On May 29, President Trump signed into law the Never Again Education Act—passed with near-unanimity by both houses of a bitterly divided Congress. The act sets aside $10 million for Holocaust education, to be spent over the next five years, and declares that “learning how and why the Holocaust happened is an important component of the education of citizens of the United States.” Behind it stands the reasoning—widely accepted by Jews and Gentiles alike—that teaching about the Shoah can help serve as an antidote to the “hate” that caused it. Ruth Wisse is skeptical:

A recent article in an Israeli political journal argued that anyone who wishes to revive Israel’s moribund left must stay true to its secular heritage and “take a stand against both religion and religious people.” But to Gershon Hacohen this claim rests on a profound misunderstanding. While it is true that David Ben-Gurion and other early leaders of the Zionist left were secular insofar as they were agnostic and did not observe halakhah, their ideology was deeply enmeshed with the Hebrew Bible and Jewish traditions: