Within the rapid aftermath of World Conflict II, the sentiment “By no means once more” emerged in lots of contexts — from a multinational neighborhood of camp prisoners sure collectively in anti-fascist solidarity to Jewish survivors organizing self-defense and revenge. Because the Holocaust Museum LA realized this previous week, that slogan has change into explosively controversial.
On Sept. 4, the Holocaust Museum LA posted a now-deleted Instagram carousel with a seemingly banal message: “Jews have been raised to say ‘By no means Once more.’ Which means by no means once more. For anybody.” An accompanying graphic depicted six interlocked arms of various pores and skin tones, the lightest one tattooed within the type of Auschwitz prisoners. Extra slides added: “Jews should not let the trauma of our previous silence our conscience” and “To be Jewish is to recollect and act.”
This messaging is hardly radical on the planet of institutional Holocaust commemoration. However the response on social media was apoplectic. A whole lot of seething feedback accused the museum of trivializing Jewish struggling, spitefully in contrast the put up to claims of “all lives matter,” or insisted that “By no means once more” had at all times been and remained some sort of Jewish property. Inside two days, the museum capitulated, apologizing for posting an “merchandise … simply open to misinterpretation” as “a political assertion reflecting the continued scenario within the Center East.” The implication behind such a euphemism was that the “by no means once more for anybody” message might need inspired reflection on the violence at present inflicted by the Israeli state on the folks of Gaza.
This dust-up between a Holocaust establishment and overconfident however underinformed social media warriors was extra than simply one other case of on-line outrage. It displays a deeper flip away from the universalist strategy that has been on the coronary heart of institutional Holocaust reminiscence tradition because the Nineties. The 2000 Stockholm Declaration, which based the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, declares unequivocally that “the unprecedented character of the Holocaust will at all times maintain common that means.” Elie Wiesel himself framed the Holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy with common implications and purposes.”
As historian Amos Goldberg has argued, Holocaust reminiscence because the Nineties has contained a contradiction between a human rights-oriented universalism and an Israel-oriented empathy for the Nazis’ final victims, Jews. That contradiction has sharpened with Israel’s battle in Gaza, the place Holocaust reminiscence is deployed to protect the state from criticism and justify mass atrocities.
With its put up, the museum doubtless meant nothing greater than leveraging inclusive id politics to draw a wider public of holiday makers. However within the paranoid, possessive and aggressive interpretations of commenters, the suggestion of solidarity with others signified a denial of Jewish struggling and, worse, concern over the violence in Gaza. A grave transgression.
The reality is there isn’t a single origin story for the ever present slogan “By no means once more,” nor has there even been a consensus on its that means. Some Instagram customers have been fast to level to Jewish poet Yitzhak Lamdan’s 1927 epic Zionist poem proclaiming, “By no means once more shall Masada fall!” But already within the early years following World Conflict I, “Nie Wieder Krieg” (“By no means once more battle”) had change into a central slogan of mass anti-war rallies within the Weimar Republic.
Different folks on-line pointed to the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945 when former prisoners displayed indicators with the slogan “By no means once more.” Nonetheless, most of Buchenwald’s inmates have been political prisoners, and the phrase most likely signified their anti-fascist convictions; on the first memorial ceremony held on April 19, 1945, survivors “learn an oath of dedication to a world of peace and freedom” and “former inmates drew up preliminary paperwork for the creation of a democratic Germany in addition to the ‘Manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of the previous Buchenwald Focus Camp,’” in response to the Buchenwald Memorial.
To make sure, a vengeful, insular interpretation of the slogan was reportedly uttered as early as September 1945 by Abba Kovner, a Holocaust survivor and chief of a Jewish paramilitary group that sought deadly revenge towards Germans. And Meir Kahane, the U.S.-born godfather of the Israeli far proper, claimed the slogan for the title of his 1971 nationalist manifesto. However the backlash to Holocaust Museum LA’s put up exhibits how completely this explicit interpretation has change into mainstream. What was as soon as an inclusive ethical and political agenda about stopping and resisting persecution, racism and genocide has been recast as unique property, wielded to disclaim recognition of others’ struggling and to defend Israel in any respect prices.
The irony is that most of the liberals and progressives who attacked the museum’s put up would doubtless be unsettled to find how intently their identitarian rejection of universalism mirrors the present Israeli authorities’s public diplomacy, more and more focused at Jews who deviate from its ethnonationalist agenda. In April, the Israeli embassy in Berlin aggressively pressured the Buchenwald Memorial to cancel a commemoration speech by Israeli thinker Omri Boehm, sneering on X that Boehm sought to “dilute” Holocaust commemoration “along with his discourse on common values.”
Holocaust survivors comparable to Wiesel typically insisted that the lifeless be honored not by solely commemorating Jewish struggling however by stopping future atrocities towards others. However the backlash to the put up and the museum’s subsequent acquiescence present how a lot floor is being ceded to slender ethnonationalism. In addition they reveal a looming battle between the very premise of memorial museums and their skilled imperatives to extend guests and enchantment to new audiences, on the one hand, and the identitarian politics of response spreading throughout the globe, on the opposite.
There may be definitely a lot to debate in regards to the limits of a universalist strategy, and students and practitioners have achieved so for many years. But when a public Holocaust museum in Los Angeles can’t bridge its assortment to broader classes about solidarity, human rights and the prevention of persecution, hate and violence — or worse, if such a museum feels compelled to apologize for even attempting — then what’s the level?
Ben Ratskoff is an assistant professor within the Division of Important Concept and Social Justice at Occidental School. His present analysis interrogates the politics of Holocaust reminiscence and illustration and the connection between antisemitism, colonialism and white supremacy.
