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The Chris Hedges Report
The Death of Holocaust Studies (w/ Raz Segal) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
A
The idea that the Holocaust is a unique event in human history serves the interests of Zionists who use it to paint Jews as eternal victims and justify the apartheid state of Israel as well as the genocide being carried out in Gaza. Unique suffering in their eyes confers unique entitlement. But it also serves the interests of colonial powers who carried out their own genocides, ones they seek to obscure and deny. What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by Turks, the Indians and the Bengal famine by the British, or the Soviet orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is manifest destiny any different from the Nazis concept of Lebensraum? These too were Holocausts fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlust for mass extermination. Nearly all Holocaust scholars who see in any criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Holocaust have refused to condemn the genocide. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians. These scholars and institutions are rendering the slogan never again meaningless. They are misappropriating the Holocaust to perpetuate a false view of the world and human nature, a way not to explore the past but manipulate the present. This decision to render the Holocaust an isolated event in human history, some grotesque aberration of human depravity, robs it of its meaning and its universal importance. The sacralization of the Holocaust allows Germany, which has been one of Israel's most important weapons suppliers since the state's inception, to absolve itself for its past atrocities through its backing of the Israeli settler colonial state. Germany uses this alliance with Israel to separate Nazism from from the rest of German history, including the genocide carried out by German colonists against the Nama and Herero in German Southwest Africa, now Namibia. Such magic, the Israeli historian and genocide scholar Ross Siegel writes, legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetuates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust. Joining me to discuss the uses and misuses of the Holocaust and what it means for Holocaust studies is Professor Ros Siegel, an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, where he also directs the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program. Professor Siegel, because of his condemnation of the genocide in Gaza, saw the offer to lead the center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota revoked. Let's begin with the Lessons of the Holocaust. Because for Zionists and if you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the lesson of the Holocaust is the creation of a well armed Jewish state. That's not the lesson for other writers of the Holocaust such as Primo Levi. But maybe you can lay out what in your mind is the importance. And I think that of course both of us fear that the misuses of the Holocaust diminishes its importance for all of us who need to learn about the capacity for human evil.
- [04:06]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Chris, and for the invitation to speak with you today. For me, the significance of the Holocaust. There's a number of things to say, but in a very, in a very basic way I take the idea of Never Again, which is also in the title of the UN Genocide Convention, which is the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So genocide prevention and Never again. I take that very seriously. And I take that very seriously not in the framework of Holocaust uniqueness, exclusionary Israeli, Zionist framework, Never Again for us, which as you mentioned really means reproduction of the systems and processes of violence that led to the Holocaust embodied in the State of Israel. But for me the framework is universal framework. So that is indeed about genocide prevention. So that's, you know, that's in a very basic way the significance of, for me of thinking about the Holocaust, the Holocaust, and certainly about thinking about the Holocaust, as I said, not as an exceptional event. Right. But as something that is very much rooted in, in the broader context and really in the making of the late modern world. And in that sense, you know, I think about it as rooted in the nation state system and colonialism. I mean, there's a reason that the Holocaust happened, when it happened, where it happened, that is in the middle of the night of the 20th century, the heart of Europe. And we can't understand Nazism, we can't understand the Holocaust, we really can't understand the phenomena of modern genocide without understanding the nation state system, the exclusionary nation and colonialism, European expansion around the world, settler colonialism and colonial genocides that accompanied this expansion for hundreds of years. And in that sense, and here I come to, you know, another way in which I see the significance of thinking about the Holocaust. After the defeat of Nazism, after the Holocaust, after the end of World War II, there, there was no coming to terms with the systems and processes in the nation state and colonialism that eventually culminated, not in any deterministic way, but eventually culminated in the Holocaust rather, the nations, the exclusionary nation state system and Colonialism were actually reproduced after World War II. And most horribly, they were actually reproduced and intersected in the Israeli State Project because Israel emerged, it's a self described nation state of Jews. It actually has a basic law, the Jewish nation state, basic law from 2018. So it's actually defined in an exclusionary way, the Jewish state. But it's also from the very beginning, and again very explicitly a settler, settler colonial project. So we have in the Israeli State Project the intersection really of the systems of the violent processes that were central to the targeting of Jews for a long time before the Holocaust and then culminated in the Nazi genocide of Jews and in the layers of genocidal violence during World War II, not only against Jews. This was then, as I just explained, reproduced in the Israeli State Project. And for me, therefore, there's, you know, there's a. Another significance of studying the Holocaust that is related to the project of to really, to taking seriously, never again in its universalist meaning and taking seriously the international law and the issue of genocide prevention. And that is really the struggle against Israeli mass violence. Well before. Well, well before October 2023, really, you know, the Gaza genocide is a culmination of Israeli settler colonial violence, the ongoing Nakba since 1948, and really Zionist settler colonialism before 1948. So the struggle against Israeli mass violence because it's actually so central, the Israeli State project, in thinking about the Holocaust, because it's so central in weaponizing the Holocaust, in the reproduction of the causes that led us to the Holocaust. The struggle against Israeli mass violence, the struggle for a different kind of state and society between the river and the sea is for me, a very important element that stems from. From thinking about the significance of the Holocaust. So these are kind of the two related ways in which I think about the significance of the Holocaust.
