Former White House aide Sarah Hurwitz, who served as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, warned this week that Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with “weak, skinny Palestinians” instead of “powerful Israelis.”
She continued:
“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza, and this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they’re just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.”
And you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and then they think, “Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.” So, when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, “Oh I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
I don’t know what other jew’s Jewish education looked like and what they took away from it, but clearly I somehow got a completely different message from all of it.
When I was told “Never again” it meant never again for anybody. Like we should be the first ones to decry against any genocide anywhere because it was done against us.
So seeing what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is so grotesque to me. They don’t speak for me and yet they do these horrible things supposedly in my name.
The irony was that I did buy most of the Hasbara up until I went on Birthright (this is a fully paid trip that diaspora Jews can go to Israel to build the connection with it). When I was there my own tour guide (the person paid to propagandize us) said that they want the fighting to stop, they want to stop everyone from having their children to die pointlessly. Literally after that the spell broke. It became so easy to see the Hasbara and how it is causing problems.
Like you want the fighting to end then make it so. Stop terrorizing the Palestinians and stop the apartheid, let them reside on the land they have lived in for centuries and coexist. You only make them your enemy by grinding them beneath your boot. The land Israel is made from doesn’t belong to one people, it has a rich history where all of them have descended from. Israel isn’t just for the Jewish people, Muslims, Christians, and others also have claims to that land (fucking hell it’s the same deity for the first three and you’re all kinda just blending shit together anyways).
I feel like I didn’t have some magical education that taught me differently, I guess I just took what they meant at their word and applied the concepts to the modern world (like we were fucking taught to do). For a people who pride themselves on being educated it feels like people memorized a lot of stuff and didn’t actually process it or question it (again like you’re fucking supposed to).
Sorry for the rant but seeing people who are fairly left leaning (US standards) become bloodthirsty ghouls the moment Palestinians are brought up like a fucking light switch has been really bothering me. I feel like I’m somehow in the wrong because everyone else has gone literally insane.
My father was an Arab muslim, and was involved in the fight for Palestinian rights for as a long as I can remember, until he died of cancer a few months before the October 7th attacks. I never really thought much about his activism and was never curious enough to ask him questions about what he was actually doing.
When he was on his death bed at the hospital and I was staying with him, we got visited by members of his town’s Jewish community. They told me he was a great guy, and that throughout his years as an activist for Palestinian rights he has always strived to build bridges between Muslim and Jewish communities and always made it clear that the palestine-israel conflict shouldn’t be an excuse to antisemitism or islamophobia. They also told me he took part in a humanitarian trip in Palestine with them, as a translator, and was instrumental in bridging the gap between them and their Palestinian contacts. I never knew he did all that and it really made me proud.
What sometimes still keeps me up at night is to think that, should he have lived to see the current events, he would probably have been called a raging antisemite by the assholes we see all over the media.
Clearly some folks took “never again” to mean, “Never again will Jews be the victims of genocide. They’ll be the perpetrators instead!”