The Seductive Inversion of Holocaust Memory and Gaza ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, October 31, 2025

The Seductive Inversion of Holocaust Memory and Gaza

Every few months, another academic or journalist decides that the best way to honor Holocaust memory is to accuse Israel of repeating it. The latest comes from The New York Times, where Professor Marianne Hirsch, interviewed by Masha Gessen, claims we need to “rethink how we think about the Holocaust.”

It’s a long conversation—ostensibly about pedagogy and post-memory—but it eventually lands in the same familiar place: Holocaust memory, they say, has been “misused” to justify Israeli actions in Gaza, while Israel itself now stands accused of committing “genocide.” Gaza, in their telling, is the new Warsaw Ghetto.

That’s not scholarship. That’s moral inversion with tenure.

Hirsch and Gessen actively refuse to draw the simplest, most obvious analogy—the one between Hamas and the Nazis. The introduction says:

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters, “This is the savagery that we only remember from the Nazi crimes in the Holocaust. Hamas are the new Nazis.” In an interview with the Times Opinion columnist M. Gessen, the Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch argues that the trauma and memory of the Holocaust are being misused and makes a case for how it should be taught going forward.

Hamas’s founding charter calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people. Its fighters carried out the largest one-day mass murder of Jews since 1945. Its propaganda depicts Jews as vermin, its ideology celebrates martyrdom through extermination. If any movement today mirrors Nazi intent, it is Hamas.

And yet the Times only mentions Hamas in terms of how it is not comparable to the Nazis. Instead, it’s Israel—defending itself from a group openly dedicated to genocide—that gets branded as today's Nazis.

And this is done in the name of pedagogy.

Hirsch says:

There’s an outsize influence of the Holocaust that then obscures other histories and also obscures what is happening right now: the genocide in Gaza, which the exceptionalism of the Holocaust has fostered denial of other genocides. And I think that creates a real crisis if victims of genocide perpetrate genocide and one can deny that. I think we’re in a moment of real crisis.

It isn't Hamas who wants to wipe out a people like the Nazis - its the Jews, according to this scholar.

That Holocaust inversion is not just wrong; it’s obscene. It replaces ethical reasoning with aesthetic irony.

There’s a certain narrative seduction in imagining the victims becoming the villains. It feels poetic—almost redemptive. The oppressed become the oppressors; history closes its moral loop.

But this isn’t morality. It’s literature pretending to be ethics. It’s a way for comfortable liberal Western observers to purge inherited guilt: If Jews are now the Nazis, then we can be the righteous ones this time.

That’s why the Nazi analogy persists. It satisfies a psychological craving for symmetry, not a search for truth.

What makes Hirsch’s version especially dangerous is that it comes from within. She is Jewish, the daughter of survivors, and so the accusation carries an air of moral authenticity.

It sounds like humility, but it’s really a form of moral self-cannibalism: turning the Holocaust—the ultimate warning to protect Jewish life—into a tool for condemning Jewish self-defense.

This is not teshuvah (moral repentance). It’s performance guilt: adopting the language of self-correction without the honesty or evidence that real repentance requires.

To remember the Holocaust responsibly is to preserve moral distinctions, not erase them. The lesson is not that “anyone can become a Nazi.” The lesson is that genocidal ideologies exist—and must be confronted before they metastasize.

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany doesn’t deepen Holocaust understanding. It desecrates it. It turns Jewish trauma into a rhetorical weapon and rewards those who strip history of proportion.

There is a legitimate way to universalize the Holocaust’s lessons: by defending human dignity, by opposing mass dehumanization wherever it occurs—including when Jews are its targets. But that requires moral symmetry, not moral theater.

The most charitable interpretation I can give Hirsch is that she believes so strongly that the Holocaust must not be treated as unique but as an object lesson for us all that she uses the most obscene example of accusing Jews themselves of not learning the lessons of the Holocaust as an object lesson for all. And in effect, that is worse than the antisemites calling Jews Nazis - because this is a Holocaust lecturer making the accusation.

Singling out Jews as the main inheritors of the Nazi mantle is not “learning the lessons of the Holocaust.” It is treating the Holocaust like a course the Jews failed—implying they must repeat it until they pass.

If the Holocaust is to remain a moral compass rather than a cultural bludgeon, we have to reject these “redemptive inversions.” The comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is not a bold act of conscience. When Jews do it, it is an act of performative guilt dressed up as courage.

Hamas is the group that seeks genocide. Israel seeks survival. If we can’t tell the difference, we haven’t learned a thing from history.