Holocaust Memory and Trauma

At this past week's Jewish Federation of North America General Assembly, Sara Hurwitz described what she called “the carnage in Gaza,” and, more specifically, the way platforms like TikTok have disrupted what Jewish leaders assumed was a stable, linear narrative. She worried that “TikTok is smashing our young people’s brains with images of carnage,” and that these images interfere with what they were taught to understand about antisemitism.

She said: “We learned that the Holocaust was big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews—just like anti-Black racism was powerful white people hurting powerless Black people. So when we see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it seems like the lesson of the Holocaust is: you fight Israel.”

For her, such confusion signals a crisis: the fear that “the bet on Holocaust education… is beginning to break down,” and that students are learning outside the boundaries of highly curated curricula—which, as she noted, rarely include Islamist antisemitism or Soviet anti-Zionism, and therefore leave out huge swaths of the political genealogies that shape conspiracy and hostility toward Jews today.

There is also a larger backdrop here: more than 2,500 Jewish communal leaders, philanthropists, and organizational heads attended this event, with 10,000 more watching online. The Jewish Federations of North America alone have raised more than $908 million since October 7. They are planning to send thousands of American Jews to Israel over the next five years. This is mainstream Jewish thought. And what we hear from these convenings is the same rhetoric echoing from the bimah/pulpit in synagogues across the country.

Infamously, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove has included in almost every d’var in the last year that Jews must prioritize the safety of other Jews over non-Jews. He portrays this as natural, as merely the Jewish version of what all communities do. He claims: “For Jews, ahavat yisrael, love of Israel, does take precedence over other loves. Every human being is created with equal and infinite dignity, yet we prioritize the needs of our families, our people, and our nation.”

He roots this in identity, writing that Zionism, Israel, and Jewish self-determination are “not political preferences” but “constituent building blocks” of Jewishness itself. Asking him to care about Judaism apart from concern for the State of Israel, he says, makes no more sense than asking him to abandon God or Torah.

And yet, what is striking is not just Cosgrove’s recent rhetoric, but the dissonance between his current position and something he himself wrote in April of 2022. And I quote him:

“Is the Holocaust akin to the Syrian refugee crisis, American slavery, or the war in Ukraine? What is the technical definition of genocide and how does it differ from garden-variety crimes against humanity? Arguing that such debates on whether to compare or not to compare miss the bigger point that it is all terrible and it all demands a moral response. Acknowledging someone else’s suffering does not diminish mine; just the opposite, as a Jew it is an awareness of my people’s suffering that enables me to have empathy for that of others. As Elie Wiesel taught, while the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely Jewish event, its implications are universal.”

If he once believed this, what changed? What pressures—social, institutional, political—have allowed Jewish institutions to pivot so dramatically from empathy to exclusion, from universality to exception? And what does that shift reveal about the uses and misuses of Holocaust education today?

To understand how we arrived at this moment, we need to retrace the arc of Holocaust education in the United States and Israel—a trajectory that begins not with the Shoah itself, but with its mediation to different audiences.

Anne Frank’s diary, especially the 1952 English edition, became one of the earliest gateways for American audiences. It made the Holocaust legible through a single young girl, translating vast destruction into familiar liberal-humanist themes. But it was the 1961 Eichmann trial that in many ways reshaped global memory. The trial’s televised testimony centered the voices of survivors, replacing earlier narratives grounded in perpetrators’ documents with a discourse of witness.

In Israel, this marked a shift: survivors, once regarded as passive victims, were integrated more into national identity. In the diaspora, the Eichmann trial provided a narrative template—arrest, trial, testimony, verdict—that educators could teach.

The wars of 1967 and 1973 further intensified the link between Holocaust trauma and contemporary Jewish political identity. Fear of annihilation made the Shoah available not only as past, but as metaphor, warning, prophecy.

By the 1980s and 1990s, institutions proliferated. Yad Vashem expanded; Americans built museums and curriculum teams.

