The oft heard phrase is that “The winners write history.” Of course, this implies that whoever wins a conflict creates the narrative around it, not necessarily holding a high standard of objectivity and accuracy. And it’s correct. If you look towards history books from the United States about their annexation of Hawai’i, rarely is the story told with the recognition that a gun is not a means for annexation, and an overthrow is not a transition of power. That spills over into the way people view Hawai’i today, with a sort of sense of entitlement. Even as I browse on TikTok, it’s not hard to find people who are angry about COVID travel restrictions or pleas to treat Hawai’i’s flora and fauna with respect. Maybe it’s naive to think that things would change if people were taught about America’s history of brutally colonizing the islands, but I know our current educational narratives certainly don’t help.
So as I walked into the Holocaust Museum LA on July 8 as a part of a CAUSE-Jewish American Federation partnership, I wondered who exactly wrote the history about one of the worst atrocities the world has seen. While the United States was on the Allies side, and we read history books written by them, my formal education on the Holocaust has always treated it with a sort of distance. They would recount the number of deaths, or the locations that Jewish people were moved to, but never the actual stories and narratives of people. Scholar Jeremy Jimenez analyzed 50 different United States history textbooks, and described “the most enduring textbook writing characteristic” within the books as the tendency to use passive voice when speaking of white supremacy and violence against minority groups and to use active voice when speaking of violent acts committed by non-white groups.
In such an instance, passive voice is an act of violence. It kills opportunities for criticism of the oppression the United States was built on, and brutally beats the concept of accountability. “Holocaust history was written without empathy.” But by who? Passive voice removes the perpetrator, but we fail to realize that you can’t have a victim without a perpetrator.
The Holocaust Museum LA was an anti-demonstration of historical distance through language. As we discussed the “Jews in Shanghai” exhibit, I noticed that the narratives created by the curators never failed to use active voice. They named perpetrators of violence against Jewish people during Japanese colonization of Shanghai, and also the people who had enabled its rise in Germany.
The exhibit also centered the actual lived experiences of survivors. It featured five Jewish families who had immigrated to Shanghai to escape Germany during the Holocaust, centering each of their narratives and struggles. We learned about the Kolber family’s journey to Shanghai through the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and looked at photos documenting the resistance and solidarity that took place not in the United States, lauded as the hero of WWII, but Shanghai.
As I observed the museum, it became obvious to me the key features that differentiated the way that Jimenez’s authors wrote history, and the way the Holocaust Museum LA told it. The curators of this exhibit were of Jewish ancestry, and as Jordanna Gessler, Vice President of Education and Exhibits and co-curator of the “Jews of Shanghai” explained the context of the exhibit, her passion for her work against antisemitism was obvious. On the other hand, formal history is written by companies, who don’t go out and listen to the lived experiences from people during that time, who have no real investment into advocacy work.
In Gessler’s words, “The Holocaust is not just a Jewish experience, it is a shared human experience.” Too often we regard the experiences of people of color as an “Asian experience” or a “Black experience”, while white experiences are seen as the “American experience.” And yet, the way we are educated on the event, we fail to learn about solidarity between ethnic communities like the kind in Shanghai, similar to how Yuri Kochiyama is omitted from lower level formal education on civil rights work.
Who tells these stories matters. It’s up to us to make sure that’s the right people.