US Holocaust Memorial Museum Invitation to President Trump
To Director Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, and the Members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council:
On April 25, President Donald Trump presented the keynote address at the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda at your invitation. We, the undersigned museum professionals, believe that the selection of Donald Trump to deliver this address is antithetical to the mission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, to “confront hatred…and promote human dignity” and to cultivate “a sense of moral responsibility among our citizens.”
It is inappropriate and hypocritical to permit a man who has embraced the rhetoric of white nationalism, surrounded himself with advisors linked to hate groups and nationalist movements abroad, who has expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders and denigrated the press and an independent judiciary, and has shown disdain for human dignity in his words and deeds, to address the memory of the millions who were killed.
From the administration’s Holocaust Memorial Day statement which erased the unique persecution of Jews, to Sean Spicer's ignorant statement about Hitler refraining from using chemical weapons on "his own people," this is not an administration that should ever be normalized, and certainly not by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. President Trump’s record makes him wholly unfit to give this address. Any words that he delivered, given his established record of disregard for the dignity of others, are empty at best.
Museums in general, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum perhaps foremost among them, have the potential to combat inequalities and injustice in ways large and small, and the responsibility to do so. As members of the museum community who take this responsibility seriously, we consider this decision by the Museum to be a deeply compromising act that requires direct address by the museum community. The Museum describes its mission as providing “a powerful lesson in the fragility of freedom…and the need for vigilance in preserving democratic values.” President Trump has clearly shown his willingness to dismiss the institutions of civil society that gird those freedoms, and to undermine those democratic values. To honor him by allowing him to speak in the name of the millions who perished makes a mockery of the Museum’s stated principles and of the responsibility of museum professionals.
Sincerely,
[Signatures do not imply endorsement by the signer's affiliated institution.]
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