- [10:25]
A
You're Israeli. There's a 1999 article by Ilan Pape that talks about the way Israelis are indoctrinated. These are his words. How did you. What was your own trajectory to kind of arrive to where you are, especially having been. Been born and raised in Israel?
- [10:48]
B
Oh, the. You know, I don't know about the word indoctrinated. I have to say.
- [10:56]
A
That's his word. That's his word.
- [10:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I understand it might apply. I mean, maybe it's the right word, maybe it's not. I think that people, not only Israeli Jews in that sense, develop, you know, a sense of nationalism, right. And national attachments to places in various ways. And in many cases, you know, it's not through kind of outright indoctrination, which doesn't make it any, you know, any less strong. Quite to the contrary, it might make it actually even stronger for me growing up. Look, this is the thing, right, that is very important, I think, to explain. And that's why I said that I'm not sure about indoctrination. The issue of uniqueness that you explained briefly in your introduction was common sense issue in the way that I saw the world and felt in the world growing up as an Israeli Jew. What do I mean that it was kind of. It was almost, you know, the basis of how I viewed the world, right? So the Holocaust was unique, but the Holocaust was unique, was only part of thinking. And again, none of this was like, articulated in a very sophisticated way. It was primarily felt, right? So Jews, of course, were a unique people, right? And Jews, because they were unique people, always faced a unique hatred anti Semitism, which then culminated in a unique genocide. Really the only genocide ever in human history, right? In this framework, Holocaust. And because Jews and anti Semitism and the Holocaust are unique, then of course the Israeli state, right? That is in this framework, seen as a response to the Holocaust, right? Is also unique, right? And, you know, so the. Everything kind of flowed from this kind of system of uniqueness of Jews, antisemitism, the Holocaust and. And Israel. For me, and therefore I grew up, Nakba denial was nothing explicit, right? It was just unimaginable to think about the Nakba. And this is. And certainly the ongoing Nakba, right? Even though, again, you know, Israel is a small place, right? Israel, Palestine, this. So it's also a very interesting case to think about how people imagine the world around them, even when reality contradicts it in very clear ways. Right? But the issue of not imagining the Nakba is actually rooted also in the international political and legal system after the war. And this is an important sidebar, I think. You know, I'm zooming out here from my own experience, right, growing up in Israel to the international political and legal system. Because again, the international legal system that emerged after World War II or reemerged actually, right? I mean, international law has a history well before World War II. It re emerges after the war, and genocide is its key innovation. Crime of genocide. But the crime of genocide emerges in relation to what we call today the Holocaust. No one used the word at the time. And because of this idea of uniqueness that played, you know, that had various, you know, addressed various interests of the victorious powers In World War II, the idea of uniqueness meant that immediately what we have, right, is hierarchy, which is embodied then in the 90s, much later in the field in which I work, Holocaust and genocide studies, right? So Holocaust and then genocide. But because, again, the Holocaust is unique, Nazism is unique. And because Israel was immediately perceived, of course, as the state of the. Of the Holocaust, of Holocaust survivors. So again, Israel is also unique, which means that from the very beginning of the reemergence of the international legal system in relation to the new crime of genocide, Israel assumes what is really has become structural in the international legal system. Impunity, right? The idea that it's a unique state, that it literally becomes. Again, back to this idea of not imagining unimaginable, that Israel could perpetrate any crime under international law, let alone genocide, right now. So this is. So what I'm saying is that there was an international context to basically, it's not even. It's a. It's absolute complete marginalization of Palestinians, their history, their existence as a people. Denying that Palestinians existed as a people is a very common. Was a very common. Still is a very common issue in Israeli politics and society. Denying the Nakba, right? And of course, denying the ongoing Nakba, the, you know, long history of Israeli mass violence against Palestinians, culminating today in the Gaza genocide. So now, in terms of my trajectory of kind of, you know, emerging or, you know, moving away from this framework, it was a very long process and there's no time to get into it. But what matters here is that it was a process that unfolded in parallel to my studies, my interest in my academic studies about the Holocaust. Right. And again, I came to it, of course, imagining and thinking and feeling that the Holocaust is unique, that Jewish history is unique, that, you know, and what happened to me, particularly in my doctoral studies stage and under the guidance of Dr. Debord Bourke, who was the founding director of the Strassler center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, where