The Holocaust Is Not a Comparative Survey of Grievances
William Diamond was a young drummer in the Lexington militia when he stood on the town green before dawn on April 19, 1775, and beat the call that summoned his neighbors to assemble. The middle school that bears his name in Lexington, Massachusetts, exists, like every school, to do a version of what he did: to sound a summons, to ready the next generation for the hard things that citizenship asks. Not long ago it did the opposite.
After a class of seventh graders sat through a lesson connecting the Holocaust to the antisemitism still around them, some families complained. The lesson, they said, had left their children feeling “unseen,” their communities “left out or erased,” the session leaving them “less safe, not more.” And so the principal, Dr. Johnny Cole, wrote to the students to apologize. He had “missed the mark.” He promised to build something better at his school: a curriculum about hate and prejudice in general, one that would “include all of our communities and all of our histories.”
Read that last phrase slowly, because it is the whole story.
The Holocaust is not a unit in a comparative survey of grievances. It is not one history among many, to be balanced against the others so that every child leaves the room feeling equally represented. It was a dark moment in human history and it happened; full stop. Six million Jews were murdered by a modern state that organized its bureaucracy, its industry, and its science around their extermination. To teach that truthfully is not to slight anyone else. It is simply to teach it. The Nazis murdered others too - Roma, the disabled, Soviet prisoners - and honest teaching says so. But the Lexington families were not asking that those victims be remembered. They were asking to be centered themselves. A lesson about the murder of Europe’s Jews is under no obligation to make room for that.
What Cole’s email does - gently, therapeutically, in the warm cadences of the contemporary administrator - is concede the opposite. It accepts the premise that the measure of a Holocaust lesson is how the non-Jewish children in the room feel about their own visibility. Once you accept that premise, the apology follows automatically. And once the apology is sent, the lesson that lands is not the one about 1939. It is this: Jewish memory is an imposition, and discomfort is a veto.
This is the part that is easy to miss. The crude antisemitism is also present here. The same school found a neo-Nazi graffiti and slurs scrawled in a bathroom last December, and the institutional response was an announcement asking students to be kind. A girl whose great-grandmother survived a camp was told to stop wearing a shirt reading “punch Nazis” - one she had worn for two years - because other students said it made them feel threatened. But graffiti is not the most corrosive thing here. The graffiti is recognizable. Everyone knows what to call it.
The apology is more dangerous precisely because it is respectable. It arrives in the voice of inclusion and teaches - with all the authority a school holds over a twelve-year-old - that confronting the murder of the Jews is a kind of harm that requires redress. No vandal could accomplish that; only the principal could. This is how antisemitism does its real damage: not through the slur on the wall, which everyone condemns, but through the credentialed signal that Jewish history is a burden to be managed and made comfortable for everyone else.
And Cole is no outlier. To apologize for a true and necessary lesson, and then promise to dilute it, is now the reflex of a whole class of American schools - where the answer to any complaint is to reframe, to soothe, to “build something better.” It looks like kindness, but is an abdication.
Schools are formation institutions before they are anything else. Tocqueville understood that a free people is made, not born; assembled out of habits and daily lessons about what a community will tolerate. The real curriculum is never just the syllabus - it is the conduct of the adults. When the adults flinch, children learn that truth is negotiable and that the loudest discomfort sets the terms. That is a civic education too and it is simply a disastrous one.
Jews have a word for the obligation this school abandoned: zachor, remember. It is not a sentiment but a commandment, carried l’dor v’dor (“generation to generation”), because memory is fragile and the temptation to soften it never goes away. The student with the shirt - the great-granddaughter of a survivor - understands this better than the credentialed adults around her. She was doing exactly the work the institution was built to do. They told her to take it off.
There is a way to handle a hard lesson. You explain why it matters. You sit with the discomfort, because the discomfort is part of the point. You do not apologize for the truth; you teach children how to bear it. That is the difference between forming citizens and managing customers.
And it matters enormously where this happened. Lexington and Concord are not ordinary suburbs. They are the ground where the American idea was born: where ordinary farmers and shopkeepers, some of them barely more than boys, decided they would not be ruled by fear and would not be told what they were forbidden to say. It was a teenager’s drum that called them onto the green. Those few square miles gave the country its first lesson in self-government and its lasting conviction that ordinary people, and not their betters, define who we are.
That is the inheritance a school on that soil now teaches its children to apologize for. The young, as it happens, still grasp it better than the adults: the girl told to take off her shirt was doing exactly what William Diamond did - sounding the alarm about a danger her elders would rather sleep through. The school that bears the drummer’s name heard the alarm, hit the snooze button, and called it inclusion.
So let this be another shot heard round the world. Let parents, teachers, and citizens - in Lexington and everywhere a school has confused inclusion with surrender - rise and say it plainly: this is not how we educate the young. We do not apologize for the truth. We do not let the loudest discomfort decide what a child is allowed to know. And on the ground where Americans first refused to be governed by fear, we are not going to start now.
