The Nazis did kill six million Jews, I said, but also millions of Romani, homosexuals, disabled people, trade unionists, socialists, Slavs, and members of the Herrenvolk who did not go along with the horror.
The number needed to be higher to convey the extent of the fascists’ crimes. Yet, I was accused of minimising the murder of Jews and diverting attention away from Antisemitism.
I was perplexed. Antisemitism, after all, is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of the broader reservoir of hate underpinning European nationalism.
These conversations would come to mind as an adult, as I wandered through Dachau, near Munich, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
What is the purpose of all this memory?
For many, it serves as a warning to us all that danger to humanity can emerge at any moment, against anyone, and it is down to us–the ordinary people outside the halls of power–to prevent it.
Sarah Hurwitz has a different point of view.
Hurwitz caused an uproar last week when, during a talk at a Jewish Federations of North America conference, she stated that Holocaust education had failed in the United States because imagery of big, strong Nazis versus weak, powerless Jews has led people to sympathise with Palestinians.
Now, Hurwitz said, people “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’.”
All those hours of reading Elie Wiesel’s memoir about surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Night and watching Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning drama Schindler’s List made us a little too sympathetic to David at the expense of Goliath.
Before we get to this and why her comments are so disturbing, we need to understand why Hurwitz is important in the first place.
A former speechwriter for both Barack and Michelle Obama and other prominent Democrats, Hurwitz experienced a spiritual reawakening while becoming a hospital chaplain. She recounts this journey in two books, the latest titled *As a Jew*, which has made her a sought-after figure in Jewish media and speaking circuits.
Hurwitz believes that for too long, Jewish spiritual traditions have been absent from Jewish upbringing, as families may have become “cultural Jews”—interpreting their Jewishness more as an ethnic identity, similar to being Italian-American, rather than practising a religion.
The reason for this is centuries of Antisemitism, Hurwitz explains, specifically Christian Antisemitism.
Early Christianity, Hurwitz notes, was founded to oppose the Jewish monopoly on the Abrahamic faith. A whole host of perceptions about the wickedness of Jews were born, starting with being blamed for Christ’s death and playing out through Jewish expulsions and persecutions throughout Europe, culminating in the Holocaust.
This has created an impulse for Jews to bury their Judaism, to fit in and seem more like everyone else as a defence mechanism.
A Jewish traditionalist would view this as betrayal, since the core of the 613 commandments—from dietary laws to dress codes to circumcision—is to serve as a constant reminder to the non-Jewish world: we are different.
That is precisely the direction Hurwitz is heading, advocating a return to the textual traditions of Judaism rather than comfortably embracing secular Jewish symbols to identify as Jewish–bagels and lox, reruns of Seinfeld–without attending Shabbat services.
On this point, Hurwitz may seem to support the expulsion of Baruch Spinoza. But who are we to tell her how to spend her Friday nights?
Inevitably, Hurwitz is drawn to the political realm, joining a chorus of Jewish scholars, activists and journalists who believe Jews are under attack by a new wave of Antisemitism that comes from all sides.
Following the thinking of elders like Deborah Lipstadt, Hurwitz is of the school that teaches the right brings Antisemitism through this traditional Christian line of thinking (see the great replacement theory or mythology of George Soros) while the left packages Jew-hatred through anti-Zionism.
“The right is saying the Jews are doing a white genocide and the left is saying they’re doing a genocide in Gaza,” she said on the Being Jewish with Jonah Platt podcast, despite the fact that “white genocide” is a made-up concept.
At the same time, there is hard evidence of Israeli government-instigated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, cited by Israeli scholars and activists alike. Not just in Gaza. Israeli politicians do themselves no favours when they openly encourage genocidal behaviour, either.
Nor is anyone on the left saying “Jews” are committing a genocide in Gaza. They’re saying a particular government is. But Hurwitz has embraced the old lightbulb joke about Zionists proclaiming “that the entire Jewish people stands behind their actions”.
Unlike Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens, whose reputations are built on conservative animosity toward open-society universalism, Hurwitz’s ties to the Obamas situate her comfortably within coastal American liberalism, giving her the credentials to attack the left.
The left doesn’t want to see Jews dead, she explains, but rather across college campuses, Jews are forced to shed an aspect of their identity, in this case, affinity with Israel, to be accepted by a college activist scene that seems entirely pro-Palestine.
As a result, Jews can wear a Star of David necklace but not the IDF t-shirt they picked up on their Birthright trip, once again forced to divorce themselves from Jewishness, underlying the argument that Jewish survival rests with the need for the Jewish state.
Hurwitz’s problem isn’t just with pro-Palestine non-Jews but with Jews who don’t desire state power and seek acceptance in the societies in which they are born.
She told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “For 2,000 years, Jews were powerless, blameless victims. The problem with statelessness was that it led to slaughter on a massive scale. Some yearn for that innocence of powerless Jewish life, but I disagree that the cost of millions of deaths was worth it.”
To call this a strawman argument would be too kind.
