opinions
Ukraine, Russia and the Unbearable
Lightness of ‘Never Again’
BY YEHUDA KURTZER
A fter decades of fearing that we would forget
the horrors of our recent past, I am starting to
fear the opposite possibility: that we Jews remember
our history all too well but feel powerless to act on
its lessons.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine invites analo-
gies to our traumatic past. History begs us to learn
from what came before. These analogies to the
past are never perfect. Seeing analogies between
past and present does not mean we think that
anything that happened in the past would be iden-
tical to anything happening in the present.

For comparisons to be useful, however, they
need not be exact. It is enough for us as Jews
to see familiarity in the past and resemblance in
the present. We do this to activate our sense of
responsibility, to ask if we have seen this plot point
before, to fi gure out how we are supposed to act in
the story to change the inevitability of the outcome.

We become diff erent people when we remember,
as the past merges with the present and points to
the choices we might make.

But now: What if we remember well, but cannot
act upon it? Will Jewish memory become a prison
of our powerlessness?
I grew up believing that appeasement was just one
rung above fascist tyranny itself, and at times possi-
bly worse: Appeasers replace responsibility with
naivete and facilitate demonic evil even when they
know better. The narrative of the West juxtaposes
Churchill the hero with Chamberlain the villain; the
philosopher Avishai Margalit uses Chamberlain as
the archetype of the “rotten compromise,” for mak-
ing concessions that make people skeptical of the
morality of compromise altogether. I know that the
sanctions regime imposed against Putin’s Russia
and his oligarchs are the most severe in history, and
still I wonder: What is the threshold of appeasement,
and will we know if we have crossed it?
We still debate FDR’s decision not to bomb the
train tracks leading to Auschwitz. It was a viable
option, and we know this because Jewish leaders
pleaded with American offi cials to consider it, and
they decided against it. None of us has any idea
whether such a bombing operation would have
succeeded, much less whether it would have made
a dent in the Final Solution. But our memory of the
story makes us wonder whether it might have, and
it makes us furiously study the current invasion,
seeking opportunities for a similar intervention.

Our insistence on memory — and the belief
that it will change things — never quite works.

This is because the invocation of memory
can be banal, and because it can pull us apart.

At the same time, we fear that we will only know
what actions we should have taken a long time
from now, and that our children will study such
actions with the same helplessness that plagues
us when we read about FDR’s decisions.

My great-grandparents came to America well
before World War II. But I have read about and
feel chastened by America’s turning away Jewish
refugees during the war. I am in shock watching
the largest and fastest-developing refugee crisis
unfolding before us and seeing our country fail-
ing to participate in a proportionate way — given
our size and economic power — to the absorp-
tion and resettlement eff orts. Why do we have
a museum celebrating American intervention in
wartime, as we do in the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, and why do we have such
a profound educational apparatus focused on
helping Americans understand how to not be a
bystander, if not for moments like this?
It is not hard to imagine the museum that will
one day mark this unfolding atrocity.

Our insistence on memory — and the belief that
it will change things — never quite works. This is
because the invocation of memory can be banal,
and because it can pull us apart. “Never again”
is everywhere now — Meir Kahane’s appeal to
Jewish self-defense became a rallying cry to prevent
genocide, a banner to fi ght immigrant detention, a
slogan for schools and gun control. And whatever
we wanted the legacy of the Shoah to be, we have
in no case been successful. American presidents
mouthed these words seriously even as they failed to
intervene, or intervened too late, to stop genocides
in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Syria and elsewhere.

If the fear was forgetting, it was unfounded. But
remembering and acting on the memory is some-
thing else entirely. The legacy of our past indicts us
when we can’t carry the former into the latter.

I never expected — even watching the politics
of memory pull apart the legacy of remembering
for opposing political ends — that we would shift
from a fear of forgetting to the fear that comes
with remembering. The past glares at us now, it
revisits us every day in the news cycle, and I am
scared. It is not because we have forgotten it, but
precisely because we remember it, and we do not
know how to heed it. JE
Yehuda Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom
Hartman Institute of North America and host of
the Identity/Crisis podcast.

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