Never Again, Once Again | Peter E. Gordon | The New York Review of Books

 

A few years ago, in the early summer of 2019, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared on its website that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” Apparently it felt that this declaration was necessary because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, had the temerity to characterize detention centers for migrants on the US southern border as “concentration camps.” Her statement might not have provoked such a strong reaction from the USHMM had she not felt moved to invoke the phrase “Never Again.”

As someone who thinks a fair bit about the conceptual underpinnings of the social sciences, I found the USHMM’s condemnation of analogies between the Holocaust and what it (rather blandly) called “other events” truly puzzling, and I responded with an essay in these pages. I sought to explain just why analogies are indispensable to historical inquiry and why comparison in general is a necessary presupposition for all social-scientific understanding. More importantly, I suggested that comparison is an essential component of all moral deliberation. Analogies are helpful, I argued, not only because they assist us in discerning similarities but also because they can alert us to differences we might have otherwise missed. Moral judgment requires that we determine whether in distinct cases of human conduct the same principles obtain. Without comparison such judgment would be impossible.

Five and a half years later the scandal has seen a reprise. During a press conference on Sunday, January 25, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, spoke about the assault by ICE on immigrant communities in his state. “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

Walz offered these remarks just two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is marked yearly on January 27, the day that soldiers in the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. On X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the USHMM offered a swift retort: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”

Reading this latest statement I could only shake my head in dismay. The charge that Walz indulged in “false equivalencies” for “political purposes” is even more perplexing than the museum’s statement five years ago. It should be altogether obvious that Walz did not actually assert an equivalence. He did not say that Anne Frank was in the very same position as an immigrant in the US. He did not say that immigrants in the US are now undergoing an overt program of mass extermination. He simply suggested that the experiences of children who are now hiding in their houses from agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement would some day deserve stories of their own.

And why not? It’s entirely correct, of course, to say that he was invoking the memory of Anne Frank for political purposes. But it’s not at all obvious why this would be morally unacceptable, let alone “deeply offensive.” On the contrary, one might think that invoking the memory of Jewish persecution today would be a moral imperative. The USHMM was created to promote public education—presumably with the aim of ensuring that we honor the broader implications of the slogan “Never Again.” If the museum’s statement five years ago was already at odds with that mission, today it is even more obvious that the institution has betrayed its purpose. By “unequivocally” rejecting all analogies, it has erected a fence around the Holocaust that ensures that its moral lessons will be forgotten.

*

Analogies, to be sure, are seldom perfect. Often we insist on differences. But no less often comparisons alert us to resemblances we would prefer to ignore. In recent years the Jewish community has found itself compelled to reckon with another analogy—one that casts the state of Israel in an unfavorable light. Over the past three years Israel has prosecuted a brutal war that reputable human rights organizations now consider a genocide. In late November Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, described “two years of relentless bombardment and deliberate systematic starvation” that have left Gaza’s Palestinian population in conditions of thoroughgoing catastrophe. The so-called cease-fire to which Israel agreed in October has hardly brought a real reprieve. As Callamard notes,

So far, there is no indication that Israel is taking serious measures to reverse the deadly impact of its crimes and no evidence that its intent has changed. In fact, Israeli authorities are continuing their ruthless policies, restricting access to vital humanitarian aid and essential services, and deliberately imposing conditions calculated to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza.

Recent estimates by Amnesty and other groups suggest that more than 18,000 children have been killed, though we can presume that the actual number is far higher, and will only grow higher still due to difficulties in securing food and medicine. Many others, adults and children, are still missing; some are assumed to be lost in the rubble. Many Palestinian children who are still alive will grow up without families and with permanent disabilities.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem went so far as to call the assault on Gaza “our genocide.” No doubt the USHMM would take umbrage at that phrase. In early August 2025 Stuart Eizenstat, the chair of the museum’s board, published a statement in The Jerusalem Post, reproduced on the USHMM’s website, in which he objected to the “weaponization” of terms such as genocide “in order to attack the legitimacy of the existence of the Jewish State.” It is admittedly true that in public discourse critics will sometimes seize upon the strongest language to express moral disapproval or to condemn their opponents. But many human rights groups, including Jewish ones, find the charge of genocide legitimate. They did not reach that conclusion lightly, and the suggestion that they wield it only as a weapon is deeply unfair.

