Reflecting on the resurgence of antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and what he called the “anti-history” engulfing much of the world, Ferguson reached a painful conclusion. “The goal of my entire career as an historian was to ensure that citizens learned the lessons of history. … Yet today … anti-history is spreading like a cancer. The Holocaust is either denied or derided. I have to admit: I failed utterly.”

 His words resonated with me because they capture what many Jews are experiencing today. I understand why he feels defeated, but I simply don’t think defeat and failure are the same thing.

The purpose of historians

Antisemitism has returned to the mainstream. Holocaust denial has become fashionable and even expected in some circles. And far too many young people are historically ignorant and seem detached from even the most basic knowledge of the past.

 But I think Niall reached the wrong conclusion about both his work and that of history more generally.

 He did not fail. Rather, he expected history to accomplish work that history has never been able to achieve on its own.

 His mistake was understandable. Historians preserve the past. Their task is to recover it, explain it, place it in context and protect it from distortion. That is indispensable work. However, preserving the past and transmitting it are different responsibilities. Historians can document a civilization. They cannot, by themselves, persuade civilizations to remember.

 The Jewish tradition has understood that distinction for thousands of years. Judaism never assumed that facts speak for themselves or that historical knowledge automatically becomes moral wisdom. Instead, it taught those lessons around the dinner table, in the synagogue, and from one generation to the next.

Remember

The Hebrew word is zachor — remember. It is not advice; it is a command and is an idea that I first encountered when I was in elementary school. I vividly recall being taught to remember that we were strangers in Egypt, that we must remember Amalek and the Sabbath, and that very Covenant itself is sacred.

 Former Columbia University professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observed in his landmark book, Zakhor, that “remember” appears in the Hebrew Bible no fewer than 169 times, with either God or Israel as its subject and that is no accident. Memory, in Judaism, is not simply a feeling or an act of nostalgia — it is an obligation.

 Yerushalmi’s central insight in Zakhor was that history grows more important precisely when memory grows weaker. As the ordinary practices that carried Jewish memory from one generation to the next became less secure, Jews increasingly turned to writing history. History expanded as memory contracted.

 That is a lesson worth remembering far beyond the Jewish experience. We often assume that historical knowledge is enough — that if people learn the facts, they will reach the right conclusions. But facts alone do not sustain a civilization. Judaism has always demanded something more: not simply that we know the past, but that we remember it.

 The holiday of Passover may be the clearest example. Every year Jews gather around the Seder table not simply to recall the Exodus but to enter it. The Haggadah instructs every person to see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt. Parents tell the story and children interrupt with questions; this is celebrated and encouraged. Meals, songs, ritual, and repetition give the story emotional weight until it becomes part of a family’s identity rather than simply another historical event.

 That is how Jewish memory survived nearly 2,000 years of exile, persecution, dispersion, and hate. History and scholarly pursuits certainly mattered and remain central to Jewish life, but they were never sufficient. For centuries, families, synagogues, schools, and local communities carried memory together until it became woven into the rhythm of ordinary Jewish life.

What has changed

Many of those institutions — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — are weaker today. Families spend less time together. Religious participation has declined. Voluntarism has declined. Civic organizations have withered. Schools often struggle to transmit a shared civic inheritance.

 I do not need polling to tell me something has changed. I have seen the resurgence of antisemitism where I teach, online where anonymity magnifies hatred, and on the streets of New York while walking with my children. What Ferguson describes is not an abstraction. It is part of daily Jewish life once again.

 It is tempting to blame social media and artificial intelligence for what we see today. I think that gets the causal arrow backward. AI and social media did not create this problem. They exposed our cultural weaknesses. We have become very good at preserving, but much less good at passing on memory.

 Immediately after the Shema, Jews are commanded: “You shall teach them diligently to your children.” That command assumes something important. Memory is fragile and if neglected or ignored, even the most important truths disappear.

 Bernard-Henri Lévy recognized this almost immediately when he responded to Ferguson online. “No, dear Niall,” he wrote, “this is not a failure; it is a defeat. … Antisemitism may win battles, but not the war.”

