Historians know what memory politics forgets.

No grave historical trauma, not even the Holocaust, lives on through lived experience alone. Remembrance changes how past pain is remembered. Narrative weaves metaphor into the expression of hatred, even antisemitism.

Don’t get me wrong. The Holocaust was very real. I have been reflecting on it for fifty years. Even if its memory is invoked for political purposes, anger at what Israel does today does not relieve us of the moral responsibility to challenge the “bafflement and demoralisation” of thinking about the unthinkable.

Or indeed, the incomparable unthinkables of the 1948 nakba, the Bengal famine, the Conquest of the Americas, transatlantic slavery, the Trail of Tears, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmelnitsky massacres of the 1640s in Poland/Ukraine, the USA ‘fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian‘, the genocide in Gaza.

The list sadly is too long for one human heart to bear.

There are so many horrors in history.It is always a time of monsters.

Our ways of perceiving those monsters, of calming and inciting ourselves in the gaze of the Gorgon, change with the winds of history, especially the mercurial history of culture.

In the 1970s, Mark Mazower shows in On Antisemitism, a constellation of sacral remembrance of the Holocaust emerged; not from the Lobby or Mossad, but also not without intentional advocacy by the US American Jewish community. It emerged from deep currents of US American cultural, social and political history.

The USA’s bond with Israel is not capture by a “foreign power” and ‘Zionist propaganda’. It is the creation of US American culture. And it is time the USA gazed into the eyes of its own monsters.

I will explain more in my post this Saturday.