"De-Jewifying" the Holocaust is the concerning trend our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin talks about in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... with Jacki Alexander, CEO and President of HonestReporting.

TRANSCRIPT: 

Usually on this podcast, we sit with the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We listen carefully as they reflect on memory, legacy, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and what it means to carry stories and experiences that were never meant to survive, but did. This is Sheryl Hoffman, podcast founder and co-director, and this episode of TO BE CONTINUED… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors is a little different. Not a departure from our mission, but in many ways a descent into its deepest urgency, because in recent years, the Holocaust is increasingly being remembered without Jews. Please listen and share on social media and with your family and friends.

This is "To Be Continued." We discuss the implications of trauma and resilience for second and third generation Holocaust survivors. 

And where we are in the calendar right now is very important. We are now following up on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we're talking about what it means to remember the Holocaust, to remember the Shoah, and what that memory entails, and how sometimes bad actors abuse and distort that memory.

Thank you so much for having me to talk about this incredible, important topic, and one that's really personal to my heart, giving my background.

Well, I want to talk about why that is in fact the case, but I want to go right to something you wrote. I want to talk about something that I wrote. I want to talk about your background as well. You know, what you did this past week was, you used a term and I love it. In fact, I've been quoting you over the last several days to friends of mine.

History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, right? That was Mark Twain, however many years ago. And I think for our entire history, we have always been targets of, the Jewish people have always been targets of bad people and then we have always been identified with then the bad people, right? So how does that rhyme today? Israel and the IDF are the new Nazis. Jews were the victims and now we are the oppressors. Yossi Klein Halevi had a great speech about this a couple of years ago, going through history and saying, when the communists were the bad guys, the Jews were the communists. When the capitalists are the bad guys, the Jews are the capitalists, right? Today, Jews are the oppressors, Jews are the colonialists, Jews are, you know, white people has become a four letter term now, Jews are the white people. So I think that this is just erasing Jews from something that can bring sympathy or an understanding is just the next step in a long history.

So your article, Jacki, uses this wonderful phrase, you really are very good at turning phrases and creating them, "Erasive Jew hate," as if it were the children's game Etch-A-Sketch, where you draw something, you turn it over, you shake it and it's gone. So let me ask you, how is erasing Jews from Holocaust narratives different from overt antisemitism? Is it the same and is it just as dangerous?

And I do think that that is a new form of antisemitism, which is again, another word which we can't even use anymore because that has been weaponized against us. And as soon as you say antisemitism, people stop listening to it. But people forget that it wasn't just the final solution, right? It was the final solution to the Jewish question. Jews were the problem. Hitler wrote an entire book about Jews. This started not with the stab in the back of the Sinti. And again, this is not taking away the horrible history that happens. This was the stab in the back of the Jews. But for what the Jews did on the homefront in Germany, Germany would have won the war and therefore they are the bBreiggest scapegoats. And I think that by removing Jews and erasing our history, it allows it, as you said, to repeat.

So I published an article this week in the wake of a very famous American politician omitting the Jews from the Holocaust narrative by talking about the taxonomy of Holocaust distortion. Where people minimize the Holocaust, where they say the numbers were not as high as they say, or they universalize it as if to say, as you've said, the Roma, gay men, labor leaders, Slavs, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, they were also victims. Or worse, inversion, which is what you just talked about, which is the Jews are the new Nazis, which by the way, works very well in Europe because that's an excellent way for contemporary Europeans to erase the burden of guilt that they may or may not have inherited from their grandparents. So it feels to me that when we do this, Jacki, that we are entering a very savage new world of Jew hatred. So where do these distortions fit into the framework of antisemitism?

So the way that antisemitism today is manifesting is in the very nature of information itself.