No one seriously argues that suffering in the Diaspora was worth the so-called ‘innocence’. But they might say that both the crimes committed to create an ethnostate and to extinguish Jewish life in Europe and the Middle East, turning historic Palestine into history’s biggest Jewish ghetto, aren’t worth the price of state power.
On the same episode of Platt’s podcast, Hurwitz snarls when told of a Jewish person who said they were glad their Jewish tradition wasn’t based on Zionism. We never learn if this person is a Bundist, a descendant of the old Yishuv or whatnot.
This Jewishness without a state couldn’t possibly be genuine Jewishness, she speculated, and must be a result of the Jewish survival mechanism of appeasing Antisemites. “The shame is so baked in you think it’s normal,” she said. “That’s a bummer.”
Hurwitz isn’t arguing for Israel solely as a nationalistic idea, but one tied to spirituality, and so she’s not terribly impressed with left-wing Jews who hold anti-Zionist seders to make a political point.
However, this kind of condescension is enough to make one sympathise with ultra-Orthodox Jews who see Zionism as a false-messianic heresy.
And the more we see modern state power equated with the textual tradition of Jewish religion, it makes us wonder if this secular invention, being a litmus test for Jewishness, is a low-grade violation of Exodus 20:5, idolatry.
Of course, Hurwitz herself does the kind of apologising for her Zionism she accuses weaker Jews of succumbing to. “We’re confusing Zionism with the current Israeli government,” she told Platt. She doesn’t like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his coalition and many of the government’s policies.
You can still support this founding idea of the Jewish state while objecting to this current governing coalition, she says.
For someone who accuses the rest of Jewry of forgetting thousands of years of tradition, Sarah Hurwitz seems uninterested in the last eight decades of Israel’s political life, because the growth of Jewish anti-Zionism is directly tied to the state’s degradation.
Certainly, there was a period, whether under Ottoman rule or during the British Mandate, when more benign ideas about revitalising Jewish life in Palestine existed. Think the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, and Martin Buber’s Hebrew humanism.
But the 1967 war ended the notion that Israel was an indefensible sliver of land, vulnerable to its Arab neighbours. Now an occupying power, Israel’s gradual settlement of the Occupied Territories intensified the colonial aspects of Zionism buried by the Holocaust.
The brutality of the first Lebanon war, in 1982, put both Israeli and Diaspora Jews into crisis, wondering if maybe Israel was the bad guy after all. Israel’s violent repression of Palestinian protests during the first intifada, in 1987, helped drive that home.
Today, we come to an Israel that is not only committing a genocide while destroying political freedoms and democratic guardrails inside the country, but following the playbook of fascist movements throughout Europe and the United States.
Perhaps you might support the Holocaust origin story. However, the IDF’s campaign in Gaza since 7 October has increasingly caused people worldwide to question the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The crisis is real and entirely of the Israeli government’s making.
Restricting press access to Gaza has failed to prevent this. That is exactly what Hurwitz fears, but she isn’t angry at the state for becoming this way; she is frustrated with the messengers who inform us. It’s all about spin, not reality.
In her speech to the conference of Jewish federations, Hurwitz equated Al Jazeera with Antisemite and right-wing racist Nick Fuentes because of its Gaza coverage. She said Jewish day school students should be banned from having smartphones so they don’t get too much news.
And this brings us back to comments about the Shoah that’s caused such a stir. What does someone like Hurwitz want Holocaust education to do, if not confront difficult questions about our own countries and governments?
I, of course, always digested this material, to quote the title of her book, “as a Jew”. But the teaching is supposed to be universal. If you’re a Hutu, will you shelter a Tutsi? Today, we might ask, if you’re a US citizen, will you warn the undocumented about ICE raids?
It certainly sounds like Hurwitz has acquired Israel’s amnesia about the Holocaust.
In fact, if the mainstream of Jewish institutions taught Holocaust education more honestly than they do, we’d see more people, Jew and non-Jew, move in the universal direction Hurwitz and other nationalists despise.
They’d see that the Nazis drew their ideology not just on the Christian Antisemitism she rightly cites, but American race laws, putting Blacks and Jews closer together.
Or as Jochen Hellbeck wrote recently in The New York Times, Nazi Antisemitism was inextricably linked to anticommunism.
Real, true Holocaust education would take us to a secular, anti-nationalist, humanist, universalist politics that Zionist organisations don’t want us to embrace.
Hurwitz’s interventions into the discourse are a telling desperation of a Zionist cohort that has lost its grip on politics.
Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim socialist critic of Israel, won a third of New York City’s Jewish vote in the city’s mayoral election.
Forty per cent of Jewish-Americans believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, with 61 per cent of Jews believing Israel has committed war crimes.
Looking to fill the legislative seat of Jerrold Nadler, the outgoing dean of Jewish congressional Democrats, is a young pro-Palestine Jew who is also a survivor of the infamous Parkland high school shooting.
The Zionist political establishment knows that it is losing Jews not just on the question of preserving an ethnostate but to a general philosophy of universal humanism, the idea that the struggles of different minority groups are interconnected.
Sarah Hurwitz is only the latest soldier trying to isolate such inconvenient Jewish movements. And she won’t be the last.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
