Last week, institutions across the world commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day, marking 81 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The day was full of significant moments. The King and Queen hosted a reception for Holocaust survivors and their descendants at Buckingham Palace. Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich addressed the cabinet, the first Holocaust survivor and third person ever to do so. Thousands of institutions and organisations held events and issued statements of commemoration, from local authorities and political parties to football clubs, universities, charities, and others.
Notwithstanding the vast and meaningful engagement with HMD this year, there was something consistently missing across many of the interventions: Jews.
Most notable was the BBC, which across four of its programmes referred to the six million “people” murdered in the Holocaust. It later issued an apology and a statement of correction on its website, but one wonders how such a failing was missed, given the level of scrutiny that scripts undergo before they make it to our screens. This is just the latest in a long line of issues for the national broadcaster. Sadly, this is not new. Last year, a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, one of the country’s most-watched breakfast television programmes, stated live on air that “six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War”. She later apologised on air, but you might think that other broadcasters would take note of such shortcomings.
Dozens of members of Parliament signed the Book of Commitment, posting their messages without reference to the reason that six million men, women and children were murdered – because they were Jewish. Since then, several of these elected officials have engaged in Holocaust inversion and invoked antisemitic tropes on social media.
Whether these institutions or people were actually thinking about Jews, or acted in bad faith, is unclear. And while this is not to say that their memorials were not meaningful, taken together it amounts to an erasure, and one thing is becoming increasingly clear. People feel uncomfortable mentioning Jews. But why, when discussing the history in which their story is so central?
Just like the past two years, the world observed Holocaust Memorial Day in times that are fraught. We know that in times of political instability and uncertainty, people take comfort in finding someone to blame. Antisemitism is never far behind that.
The inherent contradiction of anti-Jewish racism is its treatment of Jews as simultaneously embodying all evils in the world – unimaginably powerful and sub-human. Though such ideas have existed for centuries, the recent conflict in the Middle East has resurrected an impetus to diminish Jewish victimhood, or often reject it entirely.
The law of Schrödinger’s Whites, in which Jews are white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer, undoubtedly plays a part in this. Such a perception fuels the idea that Jews cannot be victims of racism. Antisemitic modes of thinking treat the world’s only Jewish state as the embodiment of all that is wrong with the world, the ultimate oppressor and root cause of evil, the sole obstacle standing between society and utopia. If this were the case, then it would be impossible to conceive of Jews as victims in any context. Put another way, it is uncomfortable, unfashionable for Jews to be considered as lacking agency.
Cue silence from the "anti-racist” activists, purporting to champion policies of equality and anti-racism, whilst doing painstakingly little to address antisemitism including within their ranks. It did not go unnoticed that some political parties that purport to be fundamentally anti-racist issued minimalist statements on X, also omitting any reference to Jews.
Or the United Nations, whose statement (without any mention of Jews) claimed the Holocaust started with “apathy and silence”. The organisation founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, specifically to uphold the post-war human rights order and ensure such an event could never happen again, mitigated responsibility for the perpetrators and collaborators, and totally obscured the deliberate and vicious policy of antisemitism at the very core of their ideology that spurred them to target Jews indiscriminately and unequivocally.
All this is to say that if you don’t see Jews as victims, it’s easier to miss them out of your statements of condemnation.
For me, this Holocaust Memorial Day is yet another manifestation of a worrying trend. Since October 7, anti-Jewish racism has risen dramatically and remained alarmingly high, with the Community Security Trust recording between 200 and 300 incidents every month. In almost every sector we find a culture of antisemitism that pressures Jews to pass a political purity test, seeks to qualify or equate the Jewish experience with any and all examples of oppression, and dismisses Jewish pain and trauma, both during the Holocaust and today.
People turn a blind eye because it’s too "difficult”, too “sensitive”, too political-charged and “controversial”. We see this everywhere, from workplaces to education where the number of schools participating in HMD commemorations has dropped. New research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education found that a quarter of students did not know that six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered during the Holocaust.
In turn, antisemitism goes unchecked, unchallenged. We know where it led 81 years ago, and we know where it can lead, and has led, today.
The concept of “never again” is losing its Jewish specificity. In attempts to universalise the Holocaust (using it as a symbol of the worst of humanity, or as a proxy for ultimate evil), there seems to be a concerted effort to diminish the vicious antisemitism that fuelled the murder of six million Jews, or ignore it totally. The beating heart of Nazism has a racialised antisemitism, mobilised for genocidal purpose, built on centuries of anti-Jewish racism, reaching back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood libel, and even earlier ideas. The bureaucratic, industrialised, systematic murder of an entire group of people on such a scale was unprecedented. You can’t talk about the Holocaust in a meaningful way without mentioning Jewish victims. It undermines its very historical truth.
The specific, devastating impact of the Holocaust on Jewish communities across the world is still felt today. The lives of six million Jewish men, women and children were stolen, but so were their languages, culture, communities, and ways of life. The Nazis attempted to destroy not only Jewish lives, but the Jewish way of life too. On Holocaust Memorial Day we mourn not only what was lost, but what could have been and never was.
We face a critical juncture where few eyewitnesses are still with us. They continue to share their testimony with bravery and resilience, imparting the urgent message to never forget what happened. We enter a new era, moving further in time from this history, with truth on the defensive. Remembrance must be active, not passive. That starts with centring Jews in the Holocaust. Erasing the experience of an entire community at the focal moment of their most painful collective memory doesn’t feel like honouring our promise to remember.
Evie Robinson is the external affairs officer for the Antisemitism Policy Trust
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.