We're not being told not to believe what we're seeing, what we're being taught is a brand new history that didn't exist before. We're seeing it in academia, we're seeing it in the nonprofit industrial complex, we're certainly seeing it on social media and in AI, where you have the Jews are responsible for the Holocaust, but also the Holocaust didn't exist, but also Hitler is amazing and he should have finished the job, but also only 271,000 Jews were killed. And all of these things exist at the exact same time. And the people that are putting it out there have no problem with the fact that they don't align with each other because it doesn't matter. They want to put out whatever they can in order to change what the status quo is. And the reason why that's dangerous is because you and I grew up in where we knew what the bottom line facts were. We were taught the same things in school. When we had to write a paper, we went to a physical building called a library that had physical books called encyclopedias. We got our baseline information there. And then we started looking at secondary sources, tertiary sources and understanding how information evolved. What's happening today with the manipulation of Wikipedia and how all of these information sources are then feeding social media and online information sources is that what people are being taught from the very beginning has no basis in reality. And yet that's the new status quo. This is so dangerous for Jews, for the Jewish people. And if I may be so bold as to say, the only universalization that people should take from the Holocaust is that what starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews.

This is a very important point. And by the way, I got into an argument that was a foolish thing for me to do with a Holocaust denier. And kids, do not try this at home. It's not worth your time or your energy. It's like what Brett Stephens said at the 92 Street Y the other night. “Here, we don't care. There's some people who are not worth our emotional investment.” And I said, “This is the most documented crime in human history, documented by survivors, documented by their descendants, and documented by the perpetrators themselves.” And I said, “Isn't it interesting that no one ever denies the fact that there was slavery in the United States?”

Right. Now, what they are doing with slavery, is saying that some of the slave owners were good, right? As though you could have that. So you are, again, what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews, but you're right. The way that Jewish history is erased and made acceptable,

it cannot be compared to anything else.

There's something else as well about this universalization of the Holocaust. I wrote about that this week in ReligionNews.com in my column, "Martini Judaism." I have been accused by some Jews of engaging in the macabre game of comparative victimology. Or forgive me, of hogging the Holocaust. It's as if Jews, this is terrible, cannot name their own particularity and believe that in order to sit at the cool kids' table, they have to shed this. I find this problematic. What do you think?

The immune system crashed.

The what?

The immune system.

The immune system crashed. People didn't have money anymore. There was 4,000% inflation. In order to buy bread, you had to take a barrel full of cash. We don't even use cash anymore, but you have to take a barrel full of cash to the bank and to the grocery store to buy bread. There are things that happen when, like you said, the immune system of a country fails. That's the universalization that we need to be studying, not that Jews weren't the only victims, because the fact is, that, again, as Elie Wiesel taught us, this was the only genocide specifically of the Jewish people, the only targeting of the Jewish people, where you couldn't convert your way out.

If you were Jewish, if you were one quarter Jewish, you were going to the ovens along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you had been converted to Christianity for a few generations. If they could trace your Judaism, you were going alongside everyone else. There was nothing you could do to escape it. That is not true for any other community. And that's an evil and a hatred that we need to teach because that can rhyme again in the future.

And many people are hearing that rhyme right now.

My friends say to me that when we make the Holocaust more universal and more inclusive,

we're saying that the lessons are more universal and more inclusive. So where is the line between drawing these universal lessons, which by the way, I believe, and I have a list of universal lessons that is actually rather long. What's the boundary between that and the deliberate distortion of history?

I think it all goes back to how we teach it. And it goes back to the Holocaust museums and the Holocaust education that's out there. We get a very limited amount of time to teach Holocaust history, forget to Jewish students, but to Americans, regular community members. Maybe if you're a public school, you get a single field trip. So what do we do? When that happens, we teach concentration camps. And if it's not concentration camps, then it's not, this is what genocide looks like. And we don't teach everything that led up to it, right? The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust did not even begin with World War II. We count the Holocaust as starting in 1933 when Hitler rose to power and within six months had a watertight dictatorship and the first concentration camp, to be fair for political prisoners, but the first concentration camp opened. That's when it happened. That's when Jews started not being allowed to go to school, not being allowed to be teachers anymore. All of these things started early. And that's where our issue comes, because once you understand what the Holocaust was, what discrimination looked like, then it's a lot harder to then take the universalization of those messages and say, the IDF are Nazis, or this person who I don't like is a Nazi, or that person who I don't like is a Nazi, or this horrible war is a genocide. No, you have to understand the totality. And we need to go back to figuring out how to reteach Holocaust education so that it's actually impactful.

