Holocaust Education: An American Tragedy

By Moshe Phillips

Shenna Bellows. Screengrab via Youtube.

Far too many professors of Holocaust history and staffers at Holocaust-related education agencies in the U.S. perversely twist the memory of the Shoah and, at the same time, falsely malign Israel as committing genocide in Gaza.

We now have new proof of just how deeply this rot has penetrated our mainstream institutions with the aftermath of the sudden implosion of Graham Planter’s political campaign. Among the potential replacements seeking the nomination is Shenna Bellows, the current Secretary of State of Maine and a former state senator. Alarmingly, Bellows previously served as the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine from 2018 to 2020—a role explicitly tasked with preserving historical memory and teaching the lessons of the Shoah.

Yet, when asked on CNN about Planter’s parting shots against the Jewish state, Bellows didn’t hesitate to validate his hateful rhetoric, stating: “Yes. Israel — the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza right now.” When a prominent public official who literally ran a Holocaust education center uses her credentials to attack and demonize Israel, it becomes undeniable that American Holocaust education has not just failed—it has been conquered from within.

Ever since the Hamas-led October 7 terrorist invasion of southern Israel, the use of Holocaust inversion by enemies of Israel went from being used only by pariahs to becoming chic. Holocaust inversion is a particularly disgusting form of Jew-hatred that falsely portrays Israel and Jews as Nazis, diminishes the historical nature of the Holocaust, and spreads the blood libel that Israel is committing genocide. By stripping the Shoah of its historical specificity and weaponizing it against the survivors’ descendants, these educators and politicians engage in a cruel psychological warfare designed to delegitimize Israel’s right to self-defense.

This distortion is not confined to cable news or campuses; it directly fuels violent extremism on the streets. Take the U.K. case of Palestine Action’s Kamran Ahmed, who is prominently featured on the extremist group’s website and is in jail for causing over $1.3 million in damage at an Israeli company’s research facility in South Gloucestershire in August 2024 during that illegal break-in. Palestine Action portrays its terrorism and property destruction as necessary to stop Israel. The Palestine Action website quotes Ahmed as saying, “You spit on the face of Anne Frank, who wished someone would put a halt to that genocide (Holocaust).”

This sickening appropriation is part of a broader, mainstreamed trend. From Governor Tim Walz’s misuse of Anne Frank’s memory this past January, we see that this cancerous co-opting of Anne Frank’s memory will continue to grow unless strongly confronted and condemned.

We must recognize the long, dark lineage of this rhetoric. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a key initiator of Holocaust distortion, Holocaust inversion, and Holocaust denial in the Arab world. In 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sharply criticized Abbas after he claimed that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts.” Scholz stated that he was “disgusted by the outrageous remarks” and that “for us Germans, in particular, any relativisation of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable.” Going further, Scholz said, “I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust.”

This newspeak, where Israelis are the perpetrators of a Holocaust and violent criminals are activists, must be confronted as the lies they are. When individuals like Shenna Bellows transition from managing Holocaust memory to weaponizing it against the Jewish state, the enterprise ceases to be educational and becomes an engine for institutional antisemitism. It is time to reclaim the memory of the Shoah from those who wish to distort it.

The very institutions that American Jews created decades ago, and entrusted with protecting the memory of the Holocaust against the deniers, have been infiltrated by extremists who use their positions to lie about Israel and genocide. Can one imagine what the battlefield of ideas would look like today if instead the Jewish establishment had marshaled resources to teach Jewish identity while promoting Zionist programming on campuses?

Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.