In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the sentiment “Never again” emerged in many contexts — from a multinational community of camp prisoners bound together in anti-fascist solidarity to Jewish survivors organizing self-defense and revenge. As the Holocaust Museum LA learned this past week, that slogan has become explosively controversial.
On Sept. 4, the Holocaust Museum LA posted a now-deleted Instagram carousel with a seemingly banal message: “Jews were raised to say ‘Never Again.’ That means never again. For anyone.” An accompanying graphic depicted six interlocked arms of different skin tones, the lightest one tattooed in the style of Auschwitz prisoners. Additional slides added: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience” and “To be Jewish is to remember and act.”
This messaging is hardly radical in the world of institutional Holocaust commemoration. But the response on social media was apoplectic. Hundreds of seething comments accused the museum of trivializing Jewish suffering, spitefully compared the post to claims of “all lives matter,” or insisted that “Never again” had always been and remained some kind of Jewish property. Within two days, the museum capitulated, apologizing for posting an “item … easily open to misinterpretation” as “a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” The implication behind such a euphemism was that the “never again for anyone” message might have encouraged reflection on the violence currently inflicted by the Israeli state on the people of Gaza.
This dust-up between a Holocaust institution and overconfident but underinformed social media warriors was more than just another case of online outrage. It reflects a deeper turn away from the universalist approach that has been at the heart of institutional Holocaust memory culture since the 1990s. The 2000 Stockholm Declaration, which founded the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, declares unequivocally that “the unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.” Elie Wiesel himself framed the Holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy with universal implications and applications.”
As historian Amos Goldberg has argued, Holocaust memory since the 1990s has contained a contradiction between a human rights-oriented universalism and an Israel-oriented empathy for the Nazis’ ultimate victims, Jews. That contradiction has sharpened with Israel’s war in Gaza, where Holocaust memory is deployed to shield the state from criticism and justify mass atrocities.
With its post, the museum likely intended nothing more than leveraging inclusive identity politics to attract a wider public of visitors. But in the paranoid, possessive and competitive interpretations of commenters, the suggestion of solidarity with others signified a denial of Jewish suffering and, worse, concern over the violence in Gaza. A grave transgression.
The truth is there is no single origin story for the ubiquitous slogan “Never again,” nor has there even been a consensus on its meaning. Some Instagram users were quick to point to Jewish poet Yitzhak Lamdan’s 1927 epic Zionist poem proclaiming, “Never again shall Masada fall!” Yet already in the early years following World War I, “Nie Wieder Krieg” (“Never again war”) had become a central slogan of mass anti-war rallies in the Weimar Republic.
Other people online pointed to the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945 when former prisoners displayed signs with the slogan “Never again.” However, most of Buchenwald’s inmates were political prisoners, and the phrase probably signified their anti-fascist convictions; at the first memorial ceremony held on April 19, 1945, survivors “read an oath of commitment to a world of peace and freedom” and “former inmates drew up initial documents for the creation of a democratic Germany as well as the ‘Manifesto of the Democratic Socialists of the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp,’” according to the Buchenwald Memorial.
To be sure, a vengeful, insular interpretation of the slogan was reportedly uttered as early as September 1945 by Abba Kovner, a Holocaust survivor and leader of a Jewish paramilitary organization that sought lethal revenge against Germans. And Meir Kahane, the U.S.-born godfather of the Israeli far right, claimed the slogan for the title of his 1971 nationalist manifesto. But the backlash to Holocaust Museum LA’s post shows how thoroughly this particular interpretation has become mainstream. What was once an inclusive moral and political agenda about preventing and resisting persecution, racism and genocide has been recast as exclusive property, wielded to deny recognition of others’ suffering and to defend Israel at all costs.
The irony is that many of the liberals and progressives who attacked the museum’s post would likely be unsettled to discover how closely their identitarian rejection of universalism mirrors the current Israeli government’s public diplomacy, increasingly targeted at Jews who deviate from its ethnonationalist agenda. In April, the Israeli embassy in Berlin aggressively pressured the Buchenwald Memorial to cancel a commemoration speech by Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, sneering on X that Boehm sought to “dilute” Holocaust commemoration “with his discourse on universal values.”
Holocaust survivors such as Wiesel often insisted that the dead be honored not by solely commemorating Jewish suffering but by preventing future atrocities against others. But the backlash to the post and the museum’s subsequent acquiescence show how much ground is being ceded to narrow ethnonationalism. They also reveal a looming conflict between the very premise of memorial museums and their professional imperatives to increase visitors and appeal to new audiences, on the one hand, and the identitarian politics of reaction spreading across the globe, on the other.
There is certainly much to debate about the limits of a universalist approach, and scholars and practitioners have done so for decades. But if a public Holocaust museum in Los Angeles can’t bridge its collection to broader lessons about solidarity, human rights and the prevention of persecution, hate and violence — or worse, if such a museum feels forced to apologize for even trying — then what is the point?
Ben Ratskoff is an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College. His current research interrogates the politics of Holocaust memory and representation and the relationship between antisemitism, colonialism and white supremacy.
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