Whose Feelings Matter? Holocaust Memory, Empathy, and Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism

ABSTRACT This article explores the history and impact, from the end of the Cold War to the present, of the intertwined relationships between increased Holocaust consciousness, the rise of moral pedagogies and political rhetorics of anti-antisemitism, and the emotionalization of Western politics and public discourse. The surge of interest in Holocaust memory in the 1990s was closely connected with the new prominence of feelings in that decade, and particularly with the widespread emphasis on empathy with suffering. Deep-seated traditions within Western culture, including within Judaism itself, of ascribing special meaning to Jewish suffering played an important role in the emergence in this decade of “redemptive anti-antisemitism.” This outlook, which rapidly attained consensus status in public debate and especially in moralized Holocaust pedagogy, enshrined opposition to antisemitism, understood as the key lesson of the Holocaust, as the key gateway to the overcoming of all hatreds and prejudices. After 9/11 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada, this universalist optimism became increasingly difficult to sustain. With Palestinians and Israelis engaged in intense competition for international public empathy, the emotional authority of anti-antisemitism became entangled with responses to this conflict. The Israeli military assault on Gaza in January 2009 generated particularly intense arguments over the politics of empathy. Since then, in different but related ways in various Western countries, the political and emotional priority accorded to anti-antisemitism has increasingly stood in a rivalrous or antagonistic rather than a solidaristic relationship with campaigns against other forms of prejudice, especially with respect to Islamophobia. The charged cultural and political resonance of appeals to empathy with Jewish suffering can only be understood through a historical understanding of how the emotional fabric of contemporary Western public debate is shaped by the deep roots of exceptionalist thinking about the Holocaust and antisemitism.

The surge in Western Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s coincided with a dramatic rise of feelings in Western politics.These two phenomena, which might seem at first sight to have nothing to do with each other, were in fact closely connected.The end of Cold War ideological rivalry created a sudden rhetorical vacuum in public debate, which was largely filled by a new emotional register of political communication.The dominant political sentiment of the 1990s was hope for an enduring, post-ideological global peace.Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, which loosely echoed Immanuel Kant's vision of perpetual peace in the wake of the French Revolution two hundred years earlier, was widely contested but nonetheless crisply captured the optimistic mood of the decade. 1 There was also a powerful demand for a new language of political education, which would replace the outdated ideological baggage of the past with a more morally lofty, culturally universal, and emotionally powerful framework for promoting the betterment of the world.Learning from the Holocaust swiftly emerged as the leading international focus of these efforts.The cultural and institutional roles of political emotions are increasingly attracting scholarly attention. 2There has been little critical scrutiny, though, of the prominence of Holocaust memory in the wider emotionalization of politics and moral pedagogy since the end of the Cold War.
There has been a particularly close relationship over the past three decades between the rise of Holocaust education and the broadening of belief in the healing power and pedagogical efficacy of empathy.The idea of empathy has a complex history.The word was only introduced into English in 1908, as a translation for the German word Einfühlung, or "in-feeling," which was used at the time to refer specifically to human aesthetic rather than moral responsiveness.As "sympathy," though, the idealization of fellow-feeling as the key motor of civilized moral sentiments stretches back to the European (and especially Scottish) Enlightenment. 3 In the 1990s, this essay will argue, an already established Western cultural fascination with victimhood and suffering, deeply entwined with the special significance ascribed to Judaism and Jewish history in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, cross-fertilized with the post-Cold War rhetorical shift from ideologies to emotions.The widespread demand for a new, non-ideological, emotionally resonant, and hopeful framework for learning from the past was largely met by enshrining empathy with Holocaust victims as the locus classicus of morally improving engagement with the horror of history.
Since the turn of the millennium, this perspective has become increasingly established at a global level.The Holocaust is today widely understood in "cosmopolitan" terms, as a global "moral forum" providing uniquely lucid, direct, and universal access to the lessons of history. 4The positioning of Holocaust memory, and of empathy with its victims, at the heart of global rhetorics and pedagogies of moral improvement is coordinated at an international level by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).This intergovernmental body has grown steadily since its foundation in 1998 and now has 35 member states. 5he status of the Holocaust as a supposed "global memory" has been widely debated and critiqued.The pedagogical and memorializing norms of the IHRA are not ubiquitous even within Europe, where Russia is a prominent non-participant, let alone in the varied memory landscapes of Asia and Africa.Holocaust memory has nonetheless become, as Enzo Traverso has argued, a "global civil religion" according to which Western democracies vaunt their virtue and measure the moral standard of other regimes. 6The historical reference points and commemorative priorities of international Holocaust memory are unquestionably Eurocentric.Despite this, and in contrast to the generally increased suspicion towards the universalization of European historical perspectives, Holocaust memory has been very broadly enshrined as a unique and universal benchmark of moral decency.
Prominent among the reasons for this exceptionalism, this essay will suggest, is the close association of Holocaust memory with the idealization of empathy as the cardinal virtue of the modern era.The idea that we are living in an "age of empathy," in which our "empathy instinct," if we can only unleash it, will enable us to realize our better selves and heal our divided societies, has become a widely popularized keynote of twenty-first-century moral improvement literature.The leading texts of the recent "empathy boom" variously blend insights and arguments from neuroscience, psychology, moral philosophy, and history.They draw on the objective authority of science and the earnestness of Western self-help culture, infused with a hopeful vision of learning from failures of empathy in the past, of which the Holocaust is often presented as the leading example. 7he "uniqueness of the Holocaust" thesis has been under sustained attack since the early years of the millennium.Is has now been powerfully challenged by a large and authoritative body of work exploring the connections between the Nazi and other genocides, and between mass killings in Europe and on colonial frontiers around the globe. 8pecialist scholarship has to a large extent moved into a "post-uniqueness era," but this shift has not been absorbed into wider historical narratives, and most certainly not into public consciousness.Within the realm of moral pedagogy, especially, the uniqueness of the Holocaust remains very deeply entrenched.The reasons for this extreme divergence between scholarship and public rhetoric are multiple and complicated.Important among them, though, is the emotional power of empathy-based approaches to Holocaust memory.These approaches, which often intertwine moral pedagogy with deep-seated Christian traditions of special meaning associated with Jewish suffering, have over the past decade become increasingly closely associated with a moral prioritization of opposition to antisemitism.In order to disentangle these intricate linkagesbetween Holocaust memory, anti-antisemitism, and the politics of contemporary moral pedagogywe need to recognize the central role of political emotions in binding them together.
