For many American Jews, today is a stark reminder that they are still trapped, a year later, inside October 7, 2023. Here in the United States, that day—the largest massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—and the events that followed it have unearthed a terrifying potential in American life, a monstrous development that is both a pattern and a warning.
Physical assaults, harassment, and death threats; vandalism at homes and businesses; bomb threats at synagogues—all of these have become almost commonplace for American Jews in the past year. In addition to this intimidation and violence, Jews have also been loudly and proudly ostracized in spaces ranging from professional networking groups to the corner bookstore, in what can only be described as an ongoing campaign to push Jews out of American public life. Reasonable people have tried to rationalize this as simply passionate “free speech,” imagining that it’s an expression of concern for civilians in Gaza, whose suffering is undeniable—a wishful but implausible conclusion, because people who care about civilians do not generally express that compassion by harassing and intimidating other civilians. Clearly, something else is going on. How did we get here?
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about a story I published in these pages in the spring of 2023 on Holocaust education in America. I’d noticed how Holocaust education, initially promoted in the United States by Jewish survivors hoping to inoculate the American public against anti-Semitism, had long since been recast to portray the murder of 6 million Jews as a universal story. The Holocaust is taught to American students as a case study in morality; well-meaning educators frequently compare it to the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the treatment of Black Americans and Native Americans, and other acts of persecution and intolerance. This approach has undeniable resonance and value.
But few of these educators think to connect the Holocaust to other assaults against and persecutions of Jews: for example, the Russian Civil War massacres in Ukraine in 1918–21, during which more than 100,000 Jews were murdered. Or the massacres, property seizures, and ethnic cleansing that drove nearly 1 million Jews from almost the entire Arab world in the mid-20th century. Or the ongoing genocidal rhetoric and periodic butchery of Jewish civilians undertaken by a slew of Islamist fundamentalist groups in the past 40 years. No—the Holocaust is mainly of interest when it’s extracted from Jewish history, used to teach a lesson about the humanity we all share. Instead of teaching students to understand anti-Semitism as a specific pattern in society, or to understand who Jews are, these curricula suggest that what happened to Europe’s Jews—who were just like everyone else—actually happened to all of us.
At the time my article was published, I thought little about the fact that few of the many Holocaust educators I’d encountered across the country were Jewish. But I have thought about it again and again in the past year, every time I encounter non-Jewish Holocaust educators bewildered by the explosion of anti-Semitism in their own schools and institutions. Hadn’t they taught the “universal” lessons of the Holocaust? Where had they gone wrong? One such educator attending one of my lectures told me ruefully, alongside her colleagues, about the surge in anti-Semitic sentiment that many of them had witnessed among their own students. Like every Holocaust educator I’ve met, she was sincere, well meaning, eager to improve. After my talk, she privately asked me if I thought that the October 7 attack had been plotted by the Israeli government. When I told her this was an anti-Semitic myth comparable to Holocaust denial, she seemed genuinely surprised.
What I observed in my deep dive into American Holocaust education, I now realize, was a massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia. This appropriation was entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: claim that that experience happened to “everyone,” and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the “universalism” of their own experience—for refusing to be just like everyone else. As far back as the Seleucid and Roman Empires, which turned the site of the Jews’ ancient temple into a center for their own worship as part of their persecutions of Jews, non-Jewish societies have followed a similar pattern of appropriation and rejection.
Christianity engaged in this appropriation for hundreds of years, claiming that Christians were the “new Israel” and then excoriating Jews who failed to accept the Church’s universal salvation. Islam did this too, insisting that the Quran was the true universal message, and that the Torah, which shares many of the Quran’s stories and precedes it by many centuries, was somehow “corrupted.” Of course, both Christianity and Islam developed their own rich traditions over time. Yet, for centuries, both Christian and Islamic societies also used the Jews’ failure to accept their “universal” values as permission to ostracize, discriminate against, and periodically slaughter them.
This pattern continued to evolve in the more secular modern era, as some societies graduated from appropriating Jewish holy sites and texts to appropriating Jewish experiences—including experiences of persecution. In the 1870s, German Jews were only a couple of generations out of the ghettos and had only recently been granted equal rights when their fellow Germans decided that they were the ones experiencing subjugation—by Jews. Sophisticated 19th-century Germans would never have dreamt of hating Jews for being Christ killers. But racial “science” had recently declared Jews a predatory, inferior race hell-bent on oppressing others. In 1879, the German author of a best-selling book explaining how Jews were discriminating against Germans introduced a handy new term for this fresh justification of Jew hatred: anti-Semitism. The supposed grounding in science gave enlightened Germans a new form of permission to persecute Jews based on “universal” values.
