The war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the immediate wave of anti-Zionist activism they unleashed across the world, forced large and small Jewish communities to decide if and how to manifest their identity and their support for Israel. Gibraltar, where the relative number of Jews is larger than in any other country except for Israel, is an example.
On March 18, approximately 300 pro-Hamas Gibraltarians, some Arab in traditional attire, participated in a demonstration rally organized by the Gibraltar for Palestine group across Main Street, the commercial and political hub of the tiny British Overseas Territory. They waved Palestinian flags and called to “free Palestine” and for a ceasefire that would land the terror group a crucial victory in its long-term effort to destroy Israel.[1]
Demonstrations, let alone such that export far-away conflicts, are a rarity in the prosperous and culturally harmonious territory that has an elected parliament and government, but where the British-appointed Governor-General is more than a symbolic figure. The Jewish population, comprising approximately 1,000 Gibraltarians, including around 200 Israeli citizens, faced a dilemma. To mobilize for Israel risked escalating tensions, in particular with the approximately 1,000 Gibraltarians of Arab extraction. To keep silent would project cowardice and concede the fight for public opinion.
At first, the community decided not to launch a counter-demonstration in order to send a “powerful message of unity and peace” from Gibraltar to the world. Its managing board (MBJC) described deep concern about the pro-Hamas rally, which, it stated, had “challenged” Gibraltar’s “defining trait” of setting aside cultural differences to unite for a common purpose. The MBJC stated that “practically every member in the Jewish Community is closely connected to someone in Israel directly affected by the massacre of October 7, whether killed, injured or currently held hostage in Gaza.” It also noted that “we have been confronted with words and chants in Gibraltar that we have never imagined would echo through our streets, chants that suggest the annihilation of the Israeli people and the destruction of their state” and which are not “merely slogans; they are war cries that have, around the world, incited acts of violence and discord.” Still, the MBJC recognized “the potential consequences: a series of demonstrations, however peaceful in intention, can inflame tensions further and contribute to an escalation.”[2]
The initial Jewish decision not to respond to the pro-Hamas demonstration was supported – or, perhaps, encouraged – by the Gibraltarian leadership, including its Governor, Vice Admiral Sir David Steel, and its Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo. Regrettably, an anti-Western terror organization that led a massacre and a democratic state defending itself were seen as two equal sides to a conflict.
The Jewish olive branch was not well received. When two months later, the pro-Hamas activists decided to march again, emphasizing without a shred of self-consciousness that they oppose an ideology and not a religion, members of the Jewish community decided, following some internal debate, to organize a public response, under the banner “bring them home now.” They stated that until the hostages taken by Hamas are released, any talk of peace “lacks legitimacy.”
And so, on May 20, Main Street witnessed an unprecedented sight: several dozen Jews and pro-Israel demonstrators waving Israeli flags in front of several dozen marching anti-Israel protestors whose cynical concern for human rights precludes Israeli Jews.[3]
Contrary to the concerns of some, the dual demonstration did not involve physical attacks or direct verbal assaults. The day not only ended peacefully, it was also the last of its kind. Ever since there have been no pro-Israel or anti-Israel events held in the territory. Posters were hanged by both parties in different locations, and graffiti was painted. Only a few, supporting the Palestinians, are still visible.
In September 2024, we spoke with 11 Gibraltarian and Gibraltar-based Jews about the demonstrations and the broader impact of October 7 on their identity and activism. “Things calmed down because people like it quiet in Gibraltar,” said Dan Hassan, a banker, 11th generation in the territory, who was on his way to take his young son to his Saturday football match with Maccabi Gibraltar.[4]
Moses Benady, a solicitor whose family has lived in Gibraltar for 250 years, explained that the local Jews demonstrated only once because “we didn’t want to bring the problems of the Middle East” to Gibraltar. The counter-demonstration, which focused on the call to release the hostages, was for him a moment of pride: pride that Jews stand quietly in solidarity with the hostages in the face of the shouting and jeering of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and pride that some non-Jews joined them, including some encouraged by local Catholic churches. He said that following the start of the war, he was surprised at what he heard about Jews, including from people he thought he knew well. Still, there was not a single antisemitic attack in the territory.[5]
Joshua Lhote, a 42-year-old lawyer, was born in Israel, where he studied in a Yeshiva in his teens. He grew up in France and in Gibraltar, where his parents were envoys of the Jewish Agency. He is the founder of the think tank Understanding Gibraltar. The history of the territory and Jewish thought are his great passions.
A modern Orthodox French-Ashkenazi married to a Sephardic Gibraltarian and a firm critic of Itamar Ben Gvir and the type of Judaism he represents, Lhote said that living in France as a child, he got into fights with Muslims almost on a daily basis because of the kippah on his head. Arriving in Gibraltar as a teenager, “I saw a place where Jews live in peace. I saw Jews who are friends with Christians, friends with Indians.”
Lhote was one of the Gibraltarian Jews who hesitated whether holding a counter-demonstration was the right thing to do. “Because Jews live here in peace, we need to give careful thought to what we do. The way [the counter-demonstration] turned out was good. But it was not good, at first, that some Jews distinguished between us, the Gibraltarians, and them, the Arabs who oppose Israel. The reality is that some Gibraltarians [who are not Arab] oppose Israel, and some Arabs [in Gibraltar] do not support Hamas.” He believes the demonstrations against Israel were led by Gibraltarians of Moroccan extraction who are not confident about their identity and assert it through expressing hate toward the Jewish state.[6]
According to Lhote, Gibraltar should serve as a role model for humanity at large for religious and ethnic coexistence. He believes that it also provides a lesson for Jews about what it takes from them to survive under unfavorable conditions: they need to be essential for the majority society.
Perhaps he makes too much of the singular story of a miniature entity. Yet, for sure, the survival of Jews in Gibraltar was unlikely, and Gibraltar would not have survived without them.
The British Empire is a historical abnormality. It continues to exist after it ceased to exist. King Charles III is today the non-constitutional head of a British Commonwealth that comprises 56 countries, as well as the sovereign of 15 realms, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Jamaica, and 14 Overseas Territories that enjoy varying degrees of self-governance, including the Pitcairn Islands, populated by the descendants of the Mutiny on the Bounty, the Falkland Islands, the theater of the last British imperial war – and Gibraltar.
You need to see this phenomenon of nature, this phenomenon of politics, to believe it is real. A territory with its own government, parliament, flag, national anthem (“May you be forever free, Gibraltar! Gibraltar, my own Land!”), a daily newspaper, and a national football team – yet with just over 34,000 residents who live on a rock that rises above a bay of some 15 kilometers in length separating Europe from Africa, as well as on a narrow stretch of land underneath that rock. Within the rock are massive tunnels dug by the Royal Canadian Engineers during the Second World War and one of the world’s most beautiful stalactite caves. On top of it is a natural colony of dozens of adorable monkeys, who are funny, except when they want your food, or handy. At the bottom is the Jews’ Gate Cemetery, which dates back to 1726 at least and closed in 1848. There is a reason why it was located there, relatively far (although not really far) from mainland Spain.
The rock, strategically important because of its command of the naval movements to and from the Mediterranean, was taken over from Spain by a British-Dutch fleet in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession. Following its conquest, several dozen Jewish merchants from Morocco settled in Gibraltar.
In the Treaties of Utrecht (1713), Gibraltar was officially conceded to Britain. The concession was, however, not without conditions. Article X stated in words that could not be clearer that “Her Britannic Majesty, at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given, under any pretense whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar.”[7]
In a lecture he delivered to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1963, Sir Joshua Hassan – remember that name – explained why and how Article X was repeatedly ignored and a permanent and prosperous settlement of Jews in Gibraltar developed. Because Spain was reluctant to accept the concession of the rock to a Protestant Kingdom from day one, the staying power of the British garrison relied on supplies from Morocco. The Sultan, Isma‘il b. Sharif, fourth in the dynasty that still rules Morocco today and has been known for its good relations with the Jewish minority, was adamant that he would only provide Gibraltar with the goods it desperately needed if the territory remained open to the Jewish and Muslim subjects who settled there after the 1704 conquest.[8]
Consequently, while Britain kept reassuring Spain that it would respect Article X and expel the Jews from Gibraltar, it also kept finding excuses for not doing so. In 1724, the first synagogue was established in the territory – Sha‘ar Hashamayim (The Gate of Heaven). It still exists today. By August 1725, there were 1,113 civilian inhabitants in Gibraltar, including 137 Jews and 113 Brits; the largest groups were Genoese (440) and Spaniards (414).[9]
In 1728, following a Spanish blockade of the territory, Britain issued an eviction order for the Jewish and Muslim residents of Gibraltar; yet seeing that Spain would still not allow the transport of goods from the mainland to the territory and that they remained dependent on Morocco, the order was delayed. A year later, Britain and Morocco signed an agreement that gave Jews and Muslims the right to reside in Gibraltar for a temporary period of no more than 30 days while specifically denying their right to reside on the rock permanently. Once a legal footing, however narrow, for the Jewish presence in the territory was established, their expulsion was off the table. By the time Spain besieged the rock again in 1779 in what came to be known as the Great Siege, already some 1,000 Jews lived in the territory – similar to their number today.[10]
By the mid-19th century, the Jewish population reached its peak, comprising as many as one-third of the territory’s mix of ethnicities, religions, and languages that began to develop their own identity. During the Second World War, Britain managed to maintain its control of the rock, saving its Jews from the hands of the Nazis and their allies. Yet hundreds were evacuated to other countries, along with non-Jewish subjects, to make room for soldiers, and only a minority returned when the war was over.
The Jewish contribution to Gibraltar was not just in economic development. The most influential Gibraltarian public figure in the second half of the 20th century was a Jew. Joshua Hassan’s studies of the history of the Jews on the rock were only a hobby. Born in 1915 in Gibraltar to a Sephardic family and a trained lawyer, he was one of the few Gibraltarians not evacuated from the territory during the Second World War and served as a gunner in the local defense force. In the early 1940s, he entered public life as one of the leaders of The Association for the Advancement of Civil Rights in Gibraltar, a political party that sought greater autonomy for the territory. In 1955, he was elected the first mayor of Gibraltar. In 1964, he was elected its first Chief Minister (the equivalent of prime minister), a role he held with only a three-year break until 1987.
As the dominant Gibraltarian following the breakdown of the Empire, Hassan secured two complementary processes. On the one hand, self-governance in internal affairs, which helped Gibraltar become one of the most prosperous political entities on earth, combining a strong economy that relies on finances, shipping, and tourism (GDP per capita for 2024 was 85,614 pounds). On the other hand, firm rejection of Spanish aspirations to reunite the rock with the mainland.
In a referendum held in September 1967, Gibraltarians were given two options: become Spanish territory or remain a self-governing British territory. The results, following massive displays of British patriotism, were taken from the Assad family guidebooks: 12,138 (99.98%) wanted to remain under Britain, while only 44 desired reunification with Spain.[11] The territory’s first constitution, adopted in 1968, which Hassan took part in drafting, was unequivocal about the right of the small population to determine its future.
Hassan died in 1997. His political legacy has lived on. In a referendum held in November 2022, 98.97% of the participants rejected a proposal by the British government for shared sovereignty with Spain. While Madrid has not given up its demand to terminate the Utrecht treaty, which it claims Britain breached, and while there are concerns in Gibraltar that Britain is tiring of the last remains of its colonial responsibilities, a change of the status of the territory is very unlikely, at least in the next few decades.
Hassan had two daughters. Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who made Aliyah in 2001, served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 2018 to 2023, representing a liberal party, Awakening. Marlene Dinah Esther Hassan-Nahon, a historian and journalist, served in the Gibraltarian parliament from 2015 to 2023 and, in 2018, formed a new social-democratic and socially progressive political party, Together Gibraltar.
Jews and Judaism are very much visually present in Gibraltar, although perhaps less than what some tour guides suggest. Their prosperity is evident in the number of Jews wearing kippahs walking along Main Street and the number of shops that announce their closure on Saturday and Jewish holidays. Saturday is the busiest commercial day, with thousands of tourists flocking Main Street.
With few exceptions, the community is Orthodox. It is predominately Sephardic, although mixed marriages and migration from England and Israel are changing its composition. There are four synagogues, one kosher supermarket, one kosher café, a Jewish preschool and school, a kollel, a mikveh, and the Maccabi Club. The synagogues are secured, but not heavily. Secular Israeli-Jews, some of whom commute daily from Spain, are not part of the community.
Lhote and others told us a few Hebrew words entered the spoken Gibraltarian language, which combines English with some Spanish. For example, ma‘ot (money or coins) is used for cash. “You’ll tell a taxi driver I don’t have ma‘ot with me,” explained Lhote. It is worth mentioning that in Israel, using this word in a taxi is unlikely to take you far.
Lhote believes the community is relatively cohesive and its Jewish identity remained intact because of its shared religiosity. “In the 1970s, you could see a Jewish man married to a non-Jew attending synagogue three times a day. You would never see this in France. Then came a less liberal rabbinic leadership. The sons of mixed marriages, for example, were not permitted to be called up to the reading of the Torah. Perhaps the conservatism helped preserve the community.”[12]
The combination of a somewhat libertarian capitalist economy and a generous welfare society, coupled with a spirit of multiculturalism and the absence of pronounced manifestations of antisemitism, has made Gibraltar attractive for its Jewish population. Still, for some, Israel is a second homeland, and a potential land of promise.
Gabriel Benady, Moses’ son, said that while he avoided publicly campaigning for Israel, “We pray for Israel every day.” He has visited Israel seven or eight times already. This is where he feels he belongs and would like to settle down ultimately.
Lhote said he saw his future in Gibraltar, but that his 16-year-old son is pondering about his ultimate destination. “For me, Gibraltar is a universal role model. For him, it is just a small village. He takes what Gibraltar has to offer for granted, and it offers a lot. He intends to travel to Israel and volunteer for the IDF in two years. It is something he has been talking about for a long time, already before October 7.”[13]
[1] Eyleen Gomez and Brian Reyes, “Around 300 People March for Palestine and Peace,” Gibraltar Chronicle, March 19, 2024, https://www.chronicle.gi/around-300-people-march-for-palestine-and-peace/.
