IMDB’s laconic description of Glazer’s masterpiece, based on a novel by Martin Amis, goes this way: “Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp.” The film is an indictment of what Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.”

The British national Glazer, however, clearly has a difficulty with the Zionist Right, which has appropriated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews as a primary plank in its platform of bestowing impunity on the Israeli government for whatever atrocity, whatever violation of international humanitarian law, whatever genocide its leaders wish to commit.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Glazer said,

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what we did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Here’s the clip:

ABC Video: THE ZONE OF INTEREST Accepts the Oscar for International Feature Film

Daniel Arkin at NBC writes, “Inside the Dolby Theatre, many in the audience could be seen cheering and applauding. Sandra Hüller, the German actor who portrayed Höss’ wife, Hedwig, appeared to be crying and put her hand to her chest.”

He adds, “Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore red pins on the Oscars red carpet symbolizing calls for a cease-fire.”

Glazer’s international platform (19.5 million people watched live) and his universalist sentiments posed a severe difficulty for the Zionist right wing. Glazer was saying that the Holocaust was an event in human history, not solely in Jewish history, and that its lesson is that dehumanization leads to atrocities and even genocide. In wartime Nazi Germany Jews were called “Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures.” And then they were murdered in their millions by the National Socialist government.

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals.”

Glazer is aware that the Hamas commandos who killed over 600 Israeli civilians on October 7, along with some 400 military personnel, also dehumanized those Jews, allowing them to mow down attendees at a music festival and left wing grandmothers at Kibbutz hamlets.

He was saying that this dehumanization, and its consequences in the casual murder of other human beings, clearly needs to be resisted. But how? How? is the existential question of the twenty-first century.

But for the current full-on fascist cabinet in Israel and its cheerleaders in the United States, the Holocaust and October 7 aren’t about universal values, they are about Jews and Zionism. They are antinomian in effect, justifying Israeli troops in committing any action, any crime. They are a get out of jail free card for Zionists. The Right denies that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, even though over 13,000 children have been killed in indiscriminate bombing and another 12,000 women noncombatants have been killed. How else, they ask, could you destroy Hamas? Even President Biden, however, has begun pointing out in public that there are other ways of targeting a small terrorist organization than killing tens of thousands of noncombatants.

Glazer also violated the tenets of the Zionist Right by saying that his film about the Holocaust is not about what people did in the 1940s but about what people do today. His clear implication is that the tactics the Israeli government is using in Gaza must be condemned for the same reason that the Holocaust must be condemned. These actions, while of entirely different scale, are atrocities that spring from a denial of our common humanity.

Glazer’s most controversial assertion was, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people.”

He was saying that the Zionist far right of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich had attempted to hijack the Jewish religion to which Glazer and some of his colleagues adhere, and that he rejects this appropriation.

This statement strikes at the core of Zionist nationalism, which insists that Judaism and Zionism are identical. Non-Zionist Jews from this point of view are traitors. Never mind that in opinion polling significant numbers of American Jews express discomfort with the right wing Zionism that has come to dominate Israeli politics.

Because Glazer’s brief, historic statement profoundly threatened the project of what some have called “Israelism,” a cult-like induction of people into the Zionism=Judaism and “Jews must support Bibi” complex of beliefs, some Zionists decided that he must be smeared and his reputation destroyed.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek deputy opinion editor, author of a book on how “woke” media is allegedly undermining democracy, and inveterate propagandist for the Israeli Right, presented a gross distortion of what Glazer said on X:

I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone's soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, "We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness."

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 11, 2024

Even X’s community comments eventually flagged the post as misleading, though it is actually a horrid lie, and it is hard to understand why anyone should ever again take seriously anything she says.

Her posting was widely reposted and paraphrased on the Zionist Right, in a disinformation campaign attempting to make it look as though Glazer were an apostate and had abandoned Jewish values rather than standing up for them.

An attempt was also made to push back against the red pins worn by numerous celebrities at the Oscars, symbolizing their call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza (which in polling the majority of Americans of both parties desire).

Foreign policy expert Matt Duss pointed to another disinformation campaign:

pic.twitter.com/h2KG6p0SW1

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) March 12, 2024

Another poster saw a pattern:

Lol.

You can watch the roll out of the propaganda in real time…

As a bunch of geographically dispersed accounts amazingly arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously. pic.twitter.com/tJk7NmfI7z

— Conor Hennessy (@typingduck) March 12, 2024

In fact, the red pins were distributed by ArtistsForCeasefire
who said, “The pin symbolises collective support for an immediate and permanent cease-fire, the release of all of the hostages and for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza,”

Israeli propaganda, or Hasbara, as Duss points out, has reached the level of irrationality and of sheer crazy that characterizes QAnon conspiracies such as Pizzagate and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers.

That is why we increasingly have to consider what comes out of AIPAC, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office and other Zionist organizations as QZionism, a form of information pollution.

