When Memory Serves
Why Holocaust analogies are appropriate, despite what the US Holocaust Memorial Museum may say. Plus, notes on Indivisible’s turnaround and the ongoing Defiance.
This is America, today. On January 30, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an article with the following opening sentences:
About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments.
“That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”
Residents of Sinai have mounted a letter-writing campaign on behalf of their Haitian caregivers; nearly ten percent of the facility’s 450 staffers are Haitians on the verge of losing their temporary protected status. Some residents were also attending a weekend protest against ICE at a local Home Depot.
I read that article and I immediately thought of a statement made by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from last week, which it put out after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stated that children in his state were “hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
In response, the Museum posted on X:
“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
Walz, to his credit, has not backed down one inch. When NPR’s Juana Summers asked Walz Friday about his describing ICE as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo” (something, she noted, that Attorney General Pam Bondi has criticized him personally for), Walz said, “I have to use the English language to describe what I’m seeing. And in America, there are very little analogous descriptions I can give to what we’re seeing. So, I’m using what I have in my vocabulary to describe what I see, and I think everybody who woke up Saturday morning and witnessed that probably would come up to the same conclusion.”
Walz’s whole interview with NPR is quite something to listen to or read. You can hear, just beneath the surface, both his fury and his fear that we are now deep in dangerous territory. As he says in his concluding remarks, “It’s much each to hold a democracy than to try and get one back.” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the past week is when Americans en masse finally started to recognize that we’re on Earth Two, battling a fascist takeover.
The seniors at the Sinai Residences in Boca Raton understand that, which is why the CEO of the facility is citing Anne Frank. Good for her. But is she trivializing the Holocaust or making a false equivalency? Until late this Monday, 350,000 Haitians living in the US because it is too dangerous back home were on the verge of losing their protected refugee status for no other reason than the White House hates Haitians. Only a last-minute court order stopped that from happening.
The Uses of Memory
Back to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I used to think of the museum as one of the most honest places in Washington, mainly because its permanent exhibit includes a searing section examining how Americans responded to the rise of Naziism and how FDR failed, with clear knowledge of Hitler’s Final Solution, to do more to save the Jews of Europe.
My view of the Museum’s honesty started to falter nine years ago. I was in Washington for a meeting of the Civic Collaboratory, a long running network curated by Eric Liu of Citizen University. It was January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, a week after Trump’s first inauguration, and the gathering—which was by invitation-only and not open to the public—was being hosted by the Holocaust Museum. In addition to a private tour of the museum, attendees also got an advance look at a new exhibit that museum staff were finalizing on “Americans and the Holocaust.”
As they walked us through a Powerpoint presentation of the planned exhibit, one slide jumped out at me. I quickly took a picture and posted it to Twitter with a note mentioning the forthcoming exhibit. It was Holocaust Memorial Day, after all.
Not long afterward during the meeting, I was approached by a museum staffer who politely but rather firmly demanded that I delete the tweet because we were in a private meeting and the slides weren’t meant to be public. I don’t remember the details of our conversation, but I believe we compromised – I offered to remove any reference to the Museum (though I really did want to give it credit for having surfaced that quote with its eerie echoes of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric). They relented and the tweet stayed up, sans credit. I figured the quote would eventually get attention when the exhibit opened a year later.
But here’s the thing. It didn’t. The quote had disappeared down Orwell’s memory hole.
The Museum’s exhibit on Americans and the Holocaust (which is still online here) didn’t shy away from reminding visitors that in November 1938, after the news of the SS’s Kristallnacht attacks had reached most Americans, public opinion in the US was not very sympathetic. While 94% of Americans disapproved of “the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany,” only 21% said agreed we should allow “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany” into the US. Seventy-one percent said no. The rise of the “America First” committee, which elevated antisemite Charles Lindbergh to national prominence, also gets noted by the Museum’s exhibit. But Senator Robert Reynolds’ bold and disgusting racism, expressed three years later in words strikingly similar to Trump’s was nowhere to be found.
Back in 2017, Sarah Wildman wrote a wonderful article in Vox about Reynolds, cataloging his racism and isolationism in greater detail. She noted that in the same Senate speech where he vowed to build a wall to keep aliens and refugees out, he also declared that:
“I believe we must rid our country of the alien enemies who are now here, and put up the bars so that from now on no alien of any nationality upon the face of the earth will be permitted to enter the United States...
