The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Israel Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Harbin Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on April 8th, 2025. I am actually recording this episode from our studio at our campus at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

It’s a few days before Passover begins, even though you’ll be hearing this episode after Passover, and right before Yom HaShoah, the state of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day. The juxtaposition of those two holidays, eight days apart, is not a coincidence. Israel marks its remembrance of the Holocaust right after Passover as a tribute to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on the Seder night of 1943. That was the day that the Nazis entered the ghetto to liquidate it and to deport the remaining Jews, and it’s haunting to think about the significance of the resistance on that particular day of the Jewish calendar.

In our liturgy on Passover, we recite the chilling phrase that in every generation there are those that rise up against us to destroy us, and God saves us from their hands. On April 19th, 1943, the ghetto fighters refused the end of that sentence to rise up, to destroy us. Decided to try to become their own saviors. They failed, and like many other times for many other Jews in Jewish history, they were not saved by God either.

It was a controversial decision when Israel undertook, in 1951, to affix its Holocaust Memorial Day, which in Hebrew is actually the Memorial Day for the Holocaust and for Heroism, to do so on the 27th of Nissan directly between the ghetto uprising just before and Israel’s Independence Day the following week.

The natural Jewish thing to do would’ve been to mark the Holocaust as traditional Jews did for the many catastrophes in our history by assigning special prayers to one of the already existing fast days or memorial days on the Jewish calendar that marked other tragic events. The original Yom Hashoah in Israel was marked until 1951 on the 10th of Tevet, and many Ultra Orthodox Jews continue to do the same. And the ninth of Av would’ve been a perfectly good option as well.

Memory is political, and never more so than when it is the province of a nation state. The control of the story of the past is a means of telling the story of the present, and just as religious Jews wanted the Holocaust to be part of canonical Jewish history as a way of describing the Jewish people’s story continuously. With all those theological overtones, the more secular state wanted to establish a different legacy for the Holocaust in its national consciousness, a story of resistance and heroism. A juxtaposition of the commitment to never, again, to a kind of support for the state and how the state would choose to respond to that threat.

The creation of Yom Hashoah did not mark the birth of Holocaust memory in Israel, nor is it the first moment when the memory of the Holocaust was adjoined to the state of Israel’s emerging national identity. The Israeli historian Tom Segev documents in his book, The Seventh Million, that the first proposals from Zionist leaders to establish a memorial in Israel for the victims of the Holocaust were advanced as early as 1942, before the majority of the victims of the Holocausts were killed. In Segev’s reading, this is evidence of a scandal, that the state prioritized state building over saving European Jewry and the appropriation of the tragedy to amplify the national story of the urgency of creating the state.

He writes, and I quote, “There was no clearer, more grotesque, even macabre expression of the tendency to think of the Holocaust in the past tense, while the Yishuv discussed the most appropriate way to memorialize them, most of the victims were still alive.”

Now, you don’t have to draw those conclusions from that data, but there’s no question in any case that the Holocaust shaped the forming of the state of Israel in countless ways. And there’s also no question that the memory of the Shoah and the choice of who gets to be its custodian continues to define contemporary Jewish conversations about Zionism and power and what it means to suffer history or to resist it.

It’s impossible to count the number of times that the Holocaust has been invoked in public discourse about Israel over the past 18 months, both by those who support Israel’s right to defend itself, and who saw in the events of October 7th remembrances of the Jewish people’s history of traumas, including those of the Holocaust, and invoked perhaps equally as much by those who now take the liberty of referring casually to the Jewish state as a genocidal state, who quite comfortably reposition the victims of the Shoah as its most prominent perpetrators.

I’m very cynical about this move, as Matti Friedman wrote on X sometime last year. It’s a real comment on Western self-awareness that numerous intellectuals have come to hate the same people as their grandparents did and seem to earnestly believe it’s a coincidence. I just think personally, we are right to be clear-eyed about all of the political uses of history, both by states and by their critics. History is unfortunately more fragile and malleable than we think. I hope we could just talk honestly about the actual past, about the actual present, and the move that we make in the present that make use of the past.

