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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has been greeted with silence by some of the nation’s Holocaust museums including those which issued statements about BLM, the death of George Floyd and every possible issue and cause except the mass murder of Jews.
The Holocaust Museum of Houston has issued statements on its site about George Floyd’s death, “family separation at the U.S. border”, Texas opting out of the refugee resettlement program and rising violence toward “the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community”, as well as some Jewish issues, but no mention of attacks and violence against Jews in Israel.
Three weeks after the Simchat Torah massacres in Israel, it has yet to issue a similar statement on its own site, only on social media. The Holocaust Museum of Houston’s statements appear under its “Resources to Support Racial Equity and Justice” which includes books to read.
None of these books, such as ‘Between The World And Me’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had recently signed a statement defending Hamas, ‘How To Be An Antiracist’ by Ibram X. Kendi, ‘Have Black LIves Ever Mattered?’ by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a cop killer, or ‘The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther’, as well as a book by the founders of BLM, focus on antisemitism. The Holocaust Museum of Houston does however promote the fringe racialist conspiracy theory that the government killed Malcolm X. Many of the authors recommended by the Holocaust Museum of Houston are antisemitic or promote antisemitic figures and movements. There’s room at Houston’s Holocaust Museum for the veneration of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, both militant haters of Jews, but not Jews.
This is in sharp contrast to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum which issued a statement condemning the massacre and stating that, “Hamas is a self-avowed Islamic terrorist organization that has the primary goal of annihilating the Jewish nation state of Israel and we strongly affirm Israel’s right to defend itself against this heinous threat.”
The Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center had in the past issued a statement that equated George Floyd’s death to the Holocaust and announced a ‘shiva’ mourning for Floyd. It also promoted BLM materials from the anti-Israel group, T’ruah.
On Oct 23, the Holocaust Center posted a message from the head of the JCRC, Lynn Davis, about the threats of “election interference” and “election integrity”, A past message was about racial segregation in Tucson. It’s currently promoting an event about ‘banned books’. Its current exhibits include “War Crimes: The World is Watching” about Ukraine.
The Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center is watching Ukraine, but apart from a brief Instagram message that fails to mention Hamas or condemn the atrocities, only wishes for “a more just, equitable and non-violent world” is closing its eyes to the murder of over 1,000 Jews.
After weeks of silence, South Africa’s Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and the Durban Holocaust & Genocide Centre, which works with HIAS, issued a baffling statement mourning “the loss of so many innocent lives in Israel and Palestine” and comparing it to the Rwandan genocide without mentioning the mass murder of Jews or the Holocaust.
Most Holocaust museums surveyed did issue some sort of statement about the attacks, even if it was only to retweet a message from the local Jewish federation, and sometimes only on social media, where they are less widely visible. Some issued stronger press statements on their own sites but virtually none then followed up with further updates beyond one press release.
“This is what genocide looks like: innocent Jewish people hunted, kidnapped, killed in their homes, at parties, and in the street. Hamas isn’t targeting Israelis, it’s targeting Jews,” the Florida Holocaust Museum declared. And offered multiple updates.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York issued a statement saying that it “condemns the attacks carried out by Hamas on Israel, during which innocent civilians, including children and the elderly, were taken hostage” and the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center spoke out against the “barbaric aggression against Jews and the State of Israel.”
The vast majority however did not put these statements visibly up front on their sites.
In Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance hosted a major rally against the Hamas atrocities in which thousands of Jews gathered to listen to speakers including the museum’s CEO Rabbi Marvin Hier connect the atrocities of the Holocaust to the ravages of Hamas terrorism..
However few museums followed the lead of the Museum of Tolerance in going beyond statements to actually engaging in more meaningful forms of community solidarity. Most have continued on with their usual programming rather than incorporate responses to the atrocities.
Holocaust museums have generally continued with their pre-existing programs. Traditional museums have limited their programming to exploring the history of the Holocaust while postmodern museums have put on exhibits about Ukraine, civil rights and the LGBTQ movement. Both behaviors show what is broken about Holocaust museums.
