- Hundreds of scholars have signed a letter calling for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to retract its June 24 statement rejecting comparisons between the conditions of migrant detention on the US-Mexico border to the concentrations camps of the Holocaust.
- It comes after a statement that the museum issued early last week in the wake of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on migrant detention centres on the US-Mexico border, comparing them to “concentration camps.”
- “The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering,” according to the letter scholars signed.
Hundreds of scholars have signed a letter calling for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. to retract its June 24 statement that rejected comparisons between the conditions of migrant detention facilities on the US-Mexico border to the concentrations camps of the Holocaust.
Over 375 scholars have signed the letter by Tuesday afternoon, which was first published in the New York Review of Books. The scholars, many of whom have studied the Nazi genocide of Jews and other minorities during World War II, signalled their continuing support for the museum and its sponsorship for their academic work.
But they criticised the museum’s “fundamentally ahistorical approach” and expressed concern that the museum’s stance has “the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies.”
Read the article by Joseph Zeballos-Roig on Business Insider Australia.