I did my PhD and Deborah really guided me through this process of change. And the process of change was really a process of learning, right. Where I needed to confront more and more, right. Evidence that. And evidence, I mean, also in the archives, when I went into the archives when I was researching my dissertation that became my book Genocide and the Carpathians. The evidence more and more challenged and undermined the ideas about uniqueness I held about the Holocaust, in this case, the Holocaust in Hungary, about Jewish history, actually in the Jews in the Carpathian region. And in parallel to that, right? When this kind of system of uniqueness, you know, when there were cracks that started to appear in it, you know, almost inevitably, right. Cracks started to appear in how I saw and felt and thought about Israel. So it was, it happened in parallel, but it was, for me personally, it was a process of year, you know, you know, for many years of learning. And then I would say, you know, you can also say of unlearning. Right. But it was, it was, you know, it was less really a process of unlearning. It was more a process of confronting the way that I felt about this place and the connection, you know, the belonging that I felt to the place and how the more I learned also about the place, again parallel to my research on the Holocaust, right. You know, the more it became clear to me, again through a lot of resistance, that the image that I had was absolutely false.
- [20:14]
A
Actually, let's talk about how Israel uses the Holocaust. IDF soldiers will go to Auschwitz, the Yad Vashem, Holocaust studies in the United States seem, you know, better, far better than I do, pretty much to have been captured by this Zionist narrative. Talk about the uses of the Holocaust by Zionists and by Israel.
- [20:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, the, I think this is quite well known, right. The way in which the Holocaust and I wouldn't say, you know, I think that the correct word is weaponized, right. The Holocaust has been weaponized by Israel and by Zionists to obviously justify the Israeli state project and rationalize and legitimize really anything that Israel did or does. Again, in, in a very basic way, it's rooted in this idea of uniqueness and in this, you know, sense of impunity, right. That Israel can literally do no wrong. Right. And the Holocaust then serves as a, you know, key element in order to rationalize this, justify this, legitimize this, reproduce this. And. But the important thing, there is two things that I think are less, you know, well understood about this. One is that the Holocaust has weaponized to justify the entire nation state system around the world. And you know, when I, when I say that, what I mean is what we call global Holocaust memory, that is the institutional phenomenon of Holocaust memory that emerged in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. And you know, we were, we were promised that it's the end of history. You remember that, Chris? Yeah. And global Holocaust memory, right? This kind of brave new world that was emerging, Global Holocaust memory was a very important element in justifying, legitimizing, rationalizing, you know, the Western dominated nation state system. And there's an obvious, you know, issue here that global Holocaust summary is an institutional phenomenon. What I mean is, I mean, the key institutes of this memory culture that are also overlapping with the academic field of Holocaust and genocide studies that really took off at the time in the 1990s, right? So the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, Yad Vashem in Israel, that had existed of course, since the 50s, but in the 90s, also became part of this global memory framework, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. So we have. It's really institutional phenomena and it's a state institutional phenomenon, right? That's the point. These are state institutes. And one of the really interesting things here is that, you know, it's obvious that state institutes, whatever they are, whatever they do, right? Their goal, their interest is the interest of the state, not the interest of the people targeted by states, right? That should be the never again genocide prevention framework. The people, right? The era of the witness, the voices of Holocaust survivors, right? That should be the focus of Holocaust memory. It isn't. It never was. Global Holocaust memory by design is a state project, right? So one of the things to understand is that it's not only used by Israel and by Zionists, right. It has a global, indeed, context here that is meant to legitimize the reproduction of the nation state system after the Holocaust, not to confront. And of course, we can't understand the Holocaust at all without the nation state system, the exclusionary nation system. Without it, we can't understand what happened to Jews in Hungary, in Romania, in France, indeed in Germany. Right? So that's one broader context to consider. But there's another broader context here to consider that I think is far less well, well known and, and understood is that in Israel specifically, the Holocaust has always also been a major problem. Not just an opportunity, but a major problem. And why was it a major problem? Because the Israeli state, right. Was based on this idea of the return of Jews to their native homeland, ancient people returning to their ancient homeland, Right. The