Museums robotically continuing on with commemorations of Kristallnacht without actually pausing to reflect and bring in the current attacks on Jews are violating their mission of ‘Never Again’ and museums that have displaced Jewish programming don’t even have that mission and have no reason to exist. Few Holocaust museums have managed to dynamically bridge the gap between the antisemitism crises of the past and present the way that the Museum of Tolerance has. Both types of museums treat antisemitism as part of a dead past.
Remembering the past is important and commemorating the dead is a crucial Jewish mission. It is why synagogues have plaques with little eternal flames with the names of those who have passed and some Jews hardly visit a synagogue except to recite the Kaddish prayer for the dead. But the reason American Jews invested so much effort into Holocaust commemorations was as a reminder to a comfortable population of the reality of murderous antisemitism.
Current events, not just the Hamas massacre of Jews, but the widespread show of support for it on college campuses, in the media and in the public square, is why those museums exist.
The silence of the Holocaust museums, their inability to pivot to dealing with the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, exposes their moral failure. Contrary to their rhetoric, the Holocaust museums and commemorations did not prepare the Jewish community for this. This did not even prepare the Holocaust museums themselves to meaningfully address the crisis.
The notion that Holocaust memorialization was a viable substitute for a deeply rooted Jewish identity, a knowledge of authentic Judaism and for collective Jewish security, has utterly failed. Kristallnacht exhibits are important, but without the context of a larger Jewish identity, can just as easily be exploited by indoctrinated teenagers to argue that Israelis are the new Nazis.
The universalization of the Holocaust detached a key moment in Jewish history from the Jews and wrongly assumed that using it to teach tolerance would neutralize antisemitism. Not only did this approach fail at fighting antisemitism, but it has been hijacked to spread antisemitism, and it has left a generation of youth without the Jewish identity that would allow them to resist.
The most meaningful responses to the Holocaust are not to reduce it to dry history or to universalize it, but to hold on to the Jewish culture and life that the Nazis sought to destroy, and to learn the lessons of that past in order to prepare for the next wave of attacks. The two most meaningful responses to the Holocaust were not to be found in museums, but in the revival of traditional Judaism in America and the rebirth of the State of Israel. These ‘particularistic’ elements rejected by liberal Jews have long since proven their worth by building a Jewish future. Holocaust commemorations are important, but they are no substitute for a Jewish life.
The silence of some Holocaust museums and the refusal of most others to place the events of the High Holy Day Massacres at the top of their calendar is an institutional indictment. Jews have spent far too long building museums when we should have been building a future.
The lesson of history is kill the enemy or become a museum exhibit.
And with that comment, you win the “Reinhard Heydrich award” for excellence in brutality.
… barbarism kinda swings both ways, doesn’t it?
Nice try. Bravely spoken.
Maybe Heydrich could play you some Mozart and you could give him flowers.
Doesn’t quite fit the progs narrative, does it?
Do you understand the difference between murder and self defense?
“All civilian lives are equal but not so the ways of taking them”
Another good article.
What a great last line: “Jews have spent far too long building museums when we should have been building a future”.
Building a future may mean looking into the past and asking if there’s any traditions worth saving, or better yet, worth CONSERVING. And there it is, conservatism!
The left won the war by advancing leftism quietly by taking over language and culture. Who wants to be conservative? Better to be progressive and not go backward-you know-like conservatives. Why keep your old worn out ways when you can “build back better”?
Sad to hear about Holocaust museums staying mum about what just happened to Jews in Israel.
The next thing will be, the Jews who run these places will be replaced by muslims….
They don’t have to be. Too many of them are already run by Jew Traitors like JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) and J Street’s Beinart!
That is assuming they don’t go the way of statues here of the 18th & 19th centuries pre-social media.
I do not understand the Jews. Why do they try to destroy themselves and why do they try to destroy America?
Leftism is self-negating nihilism. Liberal Judaism is a suicide cult
Destroy Amdrica !!!!!!! Reallly,,, where that ridiculous leap of stupidity come from ? And you include Jews, not leftists who are hell bent on totally destroying America and all it once stood for…
Climate deniers, I was highly offended the first time I heard those words. It cheapens the Holocaust.