The cultivation of empathy inevitably involves prioritization and selection.Focusing one's fellow-feeling on a particular person or group is a form of emotional choice, often particularly significant when two parties in a conflict are competing for moral support.This observation stands at odds with the utopian hope, which has underpinned much Holocaust education over the past thirty years, that empathy with Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide can straightforwardly serve as an avenue to the overcoming of all forms of prejudice and hatred.The problems with this model have grown increasingly evident with the "reawakening of history" in our new millennium.Public arguments over opposition to antisemitism, particularly in relation to other racisms and to the Palestine-Israel conflict, have frequently swirled around a confused contestation of the appropriate moral focus and political functioning of empathy.
The relationship of Holocaust memory to thinking about other forms of racial hatred is now the subject of a burgeoning literature. 9Little specific attention has been paid, though, to the significance of empathy in the politics and pedagogies of Holocaust memory and anti-antisemitism since the 1990s.This essay reflects on that significance, and sketches out the history and increasingly fraught politics of empathy and emotion in relation to the Holocaust over the past three decades.Despite the recent surge of interest in the history of emotions, collective feelings remain notoriously difficult to characterize crisply and historicize convincingly.This is particularly the case when dealing with the very recent past, and with a subject that stirs intense and charged emotions.The reflections offered here can therefore only be suggestive rather than authoritative.The diversity of global memory cultures also cannot be encompassed in a single essay: this discussion's primary geographical focus will be on the United States and western Europe.It is hoped, though, that the exploration of the politics of historical empathy offered here will resonate more widely.Above all, this essay highlights the perils associated with the post-Cold-War fantasy of universalist apolitical empathy, and the highly partisan political ends to which this has often been harnessed.

The End of the Cold War and the Resignification of Jewish Suffering
When the Cold War came to an end, the rhetorical space vacated by ideological conflict was rapidly filled by feelings.This new style of public conversation had already taken shape in the political antechamber of 1980s popular culture: most notably the confessional television talk show. 10It was not until the early 1990s, though, that the display of emotion and empathy became a prominent feature of Western political life.In 1992, when Bill Clinton looked into the eyes of a questioner in a town-hall presidential debate and said "I feel your pain," the phrase became an emblem of his empathetic electoral pitch, in sharp contrast to the old-style patrician manner of George Bush Senior.
More broadly, according to the French sociologist Didier Fassin, "social suffering" was in effect invented in the 1990s as a new political issue.Whereas previously, outside the religious sphere, socially induced emotional pain had been considered a largely private matter, recognizing and talking about this suffering now became central to the newly therapeutic ethos of Western public culture. 11he associations between Jews and suffering are deeply rooted in Western culture.The "songs of the suffering servant" in the biblical book of Isaiah have been traditionally interpreted within Judaism as referring to the Jewish people themselves, while in Christianity these verses have been read as prophesying the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus Christ.According to the "Jewish witness" doctrine most influentially formulated by Augustine, the suffering of the Jews was fundamental to the unfolding of their unique role as God's chosen people.Uprooted and dispersed in punishment for their failure to understand these prophecies in their own scriptures, their suffering would end only in the redemptive culmination of human history, when they would finally be restored to divine favour. 12In the modern period these associations have been secularized.Many nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Hegel, characterized Jews as fundamentally shaped by their fortitude in the face of relentless suffering.Jewish writers in this period also frequently referred to the Jews as a "suffering people."For the early twentieth-century philosophers Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, this suffering was inextricably connected to the Jews' messianic world-historical mission.For both men, suffering was intrinsic to the burden of the Jews as God's chosen people, which would not end until they had played their special role in the world's messianic redemption. 13fter the Holocaust this theology of Jewish suffering became unconscionable.In the immediate postwar years there was a general recoil in the Jewish world from the idea of Jewish exceptionalism, and an emphasis on normalization and "fitting in." 14 The Nazi genocide, as an overwhelming episode of Jewish suffering, was in this period an awkward and widely evaded subject, in part because, in marking Jews apart, it brushed against the widespread Jewish desire for integration and normalization.From the 1960s onwards, when, as has been widely documented, attention to the Holocaust began to increase, the genocide was interpreted not in theological terms, but as the culmination of the relentless millennia-long history of European antisemitism. 15Interpreted through this lens, Jewish suffering was able to assume meaning once again, but now in secular terms, as the most extreme case of the consequences of prejudice and hatred.
