Jan. 27 marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The date is observed with solemnity and ceremony, its language repeated so often that it risks becoming fixed in place. Auschwitz is invoked as a symbol of absolute evil, safely contained in the past. Yet the enduring importance of Jan. 27 lies not in what we remember, but in whether we recognize the conditions that made Auschwitz possible when they begin to reappear.

Auschwitz was liberated in 1945. Antisemitism was not.

As Primo Levi warned, the Holocaust revealed not a historical aberration, but a human capacity, one that emerges when dehumanization is tolerated and moral responsibility erodes. The defeat of Nazism removed a regime, not an idea. What followed was not the end of antisemitism, but its transformation.

After World War II, the Allies moved swiftly to rebuild a shattered world. Peace treaties were signed. Former enemies became partners. Germany, Italy, and Japan were reintegrated into the international order through alliances and institutions designed to prevent another global catastrophe. This effort was necessary, and it largely succeeded.

But no comparable reckoning ever took place with antisemitism itself.

No treaty was signed with the surviving remnant of European Jewry. No binding international framework was created to confront the ideology that had animated genocide. There was no moral equivalent to the Marshall Plan, and no sustained institutional commitment to ensure that the ideas that enabled Auschwitz would be identified and confronted when they resurfaced. The assumption was that the military defeat of Nazism constituted the moral defeat of antisemitism. History proved otherwise. The hatred that led to Auschwitz was never defeated. It was interrupted.

As a result, responsibility for confronting antisemitism........

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