The first board meeting of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., since the dozen members appointed by President Donald Trump were installed is showing how a few people who care can make a difference.
Members I spoke to said they were barred from revealing what went on, but that people would soon notice changes. There is a focus on harnessing the museum’s social media to be more assertive in combating those minimizing the Holocaust or promoting antisemitism. Another focus is on making the museum more welcoming to religious Jews.
“People who have been on the council for years,” said Robert Garson, one of the eleven members appointed by President Donald Trump in May, “stated that the most recent meeting was the most energized council meeting they’ve ever seen. I can’t talk about what goes on at the meeting, but it was a very energetic discussion about the future of the Holocaust Museum.”
Garson, a partner at the Miami-based GS2 law firm, heads the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. “I work very closely with people in the Republican Party, and I’ve been outspoken for many years on issues of antisemitism,” he said. “Therefore, they thought I’d be a good voice to be on the Holocaust Memorial Council.”
Another Trump appointee is Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz, editor of this newspaper. The new appointees were sworn in three weeks ago at a ceremony in Washington. Garson praised Rabbi Lipschutz and several other new council members to the 32-year-old museum as “very strong advocates for the Jewish people.”
“What you’ve got on there are self-identifying proud Jews who are willing to stand up to say who and what they are,” Garson said. “They are not apologists on behalf of themselves, their people, or Israel. With the next round of people, President Trump needs to put more people like that on the board.”
Trump gets his next opportunity to name eleven more members in the next month or so.
The Museum’s Makeup
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was the brainchild of President Jimmy Carter, who announced plans for its establishment in 1978, with survivor Elie Wiesel as its first chairman. It is located on two acres of land near the Washington Monument, on Raoul Wallenberg Way, and it was inaugurated in 1993.
The museum has more than 275,000 records, including 12,000 artifacts and nearly a thousand recorded interviews with survivors. Some 50 million visitors have come through its doors since its opening.
The museum has 55 members on its governing council. There are five members named by the Senate, five by Congress, and three from the departments of State, Education, and the Interior. The other 42 are named by the president, who gets to appoint eleven members each year. Every member serves a five-year term, and there are no term limits.
Conversely, the members appointed by the president serve at his pleasure, and he may fire them at will. Former President Joe Biden did this to members of other commissions appointed by Trump in 2021, and Trump returned fire upon taking office in January by removing some of Biden’s last-minute appointees, including Susan Rice, Ron Klain, and Doug Emhoff, from the Holocaust Museum.
Firing Bernie
One change some of the members are calling for is to remove Sen. Bernie Sanders from the council. Sanders was a Senate appointee in 2007, and his term automatically got renewed every five years.
Jonathan Burkan is one of those calling for Sanders’ removal, arguing that the senator has hardly attended any meetings and that his characterizing Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” contradicts the museum’s mission.
Burkan, a New York-based financial advisor, is on his second term on the council, both times having been placed there by President Trump. He serves on the council’s financial audit committee.
The council meets twice a year, while its executive committee convenes an additional two times each year. Burkan said that he could not recall any other council member who never attended any meetings. He wants Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to name a replacement for Sanders, which would automatically remove him from the council.
Sanders, the first sitting senator to call the Gaza war a genocide, is not the first controversial appointment to the council. In 2017, on his way out of office, former President Barack Obama named Ben Rhodes to the museum council. Rhodes openly worked against Israel’s interests during his time in the Obama administration, but he attended museum meetings. Sanders does not, Burkan and Garson noted.
“You have some unbelievable people who are on the board who give tremendous amounts of money, who have incredible knowledge, and who have been appointed by Obama, Biden, and Trump,” Burkan told the Yated. “These are people who are very generous to this museum, who are very good — let’s call them non-partisan people. I’d say the vast majority of the council are very good people. Biden appointed some very good people — though not every person he appointed was good — and I’m very pleased obviously with all the Trump appointees.”
“Bernie Sanders was appointed because he’s a U.S. senator,” he said. “It’s a different type of situation. The Senate and the House appoint their own people. And in this situation, Bernie Sanders was appointed around 20 years ago and they never replaced him. And unfortunately, he’s just never gone to any meetings.”
“It’s horrible to accuse Israel of genocide and then be on the board of the Holocaust Museum, which is to commemorate one of the worst genocides in history against the Jews, and then you never show up to any meetings,” he added. “It’s not exactly a good situation.”
Garson said that in the two decades since Sanders took up his position at the museum, he’s only gotten worse.
“As he’s become more crotchety and more woke,” Garson said, “he’s become more left-aligned, and he has picked up every anti-Israel narrative. He doesn’t realize the harm that he’s doing to his people now.”
“Self-hating Jews,” he asserted, “confuse non-Jewish people. They think, ‘Oh, Bernie Sanders, he looks like a Jew, so he’s somebody who would be right to be on the Holocaust Memorial Council because he’s a Jew.’ But they don’t understand that there are people who practice as Jews and who are aligned with the way Jews think, and then there are those who are just ethnically Jewish. And that’s a problem. We’ve always said amongst ourselves that our own worst enemies are other Jews.
