(RNS) — The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the guardians of Holocaust memory, shot back quickly earlier this week after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared children’s fears about immigration authorities in his state to Anne Frank’s desperation in her Amsterdam hideout before her arrest by the Nazis. In a post on X, the museum called the governor’s comparison “deeply offensive.”
“Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” the post said. “Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”
The reaction, coming a day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday (Jan. 27), is the most recent flare-up in a fierce debate about the goals of Holocaust education over the past two years. Is the lesson of Holocaust a universal call to prevent genocide and protect human rights, or is it a specific call to make sure Jews are never again subject to mass murder?
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was closed Tuesday because of Sunday’s winter storm, which still grips the nation’s capital, but a spokesperson reached by email pointed to its definition of the Holocaust, which it views through the prism of antisemitism. “The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic,” its definition says.
This is the position of many Holocaust education centers, viewing the threats and the legacy of the Holocaust as distinct to Jews; comparisons to other groups are considered undignified and offensive.
“If people are upset about what’s happening in democracy, they can talk about authoritarianism and fascism, but making direct comparisons to the Holocaust crosses the line and we see it as Holocaust distortion, which, as I said, is seen as a threat to the legacy of the Holocaust,” said Deborah Lauter, executive director of New York’s Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights. The institute has trained 7,000 public and private school teachers around the world as part of its weeklong seminars. “We don’t want to compare.”
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as Holocaust denial and violent antisemitism surge globally, its lessons about why our choices matter have never been more urgent. Yet the abuse and exploitation of Holocaust memory have become alarmingly commonplace. It must stop.… pic.twitter.com/xG4oFyypBr
— US Holocaust Museum (@HolocaustMuseum) January 27, 2026
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But other Holocaust scholars say that definition is far too narrow. They say Holocaust scholarship has evolved in the 80 years since the genocide of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis, so that it is no longer seen as a unique historical experience that cannot be invoked in relation to any other event.
Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, said he’s “not a big fan” of Holocaust analogies but sees Walz’s comparison of immigration authorities’ tactics in Minneapolis this past month as reasonable.