Universal Values

On 1 April, the memorial site at the former Buchenwald concentration camp announced that the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm would no longer be speaking at the eightieth anniversary commemoration of the camp’s liberation. Boehm, who teaches at the New School in New York, was disinvited because of pressure from the Israeli embassy. He will give his lecture at a later date. The director of the memorial site, Jens-Christian Wagner, said that the reason for the decision, with which Boehm agreed, was to protect Holocaust survivors from political conflict. Wagner also described the controversy as ‘the worst thing I’ve experienced in twenty-five years of memorial work’.

How did an Israeli philosopher, the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, become the object of such a campaign by the Israeli government? Boehm is an outspoken critic of Netanyahu as well as a proponent of a binational resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is also a Kantian philosopher with universalist, Enlightenment commitments.

It seems that it is precisely Boehm’s universalist humanism that is the problem. On 2 April, the Israeli embassy in Germany articulated its reasons for demanding Boehm’s disinvitation:

The decision to invite Omri Boehm, a man who has described Yad Vashem as an instrument of political manipulation, relativised the Holocaust and even compared it to the Nakba, is not only outrageous, but a blatant insult to the memory of the victims.

Although these claims of Holocaust relativisation are false, the embassy’s accusation situates the Boehm affair directly in the tradition of recent ‘comparison controversies’, such as arose when the journalist M. Gessen compared Gaza to a Nazi ghetto.

For the Israeli embassy, it would seem, any perspective that does not assert the absolute uniqueness of the Holocaust amounts to relativisation and reduces the Holocaust’s importance. This leads Israel’s representatives to reject the consensus terms on which the Holocaust has been institutionalised as a ‘cosmopolitan’ memory – that is, as a memory of universal importance. As the embassy put it, ‘Under the guise of science, Boehm is attempting to dilute the commemoration of the Holocaust with his discourse on universal values, thereby robbing it of its historical and moral significance.’

In a sarcastic follow-up post on X two days later, the embassy doubled down on its rejection of universalism: it attacked Jens-Christian Wagner, despite his decision to remove Boehm from the commemoration, and accused the director of performing ‘fashionable intellectual acrobatics’. The embassy then deployed a comparison far more provocative – not to say offensive – than anything in Boehm’s own writings: inviting Boehm to speak at a Holocaust commemoration, it suggested, ‘is like inviting Bashar al-Assad to give a lecture on human rights’.

Boehm does not question the singularity of the Holocaust or compare the Holocaust and Nakba as historical events. He does, however, recognise that they each make demands on the present and have become entangled in the politics of Israel and Palestine – as Hannah Arendt and others long ago predicted they would. In Haifa Republic, for instance, Boehm argues that ‘both the Holocaust and the Nakba are central to Israel’s fraught past,’ and that to achieve peace ‘the perspective from which the events are recollected’ must undergo a ‘fundamental reconsideration’. Through such a reconfiguration of memory, Boehm suggests, a kind of forgetting can also take place that would allow both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to begin to put traumatic pasts behind them and forge an egalitarian democratic future.

In the speech that Boehm would have given at the Buchenwald commemoration – and that was published instead in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and in English in Haaretz – he reasserts his universalist position while rejecting facile comparisons:

When people talk about the brutal massacre of 7 October these days, they sometimes say ‘Never again!’ Others look at the destruction and hunger in Gaza and say the same thing. In so far as both statements imply a comparison with the Holocaust, the one is as misleading as the other.

This critique of comparison is not a rejection of the imperative expressed in the slogan ‘Never again’, but rather a call to universalise it. ‘Never again’ cannot apply only to particularities: it cannot mean, as Boehm puts it, merely ‘never again for us’. Rather:

‘Never again’ is only valid in its universal form … A world in which the repetition of the horrors of Buchenwald is still possible is a world in which these horrors could repeat anywhere – and can also impact Jews.

The Israeli embassy was correct that Boehm takes a universalist approach to Holocaust memory, even if the accusations of relativisation by way of comparison misrepresent his arguments. Regardless of his actual views, however, what is most significant in this controversy is the embassy’s rejection of universality. In severing the Shoah from ‘universal values’, the embassy rebuffs decades of mainstream discourse on why we should remember the Holocaust. It retreats far behind Elie Wiesel’s 1979 articulation in the founding document of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum that ‘the universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness: the Event is essentially Jewish, yet its interpretation is universal.’

The embassy also rejects the 2000 Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, which emerged from a conference on Holocaust memory and education attended by representatives of 46 states (Wiesel was the honorary chairman). The Stockholm Declaration, much of which was drafted by the Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, states unequivocally in its first paragraph: ‘The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.’

This universalist message, which has been described as exemplary of a ‘cosmopolitan memory’, was embraced at the time by the Israeli state, which took part in the Stockholm Forum from the beginning and remains a member of its successor organisation, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In turning on Omri Boehm, an avowedly universalist, Enlightenment defender of cosmopolitan principles, the Israeli embassy has delivered a serious blow to a cosmopolitan Holocaust memory that Israel and its representatives helped to shape. At a moment when Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice – and in the opinions of many human rights organisations and prominent Holocaust scholars – a universalist memory of the Shoah is apparently too much to bear.