            Seeing videos of hundreds of innocent, peaceful Israelis brutally murdered, kidnapped and worse at a music festival was horrifying. Knowing that Hamas committed similar crimes against humanity at 21 other sites that day is beyond infuriating and heartbreaking. It makes anybody want to fight back hard. But political capital can be gained by some measure of restraint, and Bibi knows no such thing. It’s no less maddening and infuriating to see Bibi’s government retaliate with ten times the force, committing mass murders from 20,000 feet of ten times the number of women, children and noncombatant men killed by armed thugs on October 7. Seeing hundreds of thousands of destitute people trudging through the streets of Gaza with no place to go makes me weep. Knowing that their suffering is caused by a gross and sanctimonious perversion of Jewish ideals makes it all the more maddening.

            It’s also maddening to realize the gross hubris and arrogance of the Israeli intelligence and Army, which dispensed with sentry border guards in favor of an electronic system, which was so easily destroyed by Hamas while they were sleeping. I was shocked to learn there were no actual eyes, ears and guns at those entry points, after my experiences traveling throughout a heavily militarized Middle East and Israel many years ago. Though I’m an American Jew, I had to establish my bona fides not only before entering Israel at the notorious Rafah gate, but also before entering some places I expected a more cordial welcome. My two days at a conference in 1980 (right after Camp David) in Nazareth elicited noticeable security monitoring to make me feel watched. The security officials seem to have monitored tourists more efficiently forty years ago than the Netanyahu government monitored Gaza’s main gates last October. It appears that it had sent some forces to help squatters on the West Bank, over-confident that Hamas in Gaza was content to play Israel’s policeman on the Strip.

Embed from Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 13: U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks at a news conference calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the U.S. Capitol building on November 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. House Democrats held the news conference alongside rabbis with the activist group Jewish Voices for Peace. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).

The UN and much of the global public square have not always been a friendly place for Israel, but not because most of the world hates Jews. After all, we earned a lot of global affection and support for surviving the Holocaust. Critics of this rain of death from the skies don’t hate Jews. They hate what Israel has been doing to innocent Palestinian civilians since 1948, and more recently the juggernaut of bombardments in Gaza. Is there a more profane definition of “overkill” than ensuring that ten or twenty Palestinians die for every Israel Jew who is killed?

Zionism is not Judaism and any assertion to the contrary by Israeli propagandists only tars Jews with the brush of the Likud-led government’s war crimes. Most American Jews of the younger generation are uncomfortable with what Zionism has become. Whatever the original virtues of Zionism as a way for persecuted Jews of the Pale to assert their self-worth, it has now mutated into a quest to humiliate and dominate another people. Zionism became increasingly cruel under the Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, more so under Ariel Sharon, and more even destructively radical under Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi). Yes, Zionism was always exclusionary to encourage Jewish immigration (aliyah), but extremists have transformed it into a sick, cruel ideology that impelled the arrogant, imperial atrocities committed by Israeli governments led by those three. It’s as though Bibi and Donald Trump both fulfill their parties’ ultimate fantasies for a cruel, dystopian, Fascist agenda. The devolution quickly escalated under Bibi, just as the Republican Party has quickly devolved under Trump.

They hate the predations of the far-far right wing Israeli settlers who embrace Biblical myth as a valid historical record, as if it carries the weight of modern diplomacy and valid treaties. Modern Middle Eastern diplomacy began after WWI at the 1920 Sam Remo Conference in Italy, and the law of occupation is enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, not in ancient texts. That’s how most of the world sees it. Recent Israeli governments have empowered the illegal squatters to commit even more atrocities against Palestinian people, property, schools, farms, and water and food supplies.

I consider myself to be a good, UN-Orthodox Jew, and see no need to change. I accept my lifelong unpopularity with Republican Jews where I’ve lived, who tend to dominate the synagogues and social agencies of many American cities. They were the class seduced by Reaganomics, and they see no need to change either. (Familiarity breeds contempt at times.)  Still, a great majority of Jewish Americans are fiercely progressive, forcefully calling out the sins of the Israeli military and Republican Party. We oppose the self-annihilating tendencies of Jewish Republicans who abandoned the progressive agenda and moved increasingly to the far-far right under the Bush boys,  and Donald Trump, who realizes all the dystopian elements of the Republican fantasy model after the Bush’s and Reagan just weren’t mean enough.

PIX 11 News from 2 weeks ago: “Jewish peace activists hold sit-in protest at Grand Central to demand ceasefire in Israel-Hamas conf”

            No one cannibalizes their own like Republicans and especially Jewish Republicans. Before and during the founding of Israel, many deeply observant Orthodox Jews fiercely opposed the creation of Israel, and some still do. They view the creation of a political entity in the Biblical homeland as a disruption to the arrival of the Messiah. They too are anti-Zionist, but out of different motivation. We are not a monolith.

            Despite what I am about to say, I don’t argue for abandoning the medical and humanitarian needs of people living in Israel in a time of war. The majority of them hate their government, as most Americans hate Trump. These atrocities are not in their name either. I argue for a more thoughtful Israeli government, invested in a solution that will solve Palestinian statelessness and thereby provide security for Jews. That outcome is unlikely to be achieved by the lawless and authoritarian Netanyahu government, which is wedded to destroying the courts to remain in power.