In the years after World War II, when racial anti-Semitism lost its luster, the Soviet Union popularized a new form of universalism rooted in appropriation. Announcing on the official memorial for the 100,000 people, mostly Jews, massacred at Babyn Yar that Nazis had simply murdered “citizens of Kiev,” the Soviets declared themselves—not the Jews, who went unmentioned—to be Nazism’s chief victims. (Starting in the the 1960s, Jews attempted to gather at the site annually to commemorate the massacre; many were arrested.) The regime positioned the Jews, in fact, as perpetrators of evils like those of the Nazis. By the late 1960s, the KGB was pumping out enormous amounts of propaganda trumpeting a new value: anti-Zionism. Around the world, endless Soviet-sponsored publications and broadcasts proclaimed, without evidence, that Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism, and Zionism is genocide—all while the Soviet Union armed its Arab client states for their repeated invasions of Israel. And even as they endlessly repeated that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, the Soviets continued to mercilessly persecute Soviet Jews.
This is the permission structure for anti-Semitism: claim whatever has happened to the Jews as one’s own experience, announce a “universal” ideal that all good people must accept, and then redefine Jewish collective identity as lying beyond it. Hating Jews thus becomes a demonstration of righteousness. The key is to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the shiny new moral reasoning for why the Jews have failed the universal test of humanity.
The current calls for banishing “Zionists” from American public life follow the same ancient pattern.
Jews were murdered, gang-raped, mutilated, and abducted on October 7, 2023, by the proudly genocidal death cult Hamas. Its fellow Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen continue firing rockets at Israeli civilians. Yet anti-Israel protesters now claim that Jews are “committing genocide.” (As apparently bears repeating, civilian deaths in war are devastating, but they are not genocide. And sadly, Gaza’s own leaders have been outspoken about their lack of care for civilians.) The recent pager attacks in Lebanon, targeting operatives of Hezbollah—a federally designated terrorist organization that has fired more than 8,000 rockets at Israeli targets since October 8 and turned tens of thousands of Israelis into internal refugees—have been decried by righteous Americans as “terrorism.” Zionists, anti-Israel activists announce over and over, are the new Nazis.
Zionists, to be clear, are simply people who do not want the state of Israel to be dismantled—a possibility vividly illustrated on October 7. To be a Zionist is not necessarily to support Israel’s current government or the current war, or to oppose Palestinian statehood. According to 2024 polling, 85 percent of American Jews ages 18 to 40 believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; pre–October 7 polling reflects similar attitudes among American Jews of all ages. Which means that this denunciation of “Zionists” has amounted to a denunciation of the overwhelming majority of American Jews themselves. Yet those who have objected to being stalked and harassed and assaulted this year—tactics designed to intimidate and silence them—have been told, repeatedly, that they are perniciously shutting down “free speech.” And because Jews have supposedly rejected these universal values of promoting free speech and opposing genocide and terrorism, they must be pushed out of society by any means necessary.
As I write this, I feel a bone-deep weariness at having to list examples from the endless effluvium of this campaign. Fact-resistant slogans that demonize Jews (“Genocide supporters!” “Zionism is white supremacy!”) have by now been repeated so often across America that these lies, recycled from medieval blood libels and KGB talking points, have become boring. Where to even begin?
If I must, I’ll start with my own field, literature. Last month, an annual literary festival in upstate New York canceled an event at which the novelist Elisa Albert was set to moderate a panel. According to an email that one of the festival organizers sent to Albert, the novelists Lisa Ko and Aisha Abdel Gawad didn’t want “to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’” Albert had written an article after the October 7 attack titled “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders.” Her books, however, are not about Israel, but about American Jews. (Gawad and Ko have denied accusations of anti-Semitism. Ko has said that she did not decline to be on the panel, but merely expressed concern about the decision to put Gawad, a Muslim author, on the same panel as Albert.)
This was but one of several instances this year of American literary institutions canceling book events to prevent the public appearance of “Zionists.” In April, writers forced the cancellation of the PEN Literary Awards ceremony—a major American literary event that provides rare opportunities for emerging writers—over the organization’s “consistent platforming of Zionists.” Readers have organized smear campaigns against “Zionist” (read: American Jewish) novelists; at least one person even burned a popular “Zionist” romance novelist’s books for the delight of online viewers. The author in question has never written about Israel at all.
Demands for denouncing “Zionism” have reportedly resounded among therapists, too. According to Jewish Insider, some clinicians have been open about their desire to deny referrals to therapists “with Zionist affiliations,” and an online networking group for therapists asks its members if they are “pro Palestine” before they are allowed to join. (The group’s moderator did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment.)
Jews working and training in the medical field have watched their colleagues and instructors justify the murders and rapes of October 7 and claim that “Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.” Like book burning, these smears in the medical field are time-honored; they echo those favored by medieval rabble-rousers who accused Jews of poisoning wells during the Black Plague and contemporary alt-right nuts who accused Jews of spreading COVID-19.
