This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, analyzes how the weaponization and distortion of the Holocaust, in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, has been used to serve the narrative of Zionists and the Israeli government. He tells host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report:
“We know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world.”
Segal recounts his personal experience learning about the Holocaust in Israel, revealing a Zionist perspective that is both skewed and contradictory.
“Jews, because they were a unique people, always faced a unique hatred, anti-Semitism, which then culminated in a unique genocide, really the only genocide ever in human history, in this framework: the Holocaust,” he explains.
Though Segal outgrew this propagandized view, he explains that many in Israel and its international supporters still frame Jews and the Holocaust as exceptional. This belief in exceptionalism, Segal argues, blurs the history that led to the Holocaust and the events that have followed.
“We really can’t understand the phenomena of modern genocide without understanding the nation-state system, the exclusionary nation system and colonialism, European expansion around the world, settler colonialism and colonial genocides that accompanied this expansion for hundreds of years,” Segal contends.
Host
Chris Hedges
Producer:
Max Jones
Intro:
Diego Ramos
Crew:
Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript:
Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
The idea that the Holocaust is a unique event in human history serves the interests of Zionists who use it to paint Jews as eternal victims and justify the apartheid state of Israel and the genocide being carried out in Gaza. Unique suffering in their eyes confers unique entitlement. But it also serves the interests of colonial powers who carried out their own genocides, ones they seek to obscure and deny.
What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers? The Armenians by Turks, the Indians and the Bengal famine by the British? Or the Soviet orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is manifest destiny any different from the Nazis’ concept of Lebensraum? These too were holocausts fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlust for mass extermination.
Nearly all Holocaust scholars who see in any criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Holocaust have refused to condemn the genocide. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians. These scholars and institutions are rendering the slogan “never again” meaningless.
They are misappropriating the Holocaust to perpetuate a false view of the world and human nature, a way not to explore the past but manipulate the present. This decision to render the Holocaust an isolated event in human history, some grotesque aberration of human depravity, robs it of its meaning and its universal importance.
This sacralization of the Holocaust allows Germany, which has been one of Israel’s most important weapon suppliers since the state’s inception, to absolve itself for its own past through its backing of the Israeli settler colonial state. Germany uses this alliance with Israel to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide carried out by German colonists against the Nama and Herero in German Southwest Africa, now Namibia.
Such magic, the Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal writes, legitimizes racism against the Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetuates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.
Joining me to discuss the uses and misuses of the Holocaust and what it means for Holocaust studies is Professor Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, where he also directs the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program. Professor Segal, because of his condemnation of the genocide in Gaza, saw the offer to lead the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota revoked.
Let’s begin with the lessons of the Holocaust because for Zionists, and if you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the lesson of the Holocaust is the creation of a well-armed Jewish state. That’s not the lesson for other writers of the Holocaust such as Primo Levi, but maybe you can lay out what in your mind is the importance, and I think that, of course, both of us fear that the misuses of the Holocaust diminishes its importance for all of us who need to learn about the capacity for human evil.
Raz Segal
Yeah, well, thank you so much, Chris, and for the invitation to speak with you today. For me, the significance of the Holocaust, there’s a number of things to say, but in a very basic way, I take the idea of “never again,” which is also in the title of the UN Genocide Convention, which is the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. So genocide prevention.
And “never again,” I take that very seriously and I take that very seriously not in the framework of Holocaust uniqueness, the exclusionary Israeli Zionist framework, “never again for us”, which as you mentioned, really means reproduction of the systems and processes of violence that led to the Holocaust, embodied in the state of Israel. But for me, the framework is a universal framework. So that is indeed about genocide prevention.
So that’s in a very basic way the significance, for me, of thinking about the Holocaust and certainly about thinking about the Holocaust, as I said, not as an exceptional event, right, but as something that is very much rooted in the broader context and really in the making of the late modern world.
