(Jewish Group) Holocaust comparisons and misinformation highlight the need for quality education
Public figures have trivialized the Holocaust for decades as a stand-in for things they don't like. A new immigration policy? It's concentration camps all over again! Government-mandated COVID-19 safety policies and vaccine mandates? Nazism! A riot and assault on the U.S. Capitol? Straight from the Nazi playbook! (Actually, given that some rioters were dressed in Nazi regalia, that's a more reasonable comparison.)
Both sides of the political aisle do this. The Holocaust should not be reduced to a rhetorical weapon. That minimizes the actual horror of the Holocaust, which was the state-sponsored extermination of six million Jews. Using it to punch-up an argument not only trivializes the event itself, and helps erase our corporate memory of the event and people lost — and its continued effects on Jewish Americans. It obscures what we should learn from it.
The best way to combat such trivialization is through education. Teachers and parents are the country's first line of defense against a human tendency to forget such horrors.
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In 2018, a survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany noted that 41% of Americans were unable to identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp. Nearly one third of Americans grossly underestimated the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
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