Through more than 40 years of my commitment to academic study of Israel and Palestine, I avoided calling myself an “anti-Zionist.” Given the discrimination, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust that Jews faced at the hands of European white nationalism of the Fascist era, it was hard not to thrill at the realization of a long-held dream of Jews to return to the “Promised Land.” This began as a formal political movement with the 1^st Zionist Congress in Basle in 1896. It became a quadrennial conference, and Jewish immigration to Palestine began in increasingly larger waves. Many Jews like me styled themselves Zionists, who nevertheless objected to the notorious Israeli “military excesses.” (A euphemism for cold-blooded, systemic murder and piracy.) But as a Jew, I’ve never been more opposed to what Zionism has become. The massive overkill and atrocities in Gaza led by Bibi since October 7 and the relentless attacks on Palestinian people and properties in Occupied Palestine of the West Bank by right-wing settlers have driven me firmly to the anti-Zionist camp.

In Nazi Germany, Hertha Reis, a 36-year-old Jewish woman, performed forced labor for a private company in Berlin during World War II. In 1941, she was evicted by a judge from the two sublet rooms where she lived with her son and mother – she was unprotected as a tenant because of an anti-Jewish law.

In plain daylight, in front of the courthouse in the heart of the Nazi capital, she protested in front of passersby.

“We lost everything. Because of this cursed government, we finally lost our home, too. This thug Hitler, this damned government, these damned people,” she said. “Just because we are Jews, we are discriminated against.”

Historians knew of clandestine acts of resistance, of course, and of armed group resistance, such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising. But in the dominant understanding of the Nazi period until now, the act of speaking out publicly as an individual against the persecution of Jews seemed unimaginable, especially for the Jews.

But in July 2008, I stumbled on the first trace of such public acts of resistance in the logbook of a Berlin police precinct, one of the few chronicles of its kind that had survived in the Berlin State Archive.

The entry, bearing the label “political incident,” was written by a police officer who had arrested a Jewish man protesting against the Nazi anti-Jewish policies. At the time of the discovery, I had studied the persecution of German Jews intensively for almost 20 years, but I had never heard of anything like this.

Intrigued, I started investigating. Subsequently, finding more and more similar stories of resistance in court records and survivor testimonies began to shatter my established scholarly beliefs.

A display box for the ‘Der Stürmer’ newspaper that has been defaced to read, ‘The Jews are our fortune’ instead of ‘The Jews are our misfortune.’ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Miriamne Fields

Challenging traditional views of Jewish resistance

Historians, including myself, had long painted a picture of passivity of the persecuted. When discrimination in Nazi Germany gradually increased, the Jews slowly adapted, so went the argument. More generally, an assumption still exists today that defiance, especially individual protest, is rare in authoritarian regimes.

The astonishing evidence from the Berlin police files resonated deeply with me on a personal level. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The communist regime persecuted even mild expressions of individual opposition as threats. This personal experience of living in a dictatorship until the age of 28 provided me with a distinct sensitivity that enabled me to recognize day-to-day forms of resistance.

Knowing from history that the treatment of the political opposition in Nazi Germany was so much more brutal, how much more serious must the Hitler regime have perceived any signs of resistance coming from their No. 1 racial enemy, the Jews?

Still, today the public and many scholars understand Jewish resistance during the Holocaust mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan attacks.

By including individual acts and, thus, broadening the traditional definition of Jewish resistance, over a dozen years of systematic research I was able to unearth many new sources – from police and court records of various German cities to video testimonies of survivors – that documented a much greater volume and variety of resistance acts than could ever have been imagined.

The astonishing results change the view of Jewish resistance during World War II dramatically. The story of Hertha Reis and many other potent tales of individual defiance and courage contradict the common misconception that Jews were led like sheep to slaughter during the Holocaust.

A 17-year-old challenges the Nazi regime

Searching the Hesse Main State archive in Wiesbaden, I found the story of Hans Oppenheimer. He left his four-story apartment house every night for weeks in 1940, breaking the curfew for Jews. Not a single light illuminated the street in front of him. The city of Frankfurt had ordered a brownout to protect it from Allied air raids.

A few blocks away from his home, Hans hid in a doorway. With the entire city, Hans waited anxiously for the bombs to fall.

Persecuted because he was Jewish, as a 17-year-old, Hans had already toiled as a forced laborer for a year and a half, most recently unloading stones and cement bags from river barges for 10 hours every day. He earned only pennies and felt constantly harassed.

Hans had never been to a movie or a play, because those were prohibited for Jews in Frankfurt. As a Jewish adolescent, he saw no future in Nazi Germany. Because the war prevented him from leaving, he had decided to do something.