I say we should stop — and stop now — the refugees who are seeping into this country by the thousands every single month to take the jobs which rightly belong to the native-born and naturalized citizens of the United States.”
What do they say about history repeating, and how we have to learn from the past?
In 2017, the Holocaust Museum still seemed to have a moral spine. After the Trump White House managed to mark the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning the six million Jews murdered, drawing strong criticism (including from Republican Jewish groups and the Anti-Defamation League), the Museum deliberately put out a statement reminding everyone of the obvious fact that “The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Nazi ideology cast the world as a racial struggle, and the singular focus on the total destruction of every Jewish person was at its racist core. Millions of other innocent civilians were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, but the elimination of Jews was central to Nazi policy.”
Back then, I remember Mike Godwin, the first staff counsel at EFF and the author of Godwin’s Law – which states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1” – opining that for the years of Trump he was suspending his admonition against making Nazi analogies for current events. “If you’re thoughtful and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician,” he wrote.
But to heap irony on outrage, get this.
Last week, Godwin shared on his public Facebook page that the Holocaust Museum had removed an interview with him from its website. It was, he wrote, “an interview I gave to USHMM in 2011. It had been public on their website for far more than a decade as part of their Voices on Anti-Semitism series--I was interviewed about Godwin’s Law, of course.”
What did he say that could be so controversial? Notably, Godwin’s Law is about trying to avoid making spurious comparisons to the Hitler or the Nazis. As Godwin explained in his now-disappeared interview (which, thanks to the Internet Archive, is still available), as he observed the early days of Internet culture back in 1990, he saw that “heated debates tended to proceed in predictable ways, with escalating rhetoric, so that, when you wanted to call someone the worst thing you could call them, you said, ‘They’re like Hitler’ or ‘They’re like Nazis’ or ‘This is like the Holocaust.’”
He wanted to “make people more thoughtful” without simply yelling back at them to stop. “Here in the modern era, we fancy that we have civilized ourselves to a pretty high degree,” he noted, in words that now the Holocaust Museum doesn’t want you to hear or read. “And yet, within living memory, we have this historical period where people acted even worse. And I wanted to not necessarily promote Holocaust exceptionalism, but I really want make people aware of the gravity of the comparisons that they were making.”
Now all that remains is a link to Godwin’s name.[1] And the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has become another debased player in Donald Trump’s Washington.
All Trump Touches Turns to Shit
Last spring, the White House removed five newly-named board members who had been appointed by Joe Biden, including Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish husband of Kamala Harris. At the time, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized the move, saying that removing them before the end of their terms and without any apparent explanation “risks politicizing a vital institution” and urged that “it remain[] nonpartisan.”
Weeks later, Trump named replacement members, including Siggy Flicker, a star of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, whose stepson was charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Another nominee was talk radio host Sid Rosenberg, who declared at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in the fall of 2024 that Hillary Clinton was “some sick bastard [and] a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party [are] a bunch of degenerates…Jew-haters and lowlifes, every one of them.” A year ago, another one of Trump’s nominees, Martin Oliner, endorsed the president’s plan to rid Gaza of all its Palestinians, writing in the Jerusalem Post that the Gazan people “are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.” Other Trump appointees to the museum board include Robert Garson, a lawyer representing Trump in his suit against Bob Woodward for using recordings of interviews the journalist made with the president; Tila Falic Levi, the daughter of billionaire Simon Falic, a close friend and benefactor of Benjamin Netanyahu; Barbara S. Feingold, a close ally of Rep. Randy Fine, who is perhaps Congress’ most racist member. I have not seen a post from Jonathan Greenblatt complaining about the board’s politicization.
And last week, on International Holocaust Memorial Day, Vice President J.D. Vance, whose heated and false rhetoric about Haitians in Ohio was cheered by neo-Nazi groups, and which, as Timothy Snyder noted Sunday, helped set the stage for the regime’s push to deny their protected refugee status, issued a statement marking the day with, as in 2017, no mention was made of Jews or Nazis, just to “millions of lives lost.” As the Jerusalem Post editorialized, “…The minimum standard on January 27 is uncomplicated: Name the victims and name the perpetrators.”
This time the US Holocaust Memorial Museum did not complain about Vance’s omission. Nor did the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt say a word.
