It’s an inside joke of sorts in Jewish communal media that two types of people research whether each famous person is Jewish: antisemites, and writers for Jewish publications.

Imperfect analogy time: There are two reasons why someone might see Palestinian suffering in Gaza and think about Nazism. One is that they’re Jewish and Nazism is an inescapable reference point for them. Another is that they hate Jews, and want to get us where it hurts. So unless you know who you’re hearing from, and what their deal is, you really cannot know what it is you’re looking at in these contexts.

As JTA reports, the Holocaust Museum LA made, then mea culpa’d, a social media post that used the expression “never again” in a way that many interpreted as a criticism of Israel’s behaviour in Gaza. The Instagram post, which read, “’Never again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews,” did not include the word “genocide,” but some read that accusation into it. The organization, “which was founded by survivors,” promised to “do better.”

This story has made enough of a stir that the Los Angeles Times has an op-ed about it from an Occidental College professor, Ben Ratskoff. Ratskoff both expands on the history of “never again” as an expression and laments the rise of particularist interpretations of Holocaust memory to the exclusion of universalist ones. He has harsh words for the “overconfident but underinformed social media warriors” who called out the museum for doing what is, in his view, its job.

Meanwhile, when North American Jewish museums have leaned into particularism, they have also met with backlash, and not just of the online-gripes variety. The Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia keeps getting its Israeli flag defaced. And there were of course the two people killed in May outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., when the museum had had the audacity of hosting an American Jewish Committee event.

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I’ve been thinking about uses and misuses of Holocaust........

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