Wolf Blitzer in a promotional photo for the CNN special “Never Again: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, A Tour with Wolf Blitzer.” Photo: CNN.

This week, two seemingly unrelated stories unfolded hundreds of miles apart.

In Massachusetts, a middle school principal apologized after a mandatory Holocaust lesson purportedly left some Arab and Muslim students feeling “unseen” and “unsafe.” Rather than defend the teaching of one of history’s most documented genocides – the murder of roughly one-third of the world’s Jews in under five years – the school apologized and promised to “build something better” that would make students feel “more included.”

At nearly the same time, every congressional candidate endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic primaries, following a campaign in which support for Israel and mainstream Jewish organizations such as AIPAC was portrayed not simply as mistaken, but as morally illegitimate and incompatible with democracy. Jewish groups protested rhetoric that cast AIPAC and its supporters in sweeping, dehumanizing terms. Voters appeared unmoved.

Most Americans will see these as separate developments.
They are not.

Together, they expose a deeper failure in what Holocaust education was meant to achieve.

The United States has invested heavily in Holocaust remembrance: museums, memorials, survivor testimony, curricula, books, films, and commemorations. Yet surveys show alarming gaps in basic knowledge. A 2020 Claims Conference study found that 63% of millennials and Gen Z did not know six million Jews were murdered; nearly half could not name a single death camp or ghetto; and most were unfamiliar with Elie Wiesel.

But the problem is not only factual ignorance. Even where students learn about Auschwitz, they are often not taught the long history of antisemitism that made Auschwitz possible.

That is why a principal can feel compelled to apologize for teaching the Holocaust because students claim injury from the lesson itself. It also explains how voters can hear mainstream Jewish institutions described as sinister, democracy-corrupting, even genocidal, and mistake that rhetoric for ordinary politics.

This should force an uncomfortable question: What if we have mistaken remembering the Holocaust for understanding antisemitism?

The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz, or even with Hitler. By the time the crematoria were built, Europe had spent centuries constructing the intellectual architecture that made both the Nazis and Auschwitz possible.

Long before gas chambers, there were accusations: that Jews poisoned wells during the plague, murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, desecrated religious symbols, manipulated finance, corrupted governments, acted as disloyal citizens, and secretly controlled institutions. The details changed; the structure did not. Whatever a society feared, hated, or could not explain, Jews became its cause or embodiment.

That history is largely absent from modern Holocaust education.

Students are taught what happened. They are rarely taught why so many people – including educated, cultivated elites – found these accusations plausible and useful. They learn about the Nazi machinery of murder, but not the centuries of lies that made it possible.

As a result, many leave school believing antisemitism consists primarily of swastikas, Nazi uniforms, camps, and explicit racialized Jew-hatred. When it reappears in modern political language – recast in terms of human rights, anti-colonialism, anti-corruption, or “democracy” – they fail to recognize it.

Worse, they often mistake it for justice.

Antisemitism has never depended on fixed slogans. It adapts to each generation’s moral vocabulary.

In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of corrupting Christianity. In nationalist Europe, of corrupting the nation. Under Soviet communism, “Zionists” became the enemies of socialism. Under Nazism, Jews were blamed simultaneously for global finance and global communism.

Today, mainstream Jewish institutions are increasingly cast as uniquely corrupting democracy itself. The names change. The rhetoric evolves. The function remains.

None of this means Israel is beyond criticism. It is not. Nor is AIPAC. No political actor should be immune from criticism.

But criticism is not a license for libel. Israel should not be subject to unique or obsessive double standards because it is the Jewish state. AIPAC should not be treated as uniquely sinister among lobbying groups. There is a difference between arguing that an organization advances bad policy and claiming – as Mamdani and others effectively do – that it prefers genocide, fears democracy, and secretly subverts political systems.

The former is political disagreement. The latter evokes a much older and more dangerous tradition.

The Massachusetts episode reflects the same failure from another angle. Holocaust education is not meant to make students comfortable. History rarely does. It is meant to teach how hatred – specifically antisemitism – evolves; how conspiracy theories persist; and how civilized societies normalize the demonization, isolation, and eventual destruction of a people.

We should also be candid about a difficult reality. Some students are taught – at home, online, or in activist spaces – that Holocaust memory itself has been “weaponized” against Arabs or Muslims. That is not a reason to soften Holocaust education. It is a reason to strengthen it.

That claim is part of the problem. It reframes Jewish memory as aggression. It treats the history of the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people as a political offense. It implies that even murdered Jews are intolerable if their suffering complicates someone else’s narrative.

If teaching the Holocaust now requires apology because it makes some students uncomfortable, we have reduced history to emotional management. That inversion defeats its purpose.

As Dara Horn observed, “People love dead Jews.” Dead Jews ask only to be remembered. Living Jews ask something harder: that antisemitism be recognized as it evolves, before it culminates in catastrophe.

Remembering Auschwitz is indispensable. But Auschwitz was the end of a process, not its beginning.

If students learn only about industrialized murder, while remaining ignorant of the centuries of ideas, expulsions, ghettos, pogroms, and conspiracy theories that made it possible, they may sincerely vow “Never Again” while reproducing the very patterns that make “again” possible.

That is how a principal ends up apologizing for teaching Jewish suffering. That is how voters accept rhetoric depicting mainstream Jewish institutions as democracy’s hidden enemy. That is how a society builds Holocaust museums while failing to understand antisemitism.

Never Again requires more than remembering Auschwitz. It requires teaching how the road to Auschwitz was built.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.