To do so, I’m joined here today in Jerusalem by Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum and Memorial, that very institution that emerged from those 1942 deliberations. In fact, I think it took on the name of Yad Vashem that same year. Dani was formerly Israel’s Consul General to New York, and prior to that, an Israeli politician who appeared in multiple Knesset party lists and served as the head of the Yesha Council, the umbrella organization of Municipal Councils of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and formally in the Gaza Strip.

I met Dani in New York during his tenure as Consul General. I appreciated then as now his candor in his willingness to engage across difference. We have some differences of opinion, which I suspect will be a feature of today’s conversation as well. Dani, thank you for being here and for being here, especially right now at this moment in the calendar.

And I wanna start with the use of the Shoah over the past year and a half if we can. You were very outspoken, actually, this was in the New York Times, I believe in 2024. Your public criticism about analogies between October 7th and the Shoah, which were actually quite prominent here in Israel. We can give a whole variety of examples. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re resisting when you resist that comparison of the use of the Shoah in October 7th and what you think has happened in Israeli society that makes so many Israelis and Jews around the world turn to the Shoah to try to understand that moment?

Dani: Well, first of all, Yehuda, thank you for having me here. And it’s a good thing that you stated the exact date in which we are recording because with the hectic pace of the events in Israel, in the world, I hope the things we are going to talk about will still be relevant.

In two weeks, you know, the summer of 2022, president Joe Biden came to Yad Vashem. And I thought, what will be the first thing I will tell the president as his host? And I decided to tell him two things. The first is that Mr. President, you should know that Israel was not established because of the Holocaust, it was established in spite of the Holocaust.

But the second thing is interesting in this context. I told him, Mr. President, if you want to understand Israel, you want to understand the Israelis, you want to understand the Israeli leadership, and you want to understand the individual Israeli, you should know that the Shoah, the Holocaust, is omnipresent in the back of our minds, somewhere in the back of our, every Israeli and the Israeli as a collective. It’s present, always.

And obviously I was reminded of that on October 7th, because when we heard the first reports about the mothers muffling the mouths of their toddlers in order to prevent them from crying, and so be discovered by the terrorists, obviously every Israeli, every Jew thought immediately about the Shoah, about similar stories we heard in barns in Ukraine, or attics in Poland. But then came October 8th and 9th and November and December in 2024 and 2025, and we have to make the distinction.

And first of all, in my view, there is an objective distinction. Very sharp. You know, historians tell that you can compare every pair, every couple of events, historical events with one condition: That you state what are the similarities and what are the differences? And there is no doubt that there are similarities. The sadism and the cruelty and the intention, the genocidal intention, but the differences are much greater.

Look, the Shoah is the ultimate case of the Jews being at the mercy of others. In the Shoah the maximum we could do is to beg President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, to bomb the railways connecting to Auschwitz and they didn’t. Now, in October 7th with a certain tragic delay, we did what we thought necessary without negotiating, without asking permission from anyone. We are not anymore at the Mercy of Fathers.

I ask myself, are the volunteers, the, what we call in Hebrew, the kitat konenut, the first responders in the kibbutzim similar to Mordechai Anielewicz and Paweł Frenkiel in the Warsaw Ghetto? Yes, they are similar in their heroism, in their courage, but they are different in the purpose for they fought, as you said, very aptly, Anielewicz and Frenkiel fought in order to die with dignity. The first responders in the kibbutzim fought in order to save lives, to expel the attacker.

But there is an additional reason. I’m not sure it’s the most important, but it is important enough. I think by equating October 7th to the Shoah or saying it is a kind of a continuation of the Shoah, or if you like, Shoah 2.0, we play into the hands of Hamas. What is terror? Terror is an attempt to terrorize the population of your enemy, of your adversary. I think that there is nothing that can terrorize the Israeli public more than believing that we are back in the ghetto, back in the hallway on the path to the gas chambers. So even from a practical sense, it is a mistake to make that comparison.