It's so important what you're saying. I was having this conversation with someone just the other day. I think part of the challenge here, Jacki, is that too many people look too narrowly at the Holocaust and they look at the camps. And you correctly named very important historical fact, which is that the original occupants of the concentration camps, the original occupants of Dachau, were political prisoners. Mind you, by the way, in a bizarre early form of intersectionality, you had political prisoners who were Jews and were also labor leaders and also gay men. People could occupy, as it were, several categories. But people forget that even before the final solution, even before the conference Wanasee, you had the Holocaust by bullets. You had the mass executions, people digging their grave in the Soviet Union, executed by the Einsatzgruppen. And this happened to no other people.

And the ghettos also, by the way, the war in Gaza, the war with Hamas, has pulled out so many,

antisemitic microaggressions, right? Gaza is this great concentration camp. There are parts of Gaza that no one would want to live in. And there are also beautiful parts of Gaza. There is incredible income disparity that exists there. There was no income disparity that existed in the ghettos.

Multiple families in single-family apartments. There was disease in the streets, stepping over dead bodies. I mean, the ghettos, you had kids going out and stealing food if they could get out to come back in. And that's before right, the Holocaust by bullets.

And again, all of this came after six years of Jews being shunted out of society.

They were not allowed to take part in society. And everyone likes to say, for 10 years I've been hearing, this reminds me of Germany in 1933. Nothing reminded me of Germany in 1933. I will tell you now I'm starting to get echoes. Echoes… nothing that's saying this is happening, right? I don't think the Holocaust as an industrial, like killing machine is going to repeat itself any time ever, but certainly not in the near future.

But the saying Zionists aren't welcome here. Saying it's okay to have clubs where Zionists aren't here. Things like that, once it's acceptable to take someone out of polite society and make them your scapegoat, bad things tend to follow.

It's a really amazing situation in which we find ourselves. Again, just this past week, someone asked me if I thought that America in 2026 is tantamount to Germany of 1936. And I said, there's one thing that is separating America from Germany. And that is that Americans are responding very differently right now than the way the Germans did. And there's something else as well. I was just talking today to someone who was a professor of German history. And he reminded me of something that should be so clear to everybody. America is a democracy.

And Germany was not, Hungary was not, Poland was not. It had, in these situations, there was a very thin veneer of democracy. What we're experiencing now, while there have been totalitarian impulses in American history, to be sure, what we're experiencing now is a deviation from the norm, which makes that deviation even sharper.

So, you know, that's so important, because people don't think about that, right? I mentioned Weimar Germany before. Weimar was the name of the republic, the democracy that existed in between the two world wars, right? So think that it's 1918 to 1933. That is not a long time. That's less than 20 years that Germany experienced a democracy. Before that, there were kings.

Then before that, you know, they had only become an actual country in 1891, I think. Before that, you had these separate kingdoms. You had Saxony, you had Bavaria. So you didn't have this sense. America's celebrating 250 years of democracy, right? We have a strong emotional connection to democracy. We understand what democracy looks like. Germany did not have that. With Admiral Horthy in Hungary, you did not have that. Across Europe in general, you didn't have that. Democracy was very, very young in most of the countries that it were able to fall to this. And that piece of history is actually really important to understanding why it was so unique at that moment in time, versus anything that could possibly happen in America today.

By the way, since you mentioned the unification of Germany, which happened, I think, in the 1870s, if I remember my 10th grade history well, around the same time.

Was that 1870 or 1891? I always get it confused with Italy.

What's a couple of decades between friends!

But, the point is that neither was there a unified German national identity. There was German language, there was a literature, but the Nazis were able to create a false sense of German unity.