Handing down memory

Lévy was making a profoundly Jewish point. Judaism has never confused survival with uninterrupted success. The covenant never promised that evil would disappear or that exile would never come. Instead, it made remembering part of everyday Jewish life — in homes, holidays, prayer, and study. That is how the story endured.

 Historians preserve the past. They recover forgotten truths, challenge falsehoods, and help us understand where we have been. But they cannot do the work of memory. That responsibility belongs to families, schools, congregations, and communities.

 That work falls to the institutions that turn history into memory. It happens around dinner tables, in classrooms, in congregations, and anywhere one generation takes responsibility for the next.

 Years of studying politics, sociology, and my own religious tradition have led me to the same conclusion: Communities survive because they hand something down. Historians record that inheritance. Families and institutions transmit it.

 So no, Niall — my friend — you did not fail. The work to which you devoted your life still matters. I, for one, am grateful.

 You did what great historians are called to do: preserve the record, challenge falsehoods and help us better understand the past. But history alone cannot carry a people or stop dangerous, irrational movements like anti-history from gaining so much power and influence. I wish it could, but that work belongs to memory — to families, congregations, schools and communities willing to pass an inheritance from one generation to the next.

 History preserves the past. Memory preserves a people.

Samuel Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

During the Thanksgiving holiday, I visited the Simon Family Jewish Community Center of Tidewater (the JCC), a place I had visited before, but never truly experienced as it was meant to be lived. My earlier encounter had been during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Jewish spaces, like so many others, felt provisional and restrained: masked, socially distanced, outdoors, muted and careful. This time was different. The building was open, alive and rooted again in the steady rhythms of communal life.

And what I saw inside offered both beauty and quiet instruction.

There was much to admire: a thoughtful space designed for human presence, a K–5 school alive with children’s voices, a room honoring the
Shoah, an Israeli flag flying with confidence. It was a place that carried history and purpose without spectacle, continuity without self conscious display.

But what stayed with me most was not architectural or ceremonial.

What moved me was a simple basket near the entrance, filled with challahs for Shabbat and made available to all. A simple sign said, “Fresh Challah.” No explanation.

No campaign language. Just challah, resting there quietly, offered without fanfare or qualification.

It was a small gesture, and yet it contained a world.

We spend enormous time debating the future of Jewish life—continuity, affiliation, belonging, identity. There are reports, strategies, task forces, demographic studies. Much of this work is well intentioned, even essential.

But standing there, looking at that basket, it was hard not to feel that something far simpler was quietly doing more.

That challah was not merely bread. It was rhythm, memory and care braided into form: the inheritance of Friday afternoons and family tables. It represented nourishment and connection, linking memory and presence.

I was reminded of something I once wrote: Bread is one of Judaism’s oldest civic technologies. It binds memory to practice, heritage to the week’s rhythms. It is how the ordinary becomes sacred without spectacle. Seeing that basket felt like the lived version of that argument—a small, steady act carrying centuries of meaning.

To place challah at the threshold of a Jewish community center is to communicate something elemental: You are not entering a bureaucracy.
You are entering a home. You are not first evaluated. You are first welcomed.

There is a moral confidence embedded in that choice. It’s something that is\ rare today, when institutions often operate out of caution, when belonging can feel conditional and kindness procedural. Even communal life can feel fraught or transactional.

This basket assumed none of that. It extended care before expectation. It trusted rather than tested.

Judaism has always understood that holiness lives not only in text or ritual, but also in the sanctification of everyday life. Bread becomes blessing. Ordinary space becomes sanctuary. Hospitality becomes covenant.

We speak of chesed, lovingkindness, as if it were abstract. Here it was embodied: tangible, quiet, present. No sermon. No explanation. Just an instinctive expression of what Jewish life knows how to do when it remembers itself.

This article first appeared on American Enterprise Institute’s website.

Samuel J. Abrams is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI. He lives in New York City, blocks from Park East Synagogue.