And in that sense, I think about it as rooted in the nation-state system and colonialism. I mean, there’s a reason that the Holocaust happened when it happened, where it happened. That is in the middle of the 20th century in the heart of Europe. And we can’t understand Nazism. We can’t understand the Holocaust.
We really can’t understand the phenomena of modern genocide without understanding the nation-state system, the exclusionary nation system and colonialism, European expansion around the world, settler colonialism and colonial genocides that accompanied this expansion for hundreds of years.
And in that sense, and here I come to another way in which I see the significance of thinking about the Holocaust, after the defeat of Nazism, after the Holocaust, after the end of World War II, there was no coming to terms with the systems and processes of the nation state and colonialism that eventually culminated, not in any deterministic way, but eventually culminated in the Holocaust.
Rather, the exclusionary nation state system and colonialism were actually reproduced after World War II and most horribly they were actually reproduced and intersected in the Israeli state project because Israel emerged, it’s a self-described nation-state of Jews. It actually has a Basic Law, the Jewish nation-state Basic Law from 2018, right? So it’s actually defined in an exclusionary way the Jewish state, but it’s also from the very beginning and again very explicitly a settler colonial project.
So we have in the Israeli state project the intersection really of the systems of the violent processes that were central to the targeting of Jews for a long time before the Holocaust and then culminated in the Nazi genocide of Jews and in the layers of genocidal violence during World War II, not only against Jews, this was then, as I just explained, reproduced in the Israeli state project.
And for me, therefore, there’s another significance of studying the Holocaust that is related to the project of taking seriously “never again” in its universalist meaning and taking seriously the international law and the issue of genocide prevention and that is really the struggle against Israeli mass violence well before, well, well before October 2023 really, the Gaza genocide is a culmination of Israeli settler colonial violence, the ongoing Nakba since 1948, and really Zionist settler colonialism before 1948.
So the struggle against Israeli mass violence, because it’s actually so central, the Israeli state project in thinking about the Holocaust, because it’s so central in weaponizing the Holocaust in the reproduction of the causes that led us to the Holocaust, the struggle against Israeli mass violence, the struggle for a different kind of state and society between the river and the sea is for me a very important element that stems from thinking about the significance of the Holocaust.
So these are kind of the two related ways in which I think about the significance of the Holocaust.
Chris Hedges
You’re Israeli. There’s a 1999 article by Ilan Pappé that talks about the way Israelis are indoctrinated. These are his words.
What was your own trajectory to kind of arrive to where you are, especially having been born and raised in Israel?
Raz Segal
I don’t know about the word indoctrinated, I have to say.
Chris Hedges
That’s his word. That’s his word.
Raz Segal
Yeah, I understand. It might apply for… I mean, maybe it’s the right word. Maybe it’s not. I think that people, not only Israeli Jews in that sense, develop a sense of nationalism, right? And national attachments to places in various ways. In many cases, it’s not through kind of outright indoctrination, which doesn’t make it any, you know, any less strong. Quite the contrary, it makes it actually even stronger.
For me, growing up, look, this is the thing that is very important, I think, to explain. And that’s why I said that I’m not sure about indoctrination. The issue of uniqueness that you explained briefly in your introduction was a common sense issue in the way that I saw the world and felt in the world growing up as an Israeli Jew. What do I mean?
That it was kind of, it was almost the basis of how I viewed the world. So the Holocaust was unique, but the Holocaust was unique was only part of thinking, and again, none of this was articulated in a very sophisticated way. It was primarily felt. So Jews, of course, were a unique people. And Jews, because they were a unique people, always faced a unique hatred, anti-Semitism, which then culminated in a unique genocide, really the only genocide ever in human history, right, in this framework, the Holocaust.
And because Jews and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are unique, then of course, the Israeli state, right, that is in this framework seen as a response to the Holocaust, is also unique, right? So everything kind of flowed from this kind of system of uniqueness of Jews, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Israel for me.
