Sarah Hurwitz Profanes the Holocaust

Edited by Sam Thielman

I SPENT MUCH of this week staring into the moral abyss of comments by a former Obama White House speechwriter and member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council named Sarah Hurwitz.

At first I didn't want to write about this, since overfocusing on The Jewish Experience after Oct. 7 risks serving the propagandistic function of obscuring (or worse) the cascading atrocities Israel is committing in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. This week alone saw Israel's single most intense barrage of airstrikes in Gaza since the announcement of what is clearly a one-sided ceasefire, during which it has killed at least 312 Palestinians and counting. It also saw Israel intensify its airstrikes in southern Lebanon—claiming Hezbollah is reconstituting itself, which is either a pretextual fiction or a refutation of Israel's claim last year to have destroyed Hezbollah—another site of a one-sided ceasefire. In those assaults on Lebanon, the Guardian reported this week that Israel uses cluster munitions, which means that Lebanon south of the Litani River will become a field of unexploded ordnance that will kill unsuspecting civilians for years to come. And today al-Jazeera reports that the advancing Israeli occupation of southwestern Syria includes abductions of Syrians—essentially disappearances. ("Residents say interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa should remember his own family’s displacement when Israel occupied the Golan Heights," Osama bin Javaid pointedly reported.) 

This is also a week when the United Nations came full circle with the League of Nations and approved what amounts to a Second Mandate, this time for Gaza, chaired by the United States. There can be no more doubt that this is an American-Israeli genocide. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps may never patrol Gaza City or Khan Yunis the way they patrolled Fallujah—Sharif Abdel Khaddous reports that the company driving the mercenary component of the murderous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is looking to plus-up—but the U.S. is now unambiguously atop a new international occupation of Gaza. 

These circumstances carry far greater urgency than what Hurwitz said. But I ask for your forbearance, because I feel like I'm going to lose my mind if I don't address her astonishing remark that Holocaust education in the United States has improperly taught a universal lesson against genocide. 

The same forces of rationalization that once prompted European scientists to reject the emergent evidence of a heliocentric universe is at work in Hurwitz's Zionism. She takes great pains to say she doesn't think it's been a mistake to educate people about the Holocaust, exactly. But she believes it is now redounding to Israel's detriment, and this is a problem with Holocaust education and not a problem with Israel. 

Speaking at a Washington conference of the Jewish Federations of North America, Hurwitz said the following (and to save time I'm using the transcription typed out in this subreddit):  

So you have Tik Tok 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 are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene.

I think, unfortunately, the very smart, I think, 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 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."

It is not ignorance that drives the comparison of the genocide Israel inflicts upon Palestine to the Holocaust. It is not TikTok smashing anyone's brain. It is historical memory. And that historical memory, which Hurwitz wants more than anything not to confront, is triggered by Israeli behavior. The behavior of powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians. Of gleefully raiding their lingerie drawers, bombing their hospitals, destroying their cultural symbols, raping them in captivity, turning them into numbers for industrial-scale murder. Of describing their children as the enemy. 

When Ta-Nehisi Coates travels to the West Bank and sees Jim Crow, his eyes are not deceiving him. He is not blinded by TikTok. His historical memory is not misperceiving the occupation. His historical memory is activated by the occupation. 

I took that to be the point of Holocaust education. Not to exceptionalize Jewish suffering, but to activate solidarity. To recognize that there is a continuum of atrocity perpetrated by dominant classes against subjugated ones. The Holocaust shows where, once normalized, such things can lead. Antisemitism doesn't have to be the exact same as anti-black racism for the lesson of antisemitism to be to confront anti-black racism. The ongoing Nakba doesn't have to be the exact same as the Holocaust for me to find it appalling—particularly because it is performed in the name of my safety.  

That was what I learned from my Holocaust education: Never again for anyone. 

What Hurwitz objects to is that Holocaust education works. She is not upset that TikTok is driving misperceptions of the genocide. She is upset that the various social media vectors through which people hear directly from Palestinians drive accurate perceptions of the genocide. She is upset that those perceptions are unavoidable because of Holocaust education. Fearful of activating antisemitism, she doesn't want Israelis, or any Jews, to be thought of as rapacious murderers. I sympathize. But the only way that will happen is for Israel, whose flag displays the Star of David, to stop murdering Palestinians (and Lebanese, and Syrians, and Iranians, and Yemenis, and and and), and for Jewish institutions beyond Israel to stop rationalizing it.