And that’s the reason I, yes, I was very outspoken. I am very glad to say that I was joined by the chairman of our council, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, a survivor of Buchenwald that actually was in the Shoah. And he agrees completely, or I agree with him completely that the comparison is completely erroneous.

Yehuda: It also risks being dangerous and the place where it risk being dangerous, is, as my colleague Yossi Klein Halevi says, who also resists this comparison, who’s also the, has spent a lot of his life thinking about what it means to be the children of survivors and to raise these questions. And his critique is, no Jewish community in history had October 7th followed by October 8th.

That is to say, we actually have the power at our disposal to respond. But the reason why then becomes dangerous is that the appeal to October 7th is not just playing it to the hands of Hamas by portraying us as being vulnerable. And I think part of the reason that people gravitate towards it is in search of sympathy. That’s this strategic reason, if it’s not fully conscious, but it also makes you unaware of the ways in which you can fight back. Not necessarily with ruthlessness, but with permission to be ruthless. Because when you are the victim, you can do whatever you need to do in order to survive. And the power dynamic between Israel and its enemies is not one of a vulnerable nation state tossed among the vicissitudes of the world, its most powerful nation in the Middle East.

Dani: You know, I, there are few things that I oppose more than the use the Shoah for what we call Hasbara matters. I think that shouldn’t be done. I’m involved in a big dispute with some Israelis. That criticized me for not putting in a prominent place in the museum, in, in the Yad Vashem Museum, the famous or infamous picture, photograph of Adolf Hitler, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Jerusalem Mufti. There are claims that I removed the picture. It was never there. But that’s not the, rightfully it wasn’t there.

And the reason is because I don’t want people to come to learn about the Palestinians. Haj Amin al-Husseini was a despicable person, was a Nazi sympathizer. If he could, he would have exterminated all the Jews in general and in Eretz Yisrael particular. But he couldn’t, and, and in Shoah perspective, he’s quite a marginal personality, but people that demand that they put that photograph in a prominent place in the museum want to come to Yad Vashem in order to promote Israel’s positions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that is a thing I will never do. Yad Vashem is about the Shoah, nothing else.

6 million Jews that were exterminated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators deserve an institution, by the way, Yad Vashem is not a museum, it’s an institution that has a couple of museums, deserve an institution that is dedicated solely, exclusively to the 6 million victims of the show, and its survivals.

That is also the reason we don’t have exhibitions or research about other genocides. Not because we are not sensitive to other genocides. We’re very sensitive to other genocides. As a matter of fact, we gave advice to Rwanda. Yesterday was of April 7th, the day in which he commemorate the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. We gave a lot advice to the Rwandan government how to memorialize, in Kigali the Tutsi genocide, but we will not have an exhibition in Yad Vashem about the Tutsi genocide. Not because we are insensitive to it, but because is Yad Vashem the victim’s memorial, the victim’s institution.

That carries also another implication. We are less interested in the perpetrators. We are much more interested in the victims. That’s a difference between Yad Vashem and many other Holocaust institutes and all over the world.

Yehuda: Yeah, that was something I didn’t fully understand until I volunteered for a stretch of time as an intern at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is a place I love for a lot of reasons, but a lot of it is predicated on perpetrator history. That’s right, because of the accuracy of the records as opposed to what you feel when you walk around in Yad Vashem where there’s now a historical museum. There’s always been a historical museum, although I always felt that until recently the historical museum was better in Washington.

But what the Washington museum doesn’t do quite the same way is the expressions of art, the artistic representations, the atmospheric representations, which move you out of a place of history and into this more elastic place of memory, which is not always about the exact historical record of how things took place.