And therefore I grew up, you know, Nakba denial was nothing explicit, right? It was just unimaginable to think about the Nakba, and certainly the ongoing Nakba, right? Even though, again, Israel is a small place, Israel-Palestin. So it’s also a very interesting case to think about how people imagine the world around them even when reality contradicts it in very clear ways, right?
But the issue of not imagining the Nakba is actually rooted also In the international political and legal system after the war and this is an important sidebar I think, you know, zooming out here from my own experience right growing up in Israel to the international political legal system because, again, the international legal system that emerged after World War II, or re-emerged actually, right?
I mean, international law has a history well before World War II, it re-emerges after the war, and genocide is its key innovation, the crime of genocide. But the crime of genocide emerges in relation to what we call today the Holocaust. No one used the word at the time.
And because of this idea of uniqueness that played, that addressed various interests of the victorious powers in World War II, the idea of uniqueness meant that immediately what we have, right, is hierarchy, which is embodied then in the 90s much later in the field in which I work, Holocaust and genocide studies, right, so Holocaust and then genocide.
But because, again, the Holocaust is unique, Nazism is unique, and because Israel was immediately perceived of course as the state of the Holocaust survivors, so again Israel is also unique, which means that from the very beginning of the re-emergence of the international legal system, in relation to the new crime of genocide, Israel assumes what really has become structural in the international legal system — impunity, right?
The idea that it’s a unique state, that it literally becomes, again, back to this idea of not imagining, unimaginable that Israel could perpetrate any crime under international law, let alone genocide, right? Now, so what I’m saying is that there was an international context to basically… It’s an absolute complete marginalization of Palestinians.
Their history, their existence as a people, denying the Palestinians existed as a people is a very common, was a very common, still is a very common issue in Israeli politics and society, denying the Nakba.
And of course denying the the ongoing Nakba, the long history of Israeli mass violence against Palestinians culminating today in the Gaza genocide. Now in terms of my trajectory of emerging or moving away from this framework, it was a very long process and there’s no time to get into it, but what matters here is that it was a process that unfolded in parallel to my studies, my interest in my academic studies about the Holocaust, right?
And again, I came to it, of course, imagining and thinking and feeling that the Holocaust is unique, that Jewish history is unique. And what happened to me, particularly in my doctoral studies stage and under the guidance of Dr. Debórah Dwork, who was the founding director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, where I did my PhD, and Debórah really guided me through this process of change.
And the process of change was really a process of learning, right, where I needed to confront more and more evidence that and evidence I mean also in the archives, when I went into the archives, when I was researching my dissertation that became my book, Genocide in the Carpathians, the evidence more and more challenged and undermined the ideas about uniqueness that I held about the Holocaust, in this case the Holocaust in Hungary, about Jewish history actually in the Jews in the Carpathian region.
And in parallel to that, right, when this kind of system of uniqueness, you know, when there are cracks that started to appear in it, almost inevitably cracks started to appear in how I saw and felt and thought about Israel. So it happened in parallel, but it was for me personally, it was a process of many years of learning. And then I would say, you can also say of unlearning, right?
But it was less really a process of unlearning, it was more a process of confronting the way that I felt about this place and the connection, the belonging that I felt to the place and how the more I learned also about the place, again, parallel to my research on the Holocaust, right, the more it became clear to me, again, through a lot of resistance, that the image that I had was absolutely false, actually.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about how Israel uses the Holocaust. IDF soldiers will go to Auschwitz. The Yad Vashem Holocaust studies in the United States seem, you know far better than I do, pretty much to have been captured by this Zionist narrative. Talk about the uses of the Holocaust by Zionists and by Israel.
Raz Segal
Yeah, I think this is quite well known, right? The way in which the Holocaust, and I wouldn’t say, I think that the correct word is weaponized, right? The Holocaust has been weaponized by Israel and by Zionists to obviously justify the Israeli state project and rationalize and legitimize really anything that Israel did or does.
Again, in a very basic way, it’s rooted in this idea of uniqueness and in this sense of impunity, right, that Israel can literally do no wrong. And the Holocaust then serves as a key element in order to rationalize this, justify this, legitimize this, reproduce this.
