What Does the Holocaust Mean in 2025?

Eighty years out, is the lesson fading, distorting, changing...or will we never know?

This past Monday marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As the annual memorial sees fewer survivors, we reckon with the question that’s been hanging above our heads for decades: How will the Holocaust be remembered when the witnesses are gone?

For years, the Holocaust — the wide-ranging subjugation, imprisonment, and massacre of Jews from Estonia to Libya — has been morphing into a meme. Everyone is a Nazi. Every leader is the next Hitler. Every calendar page could flip back to 1939. Production studios and publishers can’t seem to get enough.

Just this month, a replica of Anne Frank’s annex and hiding place opened in New York. And an AI-powered educational Anne Frank chatbot launched, which a German historian called “grave-digging” and violating “every premise of Holocaust education.” When Elon Musk threw his arm out in a slightly too diagonal direction, half of the country saw it as his pledge of allegiance to the long-dead Fuhrer, while the other half saw it as a spastic wave. Regardless of what it meant, the spectacle cannibalized the news cycle, where other very serious things were happening.

What will happen to the memory of the 6 million is not really up to us. It’s everyone’s story now. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

With this on my mind, I turned to the new executive director of Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity, Ilana Cone Kennedy, for her thoughts. Cone Kennedy has worked at the Center for 22 years and recently moved up to fill Dee Simon’s shoes.

Before we get to that, just a quick refresher on last year’s legislative circus around dedicating more resources to Holocaust education:

The Holocaust Center works with 44 percent of the school districts in Washington state. Cone Kennedy shares that as a result of the Center’s work, 95 percent of students report a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and its relevance, 78 percent of students indicate improved attitudes toward diversity and inclusion, and 82 percent of students feel more informed about historical events and moral responsibilities.

As the new ED, Cone Kennedy hopes to build on what they already do well: “To be a trusted institution for all ages: Serve people of all ages, including students, teachers, adults, scholars, volunteers, families, and others,” with “programming, exhibits, resources, educational materials that are meaningful, excellent, relevant, and engaging, and always at their core, honor the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their families.”

Cone Kennedy was able to share a few minutes of her busy week with me to share some thoughts about the meaning of the Holocaust in these strange and changing times.

“The Holocaust is not a static history lesson.”

The Cholent: With Holocaust Remembrance Day this past week, how are you thinking about the lessons of the Holocaust at this moment in history?

Ilana Cone Kennedy: We had a really wonderful commemoration for International Holocaust Remembrance Day to mark the 80 year anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz on Sunday. We had a full house at the Museum of Flight. Every seat was full. I made some remarks in the beginning, which I’ll share with you:

I want to start by telling you about John Rock. John Rock was 16 years old in Austria when the Nazis took control of his country, and he was outraged by what he experienced as a teenager. He escaped to England on his own just the next year in 1939. And as soon as he was old enough, he joined the British Army. When the war ended, John learned the heartbreaking news that both of his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz. He began working in displaced persons camps in Germany, including one for unaccompanied, mostly orphaned children who had survived the Holocaust.

John lived for decades in Seattle until his death in 2004. And then he donated to us this wonderful photo album that includes photos of his time in the DP camps with these children. And so here we are now 20, 25, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, and movies and books often end at the point of liberation as if it's the end of the story. But for so many, it's actually the middle of the story or just a continuation of a very long story. It is at liberation that survivors are confronted with the reality of what they have witnessed and survived. The awareness of the destruction takes over, and the rebuilding ahead is really the biggest challenge yet.

This is the start of a story when the world is also challenged to look and reflect on all the places that we went wrong, where we let things go off the rails, where we stood by, where we didn't do enough, where we should have said something when we didn't, where we are forced to confront the best and the worst of humanity. And then we all make promises like “never again.” And now it’s 80 years later and our world is challenging. It seems that sometimes up is down and down is up. A Nazi salute is called a wave. Holocaust denial is a popular conspiracy theory. It is in this moment that our Holocaust center is more critical than ever, because the Holocaust is not a static history lesson. It is a continued challenge and a wake-up call. The stories inspire us to do more, be better, to think critically, to stand up and speak out, and most of all, to recognize that our actions matter, and we all have the opportunity to make a difference. Eighty years after Auschwitz, the Holocaust Center for Humanity stands strong and determined to create a world where we respect the humanity of all people. And this starts with every single one of us. Our actions, even the small ones, have the opportunity to make a difference.

What does it mean to make a difference? The Holocaust has so many interpretations now. For one person, it could mean standing up for Israel, saying “never again.” For another person, it could be protesting Israel for carrying out a “genocide.” How do you navigate this?

There are many lessons of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is such an enormous, multilayered onion, right? It's like you can just peel it apart and use these different stories and this history to apply to so many different pieces of our lives. I think that's different for everybody. That's going to be different for the child of a survivor than it is maybe for a non-Jewish person. And we're going to find in this history and in these stories sort of the best and worst of humanity, but also just that call to challenge ourselves to see what things really went wrong.

It really went wrong in the Holocaust. Where are our guardrails here? I feel like that's part of the importance of preserving this history and these stories, because you need to try to figure out, how can we be better? How can we be better as a society, or how can we not let it get to that point? And that really might be different for everybody. I think that's okay. I don't think there's any one way, and that's sort of the power of these stories in this history. So that might be trying to understand propaganda or trying to understand accurate media, or it might be trying to understand leadership or what is our responsibility in society, or what is our responsibility as a Jewish person. Although I don't think any Jewish person will ever agree on that. I guess I think that's okay, because I think that's the conversation and that's the important part of it.

What would you say to someone who's like, that's not good enough? It's really easy to look at the Holocaust and take absolutely opposite meanings from it. Maybe the question is, is there a limit to the universalism of the message? And have we actually diluted the power the survivor stories, of what actually happened, by sort of making it a pop culture reference?

I hear what you're saying. I think in some ways pop culture's not bad. Like, more awareness is better. Does it dilute it? It just changes it in my opinion. There's no way to keep it the same. We don't live in the world that we used to in 1950 or, you know, 1960, when the Holocaust was untouchable. That's just not our world today. So we have to understand it within its context of 2025, and we're just not going to be able to stop that tide. So, we're better off figuring out how to work within it. And part of the reason it's become so prolific, as you mentioned, is just because I think people have the same questions that you're posing, and there just are no good, tight answers.

What does it mean for us today? What can we do? What are the answers? People's roles in the Holocaust are not black and white. You have people you'd like to just classify as bad or evil, but there were Nazis who were also helping Jews, or there were people who were playing both sides. How do you categorize people like that? There were Jews who were taking advantage of the system to the detriment of other Jews. Nobody falls nicely into any category. I think that is in some ways the greatest psychological and sociological study of our time, because we have so much documentation and it's just not easy. It's not easy, in the same way that I can have worked at the Holocaust Center for 22 years and I still am on the tip of the iceberg of trying to understand this. How is that possible? It's possible because it's not explainable.

What do you think? Continue the conversation on The Cholent chat.

Photo: John Rock’s photo from working with orphans. Courtesy Holocaust Center for Humanity.

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Shoutouts

Mazal tov to Robert Spitzer, who was elected president of B'nai B'rith International after a contested election. His father, Jack Spitzer, of blessed memory, was elected to the same office in 1978.