Dani: Indeed, but it’s also important for me to say, since in your introduction, you refer to Yad Vashem as a museum, that we are not a museum, we are an institution that is involved in documentation. We have the largest archive in the world on Holocaust documentation, more than 200 million pages of documents, the largest library, the largest collection of art from the Holocaust, than any institution and an international school of education about the Holocaust, an international research institute about the Shoah, and many more activities that are, all of them related to the Shoah.

Yehuda: So just going back a step. I think I know some of the answers, but I’m cynical about some of them, which is why do we continue to bring international leaders, they’re in Israel for a total of 48 hours, why, if Yad Vashem is an institution that is about the memory of the victims is really about the past, and I’m not sure it really is, if it’s really about the past, why does it continue to shape the public identity of how the state of Israel puts itself forward?

And just as background, we here at Hartman are not really a Holocaust institution. We think about our responsibility as Jewish educators to think ally about our responsibilities in the world. And actually for a long time there was a kind of bias here, at the institute, that the more that you keep foregrounding Jewish victimhood, you never get to the real conversations about who the Jewish people should be.

And we even had an experience recently, we brought a group of people, mostly non-Jewish to Israel, and we didn’t bring them to Yad Vashem, because we had other things to do. And you know, some of them felt like, well. I never really got the story of Jewish victim, and so maybe there’s a balance, but it does seem like a big prioritization that the state of Israel makes to make sure that every foreign dignitary, the first thing that they do is come to Yad Vashem.

Dani: Well, you know, I will tell you a story about, not a foreign dignitary, but about an Israeli dignitary, Yair Lapid. When Yair Lapid was sworn in as Prime Minister of Israel back in 2022, he called me and he said, my first, I, I want from the Knesset, from the swearing in the Knesset, I will come to Yad Vashem. And I told him, Prime Minister, Yair, we are friends. I suggest that you go if you don’t want to go to the Kotel, as many other prime ministers did, that’s perfectly okay. It’s your decision, your call, but I suggest that you go to two places that are very close, one to another, to Herzl’s Tomb, and then come to Yad Vashem, that will tell the whole story. Not just the victims, the Jewish victimhood, but also the redemption Zionism.

He decided to come only to Yad Vashem for personal reasons. He said Yad Vashem is the place where I speak with my deceased father, he was the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, and I respected that. And he do, there are leaders that do both, that go to Herzl’s tomb and then to the Yad Vashem. There are leaders for, for their reasons, refuse to go to Herzl’s tomb and they come only to Yad Vashem. But I agree with you that the right thing would be to go to both those places. Not coming to the Yad Vashem will be a mistake.

Look, the Shoah is such a cataclysmic event in the history of the Jewish people. That is fundamental. It’s fundamental to understand Israel, it’s fundamental to understand the Jewish people, and it’s fundamental to honor our victims. Look, a third of our people was decimated during the Shoah. It’ll be inconceivable that the visitor to the Jewish state doesn’t pay respects to that.

Yehuda: But you now upgraded my question, which is, okay, so you wanna say foreign dignitaries and leaders who come to Israel have to recognize the relationship, historical relationship, not causal, right, but let’s say at least correlative between the Holocaust and the rise of the state of Israel. But it’s an even more intense question when it comes to why the Prime Minister of Israel would come to Yad Vashem, when it is already so baked into the DNA of our people, and where there are very implicit, right below the surface, political implications?

Dani: No, I believe, I, I believe Yair Lapid that he came to the Yad Vashem for personal reasons. Look, I think that Yair Lapid was, grew up as the son of Holocaust survivor. And for him, it was very personal, by the way. He asked to be in the Hall of Remembrance only and in the Hall of Rems alone. He asked me not to be with him. His staff was out. I believe there were no photographers. He was alone reflecting, talking with his father. I respect that. That’s a very personal decision. I wouldn’t draw conclusions from that, more generally. It was a very, an extremely personal decision, or even I would say an extremely personal need.

