The just-passed holiday of Sukkot had something of a mournful edge this year because the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre had happened at the tail end of the holiday last year. But this year added a note of sadness all its own with the death on Oct. 18 of Yehuda Bauer, a founding father of Holocaust historians who had fled Prague just as the Nazis had begun swallowing Czechoslovakia. His family made it to Palestine in 1939.

Yesterday, Haaretz published what it said was the self-eulogy Bauer left behind before he died. Apparently the historian wanted to have the last word on his own story. Some of it is modest—his students “may have absorbed some of what I tried to teach them, and perhaps a little more,” he wrote. And some of it is unabashedly proud—“I have met prime ministers, kings, presidents, I made great speeches, because I had the gift of gab, as is evidenced by this eulogy.” But it’s funny, and that itself is revealing. A Holocaust survivor who spends his life excavating the details of the Holocaust can’t live to 98 without a sense of humor.

The obituaries and remembrances continue to trickle out, and on Tuesday the UK Telegraph published one of the best so far. Bauer wrote dozens of books in his career, but two of his insights remain of monumental importance today. The first:

“[Bauer] held that, although there had been other genocides, the Holocaust was unique and distinct. This was, first, because of its global scope — the plan to annihilate every Jew, everywhere; second, because of its ideology in that, unlike other mass killings, which were often pragmatic in nature, the Holocaust was a burden on the German people, who could have used the Jews as slaves, but instead chose to exterminate them.”

And the second:

“Bauer’s contribution to Holocaust studies went beyond academia. In 1998, with European heads of state, Bauer was instrumental in setting up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a coalition of more than 35 countries that requires its members to devote government funding to education and commemoration.

“With the IHRA, Bauer also helped establish the ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism, which many governments and organizations use to help define hate crimes and discrimination against Jews.”

Those two points have, in the wake of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war, been at the center of much of the debate about anti-Semitism. And they come to us from one of the most important historians of the 20th century, a man who all but created the discipline of Holocaust history.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism has become controversial because it holds that certain types of rhetoric about Israel can cross the line into anti-Semitism. On both the left and the right, critics warn that wide adoption of the IHRA definition will necessitate the suppression of speech about Israeli policy, but that is often a bad-faith excuse to smuggle anti-Semitism into mainstream narratives under the guise of criticism of Israel. The lesson from Yehuda Bauer’s life is that you look the world squarely in the face and don’t pretend you can’t see what’s there. We cannot discard the definition of anti-Semitism because anti-Semites don’t like being called out.

The distinctiveness of the Holocaust, meanwhile, should inform our discourse far more than it does. The Holocaust was unique because anti-Semitism is a uniquely powerful and socially disfiguring force. Bauer’s scholarship, then, completely discredits the halfhearted approaches to countering Jew-hate that are so popular in the modern West, such as pairing anti-Semitism with Islamophobia, adding anti-Semitism to DEI or other race-bias trainings or sensitivity workshops. Anti-Semitism is more resistant to traditional anti-racism tactics and the consequences of failing to contain its spread are limitless.

Finally, the popularization of the argument (especially in progressive intellectual circles) that the Jews were first the victims and then the victimizers of the same Hitlerite program of annihilation is a sign of how thorough ignorance and bigotry have colonized the minds of those who call themselves educators and students. Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is not an opinion or a theory or a thought experiment, it is just a lie, and a dangerous and destabilizing one at that. Bauer looked back into the abyss from which he escaped so that we would know the truth, and we do. We should never pretend otherwise.