[2] Chronicle Staff, “Gibraltar’s Jewish Community Focuses on ‘Unity and Peace’ after Monday’s Pro-Palestine March,” Gibraltar Chronicle, March 21, 2024, https://www.chronicle.gi/gibraltars-jewish-community-focuses-on-unity-and-peace-after-mondays-pro-palestine-march/.
[3] Gabreilla Peralta, “Dual Demonstrations Spotlight Polarized Views on Gaza, amid Fears of Community Division,” Gibraltar Chronicle, May 20, 2024, https://www.chronicle.gi/dual-demonstrations-spotlight-polarised-viewson-gaza-conflict-amid-fears-of-community-division/.
[4] Interview by the authors with Dan Hassan, September 29, 2024.
[5] Interview by the authors with Joshua Lhote, September 29, 2024.
[7] Sir Joshua Hassan, The Treaty of Utrecht 1713 And the Jews of Gibraltar (London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1970; text of a lecture delivered in London on May 15, 1963), 1.
[11] Gareth Stockey, Gibraltar, ‘A Dagger in the Spine of Spain?’ (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 231, and “From the Archives: Gibraltar Votes to Remain with Britain – 1967,” The Guardian, September 11, 1967, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/11/gibraltar-votes-to-remain-with-britain-archive-1967.
[12] Interview by the authors with Joshua Lhote, September 29, 2024.
The 2024 film scene was dominated by movies dealing with the memory of the Holocaust, reinforcing the problematics of the Shoah and its aftermath being remembered through cinematic images, including cynically commercialized ones.
The Report hosted a special panel discussion about the thin lines between memory and distortion, featuring Prof. (emeritus) Moshe Zuckerman, Tel Aviv University, a scholar in the philosophy of ideas and science, Dr. Shmulik Duvdevani, the movie critic of Ynet and lecturer in cinema at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Giacomo Lichtner, Victoria University of Wellington, expert on Holocaust cinema, and Prof. Uriya Shavit, Tel Aviv University, Head of the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice
Prof. Shavit: I’d like us to start with three or four of the main critical arguments that have been made about Holocaust movies. Moviemakers, and not just commercial ones, often have the inclination to end up with a happy ending or at least some kind of positive message. It’s almost inescapable. I think it was Stanley Kubrick who said that the problem with Schindler’s List (1993) is that it deals with six hundred Jews who were saved, whereas the Holocaust is about six million Jews who were murdered.
Think of the Oscar-winning Hungarian film Son of Saul (2015), which is known as the harshest and bluntest Holocaust movie. In the end, at least the way I understood it, it also finishes with a positive tone.
Dr. Duvdevani: First of all, I’m not sure that cinema, in general, aims to please the audience. It depends on which films, where they are made, and what they are dealing with. Although Kubrick is one of my favorite filmmakers, I’m not so sure that I agree with his comment about Schindler’s List. There’s a lot to say about Schindler’s List, but I’m not sure the main argument against the film is that it deals with the survival of Jews and not the extermination of Jews.
We should bear in mind that Kubrick himself wanted to make a film about the Holocaust called “The Aryan Papers.” He already had a screenplay, and once he heard that Steven Spielberg was making Schindler’s List, he decided to set this project aside, although I don’t know why. He and Spielberg were very good friends. They remained so even after he made that comment.
But I’m not sure that, in general, Holocaust films are about happy endings. For example, Son of Saul ends with the death of the protagonist, and it deals with many ethical questions regarding the representation of the Holocaust.
Even in films with a so-called happy ending, much of what is happening until the end is tragic. These are not feel-good movies.
I think the most important question is not how movies deal with the Holocaust narratively, but how they deal with it ethically and aesthetically.
Prof. Zuckerman: On a more personal note, I’m the son of an Auschwitz survivor, so I can say that the Holocaust has contaminated my life from the very beginning. At home, we dealt with the Holocaust right from the beginning. We are one of those families who were talking about the Holocaust all the time. Dealing with it from the very first moment of my existence has devastated my life.
This is why, in the first part of my life, I watched many documentaries and movies made about the Holocaust and gained a lot of knowledge, so to speak, about the Holocaust, including from the artistic works about it.
But I’m approaching this academically from the Frankfurt School of thought, and this is the more profound thing I want to say about the issue you just raised. There is one very famous saying from the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s by Theodor Adorno: “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.”
Another person not talking about the Holocaust directly, but talking about Nazism and aesthetics, was Bertolt Brecht. In his poem “A Bad Time for Poetry,” he says there are two forces fighting in him: the beauty of the blooming apple tree and the presentation of the painter. The painter being Hitler, of course. And Brecht said only the painter is pushing him to write.
There are times when aestheticism is not a proper means to deal with reality. Adorno later took back his saying against writing poems after the Holocaust after he read Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge.” What Adorno said then was that we should not think that after Auschwitz, everything done aesthetically is barbaric just because culture has joined barbarity. Yet he also emphasized that suffering has to be represented in a way that gives the one who is tortured the right to scream, and thus, the role of art is to make suffering more presentable to people.
Of course, the question was how to do that. Adorno presented the ethical question of the extent to which art is able to represent reality, and that goes not only for the Holocaust. In the end, whether a direct or indirect reflection of reality, art is a representation and not the reality itself. I am reminded of Magritte’s painting where the pipe on the canvas is, of course, not a real pipe.
Going back to what Uriya said, Adorno said that every kind of work of art, even if it’s dealing with the most unpleasant things and is dissonant or even ugly, every kind is something from which you gain some kind of pleasure. This is one thing that got me to think about the fact that in most of the films I saw about the Holocaust, the audience gained some kind of pleasure. And you cannot deal with the Holocaust this way. You should not.
If you remember, there was a shower scene in Schindler’s List. When I saw it, I kept thinking that I knew that scene from somewhere. Where did I know this combination of shower and horror? All of a sudden, I remembered Psycho by Hitchcock, in which we have that shower scene. Then I compared some of the images that Spielberg used to those used by Hitchcock, and I was horrified to see that Hollywood had struck again.
Schindler’s List had a “Hollywoodian” way of doing it. I’m talking about the suspense moment: whether the shower will be lethal or not. I don’t need that in learning about the Holocaust, in a movie about the Holocaust. I know how things ended. So yes, the thing about gaining some pleasure, whether it’s a suspense pleasure or an aesthetic pleasure, seems to me one thing that most of the Holocaust movies were permitting.
Prof. Lichtner: I agree with Shmulik that I’m not sure that a film, in general, has to please its audience. I think the problem is more that historical cinema has to provide an experience that audiences can relate to; that’s where the problem arises. The problematic of Holocaust movies is the pursuit of empathy that actually can only deliver the illusion of empathy.
This is where the shower scene from Schindler’s List comes in very neatly because it’s a scene that’s shot in constantly shifting perspectives. So, it’s designed to give the audience the experience of being in a shower that could be a gas chamber, but also of surviving it. That’s something that actually quite a few representations of gas chambers have done in recent years, and I agree that that’s ethically very problematic.
Regarding endings, particularly, filmmakers are clearly aware of the expectations for positive endings, and there are quite a few examples of films that try to deal with it by giving you at least two endings. One egregious example is Life is Beautiful (1997). I remember watching it as a 20-year-old when it first came out. It gives you an evocative ending with the off-screen death of the protagonist, but then it has to give you the happy ending the audience wants.
There are quite a few other examples, but there’s a film that came out immediately after Life is Beautiful called Train of Life by Radu Mihăileanu (1998). It is not as well-known, but it is wonderful. It also has a double ending, but the endings are reversed, so the happy ending comes first, and the real ending comes second. That order makes all the difference. My point is that it matters in which order you put the endings.
Prof. Zuckerman: Like what you just said, Giacomo, I think there is a structural problem, ethics-wise, that begins with our definition of the Holocaust. What is the Holocaust? Is it a series of dramatic moments and events, or is it, as some have understood it, “the chasm of civilization,” meaning that it is not an event that you can grasp through the order of a summary of events?
We have to understand the Holocaust as something that industrialized an annihilation of men, being bureaucratically performed and administratively directed according to ideology. Right from the beginning, it made men fungible.
The question is: can a movie, which is an art form that relies on pictures and on narratives, cope with representing what happened?
I can hardly imagine that intellectual writing is able to cope with the Holocaust. I’m sure that cinema is not able to do that.
Prof. Lichtner: I completely agree. Some of the essential parts of what makes the Holocaust what it is, things like dehumanization, are also some of the hardest to represent.
I want to be provocative and say that maybe because of what you said, Moshe, about the intellectual discourse and its limitations, maybe we have to think that sometimes only cinema or only art in general can actually get close to describing the Holocaust because of their power to evoke without describing, without trying to understand and explain. It depends on the case, but I don’t think cinema is intrinsically less capable than other forms of language.
Dr. Duvdevani: I completely agree with Giacomo because I think two of the films I find the most important and that are the most profound in dealing with the Holocaust are actually documentaries, Night and Fog by Alain Resnais (1956) and Shoah by Claude Lanzmann (1985), and, by the way, Lanzmann could have never made Shoah had it not been for Resnais. I think these films actually deal with two major issues: image and testimony.
First, the issue of the image: what images can you show when you are dealing with the Holocaust, with death, with the extermination camps?
Secondly, Shoah, especially, deals with the crisis of testimony, which is exactly what the Holocaust caused. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, speaks a lot about it. Primo Levi writes a lot about it.
Prof. Shavit: I want to continue from here and discuss the second main criticism about Holocaust movies. Generally, the argument is that it’s good that so many movies about the Holocaust are produced because they ensure that people will never forget and that they will learn from history.
So, three points on this. First, the Holocaust never made it into popular culture before 1978, with the miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, which aired first on primetime American television and then on German, European at large, and Israeli television.
Yet I’m not sure that people in the 1960s and the 1970s knew about the Holocaust less than they know today, and I’m not sure the lessons of the Holocaust were less profoundly ingrained in public minds in the 1970s and the 1980s than they were in the 1990s and the 2000s, after the Holocaust became so big in our culture. The genocide in Rwanda took place well after Family Weiss and other movies were watched by tens of millions of Americans, and that didn’t exactly motivate the United States to intervene.
The second point is that, in the end, anything you do in cinema is fiction. Even documentaries are a form of fiction. There is an unavoidable problem, which is that movies about the Holocaust turn the Holocaust into fiction. This is simply inescapable.
The third issue takes me to a personal experience. I was in Auschwitz just once, and at a very late age, not as a school kid or as a soldier.
The thing I took from there is that if I was a Holocaust denier, nothing I saw in Auschwitz would convince me otherwise.
So, the problem with Holocaust denial is not so much about knowledge but about whether you accept the confirmed sources of knowledge in our day and age. If you don’t, if you think everything school and other establishments teach you is part of one big conspiracy, is a bunch of lies, then even watching fifteen Holocaust movies with graphic depictions from extermination camps will not change your mind.
I think it’s also important to note that Lanzmann’s Shoah was far more effective in teaching people about the Holocaust than Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. There is no footage from the actual Holocaust there. It’s people testifying. Maybe this idea that we need the visual to be convinced that something really happened and to immerse it within our souls and minds is a myth.
Prof. Lichtner: It’s a big question and an important one. I’m going to continue from my last comment about the potential, the promise of cinema. I’m going to defend the idea that just because all films are fictional, that does not automatically turn the Holocaust when represented in movies into fiction.
The relationship between truth and fiction is complex, and different films handle it in different ways. The American historian Robert Rosenstone talks about true invention and false invention. It’s a problematic dichotomy, in my view, but it’s useful for us in terms of thinking about the role that invention, that inaccuracy, can have in cinematic constructions of historical arguments.
In principle, I think invention is a tool. It’s a tool to maybe encourage people to learn or to find out more. Sometimes, I think it is a tool to teach.
I love Shoah. I worked on it a lot quite a few years ago. True, it doesn’t use documentary footage, but it certainly uses artifice and invention. There are a couple of moments that I’m going to pick out. One is the use of point-of-view camera work. Putting the camera on the front of the van as it drives through the forest puts you in the driver’s seat of a gas van, in theory. So, Lanzmann did not find footage of a gas van from 1942 or 1943; instead, he used creative reconstruction.
The second moment is the one that’s perhaps best known. It is with survivor Abraham Bomba, who did not speak to Lanzmann in the way that Lanzmann wanted him to. Bomba, the barber from Treblinka, would not relive the trauma. So, Lanzmann interviewed Bomba in New York, he interviewed him elsewhere, and in order to get him to relive the trauma, he brought him back to Tel Aviv. He put Bomba in a barber shop, and he got him to reenact the cutting of hair.
It is one of those moments that are very abusive. But it’s one of those moments that makes audiences break through, not so much to understand the experience, but to understand that you can’t understand it. And that’s a crucial step.
Prof. Zuckerman: Uriya, I would like to refer to two of your arguments. The first one: There was an incident right after Schindler’s List featured back in 1995, where a group of black youngsters was roaring in laughter every time they saw an atrocity on the screen, and people thought that it was antisemitic or black antisemitism, which was very curious because, in the 1960s, Jews and blacks used to work together in order to fight for human rights.
Then, some historians and psychologists interviewed those young black men, and it turned out that their laughter when watching the movie had nothing to do with the Holocaust and nothing to do with antisemitism. They had thought it was an action movie.
For them, it was an action movie, and this goes back to what I said from the beginning. The moment that you want to represent one of the most unspeakable and unrepresentable things in human history with the means of the culture industry, you end up with just that – with people saying, it’s an action movie!
A member of my family who lives in America was on the actual Schindler’s list; he was in the Holocaust. I want to affirm what you said, Uriya. After the movie was released, he was invited to a lot of roundtables and a lot of panels to discuss his experiences. I remember he came to Israel and showed us one of the invitations to a roundtable, where I could see it read: “You’ve seen the movie; now come and see a survivor.”