Yes. Again, without going too deep into my historical background, the fact that Prussia was the largest state, it was a very militaristic state, that overwhelmed a lot of the other pieces of Germany that came in and Hitler played to that very much. That's also why they were able to bring Austria into this. There's so many unique elements of what happened that allowed for Hitler to take over and to create this watertight dictatorship. If Russia hadn't had their March and October revolutions at the end of World War I, and the fear of communism that was happening across Europe, there are so many things that had to have come together in order for Hitler to rise. That being said, how we teach what happened and how it happened is so important to it not repeating itself.

So the eyebrow-raising event that happened, let's just name names here, was when Vice President JD Vance avoided mentioning Jews. And just turn this back a little bit. Why did that raise alarm? And it's just one speech. Why does it matter?

So, first I would say that it wasn't just JD Vance. It was the British Royal Family. It was the BBC. There were numerous elected officials in America, on both sides of the aisle, that erased Judaism and Jews from the Holocaust. And there are a couple of problems with that. Everyone listening to this podcast knows that we commemorate the Holocaust Remembrance Day later on in the year, April or May on Yom HaShoah, right? That is when Jews typically do this. This is a day for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, bigger than the Jews, that was only created about 21 years ago by the UN.

Do you know why?

You know, I actually don't tell me.

Yes, I'm gonna tell you.

It was done in order to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army as a way of exculpating the former Soviet Union from its crimes against the Jewish people.

Of course, but that makes perfect sense, including the timing, perfect sense. Thank you.

So here's my thing about the three remembrance days. I just wrote about it. Kristallnacht is about what they did to us. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is what they did for us. And Yom HaShoah is what we did for ourselves.

That’s beautiful.

Commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising, right?

That is beautiful. And with your permission, I'm going to steal that with full credit. I will let everyone know it came from you.

S-A-L-K-I-N. (Laughing)

No, I know what I hate. I hate the passive language anyway.

Though that's a given. But when they say 6 million people died, there's a famous TV show where they were interviewing a guy who was found with Hitler paraphernalia, World War II paraphernalia. And they wanted to make sure he wasn't a Nazi. So they started asking him questions and they said, what do you think the worst part about World War II was? And he said the millions of people who died said, great, who are those people? Just to check, says, oh, well, 5 million Germans and 6 million Soviets, or I'm getting the numbers wrong, but all these things. And he goes through all of the various people that died in the war, doesn't mention the Jews at all, to which the interviewer then says, I'm adding up the till here and I think you're a couple million short, right? That was a joke five years ago when it aired. Today it is reality. And when the Vice President of the United States, and elected officials in the United States, and the British Royal Family, and the BBC, and other outlets start talking about millions who died without referencing the Jews, when again, it was the final solution to the Jewish question, that is problematic. That goes back to what we were talking about, that there is a new status quo of information that people are learning and it's becoming acceptable to remove Jews from that. And that makes it easier to put us into that category of colonialists, white, and again, I'm not saying white is a bad thing, but in the vernacular of how people speak today, calling Jews white is essentially a slur, putting us into all of those categories that make us the evil villain. And whenever we are made the evil villain, what comes next is we become the victim of something. And the only thing giving me hope that that doesn't happen again, is that with the existence of the State of Israel and the IDF, we are no longer a group of people that history happens to.

We are a group of people that are in control of our own destiny.

So Jacki, let me pick up on something, because you mentioned something when we first started talking, I don't wanna let it slide. Why does this matter so much to you?

So my great uncle, escaped Auschwitz, was a partisan. And I grew up with, I guess a fascination with the time period. I was a history major. I ended up getting my master's degree in the Fall of Weimar Germany and the Rise of Hitler. And my first born son was born on Yom HaShoah and he had his bris on Yom HaAtzmaut. And to me, that is the journey of the Jewish people from victim to victory. And Holocaust history in general, I think it is so important that we honor those who were murdered. They didn't die, right? Every single one of them was murdered. It is a genocide our people still have not recovered from, which is so important for people to know as we throw those words like genocide around.