The View From Afar
For those of us who pay attention to the ongoing debate about tactics and strategy, mobilizing and organizing, Charles Duhigg’s 6,000 word essay in the January 26 edition of The New Yorker titled “What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—And Infighting” is a must-read. Duhigg, who is not a political journalist but more of a Malcolm Gladwell-style student of human behavior, offers some fresh insights about how different models of issue-based activism can emerge and take hold across the great American berserk. His comparison of DARE, a top-down anti-drug effort invented and popularized by the Los Angeles police department and school district, and MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), a bottom-up civic push for tougher drunk-driving laws, nicely illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. Most important, he credits MADD’s more chaotic approach of enabling lots of local chapters to form with its much greater level of success and longevity.
But when Duhigg’s turns that same lens on today’s largescale political movements, his article starts to suffer severely from what one of my intellectual godfathers, Lawrence Goodwyn, called “the view from afar.” Take this sentence, which somehow passed muster with The New Yorker’s vaunted factcheckers: “Today’s Democratic Party is great at mobilizing: it can propel people into the streets with big marches, raise billions of dollars for national candidates, and get liberals to bombard congressional offices with letters and phone calls,” Duhigg writes. In fact, today’s Democratic party only does one of these three things. It does not organize big marches or get liberals to call their congressional representatives. Hello?
That said, Duhigg is right to emphasize how much Barack Obama’s 2008 emphasized recruiting and empowering local supporters to organize their own precincts, and it’s useful as well to learn from his reporting how rightwing organizers like Ralph Reed understood the danger of that model and responded in kind. It’s not a new discovery, but he notes, “When a conservative activist on a college campus volunteers to create a chapter of Turning Point USA, a youth-oriented group founded by a Tea Party crusader, Bill Montgomery, and the Christian activist Charlie Kirk, they are often told to read a book called ‘Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America,’ to learn how to organize (but nothing else). These volunteers are then mostly left to find their own way.”
By comparison, Duhigg claims that instead of building similar local infrastructure, “The left has turned to a “to a different strategy. It’s become largely focused on creating spectacles, such as the No Kings protests, that can mobilize large numbers of people at breakneck speed to march, sign petitions, and contribute money. But much of the energy fizzles away once the protest or the election is over.” This is where he loses the thread.
Citing Theda Skocpol’s 2021 study of Indivisible, he claims that the group essentially followed the DARE model, raising millions in its early days, which he then suggests resulted in “thousands of Indivisible chapters.” Actually, that was because Indivisible was a hybrid, and the local chapters all appeared because they were free to adopt the “franchise” offered by the Indivisible Guide and, like MADD activists, set up their own shops.
Longtime readers of The Connector know that I, like Skocpol, was critical of Indivisible National in its early years for soaking up too much of the money that flowed its way and building up too much of a DC-centric structure and staff. But this is old news, and shame on Skocpol for continuing to repeat to Duhigg her now out-of-date conclusion that Indivisible represents “a tragic lost opportunity.” She and he are both wrong.
The truth is more complicated and far less gloomy. Unlike other organizations that have suffered from rapid leadership turnover, Indivisible National is still steered by its co-founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg. But they are learners and they have learned from their early missteps. The Indivisible movement did shrink somewhat after its first few years as some chapters chafed against National’s bureaucracy, and it shrank further after COVID hit and then Biden won the 2020 election. Liberal-leaning movements always lose active support when they think a “good guy” is in the White House.
But since 2024, Indivisible is on a major rebound, back up to around 2,600 local chapters with about 1,500 of them newly founded as a result of Trump’s re-election. This time around, Levin and Greenberg aren’t bulking up on a DC staff—I’ve heard that while they raised somewhere in the range of $25 million in 2025 to their mix of c3, c4 and PAC organizations, millions has flowed back to local groups through a sharing program that funds all kinds of useful local needs. Levin and Greenberg hold weekly open Zoom calls that anyone can attend where they discuss current strategy and field top-voted questions from the audience, which is usually around 5,000-6,000 and sometimes double that or more. And along with other partner organizations like MoveOn and the Working Families Party, Levin and Greenberg have played a key role in movement strategizing, filling a critical gap. It was their initiative in February of 2025 that gave grassroots activists their first focus, on Senate Democrats caving in to Trump’s initial budget moves, and their initiative that galvanized the giant Hands Off and No Kings rallies of April, June and October. Those record-breaking events have been critical to breaking the narrative of Trump’s overwhelming dominance, showing lots of bystanders that they don’t have to bend the knee even as many elites cave to him.
