Within the speedy aftermath of World Battle II, the sentiment “By no means once more” emerged in lots of contexts — from a multinational group of camp prisoners certain collectively in anti-fascist solidarity to Jewish survivors organizing self-defense and revenge. Because the Holocaust Museum LA discovered this previous week, that slogan has develop 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 model 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 earth of institutional Holocaust commemoration. However the response on social media was apoplectic. A whole bunch of seething feedback accused the museum of trivializing Jewish struggling, spitefully in contrast the submit to claims of “all lives matter,” or insisted that “By no means once more” had all the time been and remained some form of Jewish property. Inside two days, the museum capitulated, apologizing for posting an “merchandise … simply open to misinterpretation” as “a political assertion reflecting the continuing 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 for the reason that Nineties. The 2000 Stockholm Declaration, which based the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, declares unequivocally that “the unprecedented character of the Holocaust will all the time maintain common which means.” Elie Wiesel himself framed the Holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy with common implications and functions.”
As historian Amos Goldberg has argued, Holocaust reminiscence for the reason that 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 warfare in Gaza, the place Holocaust reminiscence is deployed to protect the state from criticism and justify mass atrocities.
With its submit, the museum seemingly supposed 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 which 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 Battle I, “Nie Wieder Krieg” (“By no means once more warfare”) had develop 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.” Nevertheless, most of Buchenwald’s inmates have been political prisoners, and the phrase in all probability 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,’” based on 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 submit exhibits how totally this explicit interpretation has develop 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 submit would seemingly 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 corresponding to Wiesel usually insisted that the useless be honored not by solely commemorating Jewish struggling however by stopping future atrocities towards others. However the backlash to the submit and the museum’s subsequent acquiescence present how a lot floor is being ceded to slender ethnonationalism. Additionally they reveal a looming battle between the very premise of memorial museums and their skilled imperatives to extend guests and attraction 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 finished 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 Principle 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.