The presentation of the Holocaust as a uniquely important lesson in civic empathy began to take root in the 1970s.The educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, founded in Boston in 1976, pioneered this classroom approach, developing materials and programmes that positioned emotionally engaging Holocaust education as the primary gateway to anti-racist consciousness-raising.Empathy had not yet, though, gained broad acceptance as a pedagogical goal.In the UK, for example, the new national curriculum for history introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s sparked protracted tussles between "progressive" backers of historical empathy and traditionalists' preferred emphasis on the supposedly more rigorous teaching of factual historical knowledge. 16Over the course of the following decade, however, empathy became increasingly prominent in the teaching of history on both sides of the Atlantic.The Holocaust was by no means the only topic to which this approach was applied, but it was more ardently moralized than any other area of the curriculum, and its teaching became much more widespread.In the 1990s Facing History and Ourselves greatly extended its reach across North America and beyond.Several US states passed legislation mandating the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools, enshrining its lessons as fundamental to the inculcation of civic virtue and moral responsibility. 17he institution that most influentially established the Holocaust as the preeminent starting point for morally authoritative civic pedagogy was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.A national project initiated by Jimmy Carter in 1978 as part of his morally earnest foregrounding of human rights in post-Vietnam US foreign policy, the USHMM finally opened its doors in 1993, three months after Bill Clinton's inauguration.Visitors were given "identity card" booklets with which they passed through the historical exhibition, discovering at each stage the personal fate of a potential Holocaust victim of their own gender.This device, which proved very popular, placed empathetic identification with suffering at the heart of the visitor experience.A similar emphasis on emotional impact and empathy animated many other new institutions devoted to Holocaust education.By the late 1990s there were more than 100 of these in North America; in Britain, the first major public presentation of the Holocaust opened at the Imperial War Museum in 2000. 18 wide range of factors fed into the Holocaust boom of the 1990s.Eastern European sites such as Auschwitz were newly accessible: their reinterpretation spurred vigorous debate, and vastly increased numbers of international tourists visited them.A consciousness that the youngest Holocaust survivors were now entering old age, heightened by a broader pre-millennial sense of temporal urgency, drove a surge of effort to capture, disseminate, and learn from their testimonies. 19The rise of Holocaust memory as therapeutic healing through feeling was also shaped by political developments.The Oslo Peace Process, initiated by the accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993 and 1995, raised hopes that this conflict might not prove intractable.This facilitated an optimistic framing of the lessons of the Holocaust as pointing the way beyond competitive victimhood and towards a resolution of what readily appeared, after the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, as the last remaining major open sore inherited from the Cold War world.
The universalistic moralization of Holocaust education meshed particularly comfortably with the sunny emotional populism of centre-left politicians such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.It associated the US and the UK with the virtuous vanquishing of hatred, and the new US-dominated unipolar world with a decisive exit from the horrors of the past.Several trenchant critiques of the sentimental and political instrumentalization of the Holocaust appeared around the turn of the millennium, but these arguments did not gain traction and were widely rejected as distastefully hard-hearted or cynical. 20fter the entrenched ideological conflict and nuclear angst of the Cold War, the emotional texture of 1990s Holocaust memory felt to most people in the West appealingly righteous and seductively hopeful.
In addition to these contingent factors, the attachment of special meaning to the Holocaust also rested on deeply rooted associations in Western culture between suffering, moral advancement, and Jewish purpose.The idea that the Jews, as God's chosen people, are marked apart for a special world-historical purpose, connected in some way to the advent of the messianic age, is axiomatic to both Judaism and Christianity.In the nineteenth century, the idea of a pedagogical and ethical "Jewish mission" to others was widely proclaimed by rabbis, especially in the German and American Reform traditions.This idea also took on a wide range of secular forms, such as the Zionist argument that a Jewish state would be, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, "a light unto the nations."Talk of Jewish exceptionalism and chosenness was much more muted during the Cold War era: the marking apart of Jews for extermination cast a profound chill over the idea.In the 1990s this chill was finally displaced by the rise of a new form of Jewish exceptionalism, based on the moralized memory of the Holocaust. 21e Rise of Redemptive Anti-Antisemitism The obsessive relentlessness of the Nazi slaughter of Jews can only be explained by their commitment to their own inverted version of the idea of Jewish purpose."Redemptive antisemitism," as Saul Friedländer has termed it, was a fundamental driving force of Nazi ideology: The Nazis looked forward to an inchoately imagined quasi-millenarian dawn, when the eliminated Jewish "chosen people" would be displaced by Aryan Germans as the transforming agents of history. 22The exceptional signification of Jews in Western thought, in other words, and their close association with the millennial redemptive transformation of the world, was a fundamental conceptual enabler of the Nazi genocide.This does not mean, of course, that this was the Holocaust's only cause or master explanation.Non-exceptionalist approacheseconomic, political, psychological and sociologicalhave provided rich explanatory frameworks for historians of antisemitism in Germany and beyond. 23Positive exceptionalist associations with Jews, including a wide range of religious and secular conceptions of their messianic or transformatory world-historical role, have also underpinned many currents of philosemitic support for Jewish projects and interests, including most notably Zionism. 24Redemptive structures of belief, while not all-determinant in Jewish history, have nonetheless since the emergence of Christianity been a remarkably resilient and malleable framework for Western thinking on Jews and their historical significance.
The sanctification of the lessons of the Holocaust as the highest essence of emotional and civic responsibility in effect re-inverted the Nazi inversion of the traditionally positive understanding, at least in its ultimate fulfilment, of Jewish world-historical purpose.Religious arguments along these lines took shape in the 1970s.For the Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, the message of Auschwitz to Christians was that they must move from a supercessionist to a fraternal and protective stance towards Jews. 25According to the Canadian Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, the post-Holocaust repair of Jewish trust in their Gentile neighbours was a contemporary cornerstone of the Jewish messianic mission to "mend the world." 26As the millennial turn approached, a broader didactic project of "redemptive anti-antisemitism" took shape in public consciousness, the theological overtones of which were often only dimly perceived.In the United States, though, it was widely noted that Holocaust remembrance had become a central tenet of Jewish "civil religion." 27Diffusing the lesson of the Holocaust, which was often distilled to tireless vigilance towards antisemitism, was now a new form of Jewish mission to others.This reformulation of Jewish purpose drew considerable emotional power, for both Jews and non-Jews, from the biblical roots and historical development of the idea of Jews as moral teachers and agents of redemption.