But the important thing, there’s two things that I think are less well understood about this. One is that the Holocaust is weaponized to justify the entire nation-state system around the world. And when I say that, what I mean is what we call global Holocaust memory, that is the institutional phenomena of Holocaust memory that emerged in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union.
And we were promised that it’s the end of history. You remember that Chris? And global Holocaust memory, this kind of brave new world that was emerging. Global Holocaust memory was a very important element in justifying, legitimizing, rationalizing the Western-dominated nation-state system.
And there’s an obvious issue here that global Holocaust memory is an institutional phenomenon. What I mean is the key institutes of this memory culture that are also overlapping with the academic field of Holocaust and genocide studies that really took off at the time in 1990s, right?
So the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in [Washington] D.C., Yad Vashem in Israel that had existed, of course, since the 50s, but in the 90s also became part of this global memory framework, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. So we have, it’s really institutional phenomena and it’s a state institutional phenomenon, right? That’s the point. These are state institutes.
And one of the really interesting things here is that, it’s obvious that state institutes, whatever they are, whatever they do, right, their goal, their interest is the interest of the state, not the interest of the people targeted by states, right? That should be the “never again” genocide prevention framework. The people, the era of the witness, the voices of Holocaust survivors, right? That should be the focus of Holocaust memory. It isn’t.
It never was. Global Holocaust memory by design is a state project, right? So one of the things to understand is that it’s not only used by Israel and by Zionists, right? It has a global, indeed, context here that is meant to legitimize the reproduction of the nation-state system after the Holocaust, not to confront it. And of course, we can’t understand the Holocaust at all without the nation-state system, the exclusionary nation-state system.
Without it, we can’t understand what happened to Jews in Hungary, in Romania, in France, indeed in Germany, right? So that’s one broader context to consider. But there’s another broader context here to consider that I think is far less well known and understood is that in Israel specifically, the Holocaust has always also been a major problem, not just an opportunity, but a major problem.
And why was it a major problem? Because the Israeli state, right, was based on this idea of the return of Jews to their native homeland, ancient people returning to their ancient homeland. The Holocaust, on the other hand, suggested a completely different kind of foundational story actually, from Holocaust to redemption. So it wasn’t about antiquity, it wasn’t about an ancient people. It was actually about a people that had lived for hundreds of years in places that were actually their homelands, right?
And then were attacked and the survivors, you know, arrive to this settler colonial project, regardless of how they themselves, of course, many survivors did not understand and did not know and did not want to in that sense partake in a settler colonial project.
But the Holocaust provided a very different foundational story, right? And this is a foundational story that’s not only about, it’s very strong in the religious Zionist framework, right? But it’s not only about religious Zionism. It’s also about secular liberal Zionism. It’s very much a framework that [David] Ben-Gurion had, right, first Israeli prime minister.
So the Holocaust from the beginning actually created all kinds of problems in Israeli politics and societies. It’s not by accident that Ben-Gurion, for example, refused, as is well known, to talk about the Holocaust, right? And, I don’t remember exactly the formulation, but he once had an outburst and he said, what is there to talk about? They died and that’s it, right?
So from the very beginning, there was a kind of urge actually, yeah, an urge I would say, to disavow the Holocaust actually, right? So there was a tension there. On the one hand, there was this framework of exceptionality, of uniqueness, right, that was very important. But on the other hand, there was the Holocaust that created a problem.
And this became very, very pronounced, of course, in the post-1967 religious Zionist settler movement, because again, there we have the contradiction is very clear, Zionism is about the return of ancient people to their homeland, and the Holocaust is a different kind of story.
And there’s a lot more to elaborate about this, but one last thing to say related to this is that what happens then, of course, with the rise of global Holocaust memory and with Holocaust education and with the proliferation of academic programs around the about the Holocaust and then Holocaust and genocide studies and of a lot of film and art and culture around this is that one of the things that happens, of course, is that people start to develop thinking about the Holocaust that is very contrary to the ideology of global Holocaust memory.