I was completely shocked and asked him if he really let them do that to him. And he asked me: “What’s the problem? This is the way that we can pass on what happened in the Holocaust!”
I have to say that I did a little survey among Holocaust survivors, not something that I could scientifically present. Some of them said it was good that the movie was done because what happened to them was similar to what was shown in the movie. But it was very few of them. Some said, what are you talking about? What does Schindler’s List have to do with the Holocaust?
And the vast majority said they don’t care about movies. You can’t grasp the Holocaust by watching movies, they said. This is what the vast majority of the Holocaust survivors I spoke with told me.
I had to take it seriously because I understand one thing, and I’ll say it in terms of Walter Benjamin, who asked himself back in the 1930s how we could go about the fact that art had become so abstract that we are losing the masses. We are losing the audience. He said we have to find a way to include some kind of kitsch to win over the hearts of the people. He said that the only medium in art that was able to do that, taking all the kitsch of the 19th century and putting it into modern terms, is cinema.
And this, of course, brings us to the question of whether movies are indeed able to do it. But not by representing reality; by doing something that you called fiction, but not in the bad sense, in the positive sense.
Art is always representation. Art is never reality. It is always a representation of reality as if it was reality. To fictionalize reality in that way means that you have to produce something that is able to win over the people without losing the message. If you win over the people, who indulge in the kitsch and the happy endings we are talking about, we are losing the one thing we intended to do, the information and the values we intended to convey.
By the way, Shmulik, you are right in what you said that this is a crisis generally, but on the other hand, I think the only way that you can deal with it is not by giving up and providing an artificial narrative but by letting the people talk. For Lanzmann, it took being a little bit postmodern and many perspectives in a documentary, but Shoah has become one of the most important films.
Prof. Shavit: The problem is that although fiction is never reality, most people see most of reality through fiction. That’s a reality we cannot change. I have to share with you, Moshe, that my Schindler’s List experience was not as horrific as yours, but the fact that it’s vivid in my head after so many years, well, I think it is telling.
I was watching it at the Ayalon Mall in Ramat Gan, and behind us sat a young person with popcorn and a Pesek Zman waffle bar, and during the break, I remember him telling his friend while sucking on the popcorn and the Pesek Zman what a difficult movie it was to watch. And I still have this so vivid in my head.
Dr. Duvdevani: I want to refer to some of your assumptions. First of all, regarding the TV series about the Weiss family, by the way, with the young Meryl Streep. Anton Kaes, professor of cultural studies at Berkley, expressed concern that Americans would think that the Holocaust looked exactly like its representation in that series, that the series’ narrative would become the main narrative of the Holocaust for millions of Americans. Well, I don’t think millions of people actually think the Holocaust is exactly like what you see in a movie.
I can just give an example. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) implied that the Holocaust of the Hungarian Jews never occurred because Hitler was murdered in a theater before that, before June 1944. Well, I don’t think that people who see Quentin Tarantino’s film actually think that that’s the way Hitler died, and that’s the way the war ended, and that nothing happened in Hungary. They will understand the film just as Tarantino wanted them to understand it: as a film that is historical fantasy. Let’s fantasize that Hitler was murdered, and that would be a “happy end.” The kind of happy end that you are talking against, Uriya. But Tarantino was doing it very intelligently, knowing what cinema is capable of doing when dealing with history.
Now, I completely agree that Lanzmann’s Shoah is a much more appropriate text than Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
There was a film, a horrible film, called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008). I still have goosebumps when thinking about it. The kid of the Nazi commander of the camp is going to the gas chambers along with his little Jewish friend. Okay, what are you saying here, that Nazis were exterminated in the gas chambers?
Yet there is one thing we should bear in mind: that many more people watched Spielberg’s film than watched Shoah. Let’s be frank about it. Not many people around the world actually watched Lanzmann’s Shoah, and most of them were highly educated.
Pauline Kael was a very important film critic for The New Yorker, and she was the only one who “dared” to write a bad review of Shoah. She said it was too long. You have to take into account how many people actually watched it when considering its contribution to the memory of the Holocaust, to the learning of its lessons.
Prof. Zuckerman: I would like to go back to Uriya’s question. What do people learn from Schindler’s List? Before having seen it, what did they know about the Shoah?
In Germany, one thing that was criticized was not that the Nazi was the hero, but that a capitalist Nazi was. I just said that any kind of art is always some kind of fantasy because it is some kind of illusion. The question you need to ask about Tarantino is: what is the point of the fantasy? What does it actually say? How appropriate is it in context?
Prof. Shavit: Perhaps, Moshe, we can say that if Oskar Schindler is also part of the story of the Holocaust, and that there were also good Germans, the problem with Schindler’s List is that it became the Holocaust movie. It’s shown to school children, and they, including German school children, think they learn about the Holocaust, not about a minor aspect of the Holocaust.
Dr. Duvdevani: I think this is the problem. The problem is not the movie. The problem is what teachers, for example, are making of that film, especially if this is the only one they have pupils watch.
Prof. Shavit: Yes, but Spielberg was Spielberg already when he directed Schindler’s List, and he could have chosen a different project. He knew he was making the Holocaust movie by merit of him being Spielberg.
Prof. Zuckerman: Before we move on, I want to say I remember that I was a sociologist in the Israeli Air Force when the Holocaust TV series about the Weiss family aired, and I had the opportunity, being a sociologist in the military, to have my people do research with soldiers by command. You know, if you are a sociologist and can question people by command, they have to cooperate.
I had a group of some thirty people. There was only one television channel in those days, and everyone watched the miniseries about the Weiss family, and I got to ask the young soldiers what they thought of it.
I will never forget the one young officer who stood up and said to me it was a very good thing that we watched the series on TV because it connected him emotionally to the Holocaust.
At first, I really thought, well, the culture industry is effective. He was connected emotionally! It took me two days to be troubled. What did he mean by “emotionally connected to the Holocaust?” What does it say about your personal emotional need to have some kind of catharsis? What does it mean in relation to the real historical event?
And I have to admit that for many people, the way they engaged with Schindler’s List was not a means of coping with the Holocaust but a means of having some kind of catharsis.
And I think that the Holocaust is the one thing that you should not have catharsis through. I think that you always have to have a very tension-filled relation to it.
Prof. Shavit: That actually brings us perfectly to the third point of criticism, which I am very curious what Giacomo would have to say about. It is, in a word, the cynicism of it all.
I want to make the following point: I have a suspicion that the reason why we have so many movies about the Holocaust is not because of the complexity of the topic, the challenges the topic involves, or the importance of the topic. Rather, it is because of two cynical considerations.
One, the Holocaust is perhaps the only major historical-political issue about which there is still consensus, at least within the mainstreams of Western societies. So, it’s the safest serious subject to deal with in an age when everything else has become so controversial.
The other thing, which is even more cynical, and here, Roberto Benigni and Spielberg enter, is that it wins you those awards. For some reason, despite the fact that, well, at least I think these awards are largely meaningless, movie directors and actors are so keen to win Oscars and other trophies. And the thinking, at least subconsciously, is: let’s do one about the Holocaust and get recognition as classy, serious, deep directors or actors!
I think the most deplorable moment in the history of Hollywood, and there are so many of them, is Roberto Benigni jumping on those chairs and being so outrageously happy without taking even the slightest second to think how inappropriate all of this is given the subject matter of Life is Beautiful.
Now, to be clear, Spielberg never actually thanked the six million when he won his Oscar. If you hear what he actually said, he wasn’t explicitly thanking the six million. But the fact that so many people remember that he thanked the six million has to do with his speech, that moment he waited for so long, looking as if he was thinking about the people he wanted to thank for helping him with the movie and his career and the six million in the same breath. Oh, boy!
Prof. Lichtner: There’s an episode in Ricky Gervais’ Extras where Kate Winslet plays an actress who’s playing a nun in a Holocaust movie, and she expresses this cynicism on set wonderfully. She says: “Oh, look, I’ve done Titanic, if I don’t win an Oscar with this one…”
Today, the thing that makes a film popular is to make a Holocaust movie and then say that it wasn’t about the Holocaust. We see it with Zone of Interest (2023), and in fairness, it’s been done for some time now. Alain Resnais said that Night and Fog was never about the Holocaust, but was always about Algeria, which is blatantly not true. So, of course, there is a commercial calculation there. Why shouldn’t there be? Cinema is a commercial medium, and it has to sell.
Prof. Shavit: If that wasn’t a rhetorical question, I want to answer it. Why shouldn’t it be? Because some things in life should not be approached cynically. Because if that’s your motivation, to win the Oscars, then that’s wrong.
Prof. Lichtner: I agree. But at the same time, making a product that’s going to have broad appeal is not something that we can resent filmmakers for. So, the question is broader. Like, why is it that the Holocaust holds this special place in the public consciousness so that we flock to watch Holocaust movies, so that we immediately and somehow automatically gravitate to a film that deals with the Holocaust?
I’ll give you a different example from Italian cinema, which I think is really telling. There is a film called Unfair Competition by Ettore Scola (2001), master of Italian cinema. In it, there is a competition between two tailors, one Jewish and one Gentile, in Rome at the outset of the fascist racial laws in 1938. The scene shows how a friendly banter that was not really so friendly becomes antisemitism and racial hostility. It’s an interesting film. The most interesting thing is that when Scola drafted the idea, it was not set in 1938. It was set in contemporary Italy. The shopkeepers were a white Italian man and a recent African immigrant. Scola ultimately decided that it was safer to place it back in 1938.
Across Europe, there’s a history where the Holocaust was first the uncomfortable topic that we don’t want to deal with, and then it became the comfortable topic that we deal with instead of dealing with contemporary racism. That is the question that you have to address if you want to understand why cinema, cynically or conveniently, seeks out the Holocaust to make money or to win awards.
At the same time, just because there is this cynicism or instrumentalism, it doesn’t mean that all Holocaust cinema is cynical. It comes back to a point I think Moshe made earlier on, which is a really important, really complex point about the definition of the Holocaust. I’m not going to try, but the Holocaust is a really difficult event to define. It defies definition.
And so you have a genre: Holocaust cinema is treated as a genre. We write about it as a genre, but actually, it’s a cross-genre. I think there are Holocaust films that cut across all genres, and if you boil it down, most Holocaust films are not really about the Holocaust. They’re about other things, and that was always Benigni’s defense. He said, this isn’t a film about the Holocaust, it’s a film about the love between a father and a son, a film about the power of imagination.
Dr. Duvdevani: First of all, I think that saying that all of it is cynicism is a big generalization. I completely agree with you about Benigni’s reaction. But at least, when he got the Oscar, he never thanked the six million.
Prof. Shavit: I watched his act again yesterday. He was actually closer to thanking the six million than Spielberg was.
Dr. Duvdevani: Indeed. But you’re completely right that Spielberg actually never thanked the six million. He mentioned them in his thank you speech, but he never thanked them. Believe me, Spielberg knows what he’s doing.
Anyway, yes, there is cynicism in Holocaust movies. However, there is also cynicism when you are making a film like The Green Book (2018) about the relationship between a black pianist and his white chauffeur in the 1950s. And there is a cynicism when you are making a film like Twelve Years a Slave (2013). So, in a way, when we are dealing with the award season, cynicism is quite common.
We should bear in mind that there are many other films we have not discussed yet. For example, there is a film that we still haven’t mentioned, and I think it is a very important film: The Pianist (2002) by Roman Polanski.
Prof. Shavit: Which also, in the end, is a feel-good movie.
Dr. Duvdevani: You know, Władysław Szpilman survived, but I can’t say that when I see the way that they are clearing the ghetto and killing the Jews, I had a feel-good reaction.
Prof. Shavit: Well, you know that the experience of the audience is mainly determined by the fate of the protagonist, not what’s in the background, and in the end, if the protagonist survives and plays the piano, it’s a happy ending.
Dr. Duvdevani: But I don’t think it’s a feel-good movie. It’s a film about survival. And yes, I am very happy that he survived, but he experienced a very traumatic event.
As we speak, in half an hour, we’re going to have three hostages released from Gaza, and I’m not sure that today is a feel-good day. They survived. So, I think survival is not the point.
Prof. Shavit: Well, the media treats it as a feel-good day.
Dr. Duvdevani: Yes, so the media is wrong. What can I say? But you cannot suspect Polanski, for example, who himself was a Holocaust survivor, to have thought that he was making a feel-good movie.
By the way, in my opinion, the actual film that Roman Polanski made about the Holocaust was not The Pianist. It was a film that he made two decades earlier, The Tenant (1976), in which he himself played someone who is being persecuted. I think that this is the real film, metaphorically speaking, that he made about the Holocaust. It’s very interesting to note that in Polanski’s autobiography, he deals extensively with other films, but The Tenant is discussed only in three pages.
Going back to the question, I think we should remember that there are also European films and also American films that won the Academy Award and are really dealing with the Holocaust in a profound, harsh way.
Prof. Zuckerman: Spielberg probably didn’t talk about the six million Jews, but I remember a video that I saw from a post-award celebration, where someone came in with a real big cake, the way the Americans like it, and they had something written on the cake. What was it? Shoah.
Prof. Shavit: I can’t believe this.
Prof. Zuckerman: I saw it. I am not making this up.
I am always distinguishing between the work of art and its creator. The creator may be a bad person but still make a very important work of art, and it can be the case that a very good person will create very poor art.
So, I am not interested in what motivated Spielberg, whether his motivation was cynical or commercial. The question is: what is the structural moment within the work that is putting us into dilemmas, ethical dilemmas, aesthetical dilemmas, and moral dilemmas?
I think that most of the Holocaust movies are not able to really result in a message that is humanistic, that is going beyond the Holocaust. As I said before, the Holocaust itself is still an enigma to us. We are still not able – I am seventy-five years of age now and even I am still not able – to understand it, and as I said before, it’s been in my life from the very beginning.
We have to distinguish not only between the intention of the creator or the producer and the work of art; within the issues or topics of the artwork itself, we have to distinguish between coping with the actual historical event and the reception of the work decades later.