The moral primacy of Holocaust education was based on the belief that confronting antisemitism in its most murderous form fundamentally strengthened opposition to all forms of hatred and prejudice.It became established educational practice to teach the history of Holocaust as an extreme-case example of the consequences of stereotyping and racism, imbued with a "never again" belief that this understanding provided some form of pedagogical inoculation against the repetition of genocidal atrocities. 28Jews were understood within this frameworkin a widespread legitimating metaphor of anti-antisemitismas "the canary in the coal mine."Like the caged canary whose death indicates that the mine must be evacuated because lethally poisonous gas is present, Jewish suffering from the gas of racist hatred provides an early warning that others must take action so that they do not meet the same fate. 29The instrumentalist and Christological sacrificial logic of this metaphor highlights redemptive anti-antisemitism's deep theological resonance.Faith in the moral efficacy of learning from the Holocaust was also based on belief in the healing power of empathy.The representation of the Holocaust became in the 1990s a leading critical terrain on which different conceptions and orientations of historical empathy were debated and contested.For Dominick LaCapraone of the most influential historical theorists of this topicthe Holocaust could not be properly understood without an empathetic response on the part of the interpreter.He was critical, though, of "unearned" or glibly self-congratulatory feelings of empathy, which did not sufficiently recognize and respect the ultimate ungraspability of other people's traumatic experiences.In contrast to this "acting out" of empathy through a dubiously straightforward identification with the victim, LaCapra advocated a more arduous "working through" of historical trauma through a form of empathy that maintained awareness of the victim's otherness.This "empathetic unsettlement," he argued, resisted redemptive closure, instead retaining the emotional rawness of grappling with the horrors of history. 30he most unsettling dimension of Holocaust-related empathy, though, related to the possibility and appropriacy of empathy with bystanders and perpetrators.In Germany, these issues began to move to the fore in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s.In the following decade, Daniel J. Goldhagen polemically rejected Christopher Browning's scholarly attempt, in his Ordinary Men (1992), to understand in nuanced detail the actions and attitudes of a battalion involved in implementing the Holocaust in Poland.In his Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), Goldhagen reduced the explanation of the Holocaust to the pervasive and deep-seated "eliminationist antisemitism" of ordinary Germans.Historians' responses to Goldhagen's book were typically critical of his shrill reductiveness.His moral simplicity resonated powerfully, though, with a broad public audience.In contrast with Browning's unsettling reflection on the inner life of perpetrators, Goldhagen offered a more straightforward and readily digestible historical righteousness, which combined empathy with Holocaust victims and outrage towards the timeless German antisemitism deemed to be the genocide's single cause. 31This outlook echoed the emotional straightforwardness of redemptive anti-antisemitism, which promised moral clarity from communing with Jewish suffering.
An emotionally nuanced focus on perpetrators unsettles the very idea that an appropriately empathetic response to the Holocaust offers a straightforward pathway to "learning its lessons."It is therefore unsurprising that empathy-led Holocaust education has focused predominantly on victims rather than perpetrators.The pedagogical importance of historical empathy with Nazis has been insisted upon by a small number of scholars, such as the American historian Thomas Kohut, building on the therapeutic emphasis on empathy by his Viennese refugee psychoanalyst father Heinz Kohut. 32But this has remained a fringe approach.Dominick LaCapra, for example, while professing openness towards empathy with perpetrators, was sharply critical of Bernhard Schlink's German novel The Reader (1995): the novel's "equivocal empathy" with a female SS guard, he argued, risked clouding historical judgment about the Holocaust. 33round the turn of the millennium, the argument that the Holocaust in toto was beyond comprehension began to be mobilized as a bulwark against serious engagement with the intellectual and emotional inner lives of perpetrators.The extreme irrationality of the Nazi slaughter, pursued even at the expense of the Nazi war effort, according to Dan Diner's influential interpretation stood outside the bounds of normal historical explicability, and therefore constituted a profound rupture in civilization itself.Diner also contrasted the functionalist interpretation of the Holocaust, which he cast as characteristically "German," to the importance of the transcendental singularity of the Holocaust when considered from the perspective of its Jewish victims, haunted by the collective memory of their own singling out for mass killing. 34These arguments offered a supporting intellectual framework for presentations of the Holocaust that eschewed explanation.In contrast to a clinically "German" aspiration to understand this event, a loftier moral aura was wrapped around the supposedly "Jewish" approach, which focused on the empathy with the Holocaust's victims, and its ineffable unfathomability when approached from their perspective.
The new historical display opened in 2005 at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem was shaped from this standpoint.As Amos Goldberg has put it, the display's curators and its target visitors shared "an assumed mutual desire not to understand." 35 The experience of passing through the galleries focused instead on the empathetic witnessing of victims' suffering.The journey taken by visitors began with the "longest hatred" of European antisemitism, then passed through the horror of mass extermination, before finally emerging into the sunlight of Yad Vashem's balcony views over the Judean hills.This itinerary shepherded visitors through an emotionally wrenching narrative of redemptive anti-antisemitism, powerfully connected in its denouement with Zionism.The inexplicable and timeless horror of antisemitism had led to the darkest atrocities imaginable, but out of this disaster, through a process also beyond explanation and experienced at Yad Vashem as implicitly miraculous, the state of Israel was born. 36n the Israeli context, this narrative fitted comfortably within the national tradition of collective memory established in the 1950s, which, James Young has argued, "in effect nationalized the oldest of all Jewish paradigms: destruction and redemption."Israel's Yom ha-Shoah was established in 1951 as a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but was positioned twelve days after the actual anniversary of the uprising so that it would fall in the midst of the country's intense spring season of religious and patriotic memory.