“So when the Senate was thinking who our appointees should be, the Democrats thought, ‘Oh, Sanders, he’s a Jew.’ But they didn’t think, really, does he represent what Jewish people think? Do his views align with the Holocaust Museum and the way that they would approach things? He’s an embarrassment to his own people.”
Burkan suggested other Democrat senators who would make a good fit to replace Sanders, such as John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Brian Schatz of Hawaii.
“There are 10 Jewish Democrat senators,” he noted. “You don’t have to be Jewish to be on the council. Fetterman loves Israel, loves Jews.” Burkan subsequently removed Ossoff and Schatz from consideration when told that they had criticized Israel’s Gaza operation and voted to block arms sales from Israel last year.
Countering those minimizing the Holocaust
The museum has its work cut out for it. The past year has seen an explosion of prominent podcasters and show hosts on the right, such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, belittling the Holocaust, openly admiring what the Nazis did, or having guests express horrendous antisemitic remarks without countering them. The left has long turned antisemitic, but the war in Gaza has intensified it.
Garson acknowledged the new atmosphere clouding the country but said that the museum will have its place in the battle.
“We’ve got a job to do, that’s for sure,” he said. “We have to sit down and look at the programs they currently have — they do lots of good work, but we’ve got to give it a little bit of adrenaline. If you look at its social media, it’s now really starting to push itself forward, and that’s thanks to the people who have been recently appointed.”
Burkan emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of the museum, but he agreed with the sentiment.
“I think all of us council members abhor antisemitism, whether it comes from the left or the right,” he said, “and we’re going to attack anyone who’s an antisemite wherever they are. I also know the museum has a social media account, and when people try to minimize the Holocaust, they call them out on it.”
“I, along with Rabbi Lipschutz and Rabbi Segal,” Richard Garson said, “very quickly identified the fact that there was no kosher food in the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which we think is wrong. If a Jewish boy or girl goes to the Holocaust Museum, one thing that they can’t do is get a kosher meal. You can’t even get a kosher sandwich there. The first thing we did was we got in touch with the current chairman, Stuart Eizenstat, and said, ‘This is one thing that’s got to be done.’”
Rabbi Nate Segal, director of community outreach at Torah Umesorah and serving his first term at the museum, will lead the move to have kosher food in the museum.
“It was a great honor to be appointed,” Rabbi Segal said, “but I was surprised at the lack of kosher food in the museum. “It is true that 95 percent of the visitors to the museum are not Jewish, but if it’s a Holocaust museum, it should have kosher food so that religious Jews will feel comfortable there.
“People who keep kosher should have the opportunity to feel comfortable in a place which represents the mass murder of six million of our brothers and sisters,” Rabbi Segal said. “And thankfully, the leaders of the museum have responded positively to this.”
Rabbi Segal also said he wants the museum to be a place where religious Jews can be comfortable attending.
Garson said he was also disturbed to not find any books in the museum’s shop on Jewish efforts to save lives during the Holocaust, and that the museum does not have a narrative to tell outsiders its overall story.
Garson said, “Everybody has a different view on what the Holocaust Museum should be. To me, it shouldn’t be a testament to victimhood, but rather it should be proof of the survival of the Jewish people. Secondly, it should remind the world of the mechanized and industrialized slaughter and place the word genocide back into its proper context. It’s been trivialized.”
That, he emphasized, would draw a direct response to the wave of Holocaust-minimizing that is currently adrift in the United States.
“We have to, I think, draw more powerful allusions to the Jew-hatred that’s going on in the streets at the moment in Britain, Australia, and the United States, and to show that that is no different from the Hitler Youth or from the brownshirts,” Garson said.
“We have to be doing more outreach to the youth of America, working with the White House faith office, and also reminding Americans of their role in stopping the Holocaust from getting even worse.”
Garson fears the day when the first-hand eyewitnesses to the Holocaust will no longer be around to counter history revisionists.
“The day that the last survivor dies will be the saddest day on earth,” he said. “Why? Because that’s when the revisionists really start to come out. They’re already out there, but when the last person who can say I was there, this was me, when that last person dies, that’s when our work really begins.”
That will likely come within the next decade or two. I asked him how he envisions the museum in five years when his term ends.
“Please, G-d, number one, it’ll have kosher food,” he said, laughing. “Let’s start with that. Number two, we hope it’ll be a much more energized and more powerful voice in the public discourse.” The museum will work with the recently confirmed State Department ambassador for antisemitism, Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, he said.
Garson clarified that while Kaploun is a State Department official, “there’s a lot of liaison between the people like me who sit on the council and Rabbi Kaploun.
“He’s going to be a very strong voice in terms of fighting antisemitism,” Garson asserted. “Together with the power and the resources behind the Holocaust Museum, don’t discount the role that the antisemitism office has had in protecting not only Jews but also others.”