Every night, he waited in the dark, anxious and excited. When the sirens started to blare, announcing that the Allied bombers were closing in, Hans set off fire alarms to divert the German firefighters from the actual bombing sites. In December 1940, after he had set off dozens of false alarms, the police finally manage to catch Hans red-handed.

The Frankfurt prosecutor indicted Hans Oppenheimer and put him on trial. Since the court could not prove treason, the now 18-year-old received only three years in prison for sabotaging the war effort.

Incarcerated and isolated, Hans suffered from severe depression and physical debilitation. When the prison officials did not respond to his repeated complaints, the young man attempted to take his own life twice. At the end of 1942, the Gestapo deported all Jewish prison inmates from Germany to Auschwitz. Hans Oppenheimer did not survive there for long, because of his weakened state. He died on Jan. 30, 1943, just days after he had turned 20 years old.

A new history of Jewish resistance

Forgotten until now, between 1933 and 1945 hundreds and hundreds of Jewish women and men performed individual acts of resistance in Nazi Germany proper. I present many of their stories in my new book, “Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany.”

They destroyed Nazi symbols, protested in public against the persecution, disobeyed Nazi laws and local restrictions and defended themselves from verbal insults as well as physical attacks.

Amazingly, Jews of all ages, educational backgrounds and professions resisted in many ways. Some did it repeatedly, others just once. The fact that so many Germans and Austrians individually resisted the Nazis and their policies obliterates the common misconception of the passivity of the persecuted Jews.

Instead, such widespread individual acts of resistance during World War II provide a new view of history: that Jews showed agency in fighting their persecution by the Nazis. And this, in turn, demonstrates that individual resistance is possible under even the worst genocidal circumstances.

Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Lizi Rosenfeld, a Jewish woman, sits on a park bench bearing a sign that reads, ‘Only for Aryans,’ in August 1938 in Vienna.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum /Provenance: Leo Spitzer, CC BY-SA

A survey commissioned in 2019 revealed the shocking result that over half of Britons did not know that at least six millions Jews had been murdered during the Holocaust.

This result was all the more surprising given the fact that the Holocaust, as a topic, has been part of the national curriculum in England and Wales since its creation in 1991. The 2014 iteration of the national curriculum has the Holocaust as a firm part of key stage 3 history – compulsory for all 11 to 14-year-olds in state schools. Additionally, many secondary school pupils may encounter the Holocaust as a topic in English or religious education lessons.

However, research into what school pupils in England know about the Holocaust shows that they lack knowledge about its context. They may know bare facts – ghettos, deportations, concentration camps – but are less clear on the ideology that led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust in the first place. Pupils may not be clear what exactly it is they need to take away from those lessons and how they can be relevant to their contemporary lives.

For instance, it is important to understand how politicians sought to gain popular support by blaming minorities such as Jewish people for all the ills Germany experienced after the first world war. Relentless anti-Jewish propaganda was used to indoctrinate the general population.

It is for this reason that literature can be a meaningful additional teaching tool, not only in schools but also for everybody interested in the events leading up to the Holocaust. Literature can broaden horizons and deepen knowledge. It can offer different perspectives, often in the same narrative; it teaches us empathy but it can also help us to acquire facts and additional knowledge.

However, the sheer number of books on the Holocaust – survivor accounts, biographies, novels, factual books – can be overwhelming.

Sometimes, bestselling books on the Holocaust, such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) or Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), lack the factually correct underpinning that is necessary to make them a good way to learn about the history. It is consequently vital to find books that meaningfully introduce their readers to the topic and that provide carefully researched historical context.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

One example is Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) which is based on Kerr’s own childhood experience. It is the story of 9-year-old Jewish girl Anna who has a happy childhood in Germany until the day her father, wanted by the Nazis, has to leave the country.

Anna’s subsequent narrative outlines the repressions affecting Jewish life on a daily basis. She encounters public events such as the staged book burnings and the daily propaganda that perpetuated falsehoods about Jews. As such, it is an excellent – though hard-hitting – way to introduce a younger readership to the prejudices and reprisals Jews were increasingly subjected to in Nazi Germany.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) is probably the one Holocaust book most people have heard of. It charts the two years Anne and her family spent in hiding in Amsterdam.

The book is often praised for its positive and hopeful message. It is, however, vital that even young readers are made aware of the fact that the Franks were eventually discovered by the Nazis, deported to Auschwitz and from there to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne tragically died in early 1945.

Night

Survivor accounts are generally the best way to learn about the Holocaust. Older teenagers could read Elie Wiesel’s outstanding Night (1958). It describes, in a dispassionate voice, Wiesel’s experiences of being deported from his home town of Sighet in what is now Romania, first to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald.

Wiesel lost his father, mother and youngest sister in the Holocaust and dedicated his life to Holocaust education. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. If anybody plans to read just one book on the Holocaust, it should probably be this one.

Maus

Some young readers might be reluctant to read such hard-hitting accounts by witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. They might be persuaded to engage with the topic, though, through Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus.

