To Edward Rothstein, Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away, which recently opened at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, is “unmissable,” thanks primarily to the hundreds of photographs and artifacts on display. But it also falls prey to the all-too-familiar tendency to turn the Holocaust into a “warning beacon”:

Here is an event scarred by singularity—the attempt to eradicate a people that numbered in the millions, living in more than a dozen countries in the world’s most politically sophisticated continent, who were executed with meticulous, obsessive brutality in the midst of a world war. After three- quarters of a century, it still stymies efforts at understanding.

Somehow, though, that singularity inspires insistence on the opposite, as if the Holocaust were simply the result of fascism or racism or intolerance. The Holocaust’s presumed repeatability—if not imminence—strips it of particularity and diminishes it by turning it into an ever-ready analogy. . . .

In the [exhibit’s] introductory section, Jews seem like afterthoughts, secondary to more fundamental political hatreds. . . . But from the very beginning, as Hitler made clear in 1925’s Mein Kampf (we see Heinrich Himmler’s annotated copy), Jews were at the center of Nazi obsessions. The exhibition acknowledges that Jews were a “special target,” but it seems intent on minimizing that issue. The result is that Germany’s expulsion of the Jews and then the Final Solution seem to erupt without context. . . .

[T]he exhibition does not prepare us to make sense of this or to recognize that despite the widespread suffering, without the goal of killing Jews, Auschwitz would have remained a conventional Nazi horror pit. Auschwitz is testimony to an obsession, around which other hatreds inconsistently circulated.

Make no mistake: this show wields considerable power, but, like most Holocaust exhibitions (aside from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem), it is oddly discomfited by that Judaic center and overly content with contemporary platitudes. In the catalog, Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz museum, warns that an Auschwitz could happen again because of “the escalation of populism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other racist ideologies.” This need to catalog villainies has counterparts in other recent responses toward hatred of Jews, making sure that any condemnation of anti-Semitism is cushioned by a roster of other hatreds.

While roughly a third of Saudis are willing to cooperate with the Jewish state in matters of technology and commerce, far fewer are willing to allow Israeli teams to compete within the kingdom—let alone support diplomatic normalization. These are just a few results of a recent, detailed, and professional opinion survey—a rarity in Saudi Arabia—that has much bearing on current negotiations involving Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. David Pollock notes some others:

When asked about possible factors “in considering whether or not Saudi Arabia should establish official relations with Israel,” the Saudi public opts first for an Islamic—rather than a specifically Saudi—agenda: almost half (46 percent) say it would be “important” to obtain “new Israeli guarantees of Muslim rights at al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Haram al-Sharif [i.e., the Temple Mount] in Jerusalem.” Prioritizing this issue is significantly more popular than any other option offered. . . .

This popular focus on religion is in line with responses to other controversial questions in the survey. Exactly the same percentage, for example, feel “strongly” that “our country should cut off all relations with any other country where anybody hurts the Quran.”

By comparison, Palestinian aspirations come in second place in Saudi popular perceptions of a deal with Israel. Thirty-six percent of the Saudi public say it would be “important” to obtain “new steps toward political rights and better economic opportunities for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” Far behind these drivers in popular attitudes, surprisingly, are hypothetical American contributions to a Saudi-Israel deal—even though these have reportedly been under heavy discussion at the official level in recent months.

Therefore, based on this analysis of these new survey findings, all three governments involved in a possible trilateral U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal would be well advised to pay at least as much attention to its religious dimension as to its political, security, and economic ones.