Prof. Shavit: I want to move on to the next and final point of criticism, which is Holocaust movies and porn. Now, there are two issues here. The first is that you have a lot of nudity in Holocaust movies, at least in some of them, especially in the ones that are more, I would say, “realistic.”
At least in my generation, for most kids, the first authorized seeing of a naked body of the opposite sex was when watching a Holocaust movie.
That’s the definition of disturbing.
The second point is that in the end, when you have those documented visuals from concentration camps, from extermination camps, and you show naked victims, identifiable naked victims, that does not dignify them. The question is, don’t they deserve the dignity of not being shown to the world like this? And when they are denied that dignity, and so casually so, is that not a statement that they are lesser humans, that we accept their being classified as such?
Dr. Duvdevani: First of all, I am not sure that most or even many Holocaust movies have nudity. And I am not sure that I would associate only Holocaust movies with nudity. I do think that there were films back in the 1970s that dealt with the Holocaust and had nudity. This was part of the provocation; they sought a way to deal with Holocaust representations and with Holocaust memory.
There are two films, both of them Italian, which I think are very interesting in this regard: Seven Beauties by Lina Wertmüller (1975) and The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani (1974). I think that these are masterpieces because they combined sheer provocation, not cynicism, with issues of representation and with issues of memory.
They are meant to disturb you. They were made by women. Women are those who usually do not take a side in history, and by this, I mean that history is not being told by women. Films were mainly made by men, especially in the 1970s. So, what I think the directors were aiming to do was to give a certain kind of a new perspective, a provocative perspective on the whole idea of masculinity.
Seven Beauties is a film about masculinity and the crisis of masculinity when dealing with the Holocaust. And in The Night Porter, sex, I mean real sex and actual sex, takes place in order to cover the trauma.
Still, I do not think nudity is part and parcel of Holocaust films. But I think in both these films, nudity was used as an issue or as an aesthetic tool to deal with the trauma and the crisis of masculinity that was caused by the Holocaust.
Prof. Lichtner: I want to draw a distinction between literal porn in movies connected with the Holocaust, a horrible sub-genre that came out in the 1970s, which I’ll leave aside, and voyeurism.
The presentation in some movies of gas chambers, in particular, is troubling. I am thinking about The Grey Zone, for instance, by Tim Blake Nelson (2001). I think it has a genuine, almost pornographic voyeurism in the shooting of the gas chamber scene where he puts you in the position of a girl following her mother into the gas chamber. Then, it has the luxury of dragging you out at the last minute. That shift of perspective is voyeuristic, it is unethical.
Back to nudity, I am thinking of the British documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, which was produced by Sidney Bernstein with the help of Alfred Hitchcock in 1945, but released only in 2014 after having been shelved for seven decades. By the way, aside from technical issues and the fear of alienating the German-occupied population, one possible reason why it was originally shelved by the British was their fear that it would help the Zionist movement.
When it was eventually completed and released in 2014, the Imperial War Museum curated it and took it to Sydney and various other places to premiere it. In Sydney, the curators were challenged about the way that the cameramen deployed in 1945 by the British military were shooting women showering, without any sense of decency. I mean, they just shot them in frontal nudity.
And the curators responded, well, these are French Jewish survivors who were showering with hot water for the first time after God knows how long. It’s about hygiene. It’s about the return to humanity. And the audience challenged this, saying, these women did not consent. It is their body. So, I think that even in something that’s not fictional, nudity is an immediate dilemma.
Prof. Shavit: Even more so when it’s not fiction.
Prof. Lichtner: Yes, you’re absolutely right. In the same footage, but not included in the film, there’s a different kind of approach to pornography, though not with respect to nudity, but with respect to death. There’s a moment quite late in the liberation of Belsen when the army film unit sent footage with notes to London saying that today, the commanders decided to use the bulldozers to scoop up the corpses and put them in the graves.
This is a really poignant moment, and they film it. But they can’t film it close up, so they put the camera behind two survivors who were watching a British Sergeant on a bulldozer scooping up bodies. You can just see the bodies falling out and going underneath the bulldozer itself. Yet you see it out of focus because the thing that’s in focus is the shoulders of the two women watching it. That’s the same technique that László Nemes used in Son of Saul.
Prof. Zuckerman: The question of the Holocaust and nudity stirred a little political crisis in Israel some 20, 25 years ago when an ultra-Orthodox politician toured Yad Vashem and said about one of the biggest photos, which was, of course, the naked women on the way to their extermination, that this was unacceptable. And then he said, we need our own Yad Vashem. This ultra-Orthodox politician said we need our own Yad Vashem; your Yad Vashem cannot be ours.
The question is, what kind of gaze, or what kind of view, does this Haredi politician have when he recognizes in this naked woman something erotic or something sexual? And so on. But he related to it quite clearly, quite well, when asking: “If it were your grandmother, how would you react to the photo?”
Well, if you want to be a good historian, you have to admit that there are moments in history where pornography being the pornography of death, being the pornography of eroticism, being the pornography of the sheer reality of being, is part of everyday life.
If I may add something here that has nothing to do with sex and nudity. My father remembered a scene that he had experienced in Auschwitz, and there, of course, we lost a major part of our family, some 80% were exterminated, but he remembered that he was in some kind of hole where he was working. There was some sort of assessor who came and saw my father, and all of a sudden, he flung him a bun. And my father, who was not able to speak about the Germans without saying, “May they all burn,” remembered that. He remembered this moment as something, some kind of glimmer of humanity even in this hell. Even the assessment man had this humanistic moment when throwing him the bun.
I think the need to combine the Holocaust with sexuality, and I’m not talking about nudity, comes from the place where you need to have something to hold on to because if you are showing all the time only the everywhere presence of death, you cannot do anything with it. Not intellectually and not artistically, and certainly not cinematically.
Prof. Shavit: Certain B movies, where you have concentration camps with women enslaving a man or the other way around, their production is actually revealing something very deep about the Holocaust itself: that there were people taking pleasure in doing all those things. And that there are now people taking pleasure in watching people who took pleasure in doing all those things is part of the story of the Holocaust. It helps us understand how it could have happened.
So perhaps in an awkward way, we learn more about human nature through those distorted B movies than through mainstream and legitimate movies.
Just as a final point, there was a period, I think it was like 20 years ago, when the London Dungeon and these kinds of facilities were very popular. They featured all sorts of terrible medieval torture instruments and epidemics and other catastrophes.
I remember hearing someone asking whether they would have a Holocaust dungeon in 500 years and will people treat it as some kind of entertainment. Because, in the end, what we were entertained by when going to the London Dungeon was people being tortured. And tormented.
I would like to move on to asking the three of you three different questions about different countries and Holocaust movies.
I want to start with Moshe and discuss two major German films, which I am sure you’ve watched. One is Der Untergang (2004) and the other is Napola (2004). What I found very disturbing in both is the narrative of the Nazis as some kind of aliens that came to Germany from outer space and took over until they were defeated. How troubling did you find this when you watched either?
Prof. Zuckerman: Yes, I was troubled that a certain part of coping with the past in Germany was exactly like what you said.
There were a few paths to deal with the history of Nazism. The first one was Germans who said that they were kidnapped by a bunch of criminals. And it was what is known in German as “the twelve years of Hitler. ” How 80 million people could be kidnapped by a bunch of these people is another question, but it was very soon that the post-war Germans didn’t go on with that.
Another way of coping was to focus on the German opposition to Hitler, the opposition that collapsed.
The third way, which started in the 1980s, was to engross with everyday life Nazism. Maybe you remember the series of films Heimat by Edgar Reitz (starting in 1984). It was very interesting to see in those films how Nazism infiltrated into remote villages and how it became a part of them.
So, in that respect, Der Untergang, in which Hitler is shown as a psychopath – and he was very ill at the end, and we can, of course, make a caricature of him, and I’m not saying Bruno Ganz’s performance as Hitler was bad; his performance was excellent – but that film was indeed some kind of escape from the real question. The real question is not how Hitler was at the end, but how could it be that until the very end, there hardly was any opposition to Hitler.
Prof. Shavit: Hitler is so external to the reality of the ordinary Germans in that movie.
Prof. Zuckerman: This is exactly what I am talking about. This is a way of not coping with your own guilt when you are showing him as something coming from somewhere else. Having said that, I have to admit that the one country that tried to cope with this past in Europe, when I compare it to the way that the British and the French cope with their colonial past –
Prof. Shavit: Or the Dutch with their Nazi past.
Prof. Zuckerman: Yes, or the Dutch with their Nazi past, and the Dutch with the colonial past as well.
Prof. Shavit: The Italians with their fascist past. But I would not compare the Nazi past to colonialism.
Prof. Zuckerman: The one country that did some kind of work of coping with the past is Germany. The question was, what path did they take? And they took, as I just tried to show it, several paths.
I think that by the end of the 1960s and 1970s, the Germans began to reflect on fascism more seriously. But, and this is a big but, they ended up with a very good explanation for fascism and even for Nazism, but not for the Holocaust. They basically concluded that they cannot cope with the Holocaust, neither historiographically nor through cinematographic works.
And in that respect, the Germans are in the same situation as others. I don’t think that others can cope better than the Germans. The Germans used to think that the only ones who were really pure and clean and without any crimes were those serving in the Wehrmacht. And then, it turned out that the Wehrmacht was one of the major promoters of war crimes against the Jews.
I think that the problem is that the Germans had a special problem coping with the Holocaust because these were, as the Polish Government rightly said, these were German concentration camps. Although Ukrainians, Poles, and so on collaborated, the concentration camps were German.
Prof. Shavit: Giacomo, my question for you is about perhaps the most contentious debate when it comes to Holocaust movies, which you have already referred to and somewhat hinted at where you stand, but I’m not sure I understood correctly. We are twenty years after that debate, so there is a bit of the benefit of retrospect or at least of a broader, longer perspective. Roberto Benigni and Life is Beautiful. Where do you stand in this debate?
Prof. Lichtner: I feel like I’ve made a career out of criticizing Life is Beautiful. I was an undergraduate when I first saw it, and I kept watching it, and each time I watched it, I liked it less. But I do remember the first time I saw it in the cinema at Christmas. Life is Beautiful was a Christmas release. And the posters advertising it showed Benigni and his wife, who’s also his on-screen wife, Nicoletta Braschi, smiling on a beautiful navy blue background with snowflakes falling.
I remember being really struck by the catharsis at the end of the movie, being moved, crying, and then each time I watched it, I liked it less.
Prof. Shavit: Why?
Prof. Lichtner: Because I think the second half is so false. You know, it’s not just inaccurate; it’s false. It’s entirely driven by the motivation of providing catharsis.
The first half is actually quite brave. It is brave because it breaks a big silence. The big silence in Italian culture is not antisemitism and the Holocaust. That’s something Italians, in the end, deal with quite easily because they just blame the Germans for it.
The big silence is Africa and what we Italians did in Ethiopia and in the other African colonies before the war. And Benigni has a way in that first half of the movie of criticizing fascist culture very subtly, including with things like the Ethiopian-themed party and so on.
There’s a critique of homemade antisemitism in the racial laws that’s actually rare in Italian cinema. The only other noticeable example I can think of is maybe Vittorio De Sica’s film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which acknowledged that Italy passed racially discriminating laws by itself well before the Second World War started, before Hitler demanded that they do so.
So, the first half of Life is Beautiful is quite brave, and the second half falls on its own premise. Benigni wants to carry on with this idea that life is beautiful, but once you take the characters into the concentration camp, it is, in my opinion, simply not possible anymore to keep that narrative going.
Prof. Shavit: Your criticism of that movie – how far will you take it? Will you say this is a movie that people should not watch, or will you say this is an effort that failed?
Prof. Lichtner: I think it’s an effort that failed. There are very few movies that I think people shouldn’t watch. Maybe Uwe Boll’s Auschwitz (2011), which was actually banned in Germany and is hard to get a hold of. Maybe that and then just a few others.
No, I definitely wouldn’t censor Life is Beautiful. I just think it’s an effort that failed, partly because Benigni is good at talking about what he knows about, which is not the Holocaust.
There’s a fantastic work by Ruth Ben-Ghiat about the film, where she says, look, forget about the Holocaust. The film is about Italy. The catharsis is the catharsis of Italy being liberated by the Americans.
And this is what infuriated some historians about the movie, the idea that Italian Jews go to this imaginary camp and then are liberated by the Americans instead of the Russians. It infuriated historians because Italian Jews, for the most part, including my grandfather, his mom, and his brother – they were all in Auschwitz – they were liberated by the Soviets. Mind you, Benigni’s father was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen, which was not liberated by the Soviets. It was liberated by the British.
Prof. Shavit: Going back to the cynicism, however, it’s not an effort that failed from Benigni’s point of view. He won the Oscar that he wanted to win.
Prof. Lichtner: From his point of view, he did it well. I think it fails because it doesn’t understand the essential elements of the history of the Shoah, the things that Moshe was talking about at the beginning: the systematic nature, the industrial nature, and the modernity of the Holocaust as a standalone event. He doesn’t understand that. How could he?
Prof. Shavit: I want to ask Shmulik about Israeli cinema now. In 2024, four major Israeli movies were released about the memory of the Holocaust; about how you deal with the memory of the Holocaust. Four! But not about the Holocaust itself.
And then, I look at the list of movies that have been produced since 1948, and there are hardly any Israel-produced films about the actual Holocaust. How do you explain that? In other words, why are there so few movies about the Holocaust, as opposed to the memory of the Holocaust?
Dr. Duvdevani: I think that there are three reasons why there were so few Israeli films that actually dealt with the Holocaust itself.
First, asking Israeli actors to play again the role of the victims and especially maybe asking Israeli actors to play Nazis, was difficult.
Second, Israeli cinema, at least in its early years, referred to the trauma of Holocaust survivors as one that can be remedied through fresher traumas, which were the focus of its attention.
