Last week, outside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I spoke with three neo-Nazis. The conversation reminded me that human beings are remarkably capable of using denial to protect beliefs—and the communities—they don’t want questioned.
Every week for almost two years, a small group of activists, most of Jewish heritage, holds a vigil outside the museum. We distribute flyers asking visitors to consider the museum’s central lesson: “Never Again” must mean never again for anyone. We urge people not to remain silent in the face of genocide, as much of the world did during the Nazi holocaust. We are committed to carrying out the Museum’s mission, in spite of its silence on Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.
We also criticize the United States’ financial, diplomatic, and military support for Israel, which enables the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The museum attracts visitors from the United States and many other countries. Representing different backgrounds, political affiliations, religions, ethnicities, ages, sports teams, and identities. We sometimes meet school groups whose chaperones ask us not to approach the students because they fear the children may be disturbed by what we are saying. That is difficult to understand: if the museum’s purpose is to help people confront the realities of mass violence, why should learning about a current crisis, paid for in part by our tax dollars, be considered an inappropriate disturbance?
We also meet visitors wearing MAGA hats, people who think our vigil is misguided or in poor taste, and of course we meet many others who are receptive or supportive. Most museum staff and security guards have been friendly. On one occasion, however, a security employee secretly and shockingly praised The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous antisemitic forgery that promotes the myth of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.
We also regularly speak with Israeli Jews who defend Israel’s actions in Gaza. Some conversations are heated; others are civil. When people reject the findings and warnings of organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and international courts and institutions, we ask them to consider whether they are also engaging in a form of holocaust denial.
That brings me back to the three young men I met last week. They were small in stature and appeared to be in their early twenties. I handed them a flyer and asked, “How was your visit? What did you take away from it?”
They responded with a rapid series of questions:
Why did the museum not explain why some prisoners were given haircuts, new clothing, housing, and tattoos when they arrived at the camps instead of being killed? Didn’t that prove the Germans were not trying to kill all Jews? If the Germans wanted to kill all Jews, why did they not simply kill them immediately?
I was taken aback, but I explained that some people were murdered upon arrival, while others were imprisoned and exploited as slave laborers before being killed or dying from starvation or disease
They continued:
Why were Jews given 10 years to leave Germany before all this started? Why did they not leave? Why did the Germans need slave labor? What use would they have had for prisoners working in stone quarries? Why was a pregnant woman allowed to live?
I am still not sure what they meant by the last question. I answered as best I could, but was unable to fully explain that Nazi persecution developed over time and that policies of exclusion, dispossession, deportation, forced labor, mass shooting, and industrialized murder were interconnected. The fact that some people were temporarily kept alive for labor does not weaken the historical record. It reveals another dimension of the crime.
I told them that more than one hundred members of my grandmother’s extended family were murdered and never seen again. One of them asked how my grandparents could possibly have had so many relatives. When I mentioned that my great-grandfather had died in a prison camp, one of them asked, “How do you know?”
At that point, I realized they weren't trying to learn. They were there to argue their beliefs and not ready to change them. I ended the conversation by asking them to oppose U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“Of course,” one replied. “We must end all U.S. support for Israel.”
Then he added: “Jews control the world.” I did an “oy-veh” and looked up at the sky.
The exchange left me with several lessons.
First, denial is not confined to neo-Nazis or to people we regard as uniquely evil. It is a human capacity. The three men I met denied or distorted the Holocaust in order to reduce German responsibility. Many others deny or minimize the suffering in Gaza because acknowledging it would require them to reconsider their political loyalties, their government’s actions, or their own obligations.
People often accept evidence more readily when it condemns an enemy than when it implicates their own side. We quickly condemn historical atrocities while dismissing or arguing against contemporary ones. We demand proof from victims while accepting uncritically the explanations offered by those in power.
That is why remembrance cannot be only about the past. “Never Again” is not a slogan reserved for crimes committed by other governments, other movements, or other generations. It demands that we remain willing to recognize suffering—even when doing so is painful, inconvenient, or politically costly.
Second, antisemitism remains real. It appears in neo-Nazi ideology, conspiracy theories, Nazi holocaust denial, and the belief that Jews collectively control governments or institutions. It also appears in some parts of the pro-Palestinian movement in the West, although I rarely find it among Palestinians living in Palestine or the West.
That said, all forms of antisemitism should be confronted plainly.
The conversation with those three men did not change their minds. I may not have changed anyone’s mind at any of the vigils I participated in. But persuasion is not the only reason to speak. We speak to keep the record visible, support those being ignored, and resist the normalization of cruelty.
I will return next week—not because I am certain that people will listen, but because silence makes denial easier. Speaking up is one way of refusing to let our unwillingness to listen become an excuse for doing nothing.
