The recent coverage of the Cohen Center and its silence regarding the genocide unfolding in Gaza for the past year made me, a senior Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) major, reevaluate the Center’s policy of selective silence.
One of the first lessons that every Genocide Studies major learns is that denial is endorsement and silence, when not under threat, is complicity. Gaza is far from the only genocide that the Center has remained silent on, they have a history of denial that could offer insight into why, this is shown through their denial of non-Jewish Holocaust victims.
The center has been willingly rejecting the reality and memory of the killings and forced sterilization of the disabled, Afro-Germans, Romani, and Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Nazi regime with the genocidal intent to destroy these groups. The only mention of these groups that I have heard from the Cohen Center was in the 2022 Kristallnacht Remembrance when Director Gibeault simply referred to them as the “others,” I would have imagined that the Cohen Center would have been uniquely positioned to understand the dangers in classifying people as “others.”
In a meeting with Director Gibeault last fall I asked why these groups were excluded from Cohen Center programming and she would only say that some scholars didn’t see what happened to them as genocide, while refusing to name the scholars or provide their reasoning, making a mockery of academic integrity, hiding her denial behind unnamed academics.
No Center, Institution, or Academic can give a victim group’s dignity back to them after a genocide, dignity is cultivated by the surviving communities, but these entities can help in the process. This is done by talking about what happened -what is happening-, supporting survivors’ voices, and telling the stories of the dead. But the Cohen Center has not been faithful in doing this. They have sacrificed their motto of “promoting human dignity” on an alter of ethnocentrism, creating a hierarchy in which human life is categorized by identity, providing safety and opportunity to regain dignity that comes with genocide education to those they deem more valuable, while remaining silent for those they see as less worthy all while refusing to provide academic for any classification they have made.
I could not see myself being more utterly disappointed in the Center than I was at this realization, but every time I open up the Equinox and see an article critical of the Cohen Center I read to find out the center is refusing to comment on their actions when concerns and calls for accountability are raised by this community they claim to be a part of. I am appalled by their selective silence both as a student of genocide studies and as a member of the KSC community who believes that to be a part of a community means being accountable for the effects you have on it.
Kate Montgomery McClellan
