Immediately after October 7th, 2023, when Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel killed more than 800 Israeli civilians, some major institutions of Holocaust and genocide studies determined that their mission required them to speak out. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which had not put out an official statement on current events since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, issued a condemnation of the “heinous attacks,” concluding that “violence targeting civilian populations, in any form, has no place in society and cannot be tolerated.” The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), which also runs a research center on genocide prevention and publishes the Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal, published a statement expressing solidarity with “the many Holocaust survivors who helped build the State of Israel, where they could finally live in the freedom and security they deserved after centuries of persecution, and ultimately genocide.” And in November, a group of scholars at the Lessons & Legacies Europe Holocaust studies conference—including elder statesmen of the field like the historians Yehuda Bauer and Saul Friedländer—released a statement arguing that “the indiscriminate killings of children, women, and men whose only crime was being Jewish unavoidably bring to mind the mindset and the methods of the perpetrators of the pogroms that paved the way to the Final Solution.” …..more
