RETHINKING HOW WE MISTHINK THE HOLOCAUST:

Every few months, another academic or journalist decides that the best way to honor Holocaust memory is to accuse Israel of repeating it. The latest comes from The New York Times, where Professor Marianne Hirsch, interviewed by Masha Gessen, claims we need to “rethink how we think about the Holocaust.”

It’s a long conversation—ostensibly about pedagogy and post-memory—but it eventually lands in the same familiar place: Holocaust memory, they say, has been “misused” to justify Israeli actions in Gaza, while Israel itself now stands accused of committing “genocide.” Gaza, in their telling, is the new Warsaw Ghetto.

That’s not scholarship. That’s moral inversion with tenure.

Hirsch and Gessen actively refuse to draw the simplest, most obvious analogy—the one between Hamas and the Nazis.

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But this isn’t morality. It’s literature pretending to be ethics. It’s a way for comfortable liberal Western observers to purge inherited guilt: If Jews are now the Nazis, then we can be the righteous ones this time.

That’s why the Nazi analogy persists. It satisfies a psychological craving for symmetry, not a search for truth.

What makes Hirsch’s version especially dangerous is that it comes from within. She is Jewish, the daughter of survivors, and so the accusation carries an air of moral authenticity.

It sounds like humility, but it’s really a form of moral self-cannibalism: turning the Holocaust—the ultimate warning to protect Jewish life—into a tool for condemning Jewish self-defense.

This is the newspaper that tried to rehabilitate the reputation of the Soviet Union in 2017, and created the “1619 Project” two years later to encourage academicians to (further) believe that America was born of Original Sin. So it’s not at all surprising to see the Gray Lady jump on the trend of, as Daniel Ben-Ami wrote at Spiked in March of “turning the Holocaust against Israel.”

Exit question: When will Hirsch and Gessen appear on Tucker’s podcast?