Marty Levine
September 17, 2025
It is always an uncomfortable experience to find that you know less than you think you do, particularly when the subject is personally relevant.
I had such a moment when I read Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land.” His memoir confronted me with the story of the Palestinian people who were living on the land that, in 1948, became the State of Israel and the self-declared homeland of the Jewish people. They were absent from what was taught and clashed with the myth that Jewish settlers seeking refuge were people looking for a land who came to a land (Palestine) that was empty and looking for people.
There was another moment during the years that the Black Lives Matter movement glowed brightly when I recognized that my understanding of the reality of American History was dreadfully incomplete. Missing from it was any understanding that slavery was not just the problem of the Confederacy; slavery was actually deeply ingrained in our nation from the very beginning.
A third “aha” moment came as I was reading Ned Blackhawk’s “Rediscovery of America”, and I saw how little I knew about our nation’s indigenous people and their history on this land beginning well before Europeans arrived.
These moments share a common theme: the confrontation of a history that sees the story of the oppressed as important, but one that must be seen alongside that told from the perspective of the powerful.
Having both in mind makes understanding where we came from, why the present is what it is, and what the future might ask of us more difficult. But I think I am better for having done some of this learning.
I am sharing these moments of personal reflection because I think our nation is now in a battle over what history we will allow ourselves to teach and learn. We are at a moment when those in power, our President and his cabal of supporters, want to actively expunge the parts of history that they find inconvenient, challenging, and perhaps damning. In March, with an Executive Order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the President told us what he was about and that he wanted to prevent me, you, and the entire nation from having these difficult but, I think, critical learning experiences.
Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.
Just days ago he used his Truth Social megaphone to move this agenda forward and make sure we knew how serious he is.
The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.
In the short time that our President has been back in office, he has shown us that his administration is this time prepared to take action and not just speak. According to the Washington Post, this is what is taking place in National Parks and Monuments across our nation.
The latest orders include removing information at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia, two people familiar with the matter said, where the abolitionist John Brown led a raid seeking to arm slaves for a revolt. Staff have also been told that information at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia, where George Washington kept slaves, does not comply with the policy, according to a third individual.
“This is not just a handful of signs that tell the story of slavery,” said Ed Stierli, senior Mid-Atlantic regional director at the advocacy group National Parks Conservation Association. “This is a place that tells the complete story not just of slavery in America, but what it was like for those who were enslaved by George Washington.”
Trying to extricate slavery from the President’s House exhibit would fundamentally change the nature of the site, said Cindy MacLeod, who was superintendent of Independence National Historical Park for 15 years until 2023.
This builds on efforts to ensure that history textbooks meet the same standards of telling only a part of our national story, the part that makes those in power feel good and puff up their chests with pride.
As I thought about this moment, I found myself reflecting back on how my Jewish Community has made it important to educate the world about the horror of the German Holocaust. The horror of that moment, as horrendous as it was, must not be hidden away because it raises questions and arouses strong feelings. “Never Again” was too important not to insist that history tell these stories. Across the world, these horrific events that decimated European Jewry must not be forgotten, must not be sanitized. In every community, it was important for people to be challenged to confront what their personal and national roles had been to allow such horror to go forward.
We knew that all of our safety required that these lessons not be lost.
Clint Smith, writing in the Atlantic several years ago, shared W.E.B. DuBois’ recognition of how our experiences are intertwined shortly after he visited Warsaw in the wake of World War II.
In 1949, W. E. B. Du Bois visited Warsaw, where he witnessed firsthand the aftermath of Nazi destruction. “I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he said. “The scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta; the marching of the Ku Klux Klan; the threat of courts and police; the neglect and destruction of human habitation; but nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw in Warsaw.”
Du Bois said that the experience “helped me to emerge from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination, and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph and broaden in the world.”
Remembering the good times, the triumphs is a feel-good experience. And it is easy. Remembering bad times, moments of failure, moments of cruelty is hard. These force us to ask ourselves hard questions about responsibility, questions that can leave us troubled and struggling with pangs of guilt.
After WW II most Germans did not want to face these questions. It was uncomfortable to have to ask what they could have done that would have saved lives. It was uncomfortable to ask themselves why they stayed silent. It was uncomfortable to recognize how they may have benefited from the suffering that they inflicted on those sent to the camps.
The world knew that it was important not to do for them what Donald Trump is doing to us.
Trump wants to suppress the story of slavery, the history of our national ravaging of the native peoples, and other moments that are shameful. He wants to prevent us from being confronted with the ongoing legacies of that history. He wants to ignore hard questions and avoid difficult conversations about responsibility.
Journalist and author Jennifer Neal on the importance of telling a full history with Clint Smith:
“What Germany does well in regards to the Holocaust is show that when you honor the victims instead of the perpetrators, you’re still remembering history,” she said. “But you’re making it clear who the aggressors were, who the victims were, and who we honored. I think this is important in terms of how the country heals.” She shook her head. “That is why I think the United States is very far from healing.”
What Donald Trump is trying to do echoes the plan of the Hitler government as it was coming into power. James Abruzzo, writing just days ago in the Berkshire Edge, reflected on those days in Germany:
Museums were repurposed to emphasize heroic and nationalist themes. Military museums glorified past victories while erasing defeats. Archives were cleansed of inconvenient truths: Jewish soldiers’ service in World War I was omitted from military histories. “Un-German” books by Freud, Marx, Einstein, and others were burned in 1933. Even children’s museums and science centers were rewritten to instill Nazi ideology.
We are that precipice right now. Can we protect our history, the good, the bad, and the ugly? Can we provide the support we need to confront the portions we do not like? Can we recognize that that discomfort does not mean something is untrue?
In writing about the Assassination of Charlie Kirk, Ta-Nehisi Coates shows us the price we pay for destroying history as it plays out before our eyes:
More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.
Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
Will we stand up and stop our history from being curated until it is meaningless? Will you?