The museum would prefer, it seems, to see the persecution of the Jews as a singularity beyond all comparison, a crime that stands as an emblem of absolute evil and must not be enlisted for “political purposes” lest we profane the memory of the dead. But this idea threatens the universal standards it is meant to protect. Every crime is singular, but no crime is so terrible that it exceeds the bounds of comparison. To exempt any act—or, indeed, any individual or state—from comparison is to vitiate the very possibility of moral reasoning.

Genocide, too, we should recall, is a comparative term. Like all terms that we employ in legal deliberation, it refers not to a unique case but to a category of crime. It was introduced into international law chiefly thanks to the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland who eventually found refuge in the United States. He was one of the few in his extended family to survive—nearly everyone else was killed.

One wonders if Lemkin would be welcome in the US today. As I write this, the US government is turning on immigrants and even on refugees who seek asylum, a practice that clearly violates international law. Jewish Americans should be among the first to insist that this assault come to an end and that our government honor the injunction from Leviticus 19:34, which draws an analogy of its own: “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Many groups have invoked that phrase, but far too many have ignored it entirely. One Jewish American activist on the political right took to X and quipped that Governor Walz is an “evil retard.” I reproduce those words with much regret, but it seems important that we recognize the malice and moral depravity that now surrounds us. Perhaps that young man is unaware of the historical fact that those who suffered mental disability were also murdered by the Third Reich. I would like to think that the USHMM would condemn his hateful remark. But I suspect it will not.

The Jewish community in America is composed of immigrants and refugees, many of them descendants of those who escaped pogroms and survived the fate of coreligionists in the gas chambers in Europe. Today their memory should serve as a reminder of what can happen when racism and bigotry become the law of the land. Heeding that reminder, however, demands honoring the principle that all human beings deserve protection no matter their race or tribe. To subscribe to the language of human rights one must believe that the same laws apply to all human beings everywhere. This is precisely the kind of universal morality that is codified in the injunction to love the stranger. But today that universalism is falling into eclipse, and the USHMM is only hastening its end.

*

These are matters of great concern for me, not only for academic reasons but for personal reasons as well. A late, dear friend of mine was born in an impoverished Soviet-bloc nation that had been devastated by communism. She was an immigrant to this country and had every hope of contributing as an educator and philosopher to the advancement of intellectual life in America. By the time she died, however, it was apparent to her that the United States was descending into the kind of authoritarianism she had tried to leave behind. Trump was to her a familiar type—a bloated and blundering oligarch with little sensitivity to culture and no sympathy whatsoever for those who suffer persecution or exile.

My friend was a gifted artist and brilliant beyond just about anyone I have ever met. She was especially drawn to paintings by Rembrandt, whose self-portraits convey an expansive humanism that knows no bounds. Among those who appear in Rembrandt’s work are individuals from Amsterdam’s Sephardic community, refugees from the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain. If that community had not found refuge in Amsterdam, a significant share of his paintings would not exist. One look at Head of Christ (circa 1648), which Rembrandt likely based on a Jewish model, should suffice as a moral rebuke to all those who persecute immigrants and refugees today.

As a child my friend never had the chance to see any of Rembrandt’s works in person. I still recall the first time that she visited the Richelieu wing in the Louvre, where she stood, at last, before the 1660 self-portrait that Rembrandt completed nine years before his death. On the neighboring wall is Bathsheba at Her Bath. Both are works of astonishing beauty that show us what it means to open our arms and our souls to those with whom we share the world. My friend must have passed nearly two hours gazing at them in silence, refusing to respond or to leave.

Now, three and a half years since her death, I read reports almost every day from Minnesota and from elsewhere in the States that awaken in me a burning anger at how callous the world can be. Some years ago a few critics clucked their tongues to chastise those of us who raised our voices in alarm as Trumpism set about dismantling the already-battered guardrails of American democracy. They said that we were guilty of “liberal hysteria,” and that “fascism” was not a suitable term for what we were witnessing.

Now we can all see what Trumpism has become. The assault on immigrants proceeds with such rapidity that no allowance is made for age or infirmity. Little children are swept up in the raids; it hardly matters if the ICE agents have a judicial warrant or if those they haul away actually possess the legal documentation they require to live in the States. The principle of habeas corpus is being violated every day and in such great numbers that lawyers are struggling to keep up. And in this situation the name of Anne Frank is invoked for what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum refers to dismissively as “political purposes.” If such purposes are not valid, then what purposes would be?