Between Washington and Jerusalem.

The Capitols of Killing and Frights. On the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2026

This year International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked annually on January 27, was profoundly different from all previous commemorations. Today memory itself is on trial, confronted with a central question: what is this memory for? The past is fixed and meticulously documented, yet the way it is used has changed completely and raises deep unease. Memory has shrunk in our time. It has retreated from its own meaning, as if frightened by itself.

Every January I make a pilgrimage with my students to the sites of memory and commemoration in Washington: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African American History. This year the city had changed its face. It was less the capital of a power founded on liberty and more a metropolis of anxieties and fears. National Guard soldiers patrolled the streets in full combat gear and vests. They were not guarding against a specific threat. They were there as a manifestation of the illnesses of the American psyche. Police vehicles blocked countless intersections and iron barricades cut through the city and its landmarks. From every corner bubbled a sense of excessive force trying to calm a shattered self-confidence. The city reminded me of Jerusalem: a city of checkpoints and surplus weapons. Two cities of exaggerated conservatism and far too many soldiers and police officers. Two capitals born as moral promises that became arenas of unrestrained force in the hands of politicians without restraint. This is no coincidence. It is the new partnership of values between Israel and the United States of our time.

Precisely on this day, meant to mark the collapse of Western morality in twentieth century Europe, it is painfully evident how the United States, Israel, and their conservative and racist allies struggle with the internalization of the lessons of those years. In the Holocaust Museum in Washington this is more tangible than ever. The museum remains as impressive as always, its exhibits scorching the soul, and yet something is missing. For many years the journey through the museum ended with a space dedicated to the catastrophes of others. There the curators dared to expand the meaning of memory: first to Syria and the horrors of its civil war, and later to Myanmar and the persecution of the Rohingya. This was always the climax of the visit. Not as comparison or denial but as a crucial moral deepening of the Holocaust. Those human rooms said something simple and clear: the Holocaust was a crime against humanity carried out largely on the body of the Jewish people, but its lesson is not the property of one people. It is universally human. Any person and any nation can be victims, or God forbid, perpetrators. This is why it is not a museum of Jews for Jews, but a national monument of the entire American nation. Holocaust memory in Washington became a warning sign placed at the very center of the most important hill in the Western world.

This year, to my surprise, there was no exhibition at the end of the path. I stood before the sealed corridor and searched for a sign or notice explaining a temporary closure or renovations. I found nothing. Could it be that the disappearance of the exhibition this year is not merely technical? I fear it is not. The past exhibitions were a profound moral statement. Now, with their closure, the boundaries of responsibility and memory have been redrawn. With terrible pain it must be said: the exhibition demanded at this moment should have dealt with Gaza. Not as historical comparison and not as indictment, but as a moral question about the use of devastating force in the name of security and identity. Especially when carried out by one that claims to be the legitimate heir of the victims of the Holocaust. This is a dilemma that should shake everyone: Israelis and Jews, Americans and people everywhere. Because the silence over Gaza is a denial of the universal human lesson of the Holocaust, nothing less. Israeli brutality wrapped in the appearance of civilized elegance does not make anything legitimate. In the absence of a sharp moral statement about Israel’s crimes at this time, the Holocaust in Washington has once again been confined to a narrow Jewish ghetto.

Against this backdrop I read the interview with Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti Defamation League. I was not surprised, only disappointed. Precisely because he is articulate and intelligent. Greenblatt sees antisemitism everywhere. It does exist and it is dangerous, but for him it is the only lens through which the world is examined. He asks why no one complains about Iran. It sounds like a moral question, but in fact it is another evasion of responsibility.

First, yes, Iran is protested and sanctioned, for years and consistently. Second, and this is the core issue, Iran does not pretend to be a Western liberal democracy. It never sought to be judged by the high standards Israel set for itself. Criticism of Israel arises precisely from its claim to be a Jewish and democratic state. Whoever seeks membership in this family of values must also be judged by them. To declare “I am the only democracy” and behave like the worst of dictatorships, this is the whiny hypocrisy at its worst. Their ear, Greenblatt’s and the museum curators’, hears only antisemitism. Their eye refuses to see universal human responsibility or to place this Israel on the side of the wrongdoers.

It may also be that in his subconscious Greenblatt is telling himself and us something else. Perhaps Israel has indeed ceased to be a Western liberal democracy, and that is why it compares itself to Iran. Not implausible.

Meanwhile reality does not stop. Washington kills its citizens in Minneapolis. Jerusalem kills Palestinians and sacrifices its own citizens on the altar of cynicism and nationalism. The pattern is the same: force driven leaders and governments deploy unnecessary lethal power against weakened populations and refuse to bear the moral cost of their actions. There is still no museum for this, no space that allows reckoning without emotional blackmail.

Because of Netanyahu’s Jerusalem and Trump’s Washington, we must establish entirely different institutions of memory and commemoration. On 14th Street in Washington, between the Holocaust Museum and the National Museum of African American History, there should be a mediating institution. Not another site of victims, but a place where memory is transformed from silent testimony into living obligation. Not what was done to us, but what is demanded of us.

Barack Obama is quoted there: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

In this spirit new and different institutions of memory will arise. Without hierarchies of pain or competitions between traumas. Only one enduring question will be asked there: what must or can human beings and societies do after recognizing that they are capable of the worst evil? Hearts will be trained there to restrain power, not to unleash it. They will commemorate civic struggles that succeeded in stopping violence, communities that chose not to use the power they held and prevailed, societies that relinquished revenge in favor of reconciliation, and states that admitted failure and repaired.

At the core of such a place there will be one hard and necessary assertion: no memory is a certificate of exemption from responsibility. Even the darkest trauma grants no one special rights to harm or to commit atrocities.

For many this is a naive dream, for others a necessary but possible political vision. It is possible to shift the center of gravity of the world from guilt and accusation toward reconciliation and repair. To speak the searing truth about what must never happen again and what must be done from here on. For example, how to build peace in a world that has lost its innocence, or how to protect human beings who are not part of our collective. And precisely we, the children of the Holocaust, must understand that we have no immunity from error or criticism. The responsibility placed upon us is greater than that of all others, or at least no less than anyone else.