Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The words “Never Again” are spoken slowly and solemnly…And then the day ends, and the chants begin.
This is the contradiction that defines Jewish life right now: a world that insists it remembers the Holocaust, while loudly excusing, rationalizing, and sometimes outright celebrating violence against living Jews. A world that claims moral clarity about history, while drowning present-day Jewish fear in slogans, hashtags, and carefully worded justifications.
Holocaust remembrance is supposed to be about memory, but memory without consequence is just theatre. It is easy to mourn six million Jews when the perpetrators are dead and the victims are silent. It is harder to stand with Jews who are very much alive, very much visible, and very much under attack.
Across cities that host official Holocaust memorial ceremonies, Jewish schools need police at dismissal. Synagogues install bollards and armed guards. Students hide Stars of David under their shirts. Elderly Holocaust survivors are told that chants calling for their people’s destruction are “contextual,” “complex,” or “not meant literally.”
We are told, again and again, that slogans about annihilation are merely political speech. That threats shouted in unison are not threats if framed as activism. That mobs surrounding Jewish spaces are protests, not intimidation. That Jewish fear is inconvenient, exaggerated, or worse, manipulative.
This is what it means to remember the Holocaust while refusing to learn from it.
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers and ovens. It began with language that dehumanized Jews, crowds that normalized hatred, institutions that looked away, and intellectuals who explained why Jewish suffering was regrettable but necessary. It began with people insisting that Jews were exaggerating, that things were being taken out of context, that history would judge more fairly… later.
Later never helped the Jews then. It will not help the Jews now.
Today, chants calling for the destruction of Jews are shouted in public squares and on university campuses, often within earshot of Holocaust memorials themselves. Jewish communities watch as people who would never tolerate such language directed at any other group rush to explain why Jews are the exception. Why Jewish death, uniquely, can be abstracted. Why Jewish terror can be debated.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is meant to be about vigilance. About recognizing patterns early. About understanding that genocide is not a historical anomaly but a human one, enabled every time moral lines are blurred for the sake of comfort or ideology.
If remembrance does not extend to protecting Jews today, then it is not remembrance. It is ritual without responsibility.
Lighting a candle while ignoring the chants outside is not honoring the victims of the Holocaust, it is rehearsing the same indifference that made it possible.
Never Again was never supposed to be symbolic, it was meant to be a line in the sand.
Howie Silbiger is the host of the Howie Silbiger Show on Truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
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