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Natalie Portman should be commended, not criticized

Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman clearly hit a nerve when, in a recent interview with the British newspaper, The Independent, she questioned the validity of the type of Holocaust education she had received growing up.
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August 28, 2015

Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman clearly hit a nerve when, in a recent interview with the British newspaper, The Independent, she questioned the validity of the type of Holocaust education she had received growing up.

“I think a really big question the Jewish community needs to ask itself, is how much at the forefront we put Holocaust education,” she said.

“Which is, of course, an important question to remember and to respect, but not over other things … We need to be reminded that hatred exists at all times and reminds us to be empathetic to other people that have experienced hatred also. Not used as a paranoid way of thinking that we are victims.”

[RELATED: In defense of Portman]

Specifically, she expressed dismay at only having been taught about the Holocaust in a vacuum, as it were, without also learning about other more contemporary atrocities such as the Rwandan Genocide.

Ms. Portman did not say that Holocaust education should be eliminated. On the contrary, she emphasized that “it must be taught.” Her concern is that it “can be subverted to fear-mongering.”

Ms, Portman probably could have expressed herself more artfully. While insisting that “I don’t mean to make false equivalences,” she appears to be equating the Shoah with – rather than relating it to – other genocides. Nonetheless, the essence of her comments is valid.

There are two distinct ways of ingraining the Holocaust into our collective consciousness. The first posits the event as a solely Jewish martyrology in the spirit of Tishah be'Av and a succession of countless subsequent deadly brutalities to which Jews and only Jews were subjected over the centuries. In this memorialization, the Warsaw Ghetto fades into Auschwitz fades into Treblinka fades into Babi Yar fades into Bergen-Belsen in a dirge-like recitation of suffering, without respite but equally devoid of purpose other than, perhaps, to instill in young Jews the sense of paranoia to which Ms. Portman refers: You, too, they are warned repeatedly, could also become a victim of obsessive anti-Semitism, and if that happens you will be all alone, abandoned by all but your fellow Jews.

The other approach to Holocaust remembrance sets the implementation of Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish Question squarely into its historical – as opposed to a quasi-mythological – context. While it acknowledges the Holocaust as the epitomic manifestation of genocide, as the ultimate consequence of bigotry and hatred as official public policy, this pedagogical model also recognizes that other genocides such as the slaughter of the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade of the 13th century and the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century occurred before the Shoah, and that subsequent genocides – Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur – have taken place since.

Some of the criticisms of Ms. Portman’s comments have been over the top. “I am shocked,” one Holocaust survivor told the Jerusalem Post. “The Nazis tried to erase the Jewish people from the face of this earth – 6 million. Before she talks about the Holocaust, she should go to Auschwitz with a survivor, she would never compare the Holocaust to anything else.” Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, groused that Ms. Portman’s “success in the movie world does not turn her into an expert in history or on genocide. If she wants to express her sympathy with all victims of such tragedies, this is definitely not a smart way to do so.”

I, for one, am far more sympathetic to Natalie Portman’s sentiments, especially since I know them to reflect prevalent attitudes toward the Shoah among large segments of the post-Holocaust generations, both Jews and non-Jews. The students who take my courses on the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities want to learn about the Holocaust, but not in isolation.

My own views in this regard are clear. As my teacher and mentor Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel has eloquently said, “the Holocaust was a unique Jewish tragedy with universal implications.” World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder wrote in The New York Times last year that it is precisely because “the Jewish people understand all too well what can happen when the world is silent” that Jews in particular must not remain silent when Yazidis and Christians are persecuted and murdered by ISIS in the present-day Middle East. Ms. Portman correctly concludes that such universal implications of the Shoah are all too frequently ignored in contemporary Holocaust education.

The Holocaust is indeed unique – not worse and certainly not more tragic – among genocides because of its enormous, continent-wide scope, because of the complexity and systematic methodology of the annihilation, and because of the willing participation of much of not just German but other societies. At the same time, none of us should ever engage in comparative suffering.

I tell my students that from the perspective of the victims of genocides or their families, all of whom share a common humanity, it really makes no difference if they were murdered in a gas chamber or with machetes. Acknowledging such a fundamental moral truth in no way detracts from the preservation and perpetuation of Holocaust memory.

The integration of Holocaust education into Jewish education requires a balancing of competing imperatives: conveying the enormity and uniqueness of the Shoah without alienating the very audiences we most need to reach. Natalie Portman should be commended, not criticized, for making the need for such a proportionate approach a topic of discussion.


Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2015)

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