Edward Rothstein in today’s Times, on the new Queensborough Community College Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Research Center and Archives, whose aims he finds too "sweeping":
“It is not a memorial,” [college president Eduardo Marti] continued. “It is a laboratory.” It provides the tools to help the 15,000 students at the college learn the “lessons of the Holocaust.” Those lessons teach tolerance, the importance of combating prejudice, the need to speak out when any group is mistreated. In videos here, students who served as interns and interviewed survivors describe how those talks have made them more enlightened, more aware of prejudice and hatred. One of the other exhibitions at the center shows just how difficult these lessons are, describing other genocides of the past century: in Armenia, Ukraine, China, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur.
The broad lesson of tolerance also provides one impetus behind the growth of Holocaust centers; it is partly why this one was placed at the forefront of the Queensborough campus, where students represent more than 140 nationalities. [Center director Arthur] Flug explained in an interview how the center also helped develop a “hate crimes” curriculum now being introduced into New York City schools…
Surely to sensitize people to the suffering of Palestinians? The Guardian praises the great Amira Hass, daughter of Holocaust survivors:
Her mother survived a concentration camp and her father the ghettos of Romania and Ukraine. "What luck my parents are dead," Hass wrote at the height of the Gaza operation in January. Her parents could not stand the noise of Israeli jet fighters flying over the Palestinian refugee camps in 1982, and nor could they have tolerated going about their daily chores in Tel Aviv with the knowledge of what was going on in their name in Gaza: "They knew what it meant to close people behind barbed-wire fences in a small area." Only a Jew can invert the "never again" logic of the Holocaust that is used to justify Israel‘s least justifiable actions. It is that very experience, Hass argues, that should teach Israel to behave differently.