Yom ha-Shoah continues today to take place on the 27th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, five days after the end of Passover and seven days before Yom ha-Zikkaron, the day commemorating Israel's fallen soldiers, which is immediately followed by Yom ha-Atzma'ut, "Independence Day," commemorating the victory of 1948.This sequence of festivals binds together two territorial tales of redemption: the Passover narrative of divine deliverance from exile and slavery to freedom in the Promised Land, and the Zionist narrative of Jewish self-deliverance from exile and slaughter to the freedom of statehood there. 37he presentation of the Holocaust through narratives of redemptive anti-antisemitism has since the 1990s become globally dominant, particularly in morally improving pedagogical contexts.Holocaust "memorial museums" around the world infuse the historical presentation of the genocide with quasi-religious meaning.These sites, Avril Alba has argued in her comparative study of the USHMM, Yad Vashem, and the Sydney Jewish Museum, have emerged as a new form of "sacred secular space" in which Jewish suffering is "offered up as a redemptive message to the world." 38Contemporary curatorial approaches are certainly not ubiquitously focused on empathy with victims: especially at sites in Germany associated with the brutality of the Nazi regime, such as the Topographie des Terrors display in Berlin, attention is primarily on perpetration and its enablement.Several scholars have noted, though, that the experience of visiting Auschwitz and other extermination camps, particularly on educational youth trips, has widely assumed the redemptive religious aura of a pilgrimage.These trips strongly emphasize imaginative empathy with the Holocaust's victims and are implicitly underpinned by the belief that the visited sites in some sense "bear witness" to the suffering that took place there.The March of the Livingthe leading international programme bringing Jewish high school students to Auschwitzpresents its mission as fostering in its participants a stronger Jewish identity and opposition to antisemitism, as well as a strengthened universalist commitment to fighting racism and injustice.The British government-sponsored Lessons from Auschwitz programme offers a similarly redemptive perspective, bridging from Holocaust memory and anti-antisemitism to the fortification of opposition to all forms of prejudice and hatred. 39nterpreters of the Holocaust are perhaps most profoundly divided and vexed over the appropriate balance between engaging empathetically with the varied testimony of victims and striving for some sort of overarching historical understanding of the genocide.Victims' voices feature prominently in Saul Friedländer's work, and it has been suggested by Amos Goldberg that his explanatory deployment of redemptive antisemitism stands at odds with his desire, in foregrounding those witness voices to the Holocaust's "excess," to resist its domestication as an event subject to ordinary historical analysis. 40It is essential, though, that we recognize and understand the ubiquity and profound appeal of redemptive thinking, and it its ability to morph into sharply contrasting political forms.
Redemptive anti-antisemitism draws its underlying emotional power, as did redemptive antisemitism for the Nazis, from the fact that it rests on a largely unspoken messianic conception of history, which rests in turn on deep-seated connections in Western thinking between Jewish suffering and world-historical transformation.Christological redemptive frameworks, as Gil Anidjar has pointed out, readily map onto the contemporary "war on antisemitism." 41Jewish belief structures, both religious and Zionist, fit equally well.In our new millennium, an even wider range of worldviewsnationalist, humanist, and liberalhave found their particular resonance in the capacious symbolic language of redemptive anti-antisemitism, and in its promise that learning from the darkest consequences of anti-Jewish hatred offers a unique pathway to the overcoming of all prejudice and victimization.

Arguing Over Gaza
It was already apparent in the 1990s that the new public focus on learning from the Holocaust was not heightening international responsiveness to mass killing in the present, but was possibly even having the opposite effect.The Holocaust was repeatedly invoked in debates in the United States about whether to intervene in the Balkan conflict, sometimes as a spur but often as a brake to action.Serb "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnians, some argued, was appalling but not at a level comparable to the Holocaust, and therefore not demanding a decisive response. 42In the spring of 1994, screenings of Schindler's List were sometimes followed by a cry of "Never Again!" and passionate applauseeven as mass killing in Rwanda, at a considerably faster rate than the killing of Jews in the Holocaust, was stirring comparatively little international reaction.These ironies did not dent the widespread belief that some sort of "ethical turn" in Western consciousness was underway.This was proclaimed, often alongside invocations of Holocaust memory, both by academics and politicians, for example in the "ethical foreign policy" unfurled by the British Labour Party after their election victory in 1997. 43ith the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, millennial "end of history" optimism came to an abrupt halt.Fear of Islam and Muslims surged across the West.In the Middle East, the hopes of peace sustained by the Oslo Process during the 1990s had already come to end with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000 and the coming to power of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon in early 2001.After 9/11, violence and death in Israel and Palestine became, in the eyes of many, the most vivid theatre of the new "war on terror."This established the interpretation of the Palestine-Israel conflict as a frontline battle over the validity of that worldview.The polarization of global perceptions of the violence in the Middle East posed a potential crisis for the consensus support that had been forged in the 1990s for Holocaust memory as redemptive anti-antisemitism.It was no longer so straightforward to draw a universalistic lesson from empathy with victimhood, and from the antisemitic persecution of Jews in particular, when one of the key fronts of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians was for international public empathy.Images of empty Israeli cafés, deserted due to fear of suicide bombers, vied for media attention and public sympathy, in the spring of 2002, against images of the rubble of Jenin and other Palestinian settlements assaulted by Israeli forces. 44n increasingly shrill media landscape heightened the polarization of emotional identification with either Palestinians or Israelis.In the United States, the audience figures for Fox News overtook CNN in early 2002: precisely the time when attention was most focused on this conflict.In the United Kingdom, the coverage of The Guardian came under intense scrutiny, with supporters of Israel vociferously accusing the newspaper (and also the BBC) of antisemitic bias in its allegedly disproportionate emphasis on Palestinian rather than Jewish Israeli suffering. 45In this new environment of intensified emotional controversy, a wave of anxiety beset some proponents of historical empathy, and of empathy with Holocaust victims in particular.An excess of inappropriately curated identification with victimhood, Carolyn Dean suggested in 2004, had led to an exhaustion of empathy and its partial eclipse by numbness. 46espite these anxieties and controversies, public concern over antisemitism clearly consolidated across much of the West in this period.Over the first five years of the new millennium, the argument that a "new antisemitism" was afoot gained increasingly broad acceptance.The idea that Israel was the "collective Jew," and that attacks on Israel were therefore simply antisemitism in a different guise, was a central claim of "new antisemitism" arguments.From 2000, the Israeli government, through various agencies including Mossad, assumed a more proactive role in global debates on antisemitism (preparing the ground for the later, more interventionist activity of Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, founded in 2006). 47The impact of 9/11 greatly increased Western responsiveness to claims that an anti-Zionist "new antisemitism" was especially rife among Muslims.Channelling fear of Muslims into protection of Jews varnished the raw political emotions of the 9/11 aftermath with a loftier sense of moral purpose.Identification with Israel's struggle against what Christopher Hitchens termed as "Islamofascism" enabled a pivoting from sentiments of shock, rage, and vengeance to a seemingly more reasoned assertion of Western "civilizational values" against Islamic barbarism.Hitchens was the most prominent of several previously left-identified commentators who flipped into this position after the terror attacks. 48In the wake of 9/11, opposition to anti-Zionism became increasingly closely associated, alongside Holocaust remembrance, with the moral righteousness of global anti-antisemitic rhetoric.