One American moment from the past year that has stayed with me involved a group of people gathered in a New York City subway car, some of them wearing face coverings. In the viral video of the incident, their leader instructs them, “Repeat after me,” after which his flock dutifully and childishly repeats, “Repeat after me.” Then the leader announces to the subway car’s passengers, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” His followers repeat the words: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Then he continues, “This is your chance to get out.” His followers repeat: “This is your chance to get out.” (The man accused of leading the chant was charged with a misdemeanor; he has pleaded not guilty.)
The group’s loyal repetition of the leader’s words is chilling. It is an act of faith, a declaration of belonging, a placement of oneself inside the circle of good and right. It is the sound of a society capitulating.
In 1935, Varian Fry, an American journalist who would later rescue thousands of Jews and dissidents from Nazi-occupied Europe, described something similar he happened to observe while in Berlin. A mob had set up a gantlet on the busy thoroughfare of the Kurfürstendamm and were demanding that any Jews in cars that came by present their identification papers. “The crowd raised the shout ‘Jude!’ whenever any one sighted or thought he had sighted a Jew,” Fry told The New York Times. “At times a chant would be raised … ‘the best Jew is a dead Jew’—precisely like a Christian liturgy, with a leader speaking the lines first and the crowd chanting them over and over again, line for line, after he had finished.”
As we are repeatedly reminded, today’s chanting and targeting and harassing and ostracizing of American Jews is nothing at all like that, because we all agree that anti-Semitism is bad. The mobs pushing Jews out of public spaces in 2024 are in no way similar to the mobs pushing Jews out of public spaces in 1935, or 1919, or 1492, or 1096, or 135. This time, you see, the Jews deserve it. Perhaps it’s their chance to get out.
The consequences for Jews of this hatred are obvious. Indeed, many American Jews have changed their behavior, hiding outward signs of Jewish identity and thinking twice before sharing their identity with colleagues and acquaintances. But its consequences for non-Jews are incalculable—not because of the often inaccurate Holocaust-education claim that Jews are the canary-in-the-coal-mine whose persecution indicates that other groups will later be persecuted, but because this permission structure devours human potential.
Imagine how many intelligent people in the 19th and early 20th centuries devoted their talents to justifying “scientific” anti-Semitism instead of doing actual science, or how many years of oppression have been endured by populations duped into thinking that their enemy was “Zionism” instead of their Soviet-sponsored dictatorships or fundamentalist regimes. Human-rights activists have appropriately raised awareness of very real injustices committed by Israel. But the enormous investment in exposing primarily Jewish perfidy—the United Nations Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation in the world—has left fewer resources to address rampant human-rights abuses elsewhere. Meanwhile, any Israeli government is less likely to consider legitimate criticism from outsiders, because the supply of such criticism has been so thoroughly poisoned by those who want Jews dead. Blood, treasure, and talent in the Muslim world have been horrifically wasted in war after war against Israel.
Palestinian Arabs have borne the brunt of their leaders’ and manipulators’ anti-Jewish obsession, winding up subjected to autocratic rule, used as human pawns, and deprived of multiple opportunities for statehood, collaboration, prosperity, and peace. Like Israeli Jews, they aren’t going anywhere; they, too, deserve freedom and dignity, and must build a future with their neighbors. For people in all of these societies, the costs of this fixation are high.
American institutions that cave to this hatred will also face these costs. Schools and universities lose their credibility and their ability to teach when educators let lies undermine learning. The same is true for other sectors of American life. A literary world where conformity is the price of entry is unworthy of the name. A prejudiced therapist is a contradiction in terms, rendering therapy itself impossible. Patients suffer when ideology derails doctors’ training. When swaths of colleagues are blacklisted and ostracized, untold possibilities for research and innovation are blithely destroyed.
The permission structure is here, alive and vivid. It always is. Thousands of years of Jewish experience suggest that we will continue on this course. But Jewish experience is not universal. One revolutionary idea in Jewish tradition, articulated everywhere from the Torah to the Israeli national anthem, is hope: Nothing is inevitable; people can change. Hope and a vision for the future of Israelis and Palestinians will have to come from Israelis and Palestinians themselves. But the future that we choose here in America is up to us.
American Holocaust educators often ask me what they should be teaching as the “lessons of the Holocaust.” The question itself is absurd. As one of my readers once put it, Auschwitz was not a university, and most Jews who arrived there were immediately gassed and incinerated, making it difficult for them to produce coursework in ethics for the rest of the world to enjoy.
But there is indeed something we can learn from the long history of anti-Semitism and the societies it has destroyed: We’ve fallen for this before. After this terrifying year, I hope we can find the courage to say, Never again.