Holocaust, on the other hand, right. Suggested a completely different kind of foundational story actually from Holocaust to redemption, right? So it wasn't about antiquity, it wasn't about an ancient people, Right. It was actually about a people that had lived for hundreds of years, right. In places that were actually their homelands, right? And then were attacked. And the survivors, you know, arrive to this settler colonial project, you know, regardless of how they themselves. Of course, you know, many survivors did not understand and did not know and did not want to in that sense, you know, partake in a settler colonial project. But the Holocaust provided a very different foundational story, right? And this is A foundational story that's not only about. It's very strong in the religious Zionist framework. Right. But it's not only about religious Zionism. It's also about secular liberal Zionism. I mean, you know, it's. It's very much a framework that, you know, Ben Gurion had, right. The first Israeli Prime Minister. So the Holocaust from the beginning actually created all kinds of problems in Israeli politics and societies. It's not by accident that Ben Gurion, for example, refused, as is well known, to talk about the Holocaust. Right. And, you know, I don't remember exactly the formulation, but he had once an outburst and. And he said, you know, what is there to talk about? They died. And that's it. Right. So from the very beginning, there was a kind of urge, actually. Yeah. An urge, I would say, to disavow the Holocaust, actually. Right. So there was a tension there. On the one hand, there was this framework of exceptionality, of uniqueness. Right. That was very important. But on the other hand, there was the Holocaust that created. Created a problem. And, you know, this was. This became very, very pronounced, of course, in the post 1967 Religious Zionist settler movement. Because again, there we have. The contradiction is very clear, right. Zionism is about the return of ancient people to their homeland. And the Holocaust is a different kind of. Of story. And there's a lot, you know, a lot more to elaborate about this. But one last thing to say related to this is that what happens then, of course, with the rise of global Holocaust and with Holocaust education and with the proliferation of academic programs around the world about the Holocaust and then Holocaust and genocide studies and course, a lot of film and art and culture around this is that one of the things that happens, of course, is that people start to develop thinking about the Holocaust that is very contrary, right. To the ideology of global Holocaust memory. Right. And in particular, people start to understand that there are big problems with, for instance, Israeli state violence against Palestinians, right. For instance, with decades of Israeli occupation that are a crude violation of international law. And wait a minute, isn't international law a Holocaust lesson in Nuremberg trials? Right. Isn't the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice are these institutes not also somehow related to thinking about the lessons, quote, unquote, of the Holocaust? So there's there develops, you know, this, you know, these ideas and there's then develops, of course, you know, particularly in the frame of critical genocide studies and what's called the colonial turn in genocide studies in the last 25 years or so as thinking about colonialism and Genocide and settler colonialism and genocide. And people, of course, started to see and make the connections with the Israeli state project and Israeli settler colonialism, which of course creates more of a problem, right, for the Israeli state and feeds into this urge also to disavow the Holocaust. The end result of this, right? The end result in this. There's two things that are that. That happened. One is that we know today, not only in Israel, but also in the US in the uk, which is a center of Holocaust education, what people actually know about the Holocaust is very little, right? And so we actually, you know, we know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part indeed of the making of the modern and late modern world. So that's one thing that is global Holocaust memory and disciplinization is actually contrary to really teaching and learning and understanding the Holocaust. But the other thing, and this of course became very pronounced with the Gaza genocide, right, is that we really see now a rise in, you know, it's not, I think, significant rise still, but we definitely see signs, right, of Holocaust denial in ways that I don't, you know, I don't. Again, we're seeing signs that, you know, may or may not develop further because indeed, the Holocaust in the world of the Gaza genocide and in the world that the Gaza genocide points to, we can talk more about this, right? Is a big problem because if we think about the Gaza genocide as a, as a really. Israel and its allies are also using the Gaza genocide as a model for the world to come, right? This is what will happen to people who dare to resist any kind of measures imposed on them by extremely violent states. Then this is a world of no international law. This is a world not of never again, but of again and again. Of course, no genocide prevention and of course, no need for Holocaust education of any sort at this point, right, for anything. So in this framework, of course, Holocaust denial, this is a very welcoming framework for Havasim.