Holocaust memory became a pedagogical tool for teaching civic ethics, pluralism, and human rights. State mandates institutionalized Holocaust education across public schools. The Holocaust was transformed into a universal moral anchor: a lesson about democratic fragility, the dangers of hate, and the responsibility of bystanders.

But universalism was never the only trajectory.

Parallel to these efforts, programs like March of the Living ritualized a journey from Auschwitz to Israel—catastrophe to rebirth—solidifying the emotional arc that equated Jewish survival with the Israeli state. Birthright, launched in 1999, further normalized this movement: young Jews learned that the endpoint of Holocaust memory was national sovereignty, military capability, and Jewish control of land.

After 9/11 and during the Second Intifada, this association deepened. A global rise in security rhetoric, counterterror discourse, and militarized policing seeped into Jewish institutional life. Jewish identity was increasingly framed through fear and threat. Holocaust education, shaped by these conditions, drifted toward something more fraught: trauma as a civic identity. There is a profound ethical difference between remembering and re-traumatizing. Remembering is an act of re-member-ing—of gathering the shattered pieces of loss and integrating them into a coherent moral vision.

Re-traumatizing, by contrast, keeps those pieces sharp; it compels the body into perpetual emergency. Much of mainstream Holocaust education in North America drifted toward the latter, and that drift reshaped Jewish identity in ways we are now seeing erupt.

Naomi Klein writes that re-traumatization “freezes us in a shattered state.” It turns loss into a ritual of reenactment. It ensures that the past is never metabolized, only re-lived. And this has political consequences: a pedagogy that begins in the gas chambers and ends on the hilltops around depopulated Palestinian villages in Jerusalem does not teach universal ethics; it manufactures consent for domination. It collapses complexity into a binary of absolute threat and absolute defense.

This dynamic is not abstract. It appears in the iconography of October 7 memorials, in the imagery of a modern Star of David stamped with “IDF” and captioned “Never Again” atop the rubble of Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. The narrative is perfectly legible: Holocaust → permanent existential threat → necessary violence. The viewer supplies the rest.

My own family’s history sits here. My ancestors were Sephardi Jews from Greece, from port cities where Ladino once drifted between market stalls like music. I have almost nothing tangible from them—not photographs, not letters. Instead, I have fragments passed mouth to mouth: names, a recipe, an address, a story of neighbors. Nearly the entire Greek Jewish world was deported and murdered. What remains are echoes.

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory gives language to this inheritance. Postmemory describes how the generation after a collective catastrophe receives memories so vivid—through story, image, ritual, even silence—that they feel lived.

It is history not in the archive but in the bloodstream. That is why a stranger’s photograph can feel like a family portrait, why a language you do not speak can sit heavy on your tongue, why an empty album can feel unbearably full.

Postmemory can be a blessing. It can nurture duty, tenderness, and a capacious empathy. But it can also be conscripted. When images and rituals are curated to bind Jewish subjectivity to a sense of perpetual siege, the affective transmission that should open us to the world instead hardens into armor.

Unexamined, postmemory becomes a lens through which every conflict looks like 1938, every adversary looks like a Nazi, and every exercise of Israeli power becomes self-defense.

This is not a failure of memory. It is a failure of how memory has been deployed. Abdaljawad Omar helps explain how Palestinians are forced to live inside a catastrophe that never ends.

He describes how Zionism elevates “civilians and civilian infrastructure” as a center of gravity—not to protect them, but to render their suffering strategically useful. Famine, humiliation, and degradation become tools for keeping a society in permanent trauma. In such a structure, even the right to grieve becomes conditional.

This is not simply a moral failure; it is a political technology. The same museums and memorials that keep Jewish grief vivid can, if unexamined, bleach out Palestinian grief entirely. If the only danger that counts is the danger in our story, then the only safety that counts is the safety enforced on others. Permit regimes, night raids, land seizures, closed military zones on harvest days—all can be narrated under the rubric of “protecting the vulnerable Jew,” while erasing the vulnerability of Palestinians.