Spiegelman’s book recounts the story of his father Vladek and mother Anja, who both survived Nazi concentration camps. He uses the imagery of an animal fable by depicting his Jewish characters as mice who are chased by the Nazi cats. While this is potentially a distancing device to soften the impact of his illustrations, it also helps Spiegelman to pass critical comments on the Nazis’ notorious attempts to classify people into strictly segregated groups.

Maus made it back into the bestseller lists in January 2022 when a County School Board in Tennessee controversially banned it from its classrooms and libraries. Censorship is not yet a thing of the past – and it is, maybe, especially the people making decisions about education who ought to read these texts.

Using literature as a tool to augment Holocaust teaching in secondary schools might be a good way to further pupils’ learning and understanding not just of the Holocaust, but of the ideologies, populism and propaganda that lay behind it – and how to identify similar narratives that are, worryingly, on the rise again in the world around them.

Christine Berberich, Reader in Literature, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – In the era of social media, antisemitism and Holocaust denial are no longer hidden in the margins, spewed by fringe hate groups. From Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – and NBA player Kyrie Irving to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, well-recognized personalities have echoed antisemitic ideas, often online.

Technology is increasingly important in Holocaust education – seen here in ‘The Journey Back’ within The Richard and Jill Chaifetz Family Virtual Reality Gallery at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, CC BY-NC-ND

Beyond high-profile figures, there are clear signs that antisemitism is becoming more mainstream. In 2021, using the most recent data available, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents in the U.S. reached an all-time high. Eighty-five percent of Americans believe at least one anti-Jewish trope, according to another ADL survey, and about 20% believe six or more tropes – a sharp increase from just four years before. In addition, Jewish college students increasingly report feeling unsafe, ostracized or harassed on campus.

All of this is layered on top of a widespread lack of knowledge about the Holocaust. As International Holocaust Remembrance Day approaches – Jan. 27, the day Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated – it is important to rethink how educators like me design lessons on antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Rather than teaching the Holocaust as an isolated event, educators must grapple with how it connects to antisemitism past and present. That means adapting to how people learn and live today: online.

Toxic information landscape

The online ecosystem where today’s antisemitism flourishes is a Wild West of information and misinformation that is largely unmonitored, distributed in an instant, and posted by anyone. Social media posts and news feeds are frequently filtered by algorithms that narrow the content users receive, reinforcing already held beliefs.

Mainstream platforms like TikTok, with soaring growth among young people, can be used to promote antisemitism, as can less well-known apps such as Telegram.

According to a 2022 report by the United Nations, 17% of public TikTok content related to the Holocaust either denied or distorted it. The same was true of almost 1 in 5 Holocaust-related Twitter posts and 49% of Holocaust content on Telegram.

An emerging danger is artificial intelligence technology. New AI resources offer potential teaching tools – but also the menace of easily spread and unmonitored misinformation. For example, character AI and Historical Figures Chat allow you to “chat” with a historical figure, including those associated with the Holocaust: from victims like Holocaust diarist Anne Frank to perpetrators such as Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda.

These sites come with warnings that characters’ responses could be made up and that users should check for historical accuracy, but it is easy to be misled by inaccurate answers.

Another potential AI hazard is deepfake videos. Media experts are warning about the potential for destabilizing “truth decay,” the inability to know what is real and what is fake, as the amount of synthetic content multiplies. Holocaust scholars are preparing to combat how historical sources and educational materials may be manipulated by deepfakes. There is particular concern that deepfakes will be used to manipulate or undercut survivors’ testimony.

Media literacy

Much of my scholarship tackles contemporary approaches to teaching the Holocaust – for example, the need to rethink education as the number of Holocaust survivors who are still able to tell their stories rapidly declines. Addressing today’s toxic information landscape presents another fundamental challenge that requires innovative solutions.

As a first step, educators can promote media literacy, the knowledge and skills needed to navigate and critique online information, and teach learners to approach sources with both healthy criticism and an open mind. Key strategies for K-12 students include training them to consider who is behind particular information and what evidence is provided and to investigate the creators of an unknown online source by seeing what trusted websites say about its information or authors.

Media literacy also entails identifying a source’s author, genre, purpose and point of view, as well as reflecting on one’s own point of view. Finally, it is important to trace claims, quotes and media back to the original source or context.

Applying these skills to a Holocaust unit might focus on recognizing the implicit stereotypes and misinformation online sources often rely on and paying attention to who these sources are and what their purpose is. Lessons can also analyze how social media enables Holocaust denial and investigate common formats for online antisemitism, such as deepfake videos, memes and troll attacks.

Learning in the digital age

Holocaust educators can also embrace new technologies, rather than just lament their pitfalls. For example, long after survivors die, people will be able to “converse” with them in museums and classrooms using specially recorded testimonies and natural language technology. Such programs can match a visitor’s questions with relevant parts of prerecorded interviews, responding almost as though they were talking to the visitor in person.

Holocaust Memorial. Pixabay.