Hurwitz is caught in the pincer of that recognition on one side and her Zionism on the other. For her, the lesson of the Holocaust is: Never again to us. And it's darker than I can bear for someone who sat upon the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council to say these things. We can safely assume that Hurwitz is not delivering off-the-cuff remarks. She's thought about this. She has chosen the abyss. She is far from the only one.

Hurwitz laments that she can't have "a sane conversation with younger Jews." She thinks this is their fault, that they're the insane ones. They're the ones blinded by propaganda. She is the one giving "data and information and facts and arguments." To explain it, she indicts the younger American Jewish generation's attachment to Judaism as surface-deep and "Protestant-style," no more than a couple bagel-and-lox jokes and Seinfeld references, and above all a disconnection from the "family" of global Jewry. Only this can explain anti-Zionist Jews, those who have the temerity to use an unearned Jewishness against their Israeli cousins. To such people, "they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene." 

That's the core here. Hurwitz cannot cope with a younger generation of Jews recognizing the obscenity in what her Zionism has convinced her is justifiable. It is the same animating spirit as Rabbi and former IDF tank commander Ammiel Hirsch's appalling "We wanted you to be Zionists" sermon condemning Jewish youth. Like Hirsch, it is unbearable to Hurwitz that more and more people, and especially her people, see villainy in what she has always understood as heroism. She must un-Jew us to spare herself the implications.

And here's the thing: I recognize that. My Jewish education—and indeed my Holocaust education—made me into a Zionist once, too. That was its purpose. I performed the same mental and moral contortions to explain away the crimes of the State of Israel. While I didn't understand it in this way at the time, later I had the clarity to understand that I feared if I stopped, there would be nothing left of my Judaism, nothing important, not in the historical sense. But that only revealed to me, in time, how little I understood of the righteousness of what Hurwitz dismisses as "certain prophetic values." Zionism stopped me from understanding those values and their instructions. Zionism stood in the way of my Judaism, to say nothing of my humanity. It is by no means the worst crime of Zionism. But it is an enabling crime.

Sarah, you are right about one thing. You and I are part of a family. We are both the children of Israel. (For the gentiles: this does not mean the State of Israel, it refers to the global Jewish community.) And I say to you in that spirit that you should sit with those feelings of horror at being perceived as the obscene one. It is your path, and not only yours, out of the abyss. 

SIMILAR THINGS ARE said far better by Benjamin Moser in his moving Equator essay, "We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves":

[T]his atrocity [Oct. 7] stripped the pretence of liberalism, of tolerance, to which the American Jewish leadership had, for generations, paid such pious lip service. In fact, this group had identified only with power. It was not the power of a leader, a party or a faction. It was an alliance with all parties, all leaders, which is to say that it was an alliance with the very power of America itself.

It was ironic that they had done this under the cover of powerlessness: of fighting antisemitism, whose impact in our country they wildly and self-pityingly overstated; of supporting ‘peace in the Middle East’ in a way that sounded ‘decent’ to distracted Americans. But under the pressure of the 7 October attacks, any pretence of American Jewish liberalism among these institutions vanished. Their protests against racism were revealed to be so shamelessly self-serving that the very word "antisemitism" was stripped of any meaning.

They bullied students, defenestrated politicians, cowed newspapers, wrecked universities. They supported and funded a reign of terror over a helpless civilian population in Palestine that seemed like something out of some other century: like something – now that you mention it – that happened to the Jews.

It's hard not to quote the whole thing, but I'm going to leave this for Sarah Hurwitz and Ammiel Hirsch to think about: "[A]ll across the Jewish world, we saw leaders who—fearfully, pathetically—refused to speak against the genocide. They could have. They would have lost some people; they would have gained some people. By their cowardice, by their refusal, they made their institutions complicit in Israel’s butchery. Never in history has so much of the Jewish leadership been stained with this much guilt—a guilt that can never be washed out."

COMMON DREAMS' BRETT WILKINS reports that the U.S. this year has quietly conducted nearly 100 airstrikes on Somalia. That places 2025 Somalia close to 2010 Pakistan, the high-water mark of the U.S. drone campaign. This is a major development that FOREVER WARS will endeavor to investigate in 2026.