What happens when we forget the Holocaust? Jews have once again become scapegoats

When Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz 80 years ago today, on 27 January 1945, they found only 7,000 gravely ill and dying inmates. The SS had left them behind when they hastily abandoned the camp for Germany earlier that month, forcing roughly 60,000 souls into death marches through the bitter cold, some lasting more than a month. They’d hoped to leave few witnesses to the 42,500 ghettos, death camps, concentration camps, labour camps, and transit camps in Nazi-occupied territory, and they often told prisoners that nobody would believe them when they spoke of the monstrosities they had suffered.

Time has given the SS some posthumous victories. Surveys conducted in the US and UK show that memory of the Holocaust has faded like an old family photograph. The median age of Holocaust survivors is now 86, which means that half of them were six or younger in 1945 — too young to bear witness to much of anything. Soon, everyone who saw the inside of a Nazi camp or ghetto will be dead, and what happened in these God-forsaken places will disappear completely from living memory. Worse, political opportunism and widespread antisemitism have distorted the way the Holocaust is remembered. Eighty years on, Western shame about the Holocaust has turned into blame of the Jews.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) recently called for a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, insisting that the Gaza “genocide” be recognised as well. This is an old story: the Muslim Council of Britain was boycotting the event 20 years ago. What is new is the sudden acceptability of public expressions of Jew-hatred in the Anglosphere after October 7. The sight of large, keffiyeh-adorned mobs in London, New York, Montreal, and Sydney, marching in support of Hamas and calling through bullhorns for the death of Jews, would have been unimaginable just 16 months ago. These demonstrations have emboldened hard-core antisemites, in a radical-chic cosplay of Kristallnacht, to deface and burn Jewish businesses, schools, and synagogues.

The gatekeepers of high culture and intellectual life have played their part in this tawdry farce, embracing a binary ideology of oppressors and oppressed that has emanated from our universities. Academic societies and journals have overtly or covertly boycotted Israeli professors, while publishers, literary agents, art galleries, and cinemas have blacklisted Jewish writers, artists, performers, and film producers. These intellectuals claim to be anti-fascists, concerned above all with the fundamental human values of equality and justice. But political space curves like the Earth: go far enough Left and you’ll be far-Right.

Pro-Hamas demonstrations, encampments, and building takeovers proliferated on college campuses after October 7. Faculty and administrators have encouraged groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, much as an earlier generation of academics, equally eager to demonstrate the political relevance of their radical ideas, stirred up the militant students of their day. In his infamous 1933 Rectoral Address to the University of Freiburg, the philosopher Martin Heidegger described Hitler as a new revelation of Being for the German people and praised student organisations that were “on the march” for Nazism. German theologians similarly worked to fashion a myth of Jesus as a forerunner of Nazism. They portrayed Hitler as the second coming of Christ, an Aryan saviour who promised to finish the work that Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism.

The Nazis weren’t the first to appropriate the divine history of human salvation for demonic purposes, making the State — with its political sermons, sacred dogmas, rituals, indulgences, excommunications, and sacrificial victims — a new Church. These innovations were introduced by the Communists, whose utopian fantasies of universal happiness claimed something like 100 million lives in the 20th century. Today, the delusion that a permanent solution to humanity’s problems can be achieved by eliminating a nation, a people, or a class has been revitalised by neo-Marxist academic theories that see society as a zero-sum competition between rival groups, in which success is achieved only on the backs of other groups.

No one should be surprised that Jews have yet again been singled out for scapegoating, this time in the name of social justice. A major survey recently found that nearly half of adults worldwide hold “significant antisemitic views”, which means they agreed with at least six of 11 antisemitic tropes, including “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”, “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”, “Jews’ loyalty is only to Israel”, and “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars”.

When the Nuremberg trials exposed the crimes of the Nazis for all the world to see, the West understood that what they did to the Jews was pure evil. To say that’s no longer the case would be an understatement. Seen through the twin lenses of antisemitism and critical theory, the Holocaust looks both too little and too big. Too big, because the Jews are viewed as having claimed an unfair share of victimhood, which  is now understood to be yet another zero-sum good that must be redistributed to other groups. Too little, because there is supposedly nothing special about the Holocaust — or for that matter, about the worst attack on Jews in 80 years. A feminist I know refused to speak out about the rape, torture, murder, and abduction of hundreds of Israeli women on October 7 because that sort of thing “is happening every day” to women around the world.

That’s not true—yet. But those who want to “globalise the Intifada” are effectively calling for a worldwide pogrom: October 7 on an endless loop. That’s the logical conclusion of antisemitism in its current form, a crowdsourced Auschwitz for the 21st century. While the future is unknowable, it would be a serious mistake to regard the Holocaust as dead, or even past: American adults may know little about it, but 76% of them believe it could happen again. If that doesn’t freeze your blood, you haven’t been paying attention.