There are also immersive virtual reality programs that combine recorded survivor testimonies with VR visits to concentration camps, survivors’ hometowns and other historical sites. One such exhibition is “The Journey Back” at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Not only can VR experiences transport viewers to such sites in a more realistic way than traditional lessons, but they also allow learners to partially decide how to interact with the virtual environment. In interviews for my current research, viewers report Holocaust VR experiences make them feel emotionally engaged with a survivor.

Society’s ‘family tree’

People often learn about themselves by exploring their family trees, examining heirlooms passed down from ancestors and telling stories around the dinner table – helping people make sense of who they are.

The same principle applies to understanding society. Studying the past provides a road map of how people and prior events shaped today’s conditions, including antisemitism. It is important for young people to understand that antisemitism’s horrific history did not originate with the Holocaust. Lessons that lead students to reflect on how indifference and collaboration fueled hate – or how everyday people helped stop it – can inspire them to speak up and act in response to rising antisemitism.

Holocaust education is not a neutral endeavor. As survivor and scholar Elie Wiesel said when accepting his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

Alan Marcus, Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I learned about Anne Frank from my mother and grandma, and read parts of her Diary when I was about the same age as she had been when she was murdered. The Holocaust documentary shows how her family’s backstory illustrates the “slow creep” of Fascism, which I view as a mischaracterization. In the context of history, it happened in a flash, after a creeping build-up that accelerated after the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Hearing accounts of Anne Frank from survivor Susan Helsinrath Warsinger, we learned that Anne was brighter, more thoughtful and more mischievous than most girls her age. We found out that her father owned a successful business in Berlin, and moved his family to Amsterdam as he recognized the growing threat in Germany. The Netherlands seemed like a safe place until Hitler stormed all of Europe. Borders shifted rapidly during this period, as refugees’ sought safe havens that became more ever more elusive.

The United States did not form such a haven for Jews in the age of the Holocaust. The American State Department was run by a WASPY clique of anti-Semitic bigots. Their prejudices were enforced by the residual economic pressures of the Great Depression, which fed the existing xenophobia towards all immigrants, but Jews in particular because so many of them would have fled to the U.S. if they could have. It was argued that with 25 percent unemployment, letting in large numbers of immigrants would produce riots in the streets by workers afraid for what few jobs were available to them, but it is hard to disentangle this convenient narrative from the anti-Semitic prejudices of those who most often offered it.

Sadly, the anti-Semitism that infected the State Department was never extinguished in the U.S. It has been nurtured back into prominence by Donald Trump and his followers, as has brazen racism toward other groups.

Watching the excavation by Burns, Novick and Botstein of the slow creep of an unbalanced far right in Germany reminded me vividly of what we have seen happen in the United States over the past half-decade. The Fascism of Trump’s political movement has taken over the Republican Party, and threatens to destroy the Republic. The MAGA denial of the results of the 2020 Election and its determination to rig future elections are undeniable, sinister dynamics. Their canonization of Trump leaves them with no respect for democratic outcomes. He has fueled their fears of the Great Replacement Theory and anti-Semitism in America, while trying to insult Jews into supporting him. The farther Jews become removed from the Holocaust, the greater is our tendency to euphemize and sugar-coat bad news, and even to be enticed into far-right politics. Jews who cater to Trump are a mystifying lot, ignorant as to how they contribute to our own demise by supporting him. Consider:

The basis of Hitler’s persecution was that Jews were a “race,” to be extinguished. The idea that Jews are a single race is refuted by the differences in ancestry between Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Europe, and Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. Trump declared Judaism to be a race, in a 2019 Executive Order. His pretext was that Jews were being persecuted on college campuses by pro-Palestinian activists. At the time, he condescended to American Jews saying, “You’re brutal killers; you’re not nice people, but you have to vote for me; you have no choice . . .” Yet this blood libel did not dissuade right-wing American Jews from supporting him.

This week, he upped the ante saying, “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith . . . , U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!” The dramatic teachings from the Burns documentary illustrate this sort of rhetoric is no trifling matter.

Trump has exploited decades of white nationalist frustrations and taken the Republican party to the outer fringes of the far-far right. His followers now appear to view the outcomes of the Civil War and WWII as objectionable, as witnessed by their unapologetic racism and growing allegiance to right-wing dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban in Hungary. That CPAC held their conference in Hungary speaks volumes about the Republican mindset under Trump.

Trump’s insidiousness lies in the fact that his movement is gaining strength without him. As part of the America First coalition, there are 299 Republican candidates for federal, state and local offices, who deny the results of the 2020 Election. Their goal is to rig elections, restore Trump to power and stack every level of government with people friendly to their agenda. The fall of Liz Cheney and rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene underlines the extent of the threat.

People can no more be a little bit fascist than women can be a little bit pregnant. The parallels of our present dysfunction to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here are haunting. Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. MAGA fulfills Lewis’s prophecy, depicted in his novel, of the League of Forgotten Men, while the army Trump commanded to storm the capital is the realization of Lewis’s Minute Men, a paramilitary force intervening in politics. His followers’ intent is to delegitimize any election results they don’t like and to take over every level of government. It IS happening here, and it must be stopped to prevent Civil War II, or the breakup of the United States.

