Joel Swanson writes:

On Thursday of this past week, Vice President JD Vance visited the site of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, making him the latest in a string of American public officials to visit a former Nazi camp. The visit, timed to coincide with Vance’s trip to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, comes a year after Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and newly-installed most powerful person in the United States, visited Auschwitz last January.

It’s worth recalling the circumstances that led to Musk’s visit to Auschwitz a year ago. The visit came after months of antisemitic statements, including using his social media platform X to boost conspiracy theories accusing Jews of “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities”; threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for being the “biggest generators of anti-Semitism”; and accusing Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros of attempting to “erode the very fabric of civilization” because he “hates humanity.”

Finally, in the wake of a threatened advertiser boycott with the potential to harm Musk’s bottom line, he did what any wealthy celebrity accused of antisemitism does these days: he made a ritualized visit to a concentration camp or Holocaust museum to have his sins of bigotry washed clean. (In Musk’s case, he also made a similarly ritualized visit to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who, of course, has a long history of giving kosher passes to far-right antisemites in exchange for their support for the most right-wing elements within the Israeli government.) Musk’s brief trip to Auschwitz was enough to win instant forgiveness for his sins of antisemitism.

Except, of course, Musk was not radically, instantaneously transformed by his time at Auschwitz. He was not magically cleansed of his antisemitism. In the year after his trip to the infamous Nazi concentration camp, Musk reinstated the accounts of Holocaust deniers and praised a Holocaust revisionist historian. In just the past month alone, Musk infamously performed a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally; joked about the Holocaust; told supporters of the German far-right party Alternative for Germany that Germany needs to “move beyond” its historical guilt for the Holocaust; and reinstated a briefly-fired 25-year-old government employee who had bragged about being “racist before it was cool” and called for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Because the truth is, a trip to Auschwitz or Dachau isn’t some instant cure for antisemitism. It does not wipe away years of bigotry and far-right sympathies in some blinding flash of moral enlightenment. In fact, Musk didn’t even take his trip to the death camp particularly seriously. According to the partner of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor who was the guest of honor for Musk’s visit to the site, Musk “did not care” about the trip at all, and was “unmoved by the experience.”

Art Spiegelman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, and himself the child of Holocaust survivors, has noted that despite the Jewishness of the Holocaust, most of our cultural narratives about the atrocity are actually Christian in nature, because they see suffering as providing a path to moral enlightenment; as Spiegelman writes: “that notion of suffering is a very Christian notion, that somehow you’re ennobled by it.”

Spiegelman is correct, but I would argue that he doesn’t go far enough. Not only are our narratives about Holocaust suffering narratives of Christian redemptive suffering, but our Holocaust memorial sites have become Christian sites of instant redemption. We see the symbolic visit to Auschwitz or Dachau as a sort of Christian pilgrimage, a way to receive penance and be cleansed of one’s sins, in the same way that Christians speak of the conversion narrative of accepting Jesus and being forgiven.

For Jews, in contrast, repentance or teshuvah isn’t something to be granted based on a singular conversion experience, it’s a lengthy and arduous process that entails taking responsibility for one’s actions and making genuine steps to become a better person. In other words, precisely what Elon Musk has not shown himself capable of doing. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports:

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday blasted Vice President JD Vance for his support of the far right in the country that gave rise to Adolf Hitler, accusing the American vice president of interfering in domestic affairs less than 10 days before national elections.

Vance’s denunciation of efforts by the German establishment to keep the far right out of power sparked a wave of condemnation from senior officials and pundits, some of whom saw a U.S. administration actively promoting political extremism in the West.

Vance on Friday used a major security conference in Munich to criticize the country’s political fire wall: the post-World War II agreement by mainstream parties to block the far right from being part of any government. Vance punctuated his point by later meeting with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which is polling in second place. The AfD denies being a far-right party but is classified by German intelligence as a suspected extremist group. One of the party’s most polemic figures has been convicted and fined for using a banned Nazi slogan.

Vance’s comments appeared to shatter a taboo. On Saturday, Scholz criticized him for visiting the Dachau concentration camp on Thursday only to meet with and voice support for far-right leaders hours later.

In a keynote address, Scholz noted that the United States helped overthrow Nazism. “‘Never again’ is the historical mission that Germany, as a free democracy, must and wants to continue to live up to day after day,” he said. “Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.” [Continue reading…]