The third problem is political; what analogies, whether ill-intended or not, will people draw from direct depictions of the Holocaust? Some Israeli moviemakers were reluctant to deal with the Holocaust directly because they feared the response of their peers in other countries, at least subconsciously.
Prof. Shavit: There was perhaps a technical impediment, which is, you know, you need access to certain sceneries if you want to adapt the novels of, say, Aharon Appelfeld to the big screen.
Dr. Duvdevani: Well, I know about at least one Israeli film that is being made at the moment in Yiddish and is being shot, I am not sure where; they wanted to shoot it in Ukraine, but it’s not shot there. And it’s actually a film dealing with the Holocaust.
Prof. Zuckerman: I think that there are no Israeli movies dealing directly with the Holocaust, but only with the memory of the Holocaust, because Israel, whatever the public opinion is, was never interested in the Holocaust. Israelis were always very interested only in the memory of the Holocaust as part of the ideologization of the Holocaust, in terms of Zionism being the solution and being the answer to the Holocaust. This is why, by the way, we don’t have proper research on antisemitism.
I’m thinking about research, proper research on antisemitism in terms of social, psychological, economic, and other aspects.
Prof. Shavit: Well, you know, Moshe, as someone who has dealt so much with memory and with history, you know that history is a work in progress. In the end, people learn history to justify the present and the future.
And now, very final questions calling for short answers. Shmulik, did The Brutalist deserve the Oscar for best movie it didn’t get?
Disclosure: I wish I thought this movie is bad. It is not, I thought worse of it. It’s banal; it does not say anything new or interesting about any of the complicated topics it broaches. As a commentary about the roots of American decline, it manifests the decline in not being able to add something inspiring to the discussion. Sorry for the Spenglerian tone. Anyhow, do you think it deserved the Oscar?
Dr. Duvdevani: Yes.
Prof. Shavit: Why?
Dr. Duvdevani: Because I think it is major movie making. It is a very long epic, though a very intimate epic, about antisemitism, Zionism, memory, architecture, and capitalism, and it deals with all these complicated issues creatively, coherently, and with much substance.
Prof. Shavit: Moshe, if a German high school teacher told you he could show his class, let’s say of 12th graders, just one movie about the Holocaust, which would you recommend?
Prof. Zuckerman: I would recommend Lanzmann’s Shoah in a shorter version. You don’t need the whole eight hours, but in a shorter version, I would recommend it.
Prof. Shavit: You’re optimistic that high school students today can deal even with a shorter version.
Prof. Zuckerman: No, I’m not optimistic at all. You asked me what I’d recommend, not what could actually work.
Prof. Shavit: Giacomo, same question but for New Zealand high school students.
Prof. Lichtner: High school students? I mean, the smart answer is Jojo Rabbit (2019).
Prof. Shavit: Why is that your recommendation?
Prof. Lichtner: Because it’s a New Zealand film by director Taika Waititi, who’s half-Māori, half-Jewish. He made Boy (2010) for his Māori father. He made Jojo Rabbit for his Jewish mother, and it’s a film that is obviously, evidently fantastical, so you don’t have to deal so much with the fear of people coming out of it thinking they understand the Holocaust now. It’s approachable.
Prof. Shavit: And for Italian high school students, will the recommendation be the same?
Prof. Lichtner: No, for Italian students, I would probably get them to watch Kapo by Gillo Pontecorvo, which was made in 1960. This movie is so important to the history of the representation of the Holocaust in cinema. The way it approaches certain imagery – the barbed wire, for instance, became a trope that then got quoted over and over again in Holocaust movies.
I think that in this movie you can see a Jewish prayer in Hebrew for the first time in the history of Italian cinema. At least, it is one of the first times. The Shema are not quite the final words in the movie, but are the final words of the protagonist. And then she dies. It is quite a powerful film. Problematic in all sorts of ways, but powerful.
Prof. Shavit: Why would you offer New Zealander and Italian high school pupils different movies?
Prof. Lichtner: Well, they need to learn different things.
With contribution from Amarah Friedman
Lithuania: The Political Rise of an Antisemite by Dr. Carl Yonker
The October 2024 parliamentary elections in Lithuania marked a shift in the country’s political landscape. The Social Democratic Party of Lithuania (LSDP), under the leadership of Vilija Blinkevičiūtė, secured 52 out of 141 seats in the Seimas, the parliament, ending the four-year tenure of the center-right government led by Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė and her Homeland Union (TS-LKD), which managed to obtain only 28 seats.[1]
While the rise of the Social Democrats and the decline of the Homeland Union was expected, less so was the success of Nemunas Dawn, a newly established populist party led by a politician known for his openly antisemitic statements, Remigijus Žemaitaitis. Nemunas Dawn, which Žemaitaitis formed in 2023, secured 20 seats and finished third in the elections. An even bigger shock was the decision by the Social Democrats to form a coalition with Žemaitaitis and his party despite pre-election statements it would not do so.
A lawyer by training, Žemaitaitis first entered the Seimas in 2009 as a member of the Order and Justice party, a conservative right-wing party championing anti-establishment views, winning his local constituency of Šilalė–Šilutė.[2] He served as its chairman from 2016 to 2020 when Order and Justice merged with two other parties to form the Freedom and Justice party, a center-right conservative party with liberal economic positions.
Known for his inflammatory rhetoric and populist tactics throughout his political career, Žemaitaitis gained notoriety in 2023 for a series of antisemitic social media posts accusing Jews of historical crimes against Lithuanians, distorting the history of the Holocaust, and making antisemitic comments about Israel.
The resulting scandal led to his suspension from the Freedom and Justice party and an April 2024 ruling by Lithuania’s Constitutional Court that he had violated his parliamentary oath and Lithuania’s Constitution by inciting hatred. This ruling led to his resignation from the Seimas to avoid impeachment.
In doing so, Žemaitaitis ensured his ability to remain a candidate in Lithuania’s May 2024 presidential election and return to the Lithuanian parliament in October 2024 as a leader of a radical new force. Indeed, despite his antisemitic remarks and controversies surrounding his historical revisionism, he maintained a strong support base among certain nationalist and far-right voter segments, as well as rural voters. He did so by portraying himself as a defender of “Lithuanian sovereignty” and a victim of elites trying to silence him from telling the truth about Jews, the Holocaust in Lithuania, and Israel.
Žemaitaitis has had a troubled relation to facts and decency when Jews or Israel are concerned. In early May 2023, reports emerged that Israeli authorities, carrying out a court order, demolished a European Union (EU)-funded Palestinian school near Bethlehem. The Israeli court found that the school had been constructed illegally in 2017 and that the structure was unsafe and in danger of collapsing.[3]
The demolition was condemned by the EU and the Palestinian Authority (PA).[4] Žemaitaitis added his voice to the criticism of Israel’s destruction of the school in two Facebook posts commenting on the incident, where he cited a well-known Lithuanian folk song with deep-seated antisemitic lyrics.
In his first post, he wrote, “Apparently, there are animals in this world besides Putin, Israel […] After such events, no wonder there appear sayings like this: ‘A Jew was climbing the ladder and accidentally fell off; take a stick, kids, and kill that little Jew.’ What else must happen for Israel to realize that such provocations and such actions only stir more anger and hatred against Jews and their people.”
In a second post made shortly thereafter, Žemaitaitis repeated the antisemitic children’s rhyme urging “Israeli Jews” to apologize to the Palestinians and the EU for “your nasty little actions in a foreign country.”[5]Several days later, he continued to make a public spectacle, apologizing as a “European, a member of the Seimas” to the Palestinian people for the Israeli actions; his post received over one thousand likes.[6]
Žemaitaitis’s inflammatory posts provoked a swift backlash and led to calls for disciplinary action against him. The embassies of Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States and the World Jewish Congress condemned the statements and called on Žemaitaitis to publicly apologize.
Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC), noted that Žemaitaitis’s statements were crafted not for Jews but for a Lithuanian audience, exploiting nationalist sentiments and historical grievances to promote his political agenda.[7] Žemaitaitis’s party, Freedom and Justice, expelled him, although he dismissed this as an illegal act and accused his former colleagues of supporting “a terrorist state – Israel.”[8] The Seimas’s Ethics and Procedures Commission launched an investigation into his conduct, and the Vilnius District Prosecutor’s Office initiated a pre-trial investigation into his possible incitement of ethnic discord.[9]
Žemaitaitis remained defiant, refusing to apologize for his remarks and instead portraying himself as a victim of political persecution and arguing that he was exercising free speech. He doubled down on his use of the antisemitic rhyme, saying he did so intentionally to argue that the state of Israel was causing antisemitism to rise around the world through its policies. He further warned that any impeachment efforts against him would be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights.[10]
A month later, in June 2023, Žemaitaitis expanded his antisemitic rhetoric to include historical revisionism in another series of inflammatory Facebook posts that distorted the Holocaust. He suggested Lithuanians suffered more than Jews in the Second World War and blamed Jews for crimes against Lithuanians. Targeting then-Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė while she visited Israel, Žemaitaitis condemned her visit and falsely claimed that Lithuanian Jews and Russians committed the June 1944 massacre in Pirčiupiai, which was actually perpetrated by a Nazi SS unit.[11] Demanding the government care more about Lithuanians allegedly murdered by Jews between 1941 and 1944, he continued,
How much longer will our politicians kneel down to the Jews who killed our people and contributed to the oppression and torture of Lithuanians and the destruction of our country? There was a Holocaust of the Jews, but there was an even larger Holocaust of the Lithuanians in Lithuania! So, if our joker politicians apologize to the Jews in Israel, when will the Jews apologize to us?[12]
Over the following days, including the June 14 Day of Mourning and Hope, which commemorates Soviet deportations of Lithuanians to Siberia, Žemaitaitis continued his tirade in several other posts. Addressing the deportations, Žemaitaitis stated: “We, the Lithuanian people, must never forget the Jews and the Russians who very actively contributed to the destruction of our nation!”[13] He further argued that the “descendants of those NKVD and KGB,” meaning Jews, rule over Lithuanians today and that June 14 should be commemorated as the national day of the “Lithuanian Holocaust.”[14]
In another post, he published a list of Jewish individuals who he falsely accused of orchestrating Soviet deportations of Lithuanians in 1941, writing, “Even after 80 years have passed, one ‘subspecies’ group of Jews is still not able to admit that in this tragedy of Lithuania their representatives played a very important role.”[15]
Žemaitaitis’s claims equating Soviet-era deportations and repressions with the Holocaust, framing Lithuanians as the true victims of genocide, and minimizing Jewish suffering and historical evidence of Lithuanian complicity in Holocaust crimes were not original or uncommon. They echo known revisionist narratives that seek to relativize the Holocaust by emphasizing the suffering of non-Jewish populations under Soviet rule and the antisemitic depiction of Jews as collaborators with the Soviet regime.
As other countries in Europe, Lithuania confronts a complicated past. The nation was a victim of injustice but also the perpetrator of injustice and was occupied by the Germans and the Soviets. The contested manner in which Lithuanians engage with their complicated past is captured by, among other things, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, which this author visited in the summer of 2023.
Located in the former KGB building in Vilnius, between 1940 and 1941, it was the prison of the NKVD/NKGB before serving as the headquarters of the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst (SD, SS intelligence), and the SD’s Sonderkommando (special squad, YB) of local Lithuanian volunteers who participated in the slaughter of Lithuania’s Jews from 1941-1944. It was then reoccupied by the KGB in 1944. However, until 2011, there was not a single exhibit in the museum about the Holocaust or about Lithuanian complicity in Nazi crimes. The “genocide” the museum dubiously referred to was that of non-Jewish Lithuanians murdered by the Soviets. Moreover, some Lithuanians who helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust, that is, in murdering their fellow Lithuanians, were lauded and praised for resisting the Soviets.[16]
Žemaitaitis’s remarks reflect the difficulty Lithuania has had in confronting its complicated past. Žemaitaitis claimed he was merely exposing historical truths about Jewish involvement in Soviet crimes in an attempt to justify himself. Yet, as several critics and historians noted, Žemaitaitis distorts historical facts and essentially is willing to say anything that will make him popular among the disaffected, the poorly educated about the crimes of the Holocaust and those who are, simply put, antisemites.[17]
The Lithuanian Jewish Community expressed its deep concern and sadness over Žemaitaitis’s rhetoric, emphasizing that such statements had not appeared in mainstream Lithuanian discourse for years.[18] That Žemaitaitis’s diatribe coincided with Lithuania’s commemoration of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto (June 1943, which SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered) made the timing of his statements even more painful for Lithuania’s Jewish community.
The government response to Žemaitaitis’s statements during 2023 was mixed. Leading figures, including then-Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė and then-Speaker of Parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, condemned his remarks, and Speaker Čmilytė-Nielsen suggested Žemaitaitis should be impeached and removed from parliament.
The ruling coalition demanded an apology for his antisemitic remarks before the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, but opposition parties refused to support the motion. Some opposition parties also refused to support efforts to impeach and remove him from parliament, signaling a reluctance to take a firm stance against antisemitism.[19]
For his part, Žemaitaitis remained defiant, asking what exactly he should apologize for. He threatened that if impeachment proceedings were started against him, he would appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, local courts, and society.[20]
Lithuanian Prosecutor General Nida Grunskienė stated that the legal proceedings against Žemaitaitis would depend on expert assessments of whether his statements constituted incitement to hatred. Given Lithuania’s legal framework, which includes laws against hate speech and ethnic incitement, a possibility existed that he could face criminal charges.[21]
While the international condemnation of Žemaitaitis’s remarks, coupled with domestic calls for accountability, suggested broad opposition to such rhetoric, the political resistance to Žemaitaitis’s removal from parliament raised questions about the extent to which there was the will to hold him accountable for his antisemitic statements.
In September 2023, the Lithuanian Parliament established a commission to investigate Žemaitaitis’s antisemitic statements on Facebook and determine whether he should be impeached. Initially, opposition parties viewed the commission as a politically motivated effort by the ruling conservative party to remove an opposition MP.