The summer of 2022 marked the 80th anniversary of the first Nazi deportation of Jewish families from Germany to Auschwitz.

Although the Nazis deported hundreds of thousands of Jewish men and women, for many places where those tragic events happened, no images are known to document the crime. Surprisingly, there’s not even photographic evidence from Berlin, the Nazi capital and home to Germany’s largest Jewish community.

The lack of known images is important. Unlike in the past, historians now agree that photographs and film must be taken seriously as primary sources for their research. These sources can complement the analysis of administrative documents and survivor testimonies and thus enrich our understanding of Nazi persecution.

As a historian originally from Germany and now teaching in the U.S., I have researched the Nazi persecution of the Jews for 30 years and published 10 books on the Holocaust.

I searched for unpublished images in all the archives I visited during my research. But I have to admit that I – along with many of my colleagues – did not take the gathered visual evidence seriously as a primary source and rather used it to illustrate my publications.

During the past decade, scholars have realized how pictures can contribute to our understanding of mass violence as well as the resistance to it. Some can provide the only evidence we have about an act of persecution – for example, a photograph of anti-Jewish graffiti. Others will reveal additional details, as in the image of a court proceeding against anti-Nazi resistors.

Photographs are now in some cases the sole objects of scholarly inquiry. They are used to identify perpetrators and victims in specific cases, when other sources would not reveal them.

Here’s one example: An image shows uniformed Nazis standing in front of a passenger train filled with German Jews in Munich on Nov. 20, 1942. Who were those men? More importantly, what are the stories of the barely recognizable victims behind the windows in this image?

Investigating photos of Nazi deportations

Between 1938 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were deported from Germany, mainly to ghettos and camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

To make pictures of Nazi deportations accessible for research and education, a group of university, educational and archival institutions in Germany and the Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California launched the #LastSeen Project — Pictures of Nazi Deportations in October 2021.

This effort aims to locate, collect and analyze images of Nazi mass deportations in Germany. The deportations started with the forced expulsion of around 17,000 Jews of Polish origin in October 1938, right before the widespread antisemitic violence of Kristallnacht, and culminated in the mass deportations to Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945.

The mass deportation targeted not only Jews, but also people with disabilities as well as tens of thousands of Romani.

What can we learn from the pictures? Not only when, where and how these forced relocations took place, but who participated, who witnessed them and who was affected by the persecution acts.

I work with the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to manage the outreach for the #LastSeen Project in the English-speaking world. The project has three main goals: first, gathering all existing pictures. These images will then be analyzed to identify the victims and perpetrators and recover the stories behind the pictures. Finally, a digital platform will provide access to all the images and unearthed information, both enabling a new level of study of this visual evidence and establishing a powerful tool against Holocaust denial.

When the project began, the partners were skeptical of whether we would find a significant number of never-before-seen images of mass deportations.

But after addressing the German public and querying 1,750 German archives, within the first six months of the project we received dozens of unknown images, more then doubling the number of German towns, from 27 to over 60, where we now have photographs documenting Nazi deportations.

Many of these photos had collected dust on shelves in local archives in Germany, and some were found in private homes. In the future, the project hopes for discoveries in archives, museums and family possession in the U.S. and the U.K., but also in Canada, South Africa and Australia. We know that liberators took photographs with them from Germany at the end of the war, and survivors received them later via various channels.

Tracing unknown images beyond Germany

The project has already located photos in the United States. In two cases, survivors had donated them to archives, which project staff learned during research visits. Simon Strauss gave an image to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum depicting the deportation in his German hometown of Hanau. He wrote on it, “Uncle Ludwig transported.” The second photo was at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, which had received the hitherto only known picture from the Nazi deportation of the Jews in Bad Homburg.

To locate more photos, the project counts on the help of ordinary citizens, researchers, archivists, museum curators and survivors’ families.

After joining the project, I searched the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which holds over 53,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Many of the Jews who gave testimony talked about Nazi deportations. All interviewees shared photographs. While many of these more than 700,000 images are artifacts of personal value, such as family and wedding photos, some images depict Nazi persecution.

Within minutes of my search using the term “deportation stills” I was staring at photographs showing a Nazi deportation in a small town in central Germany. At the end of his 1996 interview, Lothar Lou Beverstein, born in 1921, shared two photographs from his hometown of Halberstadt that he had received from friends after the war. Beverstein identified his father, Hugo, and his mother, Paula, in an image showing Nazis lining up deportees in front of the city’s famous 13th-century Gothic cathedral.

Both of Lou Beverstein’s parents were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto on April 12, 1942. In his interview, Beverstein declared that to his knowledge nobody survived from that transport, which supposedly consisted of 24 men, 59 women and 23 children. Now the project needs to locate Lou Beverstein’s family in the United States or connect to other descendants from Halberstadt to find out more about the origins of the images and the identities of the deportees depicted in them.