And in particular, people start to understand that there are big problems with, for instance, Israeli state violence against Palestinians. For instance, with decades of Israeli occupation that are a crude violation of international law. And wait a minute, isn’t international law a Holocaust lesson? The Nuremberg trials, right? Isn’t the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, are these institutes not also somehow related to thinking about the “lessons” of the Holocaust?
So there develops these ideas and then develops, of course, particularly in the frame of critical genocide studies, what’s called the colonial turn in genocide studies in the last 25 years or so, as thinking about colonialism and genocide and settler colonialism and genocide and people, of course, started to see and make the connections with the Israeli state project and Israeli settler colonialism, which, of course, creates more of a problem, right, for the Israeli state and feeds into this urge also to disavow the Holocaust.
The end result of this, there’s two things that happen. One is that we know today, not only in Israel, but also in the U.S., in the U.K., which is the center of Holocaust education, what people actually know about the Holocaust is very little, right?
And so we actually, we know that Holocaust education eventually was more focused on transmitting this feeling of exceptionality than actually teaching about Holocaust as history, as real history, as normal history, as a part, indeed, of the making of the modern and late modern world. So that’s one thing, that is global Holocaust memory and disorganization is actually contrary to really teaching and learning and understanding the Holocaust.
But the other thing, and this of course became very pronounced with the Gaza genocide, right, is that we really see now a rise in, you know, it’s not, I think, a significant rise still but we definitely see signs of Holocaust denial in ways that I don’t, again, we’re seeing signs that, may or may not develop further because, indeed, the Holocaust in the world of the Gaza genocide and in the world that the Gaza genocide points to, we can talk more about this, right, is a big problem.
Because if we think about the Gaza genocidism as really Israel and its allies are also using the Gaza genocide as a model for the world to come. This is what will happen to people who dare to resist any kind of measures imposed on them by extremely violent states. Then this is a world of no international law. This is a world not of “never again”, but of again and again.
Of course, no genocide prevention and of course, no need for Holocaust education of any sort at this point, right, for anything, right? So in this framework, of course, Holocaust denial, this is a very welcoming framework for Holocaust denial, right?
Chris Hedges
Let me ask about that because you used the word crisis in Holocaust studies. I think, having spent two decades covering war, the literature of the Holocaust has been extremely important to my own understanding of our own capacity for evil atrocity, the understanding that the line between the victim and the victimizer is always razor thin.
This is why I admire Primo Levi so much. But talk about that crisis. I mean, I think that it is extremely important that we study the Holocaust. Why do you use the word crisis? What’s happening?
Raz Segal
I mean, the crisis is again twofold. As you mentioned in your introduction, Chris, the institutes of global Holocaust memory, you know, unsurprisingly at all, all stood behind Israel’s attack on Gaza, actually participated in a crude weaponization of Holocaust history by depicting Palestinians as Nazis, by framing the Hamas attack on Israel on the 7th of October as a continuation actually of the Holocaust.
That is taking part in this genocide legitimization basically, legitimization of the Gaza genocide. So we see this across, we see this at the USHMM [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum], we see this at the Yad Vashem of course, the Israeli State Institute. We see this in the Shoah Foundation in LA [Los Angeles], in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance across the board, of course, these institutes did what they are designed to do, right?
Support the state and of course support the Israeli state. On the academic level, and of course there’s overlap, right? There’s a lot of overlap. Of course the USHMM has a research arm that also provides scholarships for students and scholars, right? So there’s a lot of overlap between the institutes of global Holocaust remembrance and the academic world.
In the academic world we’ve seen a massive divide immediately after October 7. A lot, I would say, in Holocaust studies, if we’re just thinking about Holocaust studies here, not the broader Holocaust and genocide studies, the large majority of Holocaust scholars took the position of the institutes of global Holocaust memory.
