State Secretary for International Communication and Relations Zoltán Kovács has responded to the article published a few days ago on Jewish culture and life news portal Tablet claiming that Jewish Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész has been “dumped” from the Hungarian National Curriculum.
In the introduction to his response, which was also published on the portal, the State Secretary said: “Hungary’s recent update of its National Basic Curriculum, a set of guidelines and standards about what should be taught in public schools, has sparked heads debate here at home, but the debate remained within professional, pedagogical boundaries”. “But in her article which appeared on Tablet behind the sensational headline ‘Jewish Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész Is Dumped from the Hungarian Curriculum’ Susan Rubin Suleiman claims anti-Semitism lies at the root of the changes and adds an unnecessary and patently false element to the debate”, Mr. Kovács stated.
“Holocaust education is a mandatory part of Hungary’s national curriculum because the Orbán government made it so. That’s right. No other Hungarian government saw fit to make sure that all Hungarian schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust in Hungary”, the State Secretary underlined.
In his reply, he pointed out the author’s claim that Imre Kertész, the Hungarian Nobel Laureate for literature in 2002 and author of the acclaimed Fatelessness – a novel recounting his experiences in concentration camps as a Jewish teenager in the last years of the Second World War – was “dumped” from the “required” reading list for Hungarian kids in high school, and replaced by “musty” authors who were “convinced anti-Semites.”
“It’s quite a stretch to claim that the Orbán government is somehow trying to obscure the work of Imre Kertész. In honor of Kertész, this government has funded an institute charged with the mission of ‘nurturing his legacy, collecting and processing his unpublished works’ and more”, Mr. Kovács emphasised. “Kertész himself was quite clear how he felt about today’s Hungary, but The New York Times buried an interview with Kertész in 2014, seemingly because he wouldn’t call Hungary’s government a dictatorship”, he pointed out.
“It’s unfortunate to see some attempt to exploit Kertész for some other agenda, and especially when these allegations simply do not square with what is happening in Hungary today”, the State Secretary wrote. “It is not my place to evaluate the works and ‘convictions’ of Hungarian literary figures, but I am obliged to remind those who take an interest in Hungary of how much the governments of Prime Minister Orbán have done to counter anti-Semitism and to support Hungary’s Jewish community. As I’ve written a number of times: Anti-Semitism and the Hungarian government are just fundamentally incongruent”, Mr. Kovács stated, quoting links to two of his previous blog posts. “The facts speak for themselves”, he said, listing several examples.
He pointed out that since 2010 Hungary has become one of Israel’s staunchest international supporters and the government has introduced a zero-tolerance policy on anti-Semitism. “Prime Minister Orbán was also the first Hungarian prime minister to speak explicitly of Hungary’s guilt during the Holocaust, stating that ‘Hungary sinned when instead of protecting the Jews, we chose to collaborate with the Nazis.’ It was an Orbán government that made Holocaust education a mandatory part of the national curriculum, instituted national Holocaust Remembrance Day, came to an agreement with the Claims Conference after its predecessors failed to do so, and made it a priority to back the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation with financial support. The Orbán government created a Holocaust Museum in Budapest and saw to it that our new Constitution specifically identifies the Jewish community as a constituent part of the Hungarian nation. Today’s ruling party is responsible for stricter laws against hate speech and outlawing paramilitary groups”. he underlined.
In addition, Mr. Kovács mentioned that the Hungarian government has not only helped to restore synagogues and Jewish cemeteries but has also committed funding to the construction of new synagogues. “Countering the current trend in many Western European countries, where the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes is rising, the number of incidents in Hungary has dropped”, he said, citing David P. Goldman’s report from Budapest last year, naming Hungary the “safest country for European Jews,” a place where no one gave him a second look as he walked the streets wearing his kippah. “Meanwhile, in May, a well-known author, international correspondent and long-time Budapest resident wrote movingly in the Financial Times about a ‘Jewish renaissance’ in Hungary”, he added.
“As to why certain, so-called musty authors have been included in the new curriculum, it’s important to understand that they wrote about events and a time that brought earth-shattering change to Hungary – changes that people across the political spectrum regard as a national tragedy”, Mr. Kovács wrote, adding that this is a “a period that for most of the rest of the 20th century we were forbidden from talking about, let alone studying in school”. “That’s not irredentism. It’s about understanding our national heritage”, he emphasised.
“The debate about our national curriculum is one that we need to have here in Hungary, and ill-informed attempts from outside to exploit the heritage of Imre Kertész to suggest that anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial is somehow at play is not only unhelpful but factually groundless”, the State Secretary wrote in closing.