Naming and recognizing victims

The identities of deportees and perpetrators in the existing images are often unknown. Most photographs show groups of victims whom project staff aim to identify so they and their stories can be acknowledged. This is very difficult, since there are seldom close-up shots.

Even in a photograph clearly showing two Jewish girls, we do not know anything other than that the Gestapo deported them to Kowno with the same transport depicted in the image showing Munich Jews being deported referenced at the beginning of this article. The nearly 1,000 deportees from Munich were shot soon after they arrived at their destination in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.

This is but one example of how scholars desperately need the public’s help to recover the stories of countless unidentified victims of the Nazis.

Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image: Jewish deportees march through the German town of Würzburg to the railroad station on April 25, 1942. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

Disinformation and misinformation have long been tools of war to win hearts and minds. Accusing the opposition of your own sins, and re-writing history has been in the playbook of autocrats and dirty politicians from the beginning. Putin’s claim that Ukraine is an integral part of Russian history and culture is backwards. Ukraine and Russia both came into being in the mid-9^th Century as part of an empire founded by Vikings, called Kievan Rus. Putin’s claim that Ukraine was a creation of 1917 Revolution conflicts with the historical reality that Lenin allowed Ukraine remain autonomous within the USSR after the revolution. Ukraine and Russia were founded by medieval Vikings in a compact, which lasted from 842-1262, and also included Belarus. Kiev was established centuries before Moscow was anything but a virgin forest, and Putin’s claim that Ukraine language and culture evolved out of Russia is backwards. Kiev is considered the point of origin for Russian culture and language. Ukraine and its capital have always been an imperialist target owing to its convenient location along early trade routes, land mass and great natural wealth.

Putin’s rewriting of history is also a tactic to consolidate power, and as credible is Trump claim that the 2020 Election was stolen. Both are brazen fictions. Denying the validity of a people’s culture and history has been used in America to deny Indians their birthright, and in Israel to deny the validity of Palestinian history and autonomy, as a facet of subjugation. Putin’s pretext for invasion was to declare the Ukrainian eastern states of Donetsk and Luhansk to be independent republics under Ukrainian oppression. So he sent troops as “peacekeepers,” which may be the most twisted application of that word in socio-linguistic history. The recent threat began in April 2014, when Russian-backed rebels seized government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk. World War I and the expanding Nazi and Soviet empires threatened and obscured the historical statehood of many Eastern European countries, but Ukraine ultimately prevailed, re-establishing its autonomy and declaring independence in 1991.

Yevtushenko was not Jewish, but expressed eternal solidarity and identify with the Jews of Babi Yar, saying,

“I am as old as the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

The reference to Jesus reminds readers that he was also a Jew, persecuted for his teachings. The poet invokes an “I am Spartacus” spirit, expressing his empathy and identity with the victims. References to Anne Frank, Alfred Dreyfus and other Jewish martyrs help illustrate the far-reaching history of anti-Semitism. The poet goes on to mourn the lost spirit of his beloved Russia to hateful, anti-Semitic forces saying,

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The anti-Semites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

Sadly, these words also foreshadow the madness of Putin, with his audacity of claiming to bring peace where it had existed, until his troops entered shooting, after his planes and missiles destroyed lives and property. Before the Holocaust, Ukraine had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe of 2.7 million. Nazi soldiers and death squads killed 1.5 million, and the entire population was herded into ghettos, displaced or executed. The poem concludes:

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of anti-Semites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by anti-Semites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

I memorized that poem in high school, when the physical and intellectual freedom of Soviet Jews was a global cause, and have seen varying translations. The horror of the first land war in Europe in my lifetime is unfolding in real time. Because my paternal grandfather, Louis Prosterman was from Kiev, this is somewhat personal. He emigrated at the Port of New Orleans shortly after the 1917 Revolution, for which he had been conscripted, and then made his way to Atlanta where he graduated from Emory University Dental School. Yevtushenko’s poem concludes inferring that his resistance and objection to anti-Semitism reflects the true core of Russian identity, rather than the Cossacks and Einsatzgruppen who perpetrated the pogroms by the Czars and the massacres by Nazis. True Russians he argues, react with audible and silent screams in fierce objection to such acts. Now they are rising up on the streets in visible opposition to the Ukraine invasion, at risk of arrest and brutal detention. The screams in Russia are no longer silent.

Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a “denazification” of the country.

In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to “protect people” who had been “subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

Image by (Joenomias) Menno de Jong from Pixabay.

The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine’s new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin’s authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.

As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.

Ukraine’s Jewish leadership

First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom “Servant of the People,” from which his party’s name was derived.

Mykhaylo Markiv / The Presidential Administration of Ukraine, 20 May 2019

The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family” was barely noted during the election. “Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it,” he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky’s election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.

For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”

The pogroms against Jews

Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.

During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.

Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.

Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.

A pluralistic state

Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.

One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups – Russians, Jews, and Poles – broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.

The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.

From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland’s borders.

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At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.

In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.

Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.

Jeffrey Veidlinger, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.