There was an open letter statement in November 2023 of about 150 Holocaust scholars, including some very prominent names, Jan Grabowski, Saul Friedländer, others, who again, you know, there’s not only genocide, of course, does not appear in the statement, no crime. Israel, again, can literally do no wrong. And what’s happening according to that statement in November 2023 of Holocaust scholars is really a continuation of the Holocaust, of anti-Semitism.
So this is of, again, participation, crude weaponization of Holocaust history to justify the Gaza genocide. Again, there’s other examples, some Holocaust scholars wrote some op-eds that again for example reproduced Israeli atrocity propaganda, for example, about the 40 beheaded babies on October 7th, that never happened.
And there was a piece in a Haaretz also in November 2023 by five Holocaust scholars including the Israeli Dina Porat, including the American Avinoam Patt and others who reproduced the beheaded babies Israeli atrocity propaganda that is, again, fuel for the Gaza genocide even though by the time that they were writing, by the way, it was already clear to everyone that it had never happened, right, the 40 beheaded babies. They still reproduced it in their piece.
So the dean of Holocaust studies, Israeli professor Yehuda Bauer, who was still alive at the time, also in November 2023, wrote a piece in the Times of Israel that described Hamas and Israel as living in two different worlds, right? Hamas, a world of barbarism, and Israel, a world of civilization so a very clear settler colonial racist framework, right? Again, fodder to the genocide.
So we had a lot of that and the large majority of Holocaust scholars in the U.S., certainly in Germany, where, as you mentioned in your introduction, support for Israel is a religious element, right, in the reason of the German state.
And then we had a minority of Holocaust scholars including myself, you know, we could think of other well-known scholars like Omer Bartov, of course, and others who immediately from the beginning spoke out about not necessarily the crime of genocide, as is well known, it took Omer Bartov until May 2024 to say that he recognized the crime of genocide.
Chris Hedges
Wasn’t it 2025? Wasn’t it this year? Bartov?
Raz Segal
No, Bartov in May 2024, with Israel’s invasion of Rafah, he argues that he recognized the crime of genocide. Again, there’s contradictions in the way that he framed his position in the last year, right, in relation to those early months of Israel’s attack on Gaza. But he definitely talked about Israeli crimes, very, very clear war crimes, crimes against humanities, about the danger of genocide.
And this is the key issue, right, with the crime of genocide, if we really take prevention seriously, genocide is not a crime that you are supposed to identify once the genocide is over. The whole idea about prevention and “never again” is that, as we teach our students, there are red flags that once we notice them, right, we’re supposed to work in order to stop a process that could escalate to genocide, even if it’s not genocidal yet, right?
For example, crude dehumanization of people like calling all of them human animals or Nazis, for instance, right? So there was a minority of Holocaust scholars who took that position, who wrote about it, spoke about it. Barry Trachtenberg, for example, was very central in that. And some others. But it’s a minority of Holocaust scholars. And I say crisis, right, to answer your question, Chris, because this is a divide that we cannot bridge.
People, a large number of people who have mobilized themselves in order to rationalize what is now seen by a growing number of people, a growing number of genocide scholars, a growing number of international law experts, even some Israelis and Zionists and their supporters are talking about the Gaza genocide, right?
People who have, from the beginning, put themselves in support of this genocide, right, they have burned all their bridges, right? This is why we’re talking now about, it’s even beyond a crisis, right? This is, it’s difficult, certainly, as long as Gaza genocide continues to unfold. And I’m thinking about someone like Norman Goda, the Holocaust historian Norman Goda, whose genocide denial is crude and unbelievable, right?
There is no hunger. The numbers, of course, of the Palestinian victims are inflated in his view. And we know that the 62,000 Palestinians that Israel has murdered so far in Gaza, we know that the real numbers are at least double, if not more, actually.
No, for Norman Goda, they’re inflated, which is a very, very classic mechanism of Holocaust denial, the minimization of numbers. There is no hunger. So we see Holocaust scholars today that legitimize Israeli genocide, that deny it, and there is no coming back from that. There is no way to resolve that, at least the way that I see it right now. And that’s why it’s even beyond a crisis, right?