Palestinians are told their grief is geopolitics. Their mourning is framed as threat. Their Nakba is denied or minimized. Living under military occupation, they are asked not only to endure loss, but to do so silently. Omar describes how this forced silence produces a melancholic paralysis, enabling the settler to replace the native.

Klein’s distinction between remembering and re-traumatizing maps eerily well here. Re-traumatization freezes Jewish subjectivity in emergency, and that frozen affect becomes the emotional justification for treating Palestinian life as expendable. The more intensely Jewish grief is ritually reenacted, the more thoroughly Palestinian grief is rendered illegible. Shock becomes identity. Fear becomes a personality. And students learn that safety requires overwhelming force, not shared humanity.

A trauma-informed educational ethic would ask different questions. Not: How shaken are they? But: What reflective capacities are we cultivating? What ethical commitments are we transmitting? If students leave convinced that Jewish survival depends on the subjugation of another people, we have failed at remembrance. If they leave with widened circles of concern, literacy about power, and a repertoire of non-dominating action, memory is doing its healing work. For me, Omar’s analysis opens the door to help me understand a new materialist framing of teshuva. Teshuva is often translated as repentance, but I also want to pull out its understanding as “return.”

If our tradition teaches that each life is a universe, then memory must be cosmology. The Holocaust and the Nakba must become a shared star chart—a way of mapping grief into an ethic. Not as a ledger of competing sorrows, but as a constellation that guides us toward one another. In such a cosmology, grief becomes gravity: it draws us not into siege, but into relationship; not into fear, but into responsibility; not toward domination, but toward life.

A form of return that is neither sentimental nor self-absolving. It does not deny Jewish trauma; it insists that Jewish mourning must be de-weaponized. It must stop demanding Palestinian disappearance as the condition of its safety.

Teshuva offers an alternative narrative. It calls us back to truth-telling, to unlearning, to repair, and to moral resolve. In the context of Holocaust memory and the occupation, teshuva requires re-authoring postmemory so that it no longer conscripts us into siege.

Maimonides gives us a very useful roadmap.

The first step, hakarat ha-chet—recognition—requires acknowledging that parts of Jewish institutional life have instrumentalized the Holocaust to justify domination. It requires recognizing how we teach our communities to freeze in trauma, how we avoid metabolizing grief into solidarity. It requires naming who has been harmed: Palestinians in their lives, land, water, and dignity; Jews in our moral and spiritual integrity.

Azivat ha-chet—cessation—means stopping the harmful behavior now: ending the occupation, suspending demolitions, restoring access to agricultural lands, halting de facto annexation through bureaucratic violence.

Charata—regret—requires structured listening: forums for Palestinian testimony, Jewish dissent, and historical accountability; rewriting curricula, museum exhibits, and educational materials to reflect truth rather than ideology.

Vidui—verbal confession—requires saying aloud: “We have made our ancestors’ murder into a shield for harming others. We have taught fear as identity. We have erased the wounds of our neighbors. We have mistaken domination for safety.”

Kabbalah la-atid—resolve—means changing our practices: curating images that transmit empathy rather than siege; banning shock-based pedagogy; restitution means material change: land, housing, justice, accountability.

Teshuva gemurah—complete repentance—occurs only when the next crisis comes and we do not reach for the old script. When we insist on due process, equality, shared safety, and human dignity.

I want to be clear. Teshuva is not denial, and it is not self-erasure. It is a turning—a willingness to face what hurts, to name both the harms done to us and the harms we have inflicted, and to make restitution as the condition of a different future.

If both Jewish and Islamic traditions teach that each life is a universe, then memory must be cosmology. The catastrophes of lives—the Shoah and the Nakba—must become a shared star chart, a way of mapping grief into an ethic. Not as a ledger of competing sorrows, but as a constellation that guides us toward one another. In such a cosmology, grief becomes gravity: it draws us not into siege, but into relationship; not into fear, but into responsibility; not toward domination, but toward life.