I once walked past the shoes at the museum. It took me a while to realise what I was looking at and what the incongruity of them being there meant. Most people pass them by I think but those shoes once walked in the present. It’s easy to walk by.
The terrorists are reverting to the level of Cannibals, similar to wild African tribes in the 1800s.
Danny Dayan ,the head Iof Yad Vashem refuses to allow the famous photo of Hitler and the founder of the Palestinian fiction of a people.to be be displayed.
He is protecting the good name if the Arab Nazis because he is a servant of the Progressive traitors who hide truth and create narratives.
Yes, even Yad Vashem:
Is this Dany Dayan related to the Dayan of the 6 day war, who gave half Jerusalem to Jordan?
Especially and particularly Yad Vashem !!!!!
Then he should be fired. He doesn’t understand his job.
Look him up. He used to a be a nationalist, before going native. I’m pretty sure that the Chinese Communist PArty have something on Dayan and his daughter
On page 389 of tje Grove Press edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, he wrote “If Christianity had asserted itself in Germany, six million Jews would have lived.”
Unfortunately they had Martin Luther’s version of Christianity and he hated the Jews. Mind you some Catholics call Jews, christ killers even though their forbears, the Romans, crucified him.
And my reply to the accusation of killing Christ, whoever did it, is that to complete his mission on Earth, He had to die for others’ sins. Wasn’t that God’s plan, according to Christian theology? If He had lived and died a natural death, would the sinners be able to be forgiven?
The world killed Jesus.
Yes the Romans crucified Him but He was betrayed and handed over to the Romans by the Jews after the Sanhedrin whipped up the crowd to demand He be crucified. Out of fear for his own skin and power Pilate acquiesced in a cowardly fashion to His execution even though he knew Christ was innocent. .
The events of 10:7 prove that the universalist view of the Holocaust and Holocaust education as a substitute for authentic Jewish education is a complete failure
Leftist fail at everything!
Except destruction of nations, cultures, history, and genocide.
Good point Steven.
Dear Mr. Greenfield: You deleted a post of mine, quoting a pro-Jewishcomment by Malcolm X.
It may have taken a some time to moderat but its there.
I saw it. Thanks
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam forced a Jewish employee to conceal a Magen David because it “triggered” Muslim Museum goers. It also greeted Yasser Arafat when he visited the Netherlands, while other Palestinians (such as “moderate” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) denied the Holocaust or asserted Anne Frank’s diary was a forgery.
The only good things about Holland are Rembrandt and Vermeer. KLM, their national airline, helped Nazis escape Nuremberg by flying them to South America. I think their king at that time was a Nazi. All royalty in Europe are Of German extraction.
A Jew once remarked ,when Jews build museums,it’s the end of Judaism and how true,it’s all exhibits and talk from people who know nothing about Jews or Judaism.
Ironically, Hitler collected Judiaca from all over Europe and planned to open “A Museum to An Extinct Race” in Prague. Many “Jewish” museums, worse yet, museums that are supposed to memorialize the Holocaust are very similar in practical intent.
American Jews have cut the fundamental and essential bond that connects them to the true source of their identity, which is the land and nation of Israel. Each and every Jew in America, which was a haven for Jews during the Holocaust- if “allowed” in, that is – is now a wandering Jew in a strange land, Whether Torah ignorant or Torah knowledgeable, the American Jew – or is it Jewish American? – has been sifted out of American relevance and worth.
They have lost their collective sense of nationhood with Israel, and, instead, have chosen to throw their lot in with whatever the definition of the nationhood of America is at the moment, which isn’t good for the Jews, because everything is trumped, so to speak, by fake islamiphobia, the biggest pack of lies and the most anti-Semitic construct since Nazism, along with its many offspring, blm, crt, dei, transgenderism and now, out and out pro Holocaust revivalism, a dream almost come true.
These Holocaust museums have become headstones for the graves of the sacred dead.
I cancelled my subscription to New York Magazine years ago when an article described the new US Holocaust Museum as something a bunch of rich Jews got together to build.
But the Museum of Tolerance is different. A very appropriate name. Is it really a museum of INtolerance?
