(RNS) — The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the guardians of Holocaust memory, shot back quickly earlier this week after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared children’s fears about immigration authorities in his state to Anne Frank’s desperation in her Amsterdam hideout before her arrest by the Nazis. In a post on X, the museum called the governor’s comparison “deeply offensive.”
“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the post said. “Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”
The reaction, coming a day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday (Jan. 27), is the most recent flare-up in a fierce debate about the goals of Holocaust education over the past two years. Is the lesson of Holocaust a universal call to prevent genocide and protect human rights, or is it a specific call to make sure Jews are never again subject to mass murder?
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was closed Tuesday because of Sunday’s winter storm, which still grips the nation’s capital, but a spokesperson reached by email pointed to its definition of the Holocaust, which it views through the prism of antisemitism. “The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic,” its definition says.
This is the position of many Holocaust education centers, viewing the threats and the legacy of the Holocaus …