It was not uncommon practice in medicine just a short time ago to withhold particularly distressing information from patients about the seriousness of their conditions. This left misled patients confused about treatment and prospects of recovery. Concerned husbands were entrusted with medical information that professionals judged too distressing to tell their wives. Confused and scared patients were left at the mercy of medical professionals in an age where agency and consent were not priorities.
Fortunately, the prevailing wisdom in the medical community (and the law, for that matter) no longer endorses this approach. Not only are patients individuals with the right to make their own healthcare decisions, a realistic and sober-minded encounter with reality allows those with catastrophic diagnoses to face their futures with resolve. It turns out that a clear diagnosis allows for clear-headed treatment decisions.
Not only is this true for individual ills, it is also true for social ills. To eradicate a cancer from the human body or from the body politic, we must face the nature of the cancer, the prognosis, and the risks of ignoring it. For far too long, we’ve failed to face the reality of the scourge of antisemitism in the West.
In November 2005, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 60/7, which established January 27 as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This date was chosen to correspond with the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp near Oświęcim, Poland.
Even the generation that witnessed the Holocaust couldn’t truly grasp the enormity and scale of the event. There wasn’t even a word to describe the crime committed by Nazi Germany until the term “genocide” was coined in 1948. And a still yet-to-be completed research project undertaken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1999 has uncovered tens of thousands of previously undocumented sites across Europe where the murder, violence, and dehumanization of the Holocaust took place. So, it is clear that this is a laudable and necessary day of remembrance.
But just like the physicians of an earlier era, Resolution 60/7 fails to identify the root of the problem. It reminds us that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It urges measures to “prevent future acts of genocide.” But never once is “antisemitism” mentioned.
It makes no explicit reference to antisemitism, but references more generic motivations of “hatred, bigotry, racism, and prejudice.” While other groups fell victim to Nazi Germany’s murderous rampage across Europe, we know that only the “Jewish Question” gave rise to the “Final Solution.”
The U.N. resolution was introduced by Israel and eventually passed by consensus, a mechanism that did not require a formal vote. As such, the resolution passed without dissent and it can be claimed that it was unanimously supported.
The complex of factors that saw this resolution come to life is not difficult to reconstruct. Consensus, and especially unanimity, is nearly impossible to achieve in the U.N. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted and ultimately adopted by the U.N. following World War II, it had to be very carefully crafted so as not to run afoul of the communist world’s lack of intention to integrate it into national laws and the Muslim world’s opposition to Western liberal conceptions of religious freedom. The result is a document that mimics the structure and content of the U.S. Constitution, but lacks any real universality because of interpretive ambiguity intentionally built in.
There is not much of a “legislative record” for Resolution 60/7, but if it follows the typical pattern for such things at the U.N., it could not have passed had it explicitly connected the Holocaust with antisemitism. The resolution had to reflect the accepted Holocaust narrative that has emerged in the last forty or fifty years.
Yes, there were other groups that suffered significant persecution during the Nazi period in Germany and beyond. Some were violently repressed along racial lines, and others along social and political ones. But the Holocaust itself was the delivery of a campaign promise. It was the culmination of Germany’s electoral process. The National Socialist Party came to power democratically by politically organizing around the Jews. Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, and communists, all indisputable targets of persecution, were secondary considerations in the Nazi political rhetoric.
The universalized narrative of the Holocaust that reduces the motives of perpetrators to hate and intolerance allows present-day antisemitic political posturing to go unchallenged. If the world were to admit that the end result of a blatantly antisemetic political project was the destruction of more than one third of the world’s Jewish population, then decent people would be morally obligated to question why antisemitism is allowed to foment on the left and right, across the Muslim world, and more recently in the calls to “globalize the intifada” on the streets of Western capitals and university campuses.
The surge of antisemitism and the apathy of much of the world is so intimately tied to anticolonialism, critical theory, and the demonization of the Western liberal project that it can’t be challenged and must be neutralized. The radical Islam of U.N. member states like Qatar and the need to appeal to growing Islamist voting blocks in western nations mean that there are many forces acting within the U.N. that cannot abide a counter-narrative based in reality. So, once again, political action and language must be organized around and against the Jews in order to achieve political ends.
All of this is not to say that much good can’t be realized by the widespread observation of such a day of remembrance. The news cycle that surrounds it, even if it is relatively disinterested and weak, still provides a platform to oppose antisemitism specifically and even criticize the dominant social and cultural narratives that allow it to persist. Those of us who truly desire to see the eradication of the world’s oldest hate, for Jewish communities to live in peace alongside non-Jewish neighbors, and for Israel to be secure can always use the occasion to speak, write, and organize. But part of that speaking, writing, and organizing must include clarity and honesty about the nature of the corrosive social cancer that threatens all of us, and not just the Jews.