But none of this appears to be of interest to Duhigg, who wants to make a different and less arguable point: that some leftists are too purist and rejecting of newcomers, unlike the MAGA and evangelical right. It’s true, but it’s also not a fair description of today’s Indivisibles, who are generally quite pragmatic and non-purist. But his failure to do any visible reporting on what today’s anti-Trump movements are like leads him to another round of out-of-date discoveries. Yes, as the very smart sociologist Liz McKenna of Harvard tells him, “Trump rallies are fun. The Turning Point campus debates are fun.” He adds, “For a long time, [McKenna] said, the left was less fun and more angry, ‘and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.’” But what about now? If Duhigg had bothered to venture out to a #TeslaTakedown protest or a Visibility Brigade overpass action, he’d discover that progressives are having a blast, cranking up music and dancing while making sure their neighbors know democracy has a constituency.
Duhigg ends his New Yorker piece offering miniprofiles of power-building groups like Down Home North Carolina, ISAIAH in Minnesota, and Hoosier Action in Indiana, and he’s right to lift up their models as examples of the kind of year-round, community-centered organizing based in working class areas that we desperately need more of. If Indivisible could do anything better, I’d say it would be to offer its grassroots organizers spread across the country more robust ways of learning how to do that kind of work as well as more support for knitting their local chapters into state-based tables. But it’s a work in progress—something Duhigg didn’t bother to report.
Notes on the Defiance
--Young people are now showing up in rapidly increasing numbers among the ranks of the Defiance. Dozens of high schools had walkouts last Friday, from Ashland, Oregon to Waco, Texas. And it isn’t just the “political” kids. We were watching a nephew who is in college play at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Florida on Sunday; the team he was playing against was from Carleton College in Minnesota. Every player was wearing an “ICE OUT” shirt over his jersey. Or worse!
--According to Mike Elk’s Payday Report, businesses and schools shut down in more than 120 cities last Friday.
--Local protests against planned ICE concentration camps have spread to more locations, Sophie Alexander and Fola Akinnibi report for Bloomberg. While ICE pushes ahead to purchase warehouses it plans to turn into detention centers, they report that “As the political pressure intensifies, some deals are collapsing.”
--A group of women at the giant Camp East Montana in West Texas have told Newsweek of “unsanitary, overcrowded and restrictive conditions inside a tent complex with no natural light, limited medical care, and frequent confrontations with guards.” “
--A new tactic gaining momentum: Putting pressure on local hotels to stop housing ICE. Learn more at NoHousingForIce.com.
--The rightwing claim that Minneapolis’s anti-ICE organizing is all professionally driven and “not organic” has now surfaced in City Journal, a conservative policy magazine. Investigative reporter Christina Buttons joined a local ICE Watch Signal group and now writes that the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was due to “a model that places untrained civilians in the middle of high-stakes federal operations.”
In Other News
--Continuing the debate about whether Democratic candidates win if they are more moderate, Brian Beutler argues (gift link) that the reason Taylor Rehmet won the special election in a red state senate district in Texas over the weekend is not because he focused on kitchen-table issues that reached middle-of-the-road voters, but because he’s riding “a wave of backlash to Republican over-reach.”
--The Israel Defense Forces have now accepted the estimate of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry that approximately 71,000 Palestinians were killed during the Israel-Gaza war, noting that the number does not include missing residents who are potentially buried under rubble,” Ha’aretz reported on January 29. I am now waiting for the “pro-Israel” chorus to condemn the IDF as anti-semitic for saying that the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers are credible.
[1] Well, actually, you can still find a links to his interview in Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi buried on the USHMM website, leading him to note, “It’s one thing that they tried to erase me. It’s another that they’re so dumb about it.”
I remember as a twelve year-old comparing someone to Hitler and being given a tongue lashing by my mother. Her message was that Hitler was by far the most evil man that ever lived, and comparing lesser evil people to him was insulting and disrespectful to the suffering of his victims.
I'm an old man now, a life-long student of history. I can make make comparisons and see troubling similarities between the rise of Hitler in Germany and the unfolding of Trump's 2nd term. It's more than enough to compel me to rise up in opposition, other egregious villainy and evil aside.
Terrific commentary .The rhetoric this regime uses to dehumanize immigrants can also be compared to the language Nazis used to describe Jews. Of course differences exist between the holocaust and the ethnic cleansing that Trump is promoting now, but the similarities are too stark to ignore