Isn’t tolerance a burden, a concession, a disgusting downgrade, albeit non lethal alternative, to respect? Tolerance is an unstable mid-point. Will it turn into respect built on morality or progress into hatred and murder?
One of the museum’s founders, Simon Wiesenthal, dedicated his life to seeking out and bringing to justice the murderer Nazis living free and protected among the silent Nazis around the world, who bemoaned the end of the Holocaust,
Rabbi Marvin Hier continues this work against the new Nazis. The mission is clear cut and unwavering.
The Yad Vashem memorial in Israel is unique and forever meaningful because it exists within the eternal Jewish homeland of Israel, pulsating with life, hope, faith, a vision for peace and now, especially, unity.
On one visit to Yad Vashem, I was holding my four year old son in my arms. As we passed the room with a glass wall revealing piles of gold tooth-fillings and shoes, my little boy saw the look on my face and, as he put his hand over my eyes, he said, “Don’t worry, mommy, it’s okay.”
Its a great overhwelming exhibit that transcends politics, or did until the recent unacceptable actions by its Head, who has removed the iconic picture of Hitler meeting with The Mufti, for fear of “upsetting” palestinians or those many Mulsims who decry anything negative regrding their brutal history and connections to he Holocaust…. “Offend not the Palestiians, whomever they may be” has a shallow and hollow foundation and should not be a consideration for an iconoc Institution whose prime reason for being IS THE HOLOCAUST AND EVERYTHING CONNECTED WITH THAT TRAGIC EPISODE OF MODERN JEWISH HISTORY
It’s also ironic that the Holocaust museums are silent about the current ongoing genocide – against the pre-born.
I was always opposed to Holocaust Museums’ in smaller cities around the country. One main one connected with a scholarly institute I can understand but there is something not right about the ‘Tucson Holocaust Museum’ or the ‘Springfield Ma Holocaust Museum’ and not only does it feed the Jew as Eternal Victim narrative which Israel clearly refuses to be.
I agree 100 percent.
This is posted on the Holocaust Museum of Houston’s website. I don’t know when it was posted but the statement is dated October 9th. There is enough awfulness out there without making things up.
https://hmh.org/wp-content/uploads/HMH-Statement_Hamas-Attack-on-Israel_FINAL-2023.pdf
this is a press release. not a statement,
no in fact you’re correct it is a statement which as you mention you would have to go out of your way to find
Liberals shed tears for Tyrants(Castro) and Career Crinimals ignore their victims
All of these organizations are Leftist front groups working in conjunction with Islamic Jihad.
The Holocaust has long since been appropriated by leftist Jews–especially leftist German Jews (Americas Jewish establishment are all German Jews)–to promote their brand of leftist internationalism. I dont blame anyone for being pissed off about the misuse of the Holocaust, but just dont be surprised by it.
Depravity has now gone mainstream.
When many Jewish holocaust institutions have gone berserk,
I know that the world is really depraved and berserk.
Actually the HMH has made several statements on social media about the attacks, the first on October 9, emphasizing how atrocities like this aggravate anti-Semitism Stateside (which, no doubt, was part of the point of the attack).
You can read their statement on the HMH’s Facebook page, linked at their website.
It is a grave mistake for members of any community to view other members who disagree with them on the means of defending the community as greater enemies of the community than the community’s professed enemies.
Hamas chose October 7 to attack knowing Netanyahu was distracted by conflicts with his Jewish political opponents. Mr. Greenfield is making the same mistake.
I assume, of course, that defending the Jews of Israel is the real objective, not scoring points in the great game of American politics
What I’m reading between the lines is this:
“The same people telling you to be nice to thugs are the same people telling you to be nice to terrorists. Sort them out and you won’t hear another word about how Black Lives Matter. It’s not the fault of Jews or Righteous Gentiles that the Arabs don’t know when they’re well off—never mind American Blacks.”
One glance at the Houston Holocaust Museum website plainly shows that they are anti-American, anti-white racists. They have been infiltrated by communist leftists who should be deported.
George Floyd was a career criminal thug drug addict who assaulted women.
Depicting Floyd as a paragon of virtue at Jewish Holocaust Museums is depraved and really sick.
Lightning from the Sky destroyed Floyds Memorial