Following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, Žemaitaitis justified the war crimes committed by the Islamist terrorists, stating, “There are two ends to the stick; now the Israeli barbarians must suffer for murdering Palestinians.” These words encouraged a stronger push for his impeachment. As a result, 88 members of parliament voted in favor of continuing proceedings against him, while only two opposed and two abstained.[22]
Despite the establishment of a special impeachment commission to review the case, Žemaitaitis repeatedly failed to appear at meetings. On one occasion, Commission Chairman Arūnas Valinskas stated: “We won’t undertake additional measures. We will simply send an access link to all meetings we hold in the future and will provide the member of parliament the chance to connect and explain his position.” Valinskas further noted that Žemaitaitis’s refusal to present his own explanations could be perceived as a deliberate attempt to discredit the commission’s work, possibly exploiting loopholes in parliamentary statutes.[23]
While the commission continued its work, Žemaitaitis behaved as though he had done nothing wrong. No longer a member of the Freedom and Justice party, in January 2024, Žemaitaitis registered Nemunas Dawn as a party and announced his candidacy for the May 2024 presidential elections.[24]
His announced presidential bid coincided with Lithuanian Prosecutor General Nida Grunskienė’s request for parliament to strip Žemaitaitis of his parliamentary immunity, citing his repeated posting of content on Facebook in May and June 2023 that allegedly mocked, belittled, and incited hatred against Jewish people. Grunskienė informed parliament that “the information collected in the pre-trial investigation lends credence that member of parliament Žemaitaitis […] posted texts on his social media pages which might have mocked, belittled, and encouraged hate publicly against the group of people of Jewish ethnicity.”[25]
While Žemaitaitis admitted to posting the comments during an interview with prosecutors, he insisted that he was merely expressing his opinion and denied engaging in hate speech. The following month, in February 2024, the Lithuanian parliament approved the removal of Žemaitaitis parliamentary immunity in response to allegations of antisemitic statements, opening the door to criminal prosecution.
As the criminal investigation into his antisemitic social media posts continued, efforts to remove Žemaitaitis from parliament received a boost in April 2024 from the Lithuanian Constitutional Court, which ruled that Žemaitaitis’s statements violated his parliamentary oath and the Constitution. The court found that his social media posts contained “degrading descriptions of Jewish people and Holocaust denial,” which amounted to a “gross violation” of the country’s fundamental law.
The court elaborated that his statements “[contained], among other things, degrading descriptions of people belonging to an ethnically distinct group and [quoted] a counting-out rhyme […] depicting violence against Jewish people, mocking them.” Furthermore, the ruling emphasized that Žemaitaitis’s statements incited intolerance between ethnic minorities and demonstrated hatred toward an ethnically distinct group.[26]
On these grounds, the Lithuanian parliament had legal grounds to call a vote to impeach and remove Žemaitaitis. Such a vote never occurred after Žemaitaitis, who called the ruling “unjust,” chose to resign from parliament rather than face an impeachment vote. In avoiding impeachment, Žemaitaitis ensured his ability to run in the upcoming presidential election and parliamentary elections.[27] He found a loophole.
Elected through a two-round system, a candidate in the presidential race must secure an absolute majority in the first round to win; otherwise, a runoff between the top two candidates is necessary. In the 2024 election, incumbent President Gitanas Nausėda, an independent supported by the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Regions Party, sought re-election against Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė of the Homeland Union.
No candidate achieved an absolute majority in the first round, necessitating a runoff. President Nauseda won 44%, while Šimonytė took second place with 20% of the vote and Žemaitaitis came in fourth with 9.28% of the vote (more than 132,000 total votes).[28]
At one point, before election results from cities had been counted, Žemaitaitis polled in second place, an achievement that surprised even him. Though ultimately falling to fourth place, winning over 9% of the vote despite his known antisemitic statements suggested such views are applauded or at least are considered legitimate by a segment of the electorate.
Žemaitaitis ultimately gave his support to the incumbent Nausėda in the second round, who secured a decisive victory with 75.29% of the vote, the largest margin in Lithuania’s presidential election history since its independence in 1990.
Following his failed presidential bid, Žemaitaitis turned his attention to parliamentary elections slated for October 2024. As part of his parliamentary campaign, he portrayed himself as a victim of “cancel culture,” claiming he was being persecuted for expressing views on Israel and Jews that were unpopular with the political elite. “I feel it is my duty to fight for the right to have an opinion and to express it. And not only for myself. Above all, for the people of Lithuania not to be afraid to speak out and criticize the government,” Žemaitaitis stated.[29] He went so far as to petition the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to investigate whether Lithuanian authorities had violated his freedom of expression.
While Žemaitaitis played the victim in a vulgar yet not unique demonstration of how civil liberties can be cynically abused by hate-mongers, efforts to hold him accountable for his antisemitic rhetoric continued. In September 2024, the Vilnius Regional Court began hearing a criminal case against him for inciting hatred. Prosecutors charged him with hate speech, Holocaust denial, and inciting hostility toward Jews. The indictment referenced his claim that “Lithuanian Jews orchestrated mass deportations of Lithuanians in 1941.” Prosecutor Justas Laucius stated that “The evidence clearly shows a pattern of deliberate antisemitic rhetoric aimed at fostering division.”[30] Žemaitaitis denied the charges, asserting that his words were taken out of context.
As criminal proceedings began, Lithuanian politicians began to debate the broader implications of Žemaitaitis’s rhetoric openly. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis called for a “cordon sanitaire” to prevent radical parties from gaining power after the upcoming parliamentary election, warning that history shows the tragic consequences of pandering to such radical forces.[31]
To avoid such an outcome, Landsbergis and his ruling conservative Homeland Union party appealed to the Social Democratic party to engage in talks about forming a “unity” coalition. The Kaunas Jewish Community warned that any political party willing to form a coalition with Žemaitaitis and Nemunas Dawn would be complicit in normalizing hate speech. “We cannot erase nor forget that he [Žemaitaitis] used antisemitic rhetoric as a springboard for his election,” said Gercas Žakas, chairman of the Kaunas Jewish Community.
Their warnings and pleas fell on deaf ears.
The Social Democrats’ success in the elections, winning an additional 13 seats under the leadership of Vilija Blinkevičiūtė, was driven by public dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of key issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the influx of migrants from Belarus, which had sparked a considerable amount of political unrest.[32] Despite Lithuania’s economic stability, with robust growth and low inflation, the incumbent center-right government, led by Prime Minister Šimonytė’s Homeland Union, failed to maintain voter support.[33] Žemaitaitis’s Nemunas Dawn’s winning of 20 seats, an impressive achievement for a new party, owed, in part, to its promises of tax breaks for large families as well as its reassurances that it supports Ukraine in its war against fascist Russia, albeit through rhetoric that criticized the American involvement in the conflict.[34]
During the campaign, the Social Democrats pledged not to cooperate with Nemunas Dawn and initially appeared to adhere to their word. They entered into negotiations with the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union (LVŽS) and the Union of Democrats “For Lithuania.” The two had won eight and 14 seats, respectively. Negotiations with the LVŽS failed, at which point the Social Democrats reneged on their pledge and engaged Nemunas Dawn in coalition talks.
While the potential inclusion of Nemunas Dawn in coalition negotiations sparked controversy due to the legal proceedings against Žemaitaitis and his known antisemitic remarks and historical revisionism, the talks proceeded and resulted in the formation of a three-party coalition – Social Democrats, Nemunas Dawn, and For Lithuania, holding a parliamentary majority with 86 seats. As part of the agreement, Nemunas Dawn received three of the 14 cabinet positions in the new government: the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Energy, and the Ministry of Justice.
The coalition’s formation was met with considerable opposition, both domestically and internationally. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda called the coalition a “mistake” and made it clear that he would not appoint any ministers from Nemunas Dawn. Nausėda kept his pledge in principle, as Nemunas Dawn, instead of nominating party members for the cabinet positions, endorsed three independent candidates who the president confirmed. But the President did not keep his promise in spirit, as he de-facto permitted an antisemite to become kingmaker and a dominant force in the cabinet.
Noting the coalition agreement was already causing a problem for the country internationally, as important allies like the United States, Germany, and Israel expressed their misgivings and frustration, Nausėda questioned, “What self-respecting person would want to identify with the leader of this party?”[35]
During the first session of the new parliament and the swearing in of new members, protests against Nemunas Dawn and Žemaitaitis were held outside and in the cities of Kaunas and Tauragė, while opposition MPs (those who the previous year had worked to impeach him) left the parliament hall when Žemaitaitistook his oath of office.[36]
The Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC) voiced strong concerns over the implications of the coalition. It expressed its dismay over the inclusion of a party led by a person who had made antisemitic remarks and was the subject of an ongoing criminal case for inciting ethnic hatred. LJC Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky strongly condemned Žemaitaitis’ comments, describing them as deeply offensive and harmful. The LJC warned that the coalition would damage Lithuania’s international reputation and harm the country’s democratic principles. This sentiment was echoed by opposition leaders, who argued that Lithuania’s democracy was at stake if hate speech was tolerated within the highest levels of government.
As the coalition government took shape, Žemaitaitis continued to face legal scrutiny for his antisemitic statements. In December 2024, Lithuania’s Prosecutor General formally requested again that the parliament strip Žemaitaitis of his immunity so that his criminal case could proceed. The request was approved, with 101 votes in favor and none against or abstaining.
Žemaitaitis, as always, dismissed the charges as politically motivated, claiming that the case was a form of “political persecution.”[37] At the time the Report went to print, criminal proceedings against Žemaitaitis were ongoing and the coalition remained intact.
Žemaitaitis’s political success can be attributed to his ability to harness populist rhetoric and capitalize on the dissatisfaction of certain segments of the Lithuanian electorate, particularly in rural areas. Žemaitaitis has sophisticatedly positioned himself as a populist outsider, offering a critique of the political elites in Vilna, including the Social Democrats and the more established conservative parties.
Žemaitaitis’s rhetoric often focuses on attacking the political establishment, which he portrays as corrupt and out of touch with the needs of ordinary Lithuanians.[38] His historically revisionist statements and legal battles helped Žemaitaitis frame himself as a victim of the system and become the leader of the third-largest party in parliament.
Yet, for Žemaitaitis and his party to become members of a governing coalition, more was needed: a mainstream party willing to renege on its pre-election pledges not to join forces with an openly antisemitic populist. The Social Democrats made a compromise that favored power over principles and, in the process, legitimized that which should never be legitimized again in Europe.
[38] Samoškaitė, “Sneering at Israel, Swearing at Elites.”
The United States: Seinfeld Returns to the Chronicles
Prof. Uriya Shavit
Seinfeld was not a show about nothing. Neither did it stand out from other popular sitcoms just because of Larry David’s “no hugging, no learning” formula and the cynicism and anti-social behavior it displayed. Its best episodes, and there are dozens of them, have the psychological and philosophical depth of great literature, transforming depictions of daily routines into cultural canon. They hilariously and troublingly convey how the abundance of cultural references, the ease of duplication and imitation, and the breakdown of traditional institutions impose the Freudian unheimlich, the uncanniness generated by the familiar becoming unfamiliar, on urban souls. The carefree yet anxious, detached lives of the fabulous four reflected a zeitgeist without ever intending to, and, a moment before smartphones and social media took over, prophesied deepening crises.
I saw Jerry Seinfeld in real life just once, at a press conference in Tel Aviv in November 2007. He came to promote a now all-but-forgotten movie. Real-life John Cleese is as different from Basil Fawlty as any person can be. What struck me about Seinfeld was how much he was the exact same Seinfeld from the series. He was not acting on the set. He was himself.
The real Jerry Seinfeld grew up in Long Island, attended Hebrew school, had a Bar Mitzvah, and volunteered in Kibbutz Saar in northern Israel at the age of 16. Yet in his thirties, at the height of the series’ success, there wasn’t anything manifestly Jewish about him, and there wasn’t anything manifestly Jewish about his fictional self, other than that they liked telling jokes for a living, which for some reason is considered a Jewish trait. The Seinfeld persona was made of all-American and New York icons and traditions, from baseball to cornflakes to Superman. No Star of David, no lighting of the candles when others have Christmas trees, no Yiddish phrases, no Hebrew, no rallying for Israel, no comical gigs inspired by Archie Bunker 1970s style prejudice directed against him.
In the series, his best friend, George, is questionably Jewish on his mother’s side (search “was George Costanza…” and see how Google completes the sentence). There are plenty of Jewish characters throughout, from the distant relative who had a pony in Poland to the mohel with the shaking hands to the rabbi who cannot keep a secret to the dentist who converts so that he can tell jokes about Jews. They all comically pale compared to other supporting actors and are all very much external to the reality of fictional Jerry’s life (or real Jerry’s life), which at the time was devoid of Jewish symbols, sentiments, politics, or texts as a natural reflection of being bereft of any mature or serious commitments to anything but his comedy.
Being a Jew and an American was, in the 1990s, one and the same for the fictional Seinfeld, just as it was for the real one. Rather than the old deliberate distancing from one’s roots for social gain, Seinfeld’s casual approach to his roots was enabled by a social transformation: the emergence of secular Jews who felt fully accepted in American society.
True to its New York environment, the series was rich with ethnic characters, from Pakistanis (the unforgettable Babu Bhatt, played by the Jewish actor Brian George) to South Koreans to Puerto Ricans. Seinfeld and his gang often clashed with them because of cultural differences or because they were mean, but this was never a clash between a member of one minority group and a member of another. It was clear that the easy-going Jerry was master of the domain called New York, even when tricked or embarrassed by people with funny accents. There was no meaningful substance to Seinfeld’s Jewishness in the 1990s because society made it possible for him not to be concerned with identity issues.
To appreciate how anything but obvious this positioning of an American Jew was, consider one of the most influential books in the history of Migration Studies, Nathan Glazer’s and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, published in 1963.
The term “melting pot” was popularized in the early 1900s through a play by the same name written by the British-Jewish author Israel Zangwil, the leader of Territorialist Zionism. It depicted the integration-drama of a Russian-Jewish survivor of a pogrom in the United States.
