8 | MARCH 24 • 2022 

opinion
Ukraine, Russia and the 
Unbearable Lightness of ‘Never Again’
A

fter decades of fearing 
that we would forget 
the horrors of our 
recent past, I am starting to fear 
the opposite possibility: that we 
Jews remember 
our history all too 
well but feel pow-
erless to act on its 
lessons. 
The Russian 
invasion of 
Ukraine invites 
analogies to our 
traumatic past. History begs us 
to learn from what came before. 
These analogies to the past are 
never perfect. Seeing analogies 
between past and present does 
not mean we think that anything 
that happened in the past would 
be identical to anything happen-
ing in the present. 
For comparisons to be useful, 
however, they need not be exact. 
It is enough for us as Jews to 
see familiarity in the past and 
resemblance in the present. We 
do this to activate our sense of 
responsibility, to ask if we have 
seen this plot point before, to 
figure out how we are supposed 
to act in the story to change the 
inevitability of the outcome. We 
become different people when 
we remember, as the past merges 
with the present and points to 
the choices we might make. 
But now: What if we remem-
ber well, but cannot act upon it? 
Will Jewish memory become a 
prison of our powerlessness? 
I grew up believing that 
appeasement was just one rung 
above fascist tyranny itself, 
and at times possibly worse: 
Appeasers replace responsibil-
ity with naivete and facilitate 

demonic evil even when they 
know better. The narrative of 
the West juxtaposes Churchill 
the hero with Chamberlain the 
villain; the philosopher Avishai 
Margalit uses Chamberlain as 
the archetype of the “rotten com-
promise,
” for making conces-
sions that make people skeptical 
of the morality of compromise 
altogether. I know that the sanc-
tions regime imposed against 
Putin’s Russia and his oligarchs 
are the most severe in history, 
and still I wonder: What is the 
threshold of appeasement, and 
will we know if we have crossed 
it? 
We still debate FDR’s decision 
not to bomb the train tracks 
leading to Auschwitz. It was a 
viable option, and we know this 
because Jewish leaders plead-
ed with American officials to 
consider it, and they decided 
against it. None of us has any 
idea whether such a bombing 
operation would have succeed-
ed, much less whether it would 
have made a dent in the Final 
Solution. But our memory of the 
story makes us wonder whether 
it might have, and it makes us 
furiously study the current inva-
sion, seeking opportunities for a 

similar intervention.
At the same time, we fear that 
we will only know what actions 
we should have taken a long 
time from now, and that our 
children will study such actions 
with the same helplessness that 
plagues us when we read about 
FDR’s decisions. 
My great-grandparents came 
to America well before World 
War II. But I have read about 
and feel chastened by America’s 
turning away Jewish refugees 
during the war. I am in shock 
watching the largest and fast-
est-developing refugee crisis 
unfolding before us and seeing 
our country failing to participate 
in a proportionate way — given 
our size and economic power 
— to the absorption and reset-
tlement efforts. Why do we have 
a museum celebrating American 
intervention in wartime, as 
we do in the United States 
Holocaust Memorial Museum, 
and why do we have such a 
profound educational apparatus 
focused on helping Americans 
understand how to not be a 
bystander, if not for moments 
like this? 
It is not hard to imagine the 
museum that will one day mark 

this unfolding atrocity.
Our insistence on memory — 
and the belief that it will change 
things — never quite works. 
This is because the invocation 
of memory can be banal, and 
because it can pull us apart. 
“Never again” is everywhere 
now — Meir Kahane’s appeal 
to Jewish self-defense became a 
rallying cry to prevent genocide, 
a banner to fight immigrant 
detention, a slogan for schools 
and gun control. And what-
ever we wanted the legacy of 
the Shoah to be, we have in no 
case been successful. American 
presidents mouthed these words 
seriously even as they failed to 
intervene, or intervened too late, 
to stop genocides in Cambodia, 
Rwanda, Darfur, Syria and else-
where. If the fear was forgetting, 
it was unfounded. But remem-
bering and acting on the mem-
ory is something else entirely. 
The legacy of our past indicts us 
when we can’t carry the former 
into the latter.
I never expected — even 
watching the politics of memory 
pull apart the legacy of remem-
bering for opposing political 
ends — that we would shift from 
a fear of forgetting to the fear 
that comes with remembering. 
The past glares at us now, it 
revisits us every day in the news 
cycle, and I am scared. It is not 
because we have forgotten it, but 
precisely because we remember 
it, and we do not know how to 
heed it. 

Yehuda Kurtzer is the president of 

the Shalom Hartman Institute of North 

America and host of the Identity/Crisis 

podcast.

Yehuda 
Kurtzer

PURELY COMMENTARY

A giant Ukrainian flag 
flies from a hotel directly 
across the street from 
the Russian Embassy in 
Washington, D.C., March 
10, 2022.

 VICTORIA PICKERING/FLICKR COMMONS

JTA

