The Holocaust and anticipated futures

This article examines rhetoric that links the Holocaust to a prediction about the future. To understand the aims and effects of future-oriented Holocaust comparison, the article examines two politically polarized cases: comparison between the Holocaust and climate futures, and comparison between the Holocaust and certain imagined outcomes of a successful Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The article argues that these comparisons project a vision of the future based on similarities drawn between that imagined future and the Holocaust, mobilizing Holocaust memory and, more broadly, some of the norms and ideals that undergird it. Comparisons seek to inspire affective engagement in relation to that projected future—but in so doing, they frequently inspire affective engagement with the past. In this way, the comparisons do not simply build on memory, but also construct it.