Published: 8 December 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IN NOVEMBER, the Holocaust Memorial and Education Resource Centre of Florida came under fire for its new exhibit Uprooting Prejudice: Faces of Change, featuring Minneapolis photographer John Noltner’s work documenting the mourners and protesters who congregated at the corner where George Floyd was killed by police this past summer.
The exhibition drew ire from some Jewish far-right commentators like Dov Hikind and Ezra Levant, the latter of whom tweeted, “George Floyd is added to a Holocaust museum? That trivialises and distorts the Holocaust and its six million Jewish victims.”
Both Hikind and Levant suggested that in even including the George Floyd exhibit, the centre was drawing an inappropriate comparison between the United States and Nazi Germany.
But the museum, founded by Holocaust survivor Tess Wise, has long used the past to illuminate the present, contextualising contemporary human rights abuses like the genocide in Darfur through the history of the Holocaust and other legalized oppression like Jim Crow.
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