How Should Britain Remember the Holocaust?

In today’s newsletter, Sam Knight on a fight over public space and memory, and then:

Plans for a striking national monument next to the Palace of Westminster have been mired in disagreement for years.

The story of the United Kingdom’s victory in the Second World War has been central to the nation’s identity for generations. But certain aspects of the narrative do not fit comfortably within a framework of triumph. “The murder of six million Jews—and the question of whether the British authorities could have done more to save them—complicates an otherwise ennobling story of the country’s heroic stand against Nazism, its finest hour,” Sam Knight writes, in a report from London about a years-long battle to install a memorial marking the Holocaust. The effort “has been beset by delays, legal challenges, rocketing costs, and the emotionally complicated spectacle of very old Holocaust survivors speaking both in favor and against it,” Knight writes—and it has ignited debates about what such a monument in the twenty-first century should strive to communicate. Read the story »

To carry out the new Administration’s immigration agenda, the “border czar” is counting on the enthusiasm of local law enforcement. Jessica Pishko reports »

P.S. The actor Adrien Brody is currently starring in Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which Justin Chang includes as an honorable mention in his list of the year’s best films. Brody’s mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, contributed to The New Yorker and was a staff photographer for the Village Voice. In 1991, she was on assignment in Kuwait, in the aftermath of Desert Storm, and captured these striking images. 📷