A few years ago, in the early summer of 2019, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum declared on its website that it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” Apparently it felt that this declaration was necessary because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, had the temerity to characterize detention centers for migrants on the US southern border as “concentration camps.” Her statement might not have provoked such a strong reaction from the USHMM had she not felt moved to invoke the phrase “Never Again.”
As someone who thinks a fair bit about the conceptual underpinnings of the social sciences, I found the USHMM’s condemnation of analogies between the Holocaust and what it (rather blandly) called “other events” truly puzzling, and I responded with an essay in these pages. I sought to explain just why analogies are indispensable to historical inquiry and why comparison in general is a necessary presupposition for all social-scientific understanding. More importantly, I suggested that comparison is an essential component of all moral deliberation. Analogies are helpful, I argued, not only because they assist us in discerning similarities but also because they can alert us to differences we might have otherwise missed. Moral judgment requires that we determine whether in distinct cases of human conduct the same principles obtain. Without comparison such judgment would be impossible.
Five and a half years later the scandal has seen a reprise. During a press conference on Sunday, January 25, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, spoke about the assault by ICE on immigrant communities in his state. “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
Walz offered these remarks just two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is marked yearly on January 27, the day that soldiers in the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. On X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the USHMM offered a swift retort: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