Gad Saad was on Joe Rogan's podcast and asked him how many Jews do you think there are in the world? And he said a billion, no, you know what? I'm gonna revise that, half a billion.

We are not even where we were in January 1933. That's how much our people were decimated. This is incredibly important to me. And again, I think that 80 years after the Holocaust, we are now understanding and accepting that we didn't get it right when it came to Holocaust education and it is critical to get it right going forward, especially in a post-October 7th world.

Especially in that world. I sometimes mused Jacki that I don't believe that Holocaust education has done anything to ameliorate Jew hatred, but I will say one thing, especially as we look at what's happening in America today, false comparisons, shoddy comparisons, and hearing the echoes. I do think that Holocaust education might have successfully inculcated within people a sense of what an early warning system must look like in order for a nation to protect its democratic institutions. What do you think of that?

I think that's spot on. Look, on the one hand, I will say that having survivors around was the best Holocaust education that we could have had, speaking to those people one-to-one. As they are dying off and the Holocaust becomes something of history, if I remember, my math is right -- right now, the Holocaust is as far away from us, as the Civil War was away from them, when it started, right?

Ancient history, ancient history, and it shouldn't be, because that is the personification of evil, and it's less than 100 years old. So yeah, I agree with you. We did not get Holocaust education, right? And there are still Holocaust museums out there that are getting it wrong. And for me, I have a lot of unpopular opinions. One of mine is, you mentioned Brett Stephens at the 92nd Street Y. I agree with him wholeheartedly that we have to stop worrying about getting beyond the choir and we have to focus on our choir. Where I would take it a step further is that I don't think our Jewish day schools, and I am a paying parent of three children at Jewish day schools, are doing a good enough job doing that education, whether it's Holocaust related, Israel history related, the Palestinian conflict, anything like that. And I think that we have to do a better job preparing our own future leaders with our own history as information is being poisoned, and then they will be the bulwark against everyone else that needs to hear it.

And while you're talking about our young people who are attending Jewish day schools, that is a drop in the communal bucket, realizing that the overwhelming majority of non-orthodox Jewish young people in this country, end their Jewish education sometime around puberty. We are sending kids out into the Jewish world who have not gotten their vaccinations.

Yes, and they don't get it at home. Jeff, you're putting me on the spot. These are all of the opinions that get me in trouble.

Go ahead. Hey, you've got nothing popular to say, say it to me.

And how many of our friends are listening?

Let's compare our battle wounds, come on.

So look, I think I wanna start by saying you can do everything right, and your child can still grow up to have very different beliefs than you and very different values from you, right? So that is a given, and if your child has strayed, that does not mean that you were a bad parent or you did it wrong. That being said, I think that there are a lot of parents who, well, let me say it this way. I have a nine, a seven, and a two. They go to Israel every single year. Every single year, and they went in utero, every single one of them. I want to make sure that my children understand the values. They are in Jewish day school. We are not Orthodox. My children are in Jewish day school. We live in a Jewish community, so that my children can understand, or maybe don't understand, but have the privilege and the luxury of living among other Jews and feeling like a majority, because they won't feel like that for long. There are things that we need to do at home that are uncomfortable conversations that can help make sure that our children are imbued with the values that we have. I never wanted to have a conversation about October 7th with my children, and I had no intention of doing it until I realized that other parents were doing it, and they were gonna hear about it from someone else or from me. And then when we went to Israel after October 7th, and the hostages still weren't home, I couldn't protect them from that. So I took a deep breath, and I leaned into the conversation, and we had a conversation about the bad people that exist out there, and the fact that there were hostages being held, and then we celebrated at home once they came home.

