senior vice president of education and exhibitions, had told me that the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum. But the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum. No wonder: Survivors who had lived long enough to tell their stories to contemporary audiences were young before the war, many of them younger than the middle schoolers in my tour group. They did not have a lifetime of memories of anti-Semitic harassment and social isolation prior to the Holocaust. For 6-year-olds who saw their synagogue burn—unlike their parents and grandparents, who might have survived various pogroms, or endured pre-Nazi anti-Semitic boycotts and other campaigns that ostracized Jews politically and socially—everything really did “suddenly” change.
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