Beyond the Melting Pot explored five ethnic groups in New York through field studies: African Americans (that is not the name they used), Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish, and Jews. The main argument was that assimilation is a far-fetched concept and that hyphenated identities in America are more endurable than what people tend to think. According to Moynihan and Glazer, fourth- and fifth-generation Americans with migratory backgrounds were still attached, for various reasons, to their origins and a community that represented those origins.
In the 1990s, Seinfeld – and Seinfeld – confidently suggested that secular, urban Jews have become the pot itself in which others may or may not melt; that Jews stand for what America is and what being American is. For Jews who grew up in the days when golf clubs shunned them and family names were changed so they didn’t ring Jewish, this was a revolution. For Jews who grew up in America of the 1970s, it seemed natural.
Israel is mentioned only twice in the series and only once directly by Seinfeld. The episode “The Cigar Store Indian” (74, aired December 1993, written by Tom Gammill and Max Pross) is one of the strongest and earliest warnings about the danger that political correctness would get out of hand. In one of the scenes, a mailman of Chinese extraction is upset with Jerry for asking him if there is a good Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, precisely at the moment when Jerry tries to convince the Native American woman he wants to date that he is very much politically correct, very aware about identity issues.
Reflecting on this encounter hours later, Jerry laments to George that everyone is becoming too sensitive, adding, “somebody asks me which way is Israel, I don’t fly off the handle.” Israel is on his mind as something that belongs to him, but only as a distant abstraction, a jesting reference. Political correctness is strange to him because he feels secure in the place his ethnicity acquired in American society in a way the Chinese mailman or the Native American are still not.
In the one-before-final episode in the series, the Puerto Ricans march, and Seinfeld and his gang end up stuck in traffic jams on their way home. Seinfeld does not march in the series with his people on Israel’s Independence Day. He does not feel he needs to.
***
There is no better demonstration of Seinfeld’s and Seinfeld’s confident and carefree detachment from the burdens of the Jewish hyphen and Jewish memory during the 1990s than the treatment of the Holocaust and antisemitism in the series. That treatment offers astute observations about totalitarianism, neo-Nazism, and Holocaust education. Yet, in line with Seinfeld’s general alienation at the time from rootedness of any sort, let alone one that calls for political commitment, it also testifies to how convinced Seinfeld was, at the time, that the past is no particular concern of his, how unburdened he was.
“The Soup Nazi,” one of the most celebrated Seinfeld episodes (116, aired November 1995, written by Spike Feresten), is a shrewd comment about how easily people resign to submissive, herd behavior and how one free spirit can destroy an entire tyrannical order. The conformist Jerry follows the bizarre and condescending procedures imposed by the eccentric and masterful owner of a soup stand, just like his nemesis Newman does. Kramer, the outcast and conspiracy theories fan, not only submits, but also identifies with the dictator. George is more than willing to submit after his chutzpah fails him at first and is satisfied that giving up his pride for a brief culinary delight is worth it. In contrast, Elaine stands alone, just, in insisting there are bigger things in life than soup, such as dignity and freedom of expression. When a rare act of kindness by the authoritarian soup maker inadvertently lands her his secret recipes, his entire regime collapses and he flees to another country.
One of the things that made this episode iconic within weeks of its airing was that it was based on a real soup stand and a real-life character, the Persian-American Ali Yeganeh, who was furious with the cast rather than happy with the glory that befell him and its potential rewards. Whether or not he was actually so rude has become a matter of controversy.
Funny as the “Soup Nazi” may be, there is a caveat. Seinfeld was not the first great comedian to make a joke of Nazism. Yet whereas in Mel Brook’s The Producers the comical usage of Nazism was essential for the movie’s sub-textual comments about the concealed fascist essence of musicals and popular culture at large and about the thin line between being a joke and making a joke, and whereas in Fawlty Towers’ episode “The Germans” the usage of Nazism was essential to make the point about Britain’s desperate hanging to its past, the “Soup Nazi’s” take on despotism and submissiveness would have worked well also without the vendor’s depiction as a Nazi.
Seinfeld did not introduce the use of “Nazi” as a joking pejorative term for everyday life situations involving rude, meticulous, and imposing personalities. Still, the unfortunate cultural impact of the episode was that it legitimized the comical, casual usage of the term in popular culture. This could not have happened unless for Seinfeld, at that time, the term was just another taboo to break. That mainstream television, and a Jew, were so comfortable with such a usage meant everyone might legitimately feel the same.
“The Limo” (19, aired February 1992, story by Marc Jaffe and teleplay by Larry Charles) has George pretending to be the never-seen-in-public-before Donald O’Brien, the leader of the Aryan Union and author of the antisemitic manifesto “The Big Game.” The childish trick is played so that he and Jerry can enjoy a free ride in a limousine from the airport.
This was the first Seinfeld episode with a sophisticated, dark plot, an urban-legend bent, and an unheimlich scent, as George turns out to be comfortable as an impostor of a neo-Nazi leader, and the four friends display how little they actually know about the other and how little trust they have in each other. As the “The Soup Nazi,” the episode is a sharp social commentary, exposing the intellectual laziness and fetishism of American white supremacists. The scene where Eva, a member of the party, passionately flirts with George is one of the best in the series, and so is the one where George receives the draft of the anti-Jewish speech he is supposed to deliver shortly.
One thing missing, however, is a direct reference to Jerry’s Jewishness in all of this. He finds the neo-Nazis in the limo funny at first and then, when things get out of hand, is terrified by them. But he is not terrified as Jerry the Jew. It is remarkable that in an episode that almost begs that reference, Seinfeld’s Judaism is only in the background.
“The Raincoats,” a double-episode (82, 83, aired in April 1994, written by Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Larry David, and Jerry Seinfeld), centers on Aaron, a close-talker dating Elaine, who is exceptionally selfless and kind-hearted. Jerry’s Jewish parents are staying over, making it impossible for him to make out with his Jewish girlfriend. He finally manages to fool around with her in the darkness of a movie theater while watching Schindler’s List, which they go to only because his parents insist it’s a must-watch. His shame is exposed by his nemesis, Newman. (In that news conference in Tel Aviv I attended, asking Seinfeld questions about Seinfeld was strictly forbidden. One journalist nevertheless asked whether the Jerry Seinfeld who just visited Yad Vashem was the same Jerry Seinfeld who made out during Schindler’s List. The crack was too good for Seinfeld not to appreciate).
As in the “Soup Nazi” and “The Limo,” in “The Raincoats,” too, there is more sophistication than first meets the eye. The episode can be interpreted as a well-deserved criticism of the transformation of the memory of the Holocaust into symbolic capital. “The must-watch movie” about the Holocaust, which does not really represent its horrors, is the currency through which “the must-be-earned prize” is awarded, the six million are thanked and parents and educators are satisfied that they took care of heritage-education for their children, even though they did not.
The fictional Seinfeld appears so sincere in his lack of interest in Schindler’s List. The reason does not seem to be that he is fed up with learning about the Holocaust or because it is too painful for him to learn about it at all. Fictional Seinfeld doesn’t care about Holocaust movies because he doesn’t care about anything; because that is the core of his personality. The episode and the real Seinfeld were more than content with telling the world that indifference to the memory of the Holocaust is no different than not caring about anything that rings serious in general.
The scriptwriters could not resist drawing a comical comparison between Aaron, the selfless close-talker, and Oscar Schindler, the righteous among the nations. The joke is not funny not only because it is too blunt and artificial, but also because there is a fine line between sticking a pin in the balloon of virtue signaling and the memory of the Holocaust itself. That fine line could not have been blurred if the Jerry Seinfeld of the mid-1990s, that is, the real Jerry Seinfeld, was not the American comedian who just happened to be Jewish.
***
After Seinfeld ended in 1998, Seinfeld got married and seemed content with the realization that he would never achieve anything bigger in life. One would think that the time had come for him to leave behind the persona of the adolescent and use his fame and money for good causes – for example, as Christopher Reeve did. While it was not his favorite superhero who said so, it is still true: with great power comes great responsibility.
That did not happen. Throughout the first two decades of the new millennium, Seinfeld the husband, the father, the celebrity, said almost nothing meaningful about any global or local cause, including Middle Eastern affairs and the state of Israel. He could not bring himself even to say something about the Trump phenomenon (good, bad, mixed, something). He supported a post his Jewish wife, the author of several cookbooks, Jessica, published against antisemitism on Instagram in 2022, but did so in the most unemotional, cautious way, celebrating its lack of aggressiveness. “I am just a comedian” was his unofficial slogan. It seemed helpless; Seinfeld and Seinfeld would always remain on the bench.
All of that makes what happened with Seinfeld after October 7 all the more remarkable.
Discussing the abundance of antisemitic attacks in America following the Gaza War and their impact on Jewish families, Franklin Foer wrote in The Atlantic that “the golden age of American Jews is ending.” For several generations, he argued, Jews in America enjoyed safety, prosperity, and political influence without having to relinquish their identity. “But that era is drawing to a close” in the face of growing extremism and mob behavior from both left and right, raising alarm about the future of Jews in America – and the future of America itself.[1]
Witnessing the comeback of antisemitism and feeling under threat, some American Jews have begun to engage more profoundly with their roots and identity and have vowed to take action. Bret Stephens of the New York Times wrote about “The Year American Jews Woke Up.” For years, he argued, American Jews knew that antisemitism and prejudice against them still existed, but only “after October 7, it became personal,” transforming them into “October 8 Jews” who are forced to reckon with the prevalence of hate against them.[2]
This depiction fits Seinfeld well.
On October 10, 2023, Seinfeld released the following post on Instagram: “I lived and worked on a Kibbutz in Israel when I was 16 and I have loved our Jewish homeland ever since. My heart is breaking from these attacks and atrocities. But we are also a very strong people in our hearts and minds. We believe in justice, freedom and equality. We survive and flourish no matter what. I will always stand with Israel and the Jewish people.” Attached was a poster of a girl covered with the Israeli flag and the banner “I stand with Israel.”[3]
Seinfeld also joined in the immediate aftermath of the attack some 700 people from the Hollywood entertainment industry in signing a strong-worded open letter condemning Hamas and calling for the immediate release of the hostages held in Gaza. It asked the entertainment community to speak out forcefully against the Islamist terror organization, to support Israel, and to refrain from sharing misinformation about the war. There were some big names there, but none was as big as Seinfeld’s.[4]
Two months later, Seinfeld, accompanied by his wife, visited Israel in a show of solidarity. He traveled to Kibbutz Beeri on the Gaza border and met with family members of hostages. He expressed his horror and reiterated his commitment to the people of Israel and to spreading the truth about what happened around the world. He mainly listened and talked little, as American guests tend to do in formal visits, often to the surprise of their Israeli hosts. There was no hugging, it seemed, but there was some learning.[5]
Then came what was probably the most overflowing public display of emotion in his life, when Seinfeld was on the verge of tearing up while reflecting on his visit to Israel in an interview on Bari Weiss’ Honestly podcast series. He described the tour as “the most powerful experience of my life.” Unable to explain the experience in words, his broken voice and struggle to control himself spoke instead.[6]
The reaction to his unequivocal pro-Israel position could only be expected. The heckling, the booing, the allegations that he supports genocide. For some, it wasn’t just his fame that made his involvement so outrageous, but his decision to finally take a side in a public debate regarding a conflict they believed was nuanced. Seinfeld did not back down or offer any yes-but rhetoric intended to make everyone happy.
You’d expect the Jerry of the 1990s, the fictitious and the real, would have. In an interview with GQ, he said that while he was aware antisemitism existed before October 7, it never crossed his mind, just as it never crossed the minds of other Jews from his generation, that people would ever treat him based on his Judaism and in antisemitic language. He made clear he did not regret speaking his mind and that his feelings were very strong.[7]
But he also made clear that he was not the champion of a cause, and pretended – or did he? – that he was surprised people aim at him, as if the words of a comedian like him carry any importance. I watched the commencement address he gave in May 2024 at Duke University. He was noticeably apolitical and avoided controversy. He did not make up his mind whether he wanted to be funny or inspirational, and ended up being neither, with sentences like “Don’t think about having, think about becoming.”[8] A few students, who probably could not tell the river from the sea, left in protest when he was invited to speak, booing. Seinfeld seemed nervous, but it appeared to be not because of the faint pro-Hamas demonstration, but because of the posh setting (what is it about professors with funny hats that makes people tremble? Roger Federer, another usually cool guy, gave a commencement speech at Dartmouth in June 2024, and also seemed a nervous wreck).
People do not change in old age. Seinfeld celebrated his 70th birthday in April 2024, half a year before the October 7 attack. His transformation owed to the gravity of the circumstances. He could not remain a cynical observer when the foundations of what allowed that position in the first place – the confidence in the place Jews acquired in American society, the confidence that Israel will always be there for them, just in case – were shattered. Thus, the discarding, even if hesitant, of the identity of the all-American comedian who just happened to be Jewish and the reemergence as a Jewish-American comedian, a proud Jewish-American comedian, who stands with his people and explains his doing so by the phrase, “I’m Jewish.”
There is a troubling aspect to all of this. The circumstances in which Seinfeld became manifestly and publicly Jewish reinforce the old question of whether secular American Jewishness can exist and thrive as a meaningful identity without antisemitism or Israel as rallying causes. Is there anything else? It’s got to be about something.
[5] Uri Sela, “Seinfeld Visited Beeri: Devastated from What I Saw, but Uplifted from the Sturdiness of the Inhabitants [Hebrew],” Walla, December 19, 2023, https://e.walla.co.il/item/3629923.
During the Second World War, about 75% of Jews in the Netherlands were murdered, the highest percentage in Western Europe. This high number was attributed in part to the obedience of Dutch civil servants to Nazi commands and the efficiency in implementing them. In a post-war interview, Adolf Eichmann said about the Netherlands that the transports there were running so smoothly that it was “a pleasure to watch.”[1]
In March 2024, following years of planning and construction, a National Holocaust Museum opened in Amsterdam. The museum was designed with the explicit aim to teach schoolchildren and others “how the Holocaust could happen, about its victims and perpetrators,” and most importantly, to teach “how to prevent it all from happening again.”[2] Its establishment was a milestone in the Dutch commitment to inform about the darkest times in European history, and as such, is commendable.