The Israeli military assault on Gaza in January 2009 threw into even sharper relief the tension between this rhetoric's universalistic claims and the on-the-ground politics and human consequences of this conflict.With high numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties generating intense international criticism of Israel, this was a moment of crisis for those who associated Zionism with lofty "light unto the nations" ideals.The widespread perception of Israeli responsibility for Palestinian suffering clashed jarringly with the paradigm of redemptive anti-antisemitism, which associated Holocaust remembrance and Jewish history with drawing morally elevating lessons from victimhood.This gave rise to intensely emotional controversies in the West over the representation of the 2009 assault, which to a significant extent overshadowed attention to its direct impact in Gaza itself.
The most vehement arguments in Britain and the United States were stirred by echoes of the Holocaust in association with Gaza.Comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto were vehemently contested, as was the condemnation of Israel (alongside Hamas) for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in the United Nations "Goldstone Report." 49Many supporters of Israel were shocked and aggrieved by the emergence of a discourse in which Holocaust memory was no longer unquestioningly aligned with opposition to antisemitism and anti-Zionism, but was evoked by some in relation to criticism of Israeli actions.At one level these debates were over the factual appropriacy of specific comparisons or allegations.More profoundly, though, Holocaust memory had become a bitterly contested front within a wider political and cultural battle for global public empathy.

Anti-Antisemitism in Black and White
Also in January 2009, two days after the ceasefire in Gaza, Barack Obama was inaugurated as president of the United States.This moment released emotions that contrasted markedly with those generated by the conflict in the Middle East.The new president was already closely associated with the politics of feeling: he had drawn early national attention in 2006 for arguing that the United States needed to focus less on its fiscal deficit and more on its "empathy deficit." 50Obama's slick presidential campaign had emphasized simple and positive emotional messaging: hope, change, and "yes we can."During his eight-year term of office, his greatest impact was arguably on the international political mood.Whereas the optimism of the West in the 1990s had centred on healing the scars of European history, in the context of which Holocaust memory and opposition to antisemitism moved centre stage, a more global horizon of hope gained prominence in the Obama era, focused on confronting the racial injustices bequeathed by colonialism and slavery.These hopes were reflected in the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama in the autumn of 2009, and briefly re-energized by the Arab Spring of 2011.
Obama's election intensified the post-2009 crisis of Liberal Zionism.Emphasis by liberal supporters of Israel on the painfulness of Palestinian suffering for Israeli soldiers was widely dismissed as "shooting and crying." 51 of racial justice, the Zionist focus on the security of Israel, which had long garnered support across the mainstream political spectrum, felt increasingly out of step.In his widely discussed The Crisis of Zionism (2012), Peter Beinart warned supporters of Israel that its policies under Benjamin Netanyahu were becoming starkly incompatible with liberal politics, and that many younger American Jews, if forced to choose between internationalist anti-racism or solidarity with Israel, were likely to abandon Zionism altogether. 52he polarization of American political life since the beginning of the Trump presidency has perhaps nowhere been more fraught than over the intertwined issues of xenophobia, Islamophobia, Israel, and antisemitism.The progressive "squad"especially Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first two Muslim women elected to Congresshas taken the lead in connecting internationalist solidarity, including with Palestinians, with opposition to racism and anti-immigrant nativism in America.Omar and Tlaib have faced regular accusations of antisemitism, especially for their support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.It is clear, though, that the recent emboldening of antisemitism in America has come from the far right, and has been driven by an association of Jews with left-wing multiracial coalition politics.The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter who killed eleven worshippers in October 2018 believed that Jewish support for Central American refugees was part of a "white genocide" conspiracy. 53Much of American Jewry has nonetheless remained focused on opposing the alleged antisemitism of the anti-Zionist left.Right-wing Jewish organizations, both in America and Israel, have increasingly worked alongside Christian Zionist groups that are theologically inspired by explicitly redemptive anti-antisemitism.For Christians United for Israel, which with over five million members is now America's largest pro-Israel organization, Islam is a dart of Satan aimed at Jerusalem, while the protection of Jews, in support of their role in God's plan for the messianic redemption of the world, is a central responsibility of America and of all true Christians. 54he universalistic aspirations associated with Holocaust education since the 1990s have over the past decade sheared apart from the most vocal and organized anti-antisemitic activity across the West, which is politically focused on anti-Zionism and often heavily tinged with Islamophobia.This has brought the universalistic tradition of redemptive anti-antisemitism to the brink of collapse.For many American Jews, especially those who have a strong emotional investment in both Zionism and progressive politics, the clash between these outlooks has been traumatic.The resulting arguments have plunged American Jewry into something close to a communal civil war of ideas and identifications. 55n Europe, the racial politics of opposition to antisemitism has also been scrambled.In Britain, the founders of the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine in 1975 were mostly left-wing Jews, who saw their activism as a continuation of the spirit of the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street in London's East End in 1936. 56Since 9/11, though, European far-right parties have focused their enmity on Muslims, and have increasingly positioned themselves as admirers of Israel and ardent defenders of Jews against the peril of Islamism.Israeli governments have not resisted their courtship: the Jerusalem visit in 2003 of the "post-fascist" leader Gianfranco Fini, as Deputy Prime Minister of Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, initiated this realignment.Support for Israel and opposition to alleged Muslim antisemitism has enabled far-right parties to cleanse their political image and broaden their electoral attractiveness.The mainstream right in much of Europe, in competition for the same voters, has often followed suit.The moral halo of anti-antisemitism, derived above all from its association with Holocaust memory, has provided a righteous veneer for asserting the primacy of intra-European historical memories and debts over global ones, and of Judaeo-Christian over multicultural and multiracial conceptions of European identity. 57ince the early 1990s, the moral unimpeachability of redemptive anti-antisemitism has been a fundamental tenet of liberal Western belief in the possibility of learning from the European past.The notion that this cause might be tainted by bad faith, or even by other forms of racism, produces an error message in the operating system of Western politics: the idea can barely be formulated or conceived.The danger of systemic crash has been forestalled by the emotional power of belief in anti-antisemitism's immaculate virtue.The authority of this article of faith has flooded the analytical circuits of public debate, blocking critical reflection on the ways in which opposition to anti-Jewish hatred is today often separated from and pitted against other strands of anti-racism.As an anchor of post-ideological Euro-American moral consensus, constructed on deep Judaeo-Christian foundations of religious messianism and political hope, belief in the purity of redemptive anti-antisemitism feels to many too precious to give up.The complicated relationship between anti-antisemitism and a reckoning with the global legacy of slavery and colonialism therefore remains very difficult to articulate within this consensus moral reasoning of mainstream Western politics.
