In America, the motives for memory of the Holocaust are as mixed as the population at large, the reasons variously lofty and cynical, practical and aesthetic. Some communities build memorials to remember lost brethren, others to remember themselves. Some build memorials as community centers, others as tourist attractions. Some survivors remember strictly according to religious tradition, while others recall the political roots of their resistance. Veterans' organizations sponsor memorials to recall their role as camp-liberators.
Congressmen support local monuments to secure votes among their Jewish constituency.
All such memorial decisions are made in political time, contingent upon political realities. But of all the Holocaust memorials in America, none can begin to match in scope or ambition the national memorial and museum complex that opened in April 1993 in the heart of the nation's capital. Situated adjacent to the National Mall and within view of the Washington Monument to the right and the Jefferson Memorial across the Tidal Basin to the left, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a neighbor to the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian Institute. It has enshrined, by dint of its placement, not just the history of the Holocaust, but American democratic and egalitarian ideals as they counterpoint the Holocaust. That is, by remembering the crimes of another people in another land, it encourages Americans to recall their nation's own, idealized reason for being.