The leadership of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has spent much of the past year trying to put out fires. The most recent flare-up stems from the museum's decision to hire John Roth, an internationally renowned Holocaust scholar, to head the museum's new Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. In the past few weeks, the museum has been stung by a barrage of criticism from a handful of Jewish leaders, members of Congress and newspaper columnists over a 1988 article Roth authored, in which he compared Israeli policies toward the Palestinians to the Nazis' treatment of Jews, as well as other controversial writings. Many of those who care passionately about the museum are treading cautiously.
Some critics point to what they say is a pattern of bad decision-making by the museum's leadership.
But museum leaders say that the same people who were most critical during the Arafat and Reich episodes are now engaging in a campaign to discredit the museum. This is a noisy eruption in a pretty small part of the population in the country. Moving to put the Roth controversy behind it, the museum's governing body last week voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the appointment of Roth, who is chairman of the philosophy and religious studies department at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. While some members admitted they were troubled by his decade-old analogy, most were satisfied with Roth's apology and separated their reactions to his political views from their admiration of his scholarship. Privately, some members of the council said that firing someone the museum had just hired might have proved too damaging to the institution's reputation and to its ability to attract future scholars.