This difficulty is most profound, for obvious reasons, in Germany.Learning from the Holocaust that there is no greater moral imperative than strenuous opposition to antisemitism is a cornerstone of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Germans of Turkish or Arab backgrounds, who are expected to absorb this lesson, have been perceived by their ethnic German educators as responding with the "wrong" feelings during visits to Holocaust memorial sites.Rather than adopting the expected German perspective of inherited guilt, their identification with Jewish victims is often heightened by feelings of fear that the racism they themselves have experienced in Germany could conceivably be taken to such extremes, while also sometimes offset by envy for the vastly greater public concern with antisemitism than with the forms of racism they face.These responses call attention to failures of anti-racism in Germany in the hallowed context of the nation's collective atonement for its past.The expectation of a specific, didactically guided empathetic response to the Holocaustan expectation by no means unique to Germany, but particularly acute thereforecloses recognition of these different 56 Tony Kushner and Nadia Valman, eds., Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1999). 57 emotional reactions of Germans with immigrant backgrounds.They are instead found lacking in the form of empathy considered constitutive of responsible Germanness. 58he impossibility, within the regnant German paradigm of compulsory transcendental anti-antisemitism, of acknowledging reasonable differences of perspective from those who have experienced other forms of racism has been highlighted by a string of recent controversies.The resolution passed by the German Bundestag in May 2019 deeming the BDS movement antisemitic has led to the exclusion from the German public sphere, and depiction as antisemites, of several non-Western artists and intellectuals (and dissident Israelis) who have been sharply critical of Israeli policies.The "Mbembe affair," prompted by the cancellation in early 2020 of a speaking invitation to the prominent African scholar Achille Mbembe, has been particularly vigorously debated. 59The earnest desire of many Germans, including almost the entire political class, to maintain the absolute paramountcy of their own Germanocentric determination of the moral lesson of the past has come to pose a major obstacle both to ethnic inclusiveness within Germany and to respectful engagement with the historical and emotional outlooks of the global South.Recognizing that the exclusions prompted by the Bundestag resolution seriously impede Germany's openness to the world, the leaders of many prominent German cultural institutions have called for its reversal. 60irk Moses, in a widely discussed recent critique, has trenchantly called for the abandonment of the "German catechism" linking an insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust to a special German responsibility to Jews, Israel, and anti-antisemitism.This mindset, enforced by almost all gatekeepers of German national debate, has blocked the acceptance in Germany of the wide body of authoritative scholarship that has drawn out connections and comparisons between the Holocaust and colonial mass killings.The unyielding fixity of the catechism, Moses argues, is theological in character.Determined to invert the morality of the Nazis, contemporary Germans have replaced their redemptive antisemitism with what he describes as "redemptive philosemitism." 61t is undoubtedly the case that postwar German public culture has been powerfully stamped with a philosemitic imprint, driven by a search for, in Wulf Kansteiner's words, "the opposite of genocide." 62While the desire to atone for the crimes of the Nazis by affirming diametrically opposing principles and values is a potent force in Germany, the shaping of political moralism there must also be seen in international context, and in relation to an intellectual vista that extends back long before the Nazi era.The intertwinement of Jews and redemption in Western culture has, as discussed above, since the time of the Church Fathers ascribed a special significance to Jewish suffering.The distinction between philosemitism and anti-antisemitism may often seem pedantic, but only the latter term captures this focus on suffering.Many contemporary proponents of anti-antisemitismparticularly on the far right, in Germany and elsewherecannot remotely be considered as all-round "lovers of Jews."They are nonethless ardent opponents of the suffering they perceive is inflicted on Jews by Arab anti-Zionism and antisemitism. 63n France also, anti-antisemitism is tightly bound to the identity of the state.Since the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, opposition to antisemitism has been a core element of French left-wing republican identity.Recent events have reasserted this linkage.In the huge public rallies following the January 2015 attacks on the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, the slogan "Je suis Charlie" often appeared alongside the twin declaration "Je suis juif."These slogans bonded anti-antisemitism with the secularism (laïcité) associated with Charlie Hebdo as fundamental French values endangered by Islamic terror. 64Hostility to Islam is now entrenched across the French political spectrum.The beheading of the teacher Samuel Paty in October 2020, and the retrenchment of government anti-Islamist measures in response, has intensified the cycle of antagonism between Muslim communities and the national mainstream.Anti-antisemitism in France, rather than operating alongside opposition to other forms of prejudice, now stands in competition with those campaigns, or even, for far-right voters especially, as legitimation of Islamophobic prejudices.The division of Jews from Arabs is a time-honoured French policy, stretching back to the Crémieux Decree of 1870 that co-opted Algerian Jews into the colonizing culture of the metropole. 65The recent conflation of the protection of Jews with the protection of the core values of the French republic has taken this to a new level, positioning Jews as the archetypal front-line victims in the nation's Manichaean existential struggle against Islam.
