In early June, professor Bruno Chaouat resigned from the advisory board of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies to protest an attempted hire for the center’s directorship.
Raz Segal, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians, had been offered the job. After public outcry over Segal’s views, the U paused and restarted its search for the next director of the CHGS.
But Chaouat – a French literary scholar of the Holocaust who served as the CHGS interim director in the late 2000s – won’t be rejoining the center.
While Segal’s job offer was the last straw, Chaouat has a more fundamental reason for leaving: He is another in an increasing pool of scholars who think Holocaust education is broken.
“We are in 2024, and it is astonishing to me that we have yet and still to explain to students – and even colleagues sometimes – that the Holocaust was caused by Jew hatred,” Chaouat told TC Jewfolk.
Chaouat is not confident that scholarship, or centers like the CHGS, can address the issues in Holocaust education – and in fact, he thinks they are part of the problem.
Chaouat sees current Holocaust scholarship as taking a turn from focusing on the specificity of the Holocaust targeting Jews, to leaning more into comparisons to other genocides – or subsuming the Holocaust into scholarship about colonialism, imperialism, and human rights.
“So what you have is huge, beautiful research and theories to explain the Holocaust and place it in the history of colonialism,” Chaouat said. “But those theories have a tendency to exclude the history…of anti-Judaism, which is, for me, part of the identity of the West.”
This clash of evolving Holocaust scholarship is visible in the work of Raz Segal, a historian of the Holocaust in Hungary. In a 2014 paper, Segal argued against viewing the Holocaust as a unique event. He also wrote that terms like “Holocaust” and “antisemitism” are not useful to Holocaust scholarship, because they lead scholars to overlook important political and historical contexts.
To Segal, the Holocaust was a function of modern nation-states developing and trying to be ethnically homogenous. “The destruction of Jews in wartime Hungary underscores how histories of state and nation building – in this case the drive to realize ‘Greater Hungary’ with a marked Magyar majority – generated multi-layered mass violence against non-Jews as well as Jews,” the 2014 paper’s abstract said.
TC Jewfolk did not ask Chaouat his opinion on – or respond specifically to – Segal’s scholarship. But in a broader sense, Chaouat feels that challenging the Holocaust’s uniqueness both undermines Holocaust education and is a disservice to the event itself.
“The history of slavery is super important – it has its own specificity and singularity. History of colonialism is super important – it has its own specificity as well,” he said.
“When it comes to the Holocaust, its universalization in terms of human rights, and even in terms of genocide studies, is insufficient to understand the metaphysical, the philosophical, the historical density of this event.”
To Chaouat, institutions like the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies are failing to refocus on Jews and antisemitism in scholarship about the Holocaust. He has little faith that they can turn the ship around, which, alongside the attempted hiring of Segal, led to his leaving the CHGS.
“Gradually, I realized that the center was turning into one more program in human rights, which I think are wonderful programs,” Chaouat said. “But my academic interest…is Holocaust testimony, Holocaust literature, Holocaust fiction. And so it did not really fulfill what I was looking for in terms of collaboration.”
Chaouat said that since the controversy around Segal’s hiring, no one at the CHGS has reached out to invite him back, either to the center or to the hiring process. Chaouat was not part of the original search committee for the center’s directorship.
But he does hope that the new search committee will include non-faculty members of the Jewish community, as well as other communities that have experienced genocide. (Minnesota is home to Armenians, Cambodians, Indigenous peoples, and Ukrainians, among other groups that have experienced genocide.)
“The position of director of the center is very much a position of diplomacy, and a position of reaching out to the community,” Chaouat said. “In the plural, by the way, it’s not just the Jewish community – all the communities.”
Both because of the community relations aspect, and the fundraising inherent to the job, Chaouat thinks the next director needs to be more measured in how they respond to world events. Someone accusing Israel of committing genocide, like Segal did only a week after Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, is a bad fit for the directorship, in Chaouat’s view.
“You cannot be as abrasive and incendiary in certain statements for the sake of polemic,” Chaouat said.
Chaouat remains pessimistic about Holocaust education in general. He, like some other Holocaust scholars, sees the Holocaust as now being an overused political concept, often aimed at denigrating Israel and Jews living today.
“We know about racism and about the Holocaust and all that kind of stuff, but destroy Zionism, destroy Israel, right?” Chaouat said, referencing the leftist anti-Israel rallies and encampments that have sprung up since Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza. “That’s a little weird, in my view. But that’s what we have seen for months now.”
Chaouat also holds a warning to efforts in Minnesota and across the United States to increase teaching of the Holocaust by way of state mandates. Doing so may increase what Chaouat and others call “Holocaust fatigue,” resulting in people not taking the Holocaust seriously or to outright avoid learning about it.
But education mandates could also, paradoxically, increase antisemitism. This is something Chaouat sees playing out in his native France with efforts to teach about the Holocaust in schools.
There’s a backlash and resentment from non-Jews “because of accusations of the Jews monopolizing suffering and memory,” Chaouat said. “It’s something that I wouldn’t be surprised that we have here, maybe in a less obvious, less explicit manner.”
As a Holocaust scholar, Chaout now plans to keep a low profile and stick to his own classes and work. He sees little opportunity to make an impact, or find many partners, in the current state of Holocaust and genocide scholarship.
“There is a dilution of the specificity, the density, and singularity of the Holocaust in all this kind of global history of European nationalism and imperialism, including of course, the American imperialism,” he said.
“So everything is mixed together in some sort of a cocktail of suffering, and I cannot really contribute to that.”
