New York Review of Books publishes letter signed by Knowles urging retraction of condemnation of Holocaust analogies
University of Maine historian Anne Knowles was one of more than 140 Holocaust scholars, historians and genocide experts who signed an open letter urging the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to retract its “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies” that condemned the use of Holocaust analogies. The letter ran in The New York Review of Books section online. “Scholars in the humanities and social sciences rely on careful and responsible analysis, contextualization, comparison, and argumentation to answer questions about the past and the present…The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical,” they wrote. “The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task. We hope the Museum continues to help scholars establish the Holocaust’s significance as an event from which the world must continue to learn.” Newsweek and The Hill wrote articles about the letter.