Who Is Holocaust Education For?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, April 14, 2026

 

Today is Yom Hashoah, which means speeches and conversations and debates about the lessons of the Holocaust. Yet we often pay much more attention to the content of those lessons than to whom the lessons are addressed. Who is listening, and who, specifically, cares? These, too, are questions that should be asked more often.

 

A couple of recent news stories shows us why these questions are so important in this day and age.

 

The Times of Israel interviews the leading publisher of Holocaust memoirs in Europe, revealing a disturbing irony of October 7: That day was the deadliest for Jews since the Holocaust, with the attacks themselves closely mimicked Holocaust-era Nazi violence, and yet the anti-Semitism unleashed in their wake has made the world less willing to talk about the Holocaust at all.

 

It does make a twisted kind of sense. Supporters of October 7 surely see the attacks, at least to some degree, as an extension of the campaign to extinguish world Jewry. In 1948, the failure to achieve that was termed the “nakba.” Now pro-Palestinians have appropriated the word “Holocaust” itself. Why would they recognize its unique connection to Jewry when they are clearly practicing a form of supersessionism that seeks to erase Jews from history?

 

As the profile of Liesbeth Heenk, the non-Jewish head of Amsterdam Publishing, notes: “Since then, the entire narrative has changed…. Sales are down since the war. Bookshops and cultural venues that once welcomed Holocaust memoir authors are increasingly saying no. Readers, Heenk suspects, are increasingly reluctant to engage with Holocaust material openly under the growing threat of antisemitic backlash.”

 

Heenk tracks sales and readership numbers well beyond her own company, so she is an authoritative voice on Holocaust-book statistics. Heenk also faces harassment and is under police protection just because she publishes books on the Holocaust. “It’s insane that I’m trying to help people learn from the lessons of history, and now, I’m being told, as a publisher, that I’m on the wrong side of history.”

 

That’s because, in the modern West, learning the right lessons from history is itself what puts one on the supposed “wrong side of history.” History, to the enemies of the Jews, is incomplete, even a failure. They want a manual, not a memoir.

 

And so, “People riding public transport or walking the streets do not want to be seen reading a book about the Holocaust. There’s a stigma related to everything about being Jewish, and the Holocaust, as a term, is being abused in a major way.”

 

So who’s still reading the books that tell us what actually happened, and which has no modern parallel? Jews, obviously, but also Germans: “I publish a lot of books in German, because they read these stories more than in the English-speaking world.”

 

Now, you might think that if the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators of the same crime are reading the same books about it, they probably know what they’re doing. And that’s true. Which raises the uncomfortable point of fact that Holocaust literature is for people who want to prevent another Holocaust, and such people are a dwindling portion of the marketplace in the enlightened West.

 

Which brings us to the other recent story on this topic that caught my attention. Politico published a story claiming the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is self-censoring to make Donald Trump happy:

 

“In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the ‘fragility of democracy.’”

 

That’s not all! Although the museum kept up one page about racism and the Holocaust, it took down another. The article admits that there is no evidence Trump has ever asked the museum to change its programming.

 

I couldn’t help but find it humorous that these changes are considered scandalous. We are told that this summer, a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” was removed from the museum’s website. In other words, a Holocaust museum is focusing its resources on teaching, rather than diluting, the Holocaust itself. That seems reasonable.

 

Meanwhile, a workshop for college students had its title changed from “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis” to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power.” According to Politico, the museum staff had “concerns regarding how the term fragility may be perceived or interpreted in the current climate.”

 

So the Holocaust museum sought to prevent the politicizing of the Holocaust. Good. Perhaps this is part of a general course correction in which Diaspora Jewry will stop watering down Jewish history to make it palatable to people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested.

 

Holocaust education is only valuable when it’s true. And it is a shame, but not a shock, that there are fewer people who want to know the truth.