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.
We are in a moment of real crisis when a Columbia University professor can make such glib pronouncements. That Israel is in effect the new Nazi Germany – when “victims of genocide perpetrate genocide” – is by now an old trope, brought up with glee at the Free Palestine rallies. What’s particularly shocking here is that this should be dressed up in academic language, and printed in the NYT – and voiced by a professor who’s the daughter of Jews who fled the Nazis.
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.…
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.…
Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany doesn’t deepen Holocaust understanding. It desecrates it.
More at the Jerusalem Post.
Mick Hartley 
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