The Martin-Springer Institute: Another Holocaust institute falls to the antisemitic left

Ever since a  2012 visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, I’ve known that the left has been very busy reworking the Holocaust so that it’s not about a unique evil visited upon the Jewish people, but is just shorthand for deaths in the Third World and Middle East (except, of course, for Jewish deaths). It’s not just the Anne Frank House. Other organizations once dedicated to Anne Frank have become actively antisemitic. It seems that the same is slowly happening to the Martin-Springer Institute (“MSI”) at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff (“NAU”)

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The MSI reflects the experiences of Doris Szpringer Martin, a Polish Jew who, at 12, ended up in Auschwitz, before being shifted to Ludwigsdorf, a women’s forced-labor camp. She and her immediate family survived the war and immigrated to America, where she met her husband, Ralph Martin.

Hoping to prevent another Holocaust from ever occurring, in 2000 the Martins established the MSI at NAU, along with another one at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. It was not intended to be a Holocaust memorial, looking backward, but was meant to prevent a future Holocaust by ending mindsets that dehumanized some people, that created a hierarchy of worthy versus unworthy people, or that otherwise set the stage for demanding the eradication of a specific set of people.

To that end, MSI’s mission is to attend “to the experiences of the Holocaust in order to relate them to today’s concerns, crises, and conflicts,” while emphasizing the values of moral courage, empathy, resilience, reconciliation, justice, and tolerance.

While the MSI still does a lot of Holocaust related work, it’s suffered institutional capture, so that its focus has drifted far, far left. Now, in addition to reminding people of the Holocaust so they can steer away from deadly ethnic and ideological hatreds, :

• Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Bedouins.
• American treatment of Native Americans.
• Government-sanctioned torture.
• Racism and anti-Black violence.
• Immigration policy and refugees.
• Colonialism.
• Disappearances in Mexico.
• Threats to democracy.

That’s pure leftist lingo, and as you have noted, many of those obsessions have a decidedly anti-white, anti-Western, and, ironically given how Doris Spinger’s Holocaust experience created the MSI, antisemitic tone. The following speakers, all from this year, show the direction of the MSI.

On February 17, the MSI sponsored “An Evening with the Pulitzer Prize Winning Author of The Sympathizer: Viet Thanh Nguyen.” That sounds very cool, but should a Holocaust institute be sponsoring someone who obsessively accuses Israel of genocide, supports BDS and culturally boycotting Israel, and frames the conflict in Israel through a “settler colonialism” lens (which ignores that Jews have been there for over 3,000 years, and today’s “Palestinians” for barely 200)? (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

On March 26, the MSI hosted Bridget Conley, who once worked as the Research Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, and is now a World Peace Foundation & Research Professor from Tufts University. Conley spoke about “The Indispensability of Gender: Starvation in Contemporary Contexts.” It’s likely that her speech reflected her boundless hostility to Israel, which she describes as carrying out a “campaign of atrocities” against civilians, including using starvation as a weapon.

And on April 8, the MSI also hosted Tylor Brand, from the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College in Dublin (located in what is truly a nation that is a hotbed of stupid antisemitism), to speak about “Famine and Induced Starvation During War and Colonial Suppression: Middle East and North Africa.” There doesn’t seem to be a publicly available transcript of the talk, but it just might have reflected his claim that there’s a “manmade famine Israel has imposed on Gaza.”

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Apparently, both Conley and Brand missed reports about Israel’s sending hundreds of tons of food to enemy civilians, as well as the documented fact that Hamas stole the food (something even the UN grudgingly admitted on one occasion). They also seem to have missed these videos out of Gaza:

Maybe the famine is because the Gazans are eating too much junk food? What’s more likely is that Hamas and other war profiteers ensured that they were well-fed, while Gazans and, especially, Israeli hostages were not. The one thing that never came out of Gaza was pictures like these, of the Bergen-Belsen prisoners whom the Allies arrived too late to save from disease and starvation (content warning).

At bottom, all of these speakers are targeting and dehumanizing Israel and Israelis. By doing so, they provide fuel for the malevolent, genocidal antisemitism that has spread from the Muslims of the Middle East across the West.

John O’Sullivan famously said that “any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right-wing will become left-wing over time.” Nowhere has that happened more grotesquely than in institutions originally dedicated to the Holocaust. What’s taking place at the Martin-Springer Institute is Exhibit A in the catastrophic leftist, antisemitic capture of the Holocaust, one that is teeing the world up for another organized attempt to erase Jews from the face of the earth.

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Image created using AI.