Yehuda: So, let me go back to something else that you said, which is, Yad Vashem is committed to preserving the memory and the story of the victimization and the persecution of…

Dani: No, of the victims, not the victimization, the victims.

Yehuda: The victims, Fair. And you said, and nothing else, but you also, have spoken recently about the need for Yad Vashem to play a role in responding to the rise of antisemitism and not being rooted entirely in the past. And I’d love to talk about that because there’s no way around it. Like the more we are the, and by the way, it’s not just Yad Vashem. If you’re a historian of Jewish history, there’s no version of being able to say, I only have opinions about this thing that happened in the past, and it’s not even that long ago. So I understand the gravitation towards it. It’s also very risky given the characterization of the mission of the institution.

Dani: You know, you don’t have an idea what kind of heated discussions we have.

Yehuda: Great. I wanna hear about it.

Dani: Our staff, our historians, our educators, regarding that question. And look, you know that I know very well the academic scene in, in the east coast of New York. I have spoken in basically all the Ivy League universities and my daughter, spent five years as a pro-Israel activist in Columbia University. And when I wtarted reading what is happening in Columbia, UPenn, NYU, after October 7th, I decided I have to see it by myself and I made a trip to New York, to Philadelphia. I couldn’t make it unfortunate to Boston to see also Harvard, but I met with the presidents of Columbia, then president, the then president of UPenn, and with Jewish students, and I returned really appalled. Later it became even much worse. But even then, I was appalled.

And my feeling was that we cannot, it wasn’t that it is our task to confront that, but we cannot be indifferent to that. So yes, we try to find the right place in which Yad Vashem should be positioned. We will not be an anti-antisemitism institution. We will continue to concentrate on our core mission, which is Holocaust remembrance. But I believe that there are certain circumstances, extreme circumstances, in which, you have also, to move from your comfort zone or the zone that was located to you, and do something extra, do something else. And we do it with great respect to our core mission and with great caution and care.

But yes, and the current situation, we cannot be completely indifferent. It’s also a demand that, people demand from us, people that come from all over the world. Educators that come to seminars in our international school of Holocaust education, also want to know, what is the correlation, what was the context of contemporary antisemitism? So in some senses it was a 911 call that we made to ourselves how we deal with an emergency.

Yehuda: Yeah, I suppose that it feels as though it opens a Pandora’s box because the minute that we begin to make, if it’s not analogies, you’re not talking about analogies, but you are talking about the context and climate that made possible in the West, the dehumanization of Jews and leading to this catastrophe. And what’s very clear is that this is now a contested idea, about whether it can be completely abstracted from the Jewish condition such that Jews can be the emblematic perpetrators of the Shoah, and it almost feels like there’s this safe neutrality.

There’s a quote from the director of the Holocaust Museum years ago that Ruth Weiss criticized for exactly the same reasons, saying that the museum only deals with the period in Europe between A and B. There’s that kind of neutrality. Well, we are focusing merely on the victims of the Holocaust as a particular historical event. And then there’s the, no, we don’t quite do that, but now we’re really in a contest, for either preserving the Holocaust as a particularist story about the Jews, or we are contesting with those who want to universalize this story. But once we’ve said it’s okay to extract it out of its context, you know, all rules are off.

Dani: Look, when I traveled to New York and to Philadelphia and met the presidents of the universities, they made a few measures. They explained to me how they put security agents here and there and how they protect the Jewish students and how they do not allow demonstrations in certain places and this and that. And I was extremely disappointed by, actually, I was even angered by those answers because those are the answers I expected from a police officer, from a third grade logistical director, not from academic leaders.

And I believe that the core of the issue we are dealing with is in some sense, the academization of antisemitism. I think that for many years it didn’t start on October 7th. On October 8th. But for many years, step by step, stone by stone, article by article, book by book, a pseudo academic theory, a pseudoscientific theory that promotes the elimination of the Jewish state, is being built.

