This is adapted from a January 19 address to the Holocaust Education Trust in London.
Holocaust Memorial Day is a fitting moment to talk about the use and abuse of history, the distortion and inversion of the Holocaust, and the devaluing of the language we use to fight racism and antisemitism. That language has become formulaic and meaningless and it needs to be updated.
The Holocaust, the biggest industrialized slaughter in the history of the world, is and always will be a vital historical event to understand human life and fate, to teach lessons and herald warnings about past and future. The way we see it also reflects our present. The shock of the Shoah and World War II helped inspire the very definition of crimes against humanity, the taboo against antisemitism, and the structure of the West and its world order. Yet now all these achievements are in peril.
When I think about the distortion of history, I remember when I was updating my history of Jerusalem and a friend rang me and said she had an “indispensable history of the Jewish people that you have to read.” She sent it over, all wrapped up. When I opened it, I was surprised to find it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery created by the czar’s secret police. History matters, but more than ever, we need to assert that it be based on real events.
