The Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center at the Cincinnati Museum Center is offering free admission throughout the month of January. They say their aim is to combat a rise in antisemitism seen both locally and across the U.S., and point to a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that says there’s been a sizable uptick in antisemitism since 1,200 Israeli citizens were killed by Hamas militants in a terrorist attack on Oct. 7.
But critics say there are problems with the report — and say that pro-Palestinian advocacy is being conflated with antisemitism.
Combating antisemitism with education
Jackie Congedo, chief external relations and community engagement officer for the Holocaust & Humanity Center, said the museum will be free for guests through the end of January.
“Dehumanizing rhetoric and framing have created a climate where it’s easy to lose track of our own humanity, as well as the humanity of others,” Congedo said during a Jan. 3 press event.
Between Oct. 7 and Dec. 7, the ADL recorded a total of 2,031 antisemitic incidents in the U.S., up from 465 incidents during the same period in 2022. The report includes 40 incidents of physical assault, 337 incidents of vandalism and 749 incidents of verbal or written harassment. The data includes one fatality during dueling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies in Los Angeles on Nov. 5.
Recent polling data from The Economist found one in five young Americans between the ages of 18-29 believe the Holocaust is a myth. Michael Meyer, professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College in Clifton, was at the press conference to reaffirm the painful history.
“(In) the year 1941, my parents and myself managed to escape the Nazi tyranny. We sailed into New York Harbor, and upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, waving her torch of promise, we rejoiced in our salvation,” Meyer said. “And yet, three quarters of a century after the Holocaust, antisemitism has once again reared its ugly head, even in this, our country of refuge.”
The uptick in antisemitism, according to Congedo, is rearing its head among younger generations.
“On the street, at synagogues, universities, restaurants, businesses and, yes, even Holocaust museums,” she said. “Right here in Cincinnati, chants of death to Jews in our schools. Students telling their Jewish classmates that, quote, ‘Hitler should have finished the job.’ Nazi salutes and swastikas drawn in school bathrooms, among many other alarming incidents.”
Kara Driscoll, director of marketing and events at the Holocaust & Humanity Center, said the award-winning museum has the proven ability to transform perspectives.
“When you go through this museum, you’re not only learning about the history, but the data shows that schools and kids that go through here, and the general community, have greater levels of empathy, greater levels of critical thinking skills and are able to understand their peers a little better through this history.”
Conflicting definitions
Speaking at the museum’s press conference, Congressman Greg Landsman told reporters a swastika was found on a bathroom wall at his daughter’s school, but he said a more subtle form of antisemitism is on the rise.
“There is the kind of antisemitism that’s in your face. You know, think of skinheads and Neo Nazis and folks who are very upfront and vocal about their hatred of Jews, those who chant in the streets, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ and that is scary,” Landsman said. “There’s something more terrifying than that. And that is when society turns on Jews.”
Landsman, who is Jewish, was one of the 22 U.S. House Democrats who voted on Nov. 7 to formally censure Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib for embracing the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The vote, along with Landsman’s vocal support for the Israeli government, led vandals to deface a wall near his Walnut Hills office with a Barbie movie-inspired poster proclaiming, “This Ken supports genocide!” Nationally and locally, rallies for a permanent ceasefire and freedom for Palestinians have ramped up as more than 22,000 Gazans have been killed by Israeli forces since Oct. 7.
“When [the building next to our office] was vandalized, it said that we were supporting ethnic cleansing. That we were, you know, somehow genocidal demons. And that is the kind of rhetoric that you see on social media, that you hear during protests,” Landsman said. “The war is awful, though in order to call it genocide or ethnic cleansing, requires a belief in a conspiracy that Jews represent the worst of humanity, of society.”
Amina Barhumi is the executive director of Ohio’s arm of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil rights and advocacy organization for Muslims. She disagreed with that assertion, telling CityBeat that Landsman is gaslighting the public by calling allegations of genocide in the context of Gaza antisemitic.
“What we’re seeing essentially happen is the weaponization of antisemitism,” she said. “Antisemitism has nothing to do with people who are demanding the decolonization of an apartheid state, and demanding a permanent ceasefire and the killing of innocent civilians that are oftentimes their own family members.”
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Barhumi is concerned about the museum’s embrace of the ADL’s data on antisemitic incidents, and particularly its claim that there have been 905 rallies in the U.S. that supported “terrorism against the state of Israel and/or anti-Zionism.”
“When grassroots activists are speaking of Zionism, they are speaking about the Israeli apartheid policies that every human should consider a problem, because it is dangerous for all of us globally,” Barhumi said. “Our humanity is lost when we allow for what is happening to happen to anyone, because then we are creating a standard in which any minority can then become a target for any reason that a government or regime sees fit.”
Congedo said “reasonable protests that call for humanity” can become antisemitic when holding Israel to a double standard, or when a person criticizes only Israel on certain issues, but chooses to ignore other countries that are doing the same.
“We could speak for a long time about the nuances of that conversation and how to distinguish, the easy way to tell the difference is to look for the tropes,” she said. “Look for the language that dehumanizes, that demonizes, that holds Israel to a double standard. That’s how we know there’s something more that’s happening outside of harsh critique.”
The dehumanization, Barhumi believes, is happening to Palestinians.
“Everyone that is highlighting and underscoring the killing of civilians is becoming a target of this weaponization,” she said. “I mean, let’s take a step back. Who’s killing who here?”
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This article appears in Dec 27, 2023 – Jan 9, 2024.