And I wish I could say that the presidents, the administrators of the universities turned a blind eye. No, they didn’t turn a blind eye. Actually, in some cases they promoted that. The answer of the pres… and I, I told them that my expectation from them is to take a moral stand, a moral stand that they have to come to terms with, the question, is calls for the active pursuit of the elimination of the Jewish state something that is inside the overton window, the legitimate discourse in academia. Their answer, almost a Pavlovian answer, both of them, was that, well, academic freedom and first amendment, and freedom of opinion and speech.

And my answer was that, you know, if a sociology professor in your college, in your university will write an article or a book calling to ostracize all the LGBTQ community members explaining that, with buzzwords, with academic buzzwords, that’s also academic freedom, but we all know that that sociology professor would be fired the following day, and probably rightly so. But if they call for the elimination of the Jewish state, they have a good chance to be promoted. So the freedom of expression and the academic freedom and the First Amendment are used here as excuses.

And I told them something that was very hard for me to tell them. I spoke with them about the Heidelberg University in Germany. The Heidelberg University in Germany in the 1920s was a beacon of liberalism. 10 years later, a decade later, they gave pseudo academic pseudoscientific backing to Adolf Hitler race theory. I think that the universities, the Ivy League University in the United States, should take that example into consideration. The University of Heidelberg will be forever remembered as one of the universities that gave a pseudo-academic backing to Adolf Hitler and to Nazi ideology. I don’t believe that Jews will be, again, the canary in the coal mine. There is a Jewish state today. So the question is not what will happen to the Jews. The question is what will happen to Colombia and the UPenn and to Harvard? For me, that is the question.

Yehuda: Look, I guess one of the tricky parts is that one of the successes of anti antisemitism education and Holocaust education for the last 80 years has been that it has introduced in the West a different fear, and that’s a fear of being complicit. We succeeded at showing the world that the perpetrators are bad, but the bystanders are sometimes equally bad and sometimes even worse. They’re enablers.

So there is a, I think that is a deep fear because antisemitism is still a stigma. We’re not in a place, Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism became a badge of honor. That’s not the case in the west. It’s certainly not the case in Ivy League universities, I would say. You say I’m an anti-Semite, of course I’m not. What I’m trying to do is to avoid being an enabler and being complicit, and the analogy breaks down between Jews and LGBTQ individuals because Israel’s fighting a war against an enemy population that it also controls and they’re killing a lot of people. And that’s an undeniable thing. That’s not, there’s no buzzwords associated with that.

And how do we unmake that juxtaposition of, I fear of being a bystander, and then by virtue of the fact that I fear becoming a bystander, I’m supposed to let things happen in the world that look very bad by objective standards. It’s a lot of people to kill.

Dani: Well, you know, I know that to do that you have to learn the facts. And unfortunately, we see that the facts are completely distorted, regarding what Israel is doing, in Gaza in a self-defense war. And regarding what I previously said, I wanted also to add that I’m sorry that we need an American administration, an American government, and a Donald Trump administration to force the universities to take a stand and to take measures.

I think it’s tragic in some sense, that it is being imposed by government over the universities. But given the lack of, of action, the inaction, the total inaction of presidents and, and other administrators in the university, I tend to believe, and I say it with great care and with great inhibition, that is the less of two evils being done by, imposed by universities rather than not being done at all.

Yehuda: So here’s now the real risk for me, which is, as a student of antisemitism and of the Holocaust, one can understand some dimensions of what happens in the Holocaust as the product of a hatred of the Jews incubated over several thousand years. And you have Greek and Latin roots, and you have Christian roots of antisemitism and non-Christian roots of antisemitism and so forth. The history of scapegoating, isolation of the Jews in economic position. We can go through the whole thing.

