To reimagine Holocaust education, look to Elie Wiesel | Opinion

For decades, we believed that Holocaust education would be enough to stop antisemitism. How could anyone truly absorb the brutality of the Holocaust and not commit to ensuring such evil never returns?

Despite decades of Holocaust education, however, antisemitism is thriving. The lessons of the Holocaust are often distorted, universalized into vague morality tales or, worse, inverted to attack the Jewish people and the state of Israel.

This has prompted questions about whether Holocaust education works at all. Of course it does.

Holocaust museums, educators and Holocaust survivors and their descendants have inspired and informed millions to fight antisemitism.

Clearly, however, Holocaust education isn’t the self-executing strategy we thought it would be. The current antisemitism crisis should drive us to examine how Holocaust education can best achieve its goals today.

As we address those questions, we have no better model than Elie Wiesel. As the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor and educator, Wiesel constantly found ways to make Holocaust lessons emotionally resonant, currently relevant and individually actionable. His legacy can help us connect the memory of the past to the morality required for the present.

For Wiesel, teaching was not a choice but an obligation. He felt “duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life.” His refusal to separate remembrance from responsibility drove him to recognize trends that indicated what the world needed to learn from the Holocaust.

In the years after 1945, the world needed to believe that it happened. Living Nazis still downplayed their atrocities, and educators accordingly focused their lessons on evidence and testimony.

They succeeded — in part. Holocaust denial ultimately became a fringe position, but that didn’t solve antisemitism. Although the reality of the Holocaust was accepted, its lessons began to be too broadly applied at the cost of its singularity.

Wiesel met the moment, recognizing that the world needed to not just accept that the Holocaust happened but also understand why it happened: not generic hatred, not fascism, but antisemitism.

“Those that were there won’t agree [that the Holocaust] was man’s inhumanity to man,” he said. “No! It was man’s inhumanity to Jews.”

He emphasized the Holocaust’s uniqueness even as it motivated him to advocate for genocide victims in places like Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda.

That lesson is desperately needed today, when Jewish Americans are targeted for nearly 70% of all religious-based hate crimes (despite being just 2% of the country) and 56% of Jewish Americans report changing their behavior out of concern for their safety.

Society must recognize that the humanity of Jews is non-negotiable. As Wiesel noted, “Jews were killed by the enemy but betrayed by their so-called allies who found political reasons to justify their indifference or passivity.”

The Wiesel mindset — that inaction in the face of Holocaust distortion and antisemitism is tantamount to killing the victims a second time — can galvanize action even from the 36% of Americans who don’t know a Jewish person.

As Wiesel said in 2001, “Education is the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.”

The world seems to need constant reminders that antisemitism is wrong and Jews are people, but it also needs guidance on what to do with that knowledge. Wiesel gave us the blueprint to maximize Holocaust education by moving people from understanding to action.

The Wiesel Archive and Legacy Council at The Florida Holocaust Museum, home to the world’s largest collection of Wiesel artifacts, is implementing that blueprint within the museum’s walls and far beyond, engaging people of all backgrounds on Holocaust universalization, distortion, inversion and denial, as well as the history of Jewish peoplehood.

So, to all those asking if Holocaust education has failed, it hasn’t; and if we keep learning from Elie Wiesel, it never will.

Mike Igel is the chair of the Wiesel Archive and Legacy Council at The Florida Holocaust Museum.