In that sense, it is perhaps possible to speak in a way about the death of Holocaust studies as a field. It’s quite interesting that while we might say the death of Holocaust studies as a field, of course, Holocaust scholarship, the last decade and even in the last years, we’ve seen amazing new kind of research on the Holocaust that opens up new kind of perspectives and raises new kinds of questions on Roma, on queer people, right?
There’s so much interesting research on the Holocaust, but Holocaust studies as a field might be dead, which is not necessarily a bad thing, right? If indeed Holocaust studies is intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory, maybe it’s good that we won’t have Holocaust studies anymore.
And maybe it will open the door for even more interesting and important research on the Holocaust as history, as real history. And we badly need this kind of work, this kind of work that will provide us the basis for the kind of education and the kind of political work that we need to do in the world around us today.
Chris Hedges
I mean, in Omer Bartov’s piece in the New York Times, where he calls it out as genocide, he expresses the concern, and of course he pays homage to someone like you, very early on denounced it as a genocide, he worries that Holocaust studies will just become a sectarian field, that it’ll kind of atrophy and feed as it has done, but feed in a kind of much narrower way this segment of uniqueness and Zionism and not be studied broadly.
Raz Segal
You know, what that means really, again, what we could call somewhat dramatically the death of Holocaust studies. But think about it. People can continue to study. People who are historians or sociologists or anthropologists or from whatever discipline don’t need Holocaust studies to study the Holocaust, right.
And then of course, there’s the broader field of genocide studies, which is a different issue. We don’t really have enough time to go into it and there’s a crisis there as well, but a different kind. But in a way we’re facing a crisis and the broader crisis in the academic world, really an unprecedented attack against universities here in the U.S., but really everywhere around the world.
So the broader question is what kind of academic world will there be? What kind of journals, academic presses, universities, academic programs? Maybe all that is going away in any case, right? Which is the kind of framework for studying the Holocaust. But the fact that there won’t be Holocaust studies, the fact that these people like Norman Goda that I mentioned, Avinoam Patt, these people who have burned their bridges, who cannot come back from legitimizing genocide, the fact that that field will either die or will turn into, in a way, what it has always been, a sectarian field that is meant to justify and rationalize the Israeli state project and the nation-state system more broadly.
That in itself will not mean that the study of the Holocaust will die. Quite the contrary, as I said. Of course, the larger problem of the academic world today and the attack that we’re facing is there regardless. But again, the death of Holocaust studies, that’s not a bad development.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you, Raz. I want to thank Sofia [Menemenlis], Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Photos
TOPSHOT-MIDEAST-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-GAZA-UNREST-MILITARY
TOPSHOT – Israeli army soldiers escort a Palestinian detainee to their base after exiting the northern Gaza Strip following an operation in the territory, 26 October 2007.(Photo by DAVID FURST / AFP) (Photo by DAVID FURST/AFP via Getty Images)
India Citizens Waiting in Line for Soup Kitchen
(Original Caption) India: Famine In India. By last week, an estimated 1,000,000 people had died of starvation in India and the British Government did nothing to control this situation. That number will undoubtedly rise before the final, tragic count is taken. Just released these startling pictures were taken in Calcutta at the peak of the famine in late October. A triple line of Indians suffering from the famine drags toward a “soup kitchen” in Calcutta. Often, people fell dead before they could reach the food.
Famine In Ukraine
Two boys with a cache of potatoes they have found during the man-made Holodomor famine in the Ukraine, former Soviet Union, Spring 1934. The food had been hidden by an elderly woman, who was raided by the GPU (secret police) and deported to Siberia for hoarding food. The food found by the boys had been overlooked by the GPU agents. (Photo by Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Japanese Toddler Crying Amongst Rubble
27th July 1946: A Japanese child sits crying in the rubble of Hiroshima a year after the city was devastated by the world’s first atomic bomb attack by the USA, on August 6, 1945.