The second major feature that makes the Holocaust possible is the rise of authoritarianism, of fascism, of far-right politics that are also encompassed in the rise of the Trump administration. So how I as an American, and here I think there’s a real divergence between many Americans and many Israelis, and it’s a very dangerous thing when, the Jewish people is divided in its memory of the Holocaust and what it ultimately fears. How do I, at least, how do you reconcile that? Because it is manifesting in a whole bunch of other dangerous expressions, including the alliances that the state of Israel is making with far right parties in Europe, including the whitewashing of deeply antisemitic and Holocaust denial things that have been said by some of these far right parties, cosying up to them, even inviting them to antisemitism conferences in Israel.

I’m an equal opportunity critic of antisemitism, but to say I need an authoritarian government in America to fight antisemitism feels like, I don’t know, it’s like a fox guarding the hen house.

Dani: Well, as you said, as an American, I am not an American, so I am exempt of doing what you did. But as I said that, I, I said it very clearly, I think that it is bad that it’s being imposed by a government, by any government, by the way. It should have been from their inner decision. And the fact that a government is imposing that on them is bad. It’s a dilemma. I said there’s, I tend to believe that is better than that way than not done at all, but it’s it’s a razor thin decision. And yes, I am definitely, I am uncomfortable with some of the alliances that are being made recently by ministers in Israel, by the government of Israel. I had a long conversation with the foreigner first Minister Gideon Sa’ar, regarding some of the decisions that were made to continue to boycott or not to have ties with several extreme right wing parties in Europe, including in Germany, but on the other hand, to have some contacts, diplomatic contacts with others. I believe firmly that extremism cannot be the solution, cannot be the good path to walk politically.

And yes, I’m worried about, in some senses, the way the world is going. Look, when you see your political adversary as a mortal enemy to your country. Not to yourself, to your country. You believe that if the other party will win an election, that will be such a disaster to your country that it will even destroy it, that is very clear danger to democracy. And I see it in many countries in the world, in America, in Europe, in Israel, and that worries me a lot.

When I returned from the US after four years in your country, one of the things that troubled me most is the inability of moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats to collaborate with each other. I think that the thing that made America great, made the very name America a synonym of greatness is persons like, I would say John McCain and Joe Lieberman to join forces and pull the train together, uphill. The inability that, in many countries has been lost. And that poses a great danger to the future.

Yehuda: Yeah. I think to me the most dangerous expression of it is something that we really have never seen before as the Jewish people, which is that some of the forces that are using defense of the Jewish people as the motivations for what they’re doing are expressing that we want to protect the Jews through authoritarian behaviors.

And as a liberal democrat, I basically believe, and I mean that lowercase D, I basically believe that democracy is held together by institutions, fairness, the rules of law. And I kind of wanna say, unlike you, I’m not grateful that somebody’s standing up for the Jews in that sense, because I ultimately think, unless we all collectively figure out how to trust the system, then the framework of liberal democracy falls and you wind up with this, you know, back and forth of those who rise to defend the Jews this way, those who rise to defend or attack the Jews that way, and we’re back in that dynamic of history that never served the Jewish people well.

Dani: Well, I can tell you in that respect that I will add to that. What you just said is that, I don’t believe that the way to express sympathy to the Jews is by expressing antipathy to Muslims. That’s not the way, to love Jews by showing that you hate Muslims.

Yehuda: Or other immigrants or any other vulnerable populations. And I think that’s at play.

One of the most stark things that I saw recently, and maybe you’re following this as well, is that the Trump administration is also editing out language and history of slavery from US government websites, and that felt to me like the ultimate play of, in order to tell a story about the present, here’s what I do about the past.

I’m curious what kind of pressures you ever get at Yad Vashem about the story that is told. What does that conversation look like?

Dani: I mentioned one, I mentioned the case of the Jerusalem mufti. I cannot recall something that is similar to what you just mentioned, but, yes, you know, there are pressures of many kinds. We have issues of countries that glorify war criminals because they later fought the communists. And that is an issue that I, we were very strong about. In my visits to Lithuania, for instance, I had extensive conversations with the leaders of Lithuania about that, about the need to erase any glorification of people like Noreika and Škirpa that were butchers of Jews.