So I think that we need to, we need to invest in our children. Our children are going to be the shining leaders of the future. I have no doubt about it. But we can't rely on other people to do it. We can't say, okay, my kid had their bar mitzvah, then they graduated public school. Now they're on a college campus, and I'm afraid of losing them. So hey, legacy organization that has a student program, why aren't you doing more to make sure that my kid comes to Chabad or goes to your events? Well, because there's only so much people can do on the back end, and there are a lot more that needs to happen on the front end. Again, this is where I get in trouble, because I think a lot of parents are doing really as much as they can, and Jewish education is expensive, and trips to Israel are expensive. But sometimes we have to make value judgments and priorities in our lives, in order to make sure that we are, let's put it this way, every Jewish trip I've ever been on, when you ask the madrich what the point of the trip is, they say to make Jewish babies, right? We have to do everything we can to make sure that we're putting those Jewish babies out into the world and that they will make more Jewish babies.

And what saddens me, Jacki, about what you just said the last 10 seconds, is that in some circles in which I hang out, even the phrase “making more Jewish babies” has become controversial. I once said to a Jewish leader who was offended by this, I said, "We need more Jews." I said, "Either through conversion, adoption, or childbirth. I don't care how we get them, but we need more Jews." What is wrong with this? Unless we are the stamp collecting club, which if it went out of business, no one would really notice.

There is a beauty to being part of this weird and eclectic community, right? How many other communities are there where the jokes are two Jews or two x three opinions? We are a community that thrives on arguing and fighting and trying to use Talmudic logic to become the best and most educated people we can, to not accept any sort of status quo. That's why we excel so much beyond our numbers. And I think you're right, we need more Jewish babies. I will never apologize for saying that. And we need more people in the world who are Jewish adjacent and just think like us, right? Our haters have done a great job of stealing our history and turning it against us, right? Zionist is a bad word now.

They use “goy” against us, as though we're these horribly racist people who talk about “the other” as though that word doesn't exist in every single community, that there is a word for “the other” and it doesn't have to be derogatory, right? But if we have other people who are just thinking around, and by the way, we do have those allies. I will single out Van Jones because he is brilliant. He is, and not just him, but people like that, that just think the way that we do in terms of questioning everything and figuring out how to tikkun olam, right? In the non-bastardization-way of saying that word.

You know, I along with several other alumni of my university formed a group to essentially support Jewish students, staff members and faculty who are experiencing antisemitism on the campus. When we got started, someone joined our group, is very active in that group, and I said to him, "You know, it's great to have you here, but I remember going to college with you decades ago. It was not my experience of you back then that you were Jewish." That's something very powerful, and I've been quoting this all over the country. He said, "Oh, no, I'm not. I'm an Irish Catholic kid who grew up in the Bronx. When I married a Jewish woman, we have Jewish children. What happens to you, happens to me. I am your ally."

Amazing.

Yes.

So, I got one last question for you, Jacki. We're in a time machine, we go to 2036.

Okay.

I'm 10 years older, but you're the same age.

Already, it's fantasy, right?

So in media, politics, education, popular culture, what would you like to see Holocaust remembrance look like a decade from now?

I think it needs to be centering Jews, not because Jews need to be the center of everything, and not because there's any sort of hierarchy of horror, but because in the future, in 10 years time, I hope that there has been a great balancing of information and media and news. Right now, what the statistics are telling us is that 93% of all of the information on the internet next year will be false or fake, whether it is AI-generated or something not true. And that is terrifying for the future of democracy, that is terrifying for the future and stability of the Western world. And how goes Western democracy, so goes the Jews.

So in 10 years time, if we are having an honest conversation about what the Holocaust meant and the horrible things that happened around it, where we center the Jewish experience, that will have meant that everything else will have balanced out as well.

We have been hanging out with Jacki Alexander, who is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. Friends, I hope you're all reading HonestReporting. I do, forgive me for using the metaphor, almost religiously, and I've been a fan of Jacki for a long time. So it's been a total gift for me to be able to spend time picking your brain and your soul.

I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin and this has been TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. This episode is a production of The 2G-3G Project, produced by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our founder, Sheryl Hoffman.

Thank you, friends. We'll see you again with a new episode in March. Thank you very much.