TOPSHOT-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-CONFLICT-GAZA
TOPSHOT – People watch as leaflets dropped by the Israeli military, urging evacuation south to al-Mawasi, land in Gaza City on September 9, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP) (Photo by OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP via Getty Images)
ISRAEL-GERMANY-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-DIPLOMACY
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) speaks during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz following their meeting in Jerusalem on March 17, 2024. Scholz’s visit came the same day Israeli officials were set to meet to discuss the “mandate” of a negotiations team expected to participate in a new round of talks in Qatar aimed at securing a new truce between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by Leo Correa / POOL / AFP) (Photo by LEO CORREA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Namibian slaves
https://snl.no/Folkemordet_i_Namibia (public domain)
Portrait Of Primo Levi By Larry Rivers
NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 10: Portrait of Primo Levi by Larry Rivers on February 10, 1988 in New York, New York. (Photo by Santi Visalli/Getty Images)
Refugee Jews Return To Palestine
After sailing from Cypress to Palestine, 297 Jewish refugee men, women, and children sing with joy as they arrive in the port of Haifa, Isreal, December 9, 1946. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)
Israel / Palestine: Palestinians driven from their homes and fleeing via the sea at Acre by Israeli forces, 1948
The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba (Arabic: an-Nakbah, lit.’catastrophe’), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1947Ð1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 ArabÐIsraeli War. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
K – Edinburgh – Writers Attend Edinburgh International Book Festival
Israeli historian and academic Ilan Pappe, pictured at the Edinburgh International Book Festival where he talked about his new book entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Palestinian Dynasty.’ (Photo by Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images)
Israeli Army Chief Ya’alon Visits Auschwitz Death Camp
AUSCHWITZ, POLAND – MAY 19: In this handout image provided by the IDF, Israeli army chief Moshe Ya’alon (2nd-R) leads a delegation of soldiers and officers May 19, 2005 to the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland, where some 1,500,000 Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. The outgoing general is on a two-day visit to Poland. (Photo by Tzvika Golan/IDF via Getty Images)
German Nazi SS troops guarding members of the Jewish resistance captured during the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. About 13,000 Jews died during the uprising. Most of the remaining 50,000 residents of the ghetto were captured and sent …
UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1754: German Nazi SS troops guarding members of the Jewish resistance captured during the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. About 13,000 Jews died during the uprising. Most of the remaining 50,000 residents of the ghetto were captured and sent to concentration and extermination camps. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
Daily life in Gaza under Israeli attacks
GAZA CITY, GAZA – SEPTEMBER 08: Palestinians try to maintain their daily life while they struggle with difficult living conditions, lacking basic needs such as shelter, food and clean water in Gaza City, Gaza on September 06, 2025. The humanitarian crisis experienced by the people trying to survive in makeshift tents in Gaza city center is deepening due to Israeli attacks and the blockade. (Photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Right-Wing Israelis Establish First West Bank Settlements
SEBASTIA, WEST BANK – DECEMBER 8, 1975: Right-wing Jewish Yeshiva students continue their religious studies in a tent as they wait for the government to meet their demands to set up the first Jewish settlement in the Samaria December 8, 1975 in their encampment at the Sebastia railway station in the northern West Bank. (Photo by Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images)
West Bank Residents Feel Impact Of Gaza War In Economy And Security
JERUSALEM – MARCH 8: Members of the Israeli security forces scuffle with a Palestinian man at a checkpoint near Lion’s Gate to enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound before the Friday noon prayer on March 8, 2024 in Jerusalem. Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has also reverberated through the West Bank, hobbling the territory’s economy while unsettling its security. (Photo by Sergey Ponomarev/Getty Images)
Israel-Gaza Conflict
Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas are taking part in a military parade in front of an Israeli military site to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, on July 19, 2023. (Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
This post has been syndicated from The Chris Hedges Report, where it was published under this address.