In late October, Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan caused a slight stir by wearing a yellow star with the words “never again” on the badge.

The backlash—from his own country’s foreign service—was swift. “We always attack other countries when they manipulate the memory of the Holocaust, and here comes the Israeli ambassador and does the same on the most central stage of world diplomacy,” one official told Haaretz. Others called it a “media gimmick” aimed at building Erdan’s political standing with the Likud party.

One of Erdan’s critics was Yad Vashem director Dani Dayan, Israel’s former consul general in New York. In his own flourish of overstatement, Dayan said Erdan’s move “disgraces both Holocaust victims and Israel.” He explained: “The yellow star symbolizes the Jewish people’s helplessness and the Jews being at the mercy of others. Today we have an independent state and a strong army. We are the masters of our fate. Today we shall wear a blue-white flag, not a yellow star.”

Whether intentionally or not, Dayan was missing Erdan’s point. But Dayan’s jealous guarding of Holocaust memory is consistent, and thus arguably a positive. We got more insight into this outlook this week, when 50 “Holocaust researchers” unsuccessfully tried to pressure Dayan into lending Yad Vashem’s moral authority to the campaign to libel Israel.

The researchers believe Dayan has an obligation to exaggerate the relevance and prevalence of supposed Israeli genocidal rhetoric in Gaza. One of the signatories to the letter is Omer Bartov, a Brown University professor who wrote a widely—and appropriately—panned opinion piece for the New York Times warning of an imaginary Israeli genocidal intent. It’s easy to amplify random such statements and suggest they describe some kind of emerging consensus in the government, but this kind of rank dishonesty about Israel is both common and disgraceful.

Dayan basically said as much. “Without discounting the seriousness of the words” in the researchers’ letter, Dayan responded, “the outrageous statements you cited do not express the moral position of the very large majority of the Israeli public or the IDF and its commanders.”

Dayan then said something interesting. Disputing the idea that museums such as Yad Vashem have an obligation to speak out on world affairs, Dayan insisted that the “six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust are entitled to an institution that deals with them and only them.”

In this, Dayan is right—and he enters an ongoing debate within the Jewish community about the failure of Holocaust education, specifically the way it has contributed to universalizing the Holocaust at the expense of the actual victims of the historical crime.

This has been a growing concern since Oct. 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust itself. As I noted in November, Holocaust museums around the country have shown no hesitation in throwing their names and institutions behind public “awareness” campaigns about the death of George Floyd or the plight of migrants at the southern border, but they were silent (or nearly so) about Oct. 7. It was an example of a worldview that modern Holocaust museums and education centers have fallen prey to: Everything is the Holocaust except for the Holocaust.

Then in December, New Yorker writer Masha Gessen took aim at the city of Berlin’s refusal to universalize Jewish suffering and turn its Holocaust centers’ attention to the Palestinians. Equal parts grotesque and illiterate, Gessen’s piece nonetheless fit within the trendy mainstream copycat culture of intentionally minimizing Jewish pain and tragedy in order to inflate the perception of Jewish criminality.

Where that path leads is directly to The Hague, where the UN court of justice (sic) currently has Israel on trial for genocide.

But how much of that path was paved by the mistaken assumptions of Holocaust museums? That is a difficult question to answer precisely, but it is not difficult to assess that these centers are responsible for some of it, and some is too much. The universalizing of the Holocaust by Holocaust education centers was pursued in the name of maintaining relevance, but it has only resulted in diluting the relevance of the Holocaust by commonizing it and disentangling it from its connection to its actual victims.

Is there a path back from here? Perhaps Dani Dayan’s approach is the way. Although his criticism of Erdan veered into the unfair—Jews should be able to talk about the Holocaust when their enemies explicitly aim to carry out its sequel—a course correction toward particularism might be the only chance we have to salvage what is known as “Holocaust education.”