I said in the plenary of the Lithuanian parliament, an antisemite is an antisemite is an antisemite, am antisemite cannot be a good, otherwise a good person, especially if he was a butcher of Jews. So that kind of thing in the international arena, I think that by the way, if, if we have good news in this area is that outright Holocaust denial is now quite marginal, but it was replaced by rampant distortion of the Holocaust, and that was one of the manifestations of Holocaust distortion is countries, governments, even a very powerful political or social players that say, of course, the Holocaust happened and in Auschwitz were killed. More than a million Jews, but in case chambers, et cetera, et cetera. But in my country, all the, all our citizens try to save the Jews.

Well, that’s unfortunately a fallacy. We see the use of Holocaust terminology in the propaganda war between Russia and Ukraine. By the way, in that sense, by both sides. And these are very troubling events.

Yehuda: You know, it’s interesting, I was reading today in preparation about the story of Marek Edelman, one of the last living and most prominent leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And he passed away a few years ago, lived the bulk of his life out in Poland, outspoken critic of the Communist regime, an anti-Zionist until he died. Profound critic of the state of Israel.

And it was interesting that when I was reading some of the eulogies about him, including in the Knesset, there was almost like a, there was a kind of forgiveness, or like you could imagine in today’s polarized Israel, that even a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising would’ve been treated, if they were an anti-Zionist, as a hater of the Jewish people.

Yad Vashem is obviously a Zionist institution. It’s implicitly, it believes in the nationalist response of the state of Israel to partisan fighters. Do uprising leaders get a pass? Or is there a,

Dani: Of course, of course.

Yehuda: But I don’t mean that in the, in the cute way. I’m asking like, what’s the way in which even in the rise of anti-Zionism, there is some measure of being able to incorporate us in the peoplehood.

Dani: Okay, Yehuda, I will never forget that the 6 million Jews were secular and religious, were Communists and capitalists were Ashkenazi, and Sefaradim, were atheists and Haredim, and that’s the reason I will never speak in their name in any other sense, than in the need to remember them and tell those stories. I will never say the Holocaust victims would say this and will advocate that, except for their memory. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my conclusions, my lessons from the Shoah. Of course I do, because I am dealt into my lessons, but I am aware that those are my lessons.

You know, I mentioned Rabbi Lau, the chairman of our council, a survivor. His conclusion from the Shoah is you have to devote your life to God. But Tommy Lapid, Yair’s father, that he was also a survivor and also a Chairman of Yad Vashem’s council, his conclusion from the was that God doesn’t exist. Two survivors. Two chairpersons of Yad Vashem Council. Two completely, diametrically opposed conclusions. This is legitimate and this is legitimate. We are not here to judge. Yad Vashem is not a tribunal that will judge which one of them is is right.

Yehuda: Beautifully said. I’ll ask you one last question. It’s the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. What’s a message or an idea that you’re thinking about in your role as chairman of Yad Vashem that you wanna share for this particular Yom Hashoah?

Dani: Well, you know, the thing that I think about most is that we are at the cross of those generations. Unfortunately, but inevitably in a few years, we’ll live in a world devoid of survivors. Devoid of witnesses. The formative experience that we all had, we, I had, you had, our generations had, of sitting in your living room or your classroom and listening to a survivor telling his or her story, will not exist anymore for the next generations. And that will change completely. That’s a formative experience of all of us on Holocaust remembrance.

And even in motivation, you know, survivors for me are like a bridge, that one end of the bridge is in your living room or your classroom, and the other end of the bridge is in Auschwitz. There is no substitute for that, but we’ll have to find the ways to do that, to engage the new generations in different ways. And that means since I believe that when that day comes and it’s unfortunately very near, that will be the happy hour of the denialist and the distortionists

Our mission will be much more difficult, but much more vital.

Yehuda: Thank you so much.

Dani: Thank you, Yehuda.