- [33:35]
A
Let me ask about the. Because you talked about, you used the word crisis in Holocaust studies. I think having spent two decades covering war, the literature of the Holocaust has been extremely important to my own understanding of our own capacity for evil atrocity, the understanding that the line between the victim and the victimizer is always razor thin. This is why I admire Primo Levi so much. But talk about that crisis, I mean, I think that it is extremely important that we study the Holocaust. Why do you use the word crisis? What's Happening.
- [34:13]
B
I mean, the crisis is again twofold. As you mentioned in your introduction, Chris, the Institutes of Global Holocaust Memory, unsurprisingly at all, all stood behind Israel's attack on Gaza, actually participated in a crude weaponization of Holocaust history by depicting Palestinians as Nazis, by framing the Hamas attack on Israel on the 7th of October as a continuation actually of the Holocaust that is taking part in this genocide. Legitimization, basically legitimization of the Gaza genocide. So we see this across, we see this at the ushmm. We see this with Yad Vashem, of course, the Israeli State Institute and the Shah foundation in LA in the International Hawkins Remembrance Alliance. Across the board, of course, these institutes did what they are designed to do, right? Support the state and of course support the Israeli state on the academic level. And of course there's overlap, right? There's a lot of overlap. Of course, the USHMM has a research arm that also provides scholarships for students and scholars. Right. So there's a lot of overlap between the institutes, the Global Hapa Sunrise and the academic world. In the academic world, we saw, you know, we, we've seen a massive divide immediately after October 7th. A lot, I would say the. In Holocaust studies, if we're just thinking about Holocaust studies, not the broader Holocaust and genocide studies, the large majority of Holocaust scholars took the position of the Institutes of Global Holocaust Memory. There was a open letter statement in November 2023 of about 150 Holocaust scholars, including some very prominent names, Jan Grabowski, Saul Friedlander, others who again, you know, for that there's not only, not only genocide, of course, does not appear in the statement. No crime, right. Israel again can do, can literally do no wrong. And what's happening according to that statement in November 2023 of Holocaust scholars is really a continuation of the Holocaust of anti Semitism. Right? So this is kind of again, participation of crude weaponization of Holocaust history to justify the Gaza genocide. Again, there's other examples. Some Holocaust scholars wrote some op eds that again, for example, reproduced Israeli atrocity propaganda, for example, about the 40 beheaded babies on October 7th that never happened. And, and there was a piece in Aret also in November 2023 by five Holocaust scholars, including the Israeli Dina Porat, including the American Avinam Pat and others who reproduced the beheaded babies, Israeli atrocity propaganda that is again fuel for the Gaza genocide. Even though by the time that they were writing, by the way, it was already clear to everyone that it had never happened. Right. The 40 beheaded babies, they still reproduced it in their piece so there's, you know, the dean of Holocaust studies, Israeli professor Yehuda Bauer, who was still alive at the time, also in November 2023, wrote a piece in the Times of Israel that described Hamas and Israel as living in two different worlds. Right? Hamas a world of barbarism and Israel a world of civilization. So a very clear settler, colonial, racist framework. Right. Again, fodder to the genocide. So that's, you know, so we had a lot of that and the large majority of Holocaust scholars in the U.S. certainly in Germany, where as you mentioned in your introduction, support for Israel is a religious element. Right. In the reason of the German state. And then we had a minority of Holocaust scholars, including myself. You know, we could think of other well known scholars like Omar Bartov, of course, and others who immediately from the beginning spoke out about not necessarily the crime of genocide, as is well known. It took omer Bartov until May 2024 to say that he recognized the crime of genocide.
- [39:19]
A
Wasn't it 2025, wasn't it this year?
- [39:22]
B
No, no. Bartov in May 2024 with Israel's invasion of Rafah, he argues that he recognized the crime of genocide. Again, there's contradictions in the way that he framed his position in the last year, right. In relation to those early month of Israel's attack on Gaza. But he definitely talk about Israeli crimes, you know, very, very clear war crimes, crimes against humanities, about the danger of genocide. And this is the key issue, right, with, with the crime of genocide if we really take prevention seriously. Genocide is not a crime that you are supposed to identify once the genocide is over. The whole idea about prevention and ever again is that as we teach our students, there are red flags that once we notice them, right. We're supposed to work in order to stop a process that could escalate to genocide, even if it's not genocidal yet. Right. For example, crude demonization of people like calling all of them human animals. Right. Or Nazis, for instance. Right. So there was a minority of Holocaust scholars who took that position, who wrote about it, spoke about it, it, Barry Trachtenberg, for example, was very central in that and some others. But it's a minority of Holocaust scholars. And I say crisis, right. To answer your question, Chris, because this is a divide that we cannot bridge, right? People, a large number of people who have mobilized themselves in order to rationalize what is now seen by a growing number of people, a growing number of genocide scholars, a growing number of international law experts, even some Israelis and Zionists and their supporters are talking about The Gaza genocide, right? People who have, from the beginning put themselves in support of this genocide, right? They have burned all their bridges, right? This is what we're. This is why we're talking now about. It's even beyond a crisis, right? This is, this is, you know, it's difficult, certainly, as long as the Gaza genocide continues to unfold. And I'm thinking about, you know, someone like Norman Good at the American Holocaust historian Norman Goda, whose genocide denial is crude and unbelievable, right? There is no hunger. The numbers, of course, of the Palestinian victims are inflated, in his view. And we know that the 62,000 Palestinians that Israel has murdered so far in Gaza, we know that the real numbers are at least double, if not more. Actually, no, for Norman Goda, right, They're inflated, which is a, you know, a very, very classic mechanism of Holocaust denial, right? The minimization, minimization of numbers, right? There is no hunger right there. So we, we see, you know, Holocaust scholars today that legitimize Israeli genocide, that deny it that, and there is no coming back from that. There is no way to resolve that, at least the way that I see it right now. And that's why it's even beyond a crisis, right? In that sense, it is perhaps possible to speak in a way about the death of Holocaust studies as a field. It's quite interesting that while we might say the death of Holocaust studies as a field, of course, Holocaust scholarship, the last decade, right? And even in the last years, we've seen amazing new kind of research on the Holocaust, right, that opens up new kind of perspectives and raises new kinds of questions on Roma, on queer people, right? There's so much interesting research on the Holocaust, but Holocaust studies as a field, right, might be dead, which is not necessarily a bad thing, right? If indeed Holocaust studies is intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory, right? Maybe it's good that we won't have Holocaust studies anymore, and maybe it will open the door for even, you know, more interesting and important research on the Holocaust as history, as real history. And we badly need this kind of work, this kind of work that will provide us the basis for the kind of education and the kind of political work that we need to do in the world around us today.
- [44:04]
A
I mean, in Omar Bartov's piece in the New York Times where he calls it out as genocide, he expresses the concern, and of course, he pays homage to someone like you very early on, denounced it as a genocide. But he worries that Holocaust studies will just become a sectarian field, that it'll kind of atrophy and feed, as it has done, but feed in a kind of much narrow away this segment of uniqueness and Zionism and not be studied broadly.
- [44:42]
B
You know, what that means really, again, is again, what we could call somewhat dramatically the death of Holocaust studies. But think about it. People can continue to study, people who are historians or sociologists or anthropologists or from whatever discipline, don't need Holocaust studies to study the Holocaust. Right. And then of course, there's the broader field of genocide studies, which is a different issue. We don't really have enough time to go into it. Right. And there's a crisis there as well, but a different kind. But I don't, you know, I a, you know, in a way, we're facing a crisis, the broader crisis in the academic world. Really an unprecedented attack against universities here in the US but really everywhere around the world. So the broader question is what kind of academic world will there be? What kind of journals, academic presses, you know, universities, academic program? Maybe all that is going away in any case. Right. Which is the kind of framework for studying the Holocaust. But the fact that there won't be Holocaust studies, the fact that, you know, these people like Norman Goda that I mentioned, Abhinom Pat, these people who have burned their bridges, right, who cannot come back from legitimizing genocide, the fact that that field will either die or will, you know, turn it into, in a way, what it has always been. Right. A sectarian field that is meant to justify and rationalize the Israeli state project in the nation state system more broadly. Right. That in itself would, will not mean that the study of the Holocaust will die. Quite the contrary, as I said. Right. Of course, the larger problem of the academic world today and the attack that we're facing, you know, is there regardless. But again, the death of Holocaust studies, that's not a bad development. Great.
- [46:52]
A
Thank you, Roz. I want to thank Sophia, Diego, Thomas and Max who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
- [47:09]
B
Sarah.