“When Holocaust Education Lost its Jewish Soul”
White Rose Magazine Forum on Art and Ideas
May 31, 2023
Join senior “White Rose Magazine” contributors Dr. Naya Lekht, Ben Poser, and Thane Rosenbaum for a conversation about how American Holocaust curriculum has degenerated from its original mission of safeguarding the Jewish people’s memory to general, politicized lessons in “hate.” Today, Holocaust museums and school programs focus much of their time not on anti-Semitism — the actual reason six million Jews were murdered during the Second World War — but on what Whoopi Goldberg has callously called “man’s inhumanity to man.” For example, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles offers exhibits on the subjects of “homelessness, LGBTQ+ issues, bullying, [and] the challenges of policing.”
Naya Lekht and Ben Poser, authors of an article in the Spring 2023 issue of “White Rose,” “What if the Holocaust Was Not about ‘Hate’?”, argue that the universalization of the Holocaust beyond its particular historical context — as a crime against the Jews — is an insult to the dead.
All three participants are contributors to the Jewish Leadership Project’s new book “Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership,” an expanded version of a collection originally published a year ago in White Rose.