Holocaust Memorial Day is 24 hours of shame, but not in the way you think. It was designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and it falls on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet forces: January 27, in 1945. This is tragedy enough for the Jewish people, you might think, but HMD — I don’t mind giving it an acronym, it deserves one — has changed. It is now an annual festival for the abuse of living Jewish people and the denial of our loss, and we brace ourselves for the memory of the past, and the cruelty of the present. This was the worst year yet.
When antisemitism began to return to the mainstream about 15 years ago, I wrote: saying you will never again burn Jews because you have burned so many Jews is pretty much the stupidest thing I have ever heard. It was glib but accurate: there is no reason why the world should change. Nazism was defeated, it is true, but not for the Jews’ sake, far from it: when Hitler offered German Jewry to the world at the Evian Conference in 1938 the world didn’t want them, and it left them to die.
