Last week on The Alex Jones Show, a balaclava-clad Kanye West delivered what may seem like the senseless ramble of a lone lunatic beyond the state’s purview to silence — something to lament but impossible to halt.
The truth is much different. That a celebrity of West’s stature harbors antisemitic prejudices evinces a clear societal failure on many levels, let alone that he feels comfortable in public expressing them. Besides the promoters who signed him on their brands’ campaigns and the media gatekeepers who gave him rent-free platforms, the last-resort guardrail that could have stopped West, who now goes by Ye, on his path to delivering his screed was, well, middle school. Despite the inherent difficulties of teaching such a vast and complex subject, thousands of history teachers are realizing once more that, if done right, teaching about the Holocaust is society’s last best hope to eradicate antisemitic hate.
KANYE WEST STRIPPED OF HONORARY DEGREE, A FIRST FOR PRESTIGIOUS CHICAGO ART SCHOOL
Here is how America can do a better job going forward.
The first erroneous perception to fix is the idea that teaching the Holocaust somehow involves an attempt to rank the suffering of every human group imaginable in order of magnitude. In other words, it is wrong to assume that Holocaust education is a kind of victimhood Olympics and that atop the pyramid are the Jews, whose suffering is beyond the pale to compare to that of the Armenians, the Rohingya, or even the Uyghurs.
Instead, important though the figures are to any fact-based account of history, the teaching of the Holocaust shouldn’t hammer on about the 6 million lives lost but instead zero in on the incommensurable human suffering of each one and their loved ones. The focus should be on the Holocaust’s human dimension, honed through the eyewitness testimony of survivors. This emphasis would better equip students to assess the role the Holocaust plays in the long arc of humanity’s horrors. Humans, Ye included, can more easily relate to humans than to numbers.
Secondly, and contra demands by prominent Jewish organizations, the Holocaust ought to be taught entirely separately from the state of Israel’s troubled history. Jewish history may seem like a cohesive, teleological whole to hardened Zionists, but failing to make this distinction amounts to a misconstruction of history that also fosters antisemitic prejudice among non-experts. Surely, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened the way it did if European Jews had been free to move to Palestine — the fault lies on the Germans as much as on the British, who controlled Palestine, and the Americans, who failed to open their doors, too. Granted, Israel’s existence is the best insurance against it ever happening again. But Israel is more than a haven for Holocaust survivors. In fact, two-thirds of Israelis are not European Jews. When its existence is justified by reference to the Holocaust alone, its legitimacy in the eyes of the non-Jewish public isn’t strengthened — it falters.
And finally, all efforts to teach the Holocaust should frame it as a preventable tragedy, one that put into play the ethical consciousness of millions who could have done more to save Jewish lives. This doesn’t necessarily mean boxing all midcentury Europeans into the categories of perpetrator, victim, and collaborator — that distinction is not a binary one but one of degree. Making said distinction brings out the world-historical tragedy of the Holocaust and frames it as the bellwether event it was, the canary in the coal mine of a corrosion that may well haunt us again.
Nor should this amount to a direct parallel between 1930s Germany and antisemitism in today’s America. It should, however, amount to a wake-up call and recognition that even the most minor acts of intolerance are a slippery slope toward more, with no end in sight.
There may be little we can do to correct the deficiencies in Ye’s education, but there is a lot we can do to make sure they’re corrected for future generations.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Jorge Gonzalez-Gallarza (@JorgeGGallarza) is the co-host of the Uncommon Decency podcast.
