Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museum’s Rejection of Historical Analogy

Scholars across the country this week signed an open letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum asking that it retract its June 24 statement condemning all analogies to the Holocaust.

The museum released the statement following remarks by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border “concentration camps.” The assertion triggered a flurry of debate on social media over whether it is appropriate to invoke language typically associated with the Holocaust when raising awareness of current-day injustices. In its statement the museum answered with an unequivocal no.

The scholars’ letter, which had almost 600 signatures as of Wednesday, posits that the museum’s statement represents “a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide.”

“The museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical,” the letter reads. “The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human-rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task.”

The reasoning behind the museum’s statement is not known. A spokesman declined to respond to the open letter.

Anika Walke, a history professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told The Chronicle that the letter is an “academic response” to the museum’s statement, which she said is more in line with the popular view that the Holocaust is “a singular event removed from any other historical event.” She is a co-author of the letter, along with Andrea Orzoff, an associate professor of history at New Mexico State University.

“Most scholars of the Holocaust, and of genocides more broadly, really try to place the Holocaust into a larger historical framework that specifically talks about the role of racism, of sexism, of state technologies, of industrial developments that made a genocide like that possible, to point out that this was not an event that came out of nowhere,” Walke said.

The scholars’ letter also takes issue with the broad scope of the museum’s statement, which doesn’t merely weigh in on the historical accuracy or appropriateness of applying the term “concentration camps” to the detention facilities at the border, but rejects outright the use of any historical analogy with regard to the Holocaust.

“There’s obviously a debate within the scholarly community, whether using the term ‘concentration camp’ is appropriate or not,” Walke said. “But I think that the Holocaust Museum statement actually goes far beyond that — they never mentioned the word ‘concentration camp.’”

Walke said the museum’s statement came as a shock to her and many other scholars who have long valued the museum for its resources and support of scholarly work, including work that engages in historical comparison with the Holocaust.

“They’re not only undermining their own mission and their own programming, they’re essentially also telling scholars that what they do, which often is comparison, is incorrect,” she said.

Walke added that several of the letter’s signatories are members of the museum’s academic committee, and that other scholars who work for the museum are unhappy with the statement.

Waitman Wade Beorn, a historian at the University of Virginia who specializes in the Holocaust and genocide studies, is one of the letter’s signers. He agreed with Walke and added that the letter had been misunderstood by the public as a political statement.

“There’s been some takes in the media that have viewed the letter like, this is a complete endorsement of everything that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said. And while certainly, I think a lot of us would endorse the idea that these are now concentration camps, the point of the letter was not to take a political stance in the sense of trying to endorse one person’s particular political comments,” he said.

Beorn, who is also a consultant for the Holocaust Museum, said that analogies to the Holocaust can be flippant and offensive in some cases, but that rejecting such comparisons or the use of analogy wholesale does a disservice to Holocaust scholarship.

“Imagine if the African-American community or scholars of slavery lost their minds anytime someone talked about slaves in, you know, factories in Asia or compared the slave trade to people being trafficked across the border,” he said. “It’s OK to make these comparisons … as long as you’re coming from a place of good will and good faith, and you’re making an argument that falls within the spectrum of historical correctness.”

Despite the letter’s academic focus, Walke said there is also a moral imperative in confronting the museum’s rejection of all Holocaust analogies. On Monday, ProPublica published messages and posts from a Facebook group consisting of 9,500 current and former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, in which members repeatedly made dehumanizing and violent comments about the immigrants under their care and the politicians who defend them.

“In addition to the institutional side, you also have the personal, very concrete reference to Nazi terminology, Nazi ideology, and Nazi practices,” Walke said of the officers’ rhetoric. “So I think we actually do have to highlight those ideas that apparently are very, very well alive across time and space and evoke a certain kind of violence that, whether it is committed or not, is certainly in the background as a possibility.”

Liam Knox is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @liamhknox, or email him at liam.knox@chronicle.com.