Anti-antisemitism has also been unprecedentedly prominent over the past decade in the UK.The intensely polarized responses to Israel's ground invasion of Gaza in January 2009 marked a turning point in British public debate.Controversy over the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has raged since then, with the broad equation between the two becoming increasingly forcefully expressed and institutionally accepted.The xenophobia churned up by the Brexit referendum has provided a favourable environment for the advance of this argument.Allegations of antisemitism, especially in the Labour Party during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, have attracted exhaustive media attention; abundant evidence of Islamophobia in Britain, for example pervading the Conservative Party, or scarring Muslim students' experiences, have not been met with similar concern. 66The drive for the adoption of the IHRA "working definition" of antisemitism, which has been widely critiqued for casting a broad range of critical speech on Israel as potentially antisemitic, has become a leading focus of exceptionalist and redemptive anti-antisemitic campaigning in Britain.Although the absolute disappearance of sexism, homophobia or anti-Black racism is seldom envisaged, there have been frequent calls for an "eliminationist" approach to antisemitism, with the IHRA definition promoted as a key tool in this battle for "zero tolerance." 67Overlaying the various millenarian utopias with which Jews have been associated in the past, they are now most prominently associated with a much more narrowly conceived redemptive vision: a future without antisemitism.
The surge of Black Lives Matter activism in the summer of 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, has spurred a refocus of public attention on racial justice.On many campuses, humanities curricula are being rethought in response to student calls for more diverse and global perspectives.The place of anti-antisemitism, and of Jewishrelated themes more broadly, in these developments has often been contentious.The consideration of Jewish history and literature under a postcolonial rubric was until recently fairly widespread. 68There is now a more troubled intellectual relationship between these fields.The solidaristic anti-racist alliances forged more broadly between Jews and non-white minorities in the civil rights era, which have been fraying since the 1970s, have eroded even further.
In this increasingly combative environment, Jewish support for optimistic and universalistic framings of redemptive anti-antisemitism has waned.In her bestselling People Love Dead Jews (2021), Dara Horn wryly asserts in counterpoint to her title: "Living Jews, not so much." 69The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she observes, was designed in the 1990s to foster Americans' empathy with Jewish Holocaust victims, by portraying them as ordinary people very similar to them.The result, it was optimistically hoped, would be that "they would then stop hating Jews."The antisemitism of present-day America leads her to conclude that this hope has been proven wrong. 70David Baddiel's Jews Don't Count (2021), a bestseller in the UK, accuses progressives of treating antisemitism as if does not count as a truly serious form of racism, and prioritizing non-white over Jewish victimhood.This argument invites a pugnacious rallying behind anti-antisemitism of all those who feel a measure of resentment towards those minorities regarded by Baddiel as occupying the left's "sacred circle" of the recognised oppressed. 71he promise of healing through empathy, in which so much hope was invested at the turn of the millennium, has given way in the era of social media saturation to a cacophonous environment in which feelings have themselves become a focus of combat.A popular slogan of Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement is "fuck your feelings," implicitly directed at the minority groups regarded by Baddiel as illegitimately privileged in the left's hierarchy of oppression.The role of feelings in politics has become hopelessly confused, and in no context more so than the Palestine-Israel conflict.In May 2021, during a wave of violence that caused approximately 250 casualties in Gaza and 12 in Israel, pupils at a number of British schools were disciplined for expressing pro-Palestine sentiments, with one secondary school headteacher criticising their display of the Palestinian flag because it was seen by some as "a message of support for antisemitism," which made them "feel unsafe." 72These comments, for which the headteacher later apologized, exemplify how heightened opposition to antisemitism can veneer other forms of discrimination and prejudice even to the extent of anathemizing the most basic expression of Palestinian identity or solidarity.

Conclusion
Has the millennial hope for the betterment of the world through empathetic anti-antisemitism now reached a dead end?For Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir, a renewal of Dominick LaCapra's "empathetic unsettlement"understood as a strategy for recognizing resemblances between the Holocaust and the Nakba while accepting the limits to empathetic understanding across this memory divideoffers the most promising emotional pathway towards reconciliation between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.Goldberg and Bashir also note the central challenge that a shift to this outlook poses on the Jewish side: the redemptive linkage of the Holocaust to the foundation of Israel, which is so deeply embedded in the nation's collective narrative, would need to be abandoned, or at least fundamentally problematized. 73While this aspiration is noble, the impediments to its achievement are almost overwhelmingly entrenched.At the moment, the historian Steven Aschheim has observed, Holocaust memory absorbs almost all Israeli empathetic energy, and therefore functions as a counter-empathic barrier to the recognition of Palestinian victimhood. 74Internationally, meanwhile, recent disillusionment with the redemptive aspect of redemptive anti-antisemitism has hardened resistance to recognizing the parallels and interconnections between different hatreds and atrocities.Writers such as Horn and Baddiel reflect a wider culture-war trend of increasingly combative insistence on anti-antisemitic exceptionalism.
The sacralization of the Holocaust as a fundamentally unique civilizational outrage, Dirk Moses has recently argued, has played a central role in the depoliticization of the idea of genocide.The enshrinement of the Holocaust as the archetype of genocide has underwritten the focussing of moral opprobrium on supposedly "apolitical" mass killing, motivated solely by eliminationist ethnic hatred, rather than on "political" mass killing related to colonial and geopolitical power.The global projection of Holocaust education plays a central role in this, Moses shows, functioning as a Eurocentric yardstick of civilizational decency and as a rationale for maintaining the relative deprioritization of instances of mass violence that have taken place in the global South. 75In order to understand why this model of thinking and teaching about the Holocaust has become so dominant, we need to comprehend the powerful appeal and historical development of its emotional underpinning.Contemporary Holocaust education took shape in the 1990s, and was profoundly shaped by the millennial optimism and new empathetic politics of that decade.It absorbed a potent theological underlay from the long-standing redemptive associations in Western thought with Jewish history and suffering.This outlook of redemptive anti-antisemitism has in the twenty-first century become increasingly enmeshed with the politics of the Palestine-Israel conflict, and with ethno-religious antagonisms in the West.If we are to have any chance of unpicking these entanglements, we need to start from a clear understanding of why exceptionalist thinking about the Holocaust and antisemitism maintains such widespread emotional power in global politics and public life.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).