Yet soon after its inauguration, the museum sparked a controversy, raising questions about historical memory and responsibility and a dilemma not unique to the Dutch case: how should countries occupied by the Nazis engage with the vicious and massive crimes committed through the cooperation and, in some cases, initiative, of their own people against the Jewish population?
Israeli columnist Chaim Levinson, who visited the museum shortly after it opened, argued in Haaretz, the leading Israeli liberal newspaper, that Dutch perpetrators and collaborators are “completely absent” from the museum’s exhibition.
Levinson raised very good questions: “Moving on to the question of responsibility – how, in fact, did the Holocaust take place in the Netherlands? Why did they see the Jews, who were their allies and flesh of their flesh, as an enemy that should be destroyed and eliminated? What were the opinions and worldviews behind the Holocaust of Dutch Jews? Could it have taken place in England, too?”[3]
According to Levinson, a visitor to the Dutch Holocaust Museum will not walk away with answers to these questions and won’t learn anything about the role or responsibility of Dutch perpetrators in the Shoah.
Christophe Busch, director of the Hannah Arendt Institute in Mechelen (Belgium), observed that only one section of the museum, called “wallpaper of crimes,” is dedicated to the Nazis and their collaborators. That section sheds light on the perpetrators in all their diversity, albeit briefly and without much explanation. He noted that this part of the museum touches on a complexity that the museum’s curators believe should be tackled in a thorough and nuanced way only within its educational work rather than through exhibitions.[4]
Similar criticisms were offered regarding a Dutch historical television drama about the Jewish Council that was broadcast around the time of the museum’s opening. The Jewish Council was formed by the Nazis in the Netherlands in order to utilize the country’s Jewish leadership to organize deportations with the least resistance. Although the series was widely praised for representing the dilemmas of the Council, it failed to present two critical historical factors that explain the Council’s tragedy: the context of the isolation of the Dutch Jewish community by 1942 and the cooperation of Dutch civil servants in the persecution of the Jews.
Dutch historian and professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Johannes Houwink ten Cates, said: “With the exception of a few professors and their students in Leiden and Delft, and later the churches, hardly anyone stood up for the Jews […] why is this not mentioned earlier in the series?” Moreover, “during the first three hours of this historical television drama, there is absolutely no reference to the cooperation of Dutch civil servants in the persecution. Cooperation in registering as Jews, in enforcing segregation, in removing Jewish children from education, in issuing identity cards (marked with a J for ‘Jew’), in arrests (also by the Amsterdam municipal police) and in transports to the transit camps on the way to the East. In my opinion, this is a serious lack of historical context, because the help of Dutch civil servants in the persecution and the transports was more important to the occupiers than that of the Jewish Council […] The official collaboration went unpunished after the liberation. So many non-Jewish villains and their accomplices […] went free.”[5]
Although Dutch co-responsibility for and complicity in the deportation of the country’s Jews has been discussed, researched, and publicly acknowledged in the Netherlands, there is no unanimous agreement on the extent to which this topic should be broached in the national memory of the Second World War.
Responding to the criticism, the National Holocaust Museum’s chief curator, Annemiek Gringold, argued that the museum does not overlook the complicity of the Dutch in the deportation of the country’s Jews. She pointed out that the museum does explore “this very dark part of the Netherlands’ history, as well as antisemitism in Dutch society before, during, and after the Shoah.” She refers to the museum’s “wallpaper of crimes” as “one of its most prominent sections,” explaining that it exhibits Nazi artifacts of both German and Dutch origin and offers more than 50 digital portraits of perpetrators. “About one-third of the portraits are of Dutch collaborators,” she argued. “They include Dutch Jew hunters, both civilians and police officers, Dutch SS officials, Dutch guards at concentration camps and Dutch volunteers in the German Einsatzgruppen that rounded up and shot Jews and others in Eastern Europe in their millions […] In addition to these accomplices’ acts of betrayal, looting, abuse, and deportation, the exhibition also provides dozens of personal accounts of Jewish victims.”[6]
The Director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter,[7] Emile Schrijver, clarified that one of the museum’s main intentions was to focus on the victims and “to return humanity to those who were deprived of their humanity by zooming in on individual lives” and telling individual stories through personal artifacts.[8]
The construction of memory inevitably involves contestation. Memory scholars have established that there will always be multiple memories of the same event and that struggles and negotiations take place between them.[9] This is also the case in the Netherlands, after decades of self-reflection and a gradual attempt to commemorate the persecution of Jews in the most proper way.
The rather belatedly established National Holocaust Museum is the Netherlands’ first museum solely dedicated to the persecution of the Jews in the country. It complements a string of other places of commemoration that keep the memory of the Second World War alive, the main ones being the Amsterdam Resistance Museum, the Anne Frank House, the Auschwitz Monument, the Westerbork transit camp, the Amersfoort concentration camp, and the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the Amsterdam theater that the Nazis used as an assembly space for nearly 50,000 Dutch Jews before they were deported to transit Camp Westerbork in the east of the country and then to the concentration and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. Younger Jewish children were assembled in the nursery across the street from the theater, and most of them were murdered. After the war, the Hollandsche Schouwburg, with its haunting memories, was left deserted and abandoned for years until finally, in 1962, the auditorium of the theater was dedicated as a memorial to the Dutch victims of the Holocaust.[10]
The new National Holocaust Museum is located across the street from this memorial, in the “Hervormde Kweekschool” – a former Protestant seminary that had a garden adjacent to the nursery where the Jewish children were gathered. The seminary was a crucial part of a rescue operation in which its directors, students, and employees, in cooperation with the Dutch resistance, managed to save about 600 Jewish children from the nursery and transfer them to places of hiding with Dutch families all over the country. The rescue operation was led by Johan van Hulst, who later became a senator and was named Righteous Among the Nations. He died in 2018, aged 107. Also involved in the efforts were Henriëtte Pimentell, the director of the nursery who was murdered in Auschwitz in September 1943, and Walter Süskind, a Jewish council member who died in February 1945 in or near Auschwitz.
The choice of location for the Holocaust Museum raises the question whether its curators sought to highlight this story of resistance against the dark background of the persecution of Dutch Jewry that is presented in the museum itself. This question is especially worth raising given the tendency in the Netherlands, certainly in the past, to give resistance and hiding the more prominent place in the national commemoration of the Second World War.
This was especially true in the first decades after the war when the perception prevailed that everyone in the Netherlands had had it bad; some suffered more than others, but everyone was more or less equal in their suffering. Resistance during the war was glorified and amplified to inaccurate proportions.
From the 1960s onwards, public consciousness of the Shoah increased, accompanied by feelings of bewilderment and shame, as the public was confronted with the first classic historical works and television documentaries on the fate of the Dutch Jews. This was followed by intensive scientific research on the topic.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely recognized in the Dutch public discourse that an obedient Dutch administrative apparatus had significantly contributed to the efficiency of the deportations in the Netherlands; that from top to bottom, Dutch civil servants, railway personnel, and police officers had actively participated in the preparations and facilitation of the persecution of Jews, while the population passively watched.[11]
Officials began to publicly recognize the Dutch complicity in the deportation of the Jews. Queen Beatrix addressed the Knesset in March 1995 and cautiously noted that the Dutch who saved Jews were the exception during the years of occupation, while not directly recognizing that there were those who willingly cooperated with evil.[12]
Her speech was followed by various initiatives for compensation and restitution schemes.[13] On the National Remembrance Day of May 4, 2020, King Willem-Alexander publicly acknowledged that his own grandmother, Queen Juliana, may not have done enough for her subjects who were in need, who “felt abandoned, not heard enough, not supported enough, even if only with words.”[14] In the same year, Prime Minister Mark Rutte publicly apologized for the role of the Dutch government in the persecution of the Jews.[15] This was followed by the unveiling of the Holocaust Names Monument in Amsterdam in 2021 and, finally, the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in 2024.
Memory and heritage scholar David Duindam observed that the self-critical view of the Holocaust reflected a broader political tendency to acknowledge the painful and embarrassing parts of Dutch national history. Another aspect of this tendency is the way the Dutch colonial past has been extensively addressed over the last decade. There is an urge to make room for these histories that used to be marginal and to present them to a large audience in national places.[16]
However, Dutch historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate notes that this fixation on injustice, characteristic of the present “age of apology,” also has a converse effect. With regard to the Second World War, he argues, the new tendency to trivialize resistance and to present collaboration as if it was the norm is being resisted by large segments of the Dutch public.[17]
Ten Cate observes that feelings of guilt and shame about the Holocaust have been disappearing from the public debate. For example, it is common to express the idea that the Dutch lack of solidarity with the Jews is a myth. Likewise, the distinction between good and evil has become blurred. Dutch writer and artist Chaja Polak identifies this as part of a broader tendency to manipulate history and a dormant forgetting of the Shoah.
According to historian Frank van der Vree, who recently published his volume The Netherlands and the Memory of the Persecution of the Jews 1945-2024, a common sentiment in the Netherlands remains that “this was done to the Netherlands as a nation. The Dutch are not collectively looking away from the Holocaust, and the persecution of the country’s Jews is not denied or repressed, but at the same time, the specific character of the mass murder of Jews receives little attention.”[18]
According to a study by the Claims Conference published in January 2023, only 44% of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z and only half (50%) of all Dutch respondents support recent efforts by Dutch leaders to acknowledge and apologize for the Netherlands’ failure to protect Jews during the Holocaust; 39% of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z and 31% of all Dutch respondents opposed such acknowledgments and apologies, while 17% of Dutch Millennials and Gen Z and 19% of all Dutch respondents said they were not sure.
The same study showed shortcomings in historical knowledge about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, especially among young people. Twelve percent of all respondents believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated, while 9% are unsure. These numbers are higher among Dutch Millennials and Gen Z, where 23% believe the Holocaust is a myth or the number of Jews murdered has been greatly exaggerated, while 12% are unsure. More than half of all respondents (54% of all respondents and 59% of Millennials and Gen Z) do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.[19]
This reality is accompanied by an ongoing controversy surrounding Holocaust education and sensitivities involving the wars in the Middle East, which conflated in an unfortunate way at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum on March 10, 2024.
During the inauguration, a crowd of anti-Israel demonstrators gathered in the street, demonstrating against the war in Gaza as well as the arrival of Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog, who attended the opening of the museum. At this vulnerable moment for the last survivors of the concentration camps, the Hitler salute was seen several times. Palestinian flags were waved, and “From the River to the Sea” was chanted.
The shouts of the crowd even drowned out the words of the King of the Netherlands, who was trying to address local television reporters. The demonstrators’ verbal attacks on a Holocaust survivor and his great-granddaughter who received the honor of attaching a mezuzah to the museum’s entrance and who were then rushed through a small opening in the angry crowd with their heads bowed evoked painful memories of something the museum is trying to educate against.
In the aftermath of the event, the Dutch Jewish community expressed its shock at the public aversion against Jews in front of this symbolic museum. It raised the question of how long Dutch civil society and the city’s leaders “will continue to accept the demonization of Jews” and when they would finally take a stance to protect the Jews.[20] This call is a stark echo of the past, when most Dutch Jews felt entirely abandoned by their leaders and fellow citizens in the Second World War.
Historian David Wertheim, Director of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute for Jewish Studies, commented: “The fear is very existential. It stems from the traumatic experiences of the Shoah: the idea that the Jewish community thought it was safe and it wasn’t.”[21] Levinson, in his Haaretz column, touched on these feelings by asking: “Why were the Jews considered such a disturbance to this calm and pleasant life, both then and today?” and “Why is the most heavily guarded building in central Amsterdam a Holocaust museum?”[22]
[1] Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, “The Netherlands: The Highest Number of Jewish Victims in Western Europe,” Anne Frank House publication, https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/netherlands-greatest-number-jewish-victims-western-europe/.
[2] See the official website: https://jck.nl/en/location/national-holocaust-museum.
[3] Chaim Levinson “Missing at Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum: The Dutch Collaborators,” Haaretz, August 19, 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2024-08-19/ty-article/.premium/one-thing-is-missing-at-amsterdams-new-holocaust-museum-dutch-collaborators/00000191-6a71-db7c-afdf-fe713eec0000.
[4] Christophe Busch, “The Janus face of the National Holocaust Museum [Dutch],” Historisch Nieuwsblad, April 30, 2024, https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/de-januskop-van-het-nationaal-holocaustmuseum/.
[5] “The Jewish Council is once again the scapegoat [Dutch],” Historisch Nieuwsblad, April 2, 2024, https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/de-joodse-raad-is-toch-weer-de-zondebok/.
[6] Annemiek Gringold, “Dutch Collaborators Do Play a Prominent Role at Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum,” Haaretz, August 26, 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-26/ty-article-opinion/.premium/dutchcollaborators-do-play-a-prominent-role-at-amsterdams-new-holocaust-museum/00000191-89cc-d954-add7-8fdec4870000.
[7] The National Holocaust Museum and the recently renovated memorial in the Hollandsche Schouwburg are part of the so-called “Jewish Cultural Quarter” (JCK) in Amsterdam that also includes the Jewish Historic Museum, the Children’s Museum, and the Portuguese Synagogue with its historic Jewish library Ets Haim.
[8] “National Holocaust Museum full of stories [Dutch],” Benjamin, March 27, 2024, https://joodswelzijn.nl/benjamin/nationaal-holocaustmuseum-vol-verhalen/.
[9] Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997), 1398.
[10] For two in-depth studies, see: David Duindam, Fragments of the Holocaust: The Amsterdam Hollandsche
Schouwburg as a Site of Memory (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) and Site of Deportation, Site of Memory:
The Amsterdam Hollandsche Schouwburg and the Holocaust, ed. David Duindam, Hetty Berg, Frank van Vree
(Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
[11] Margreet Fogteloo, “Finally Room [Dutch],” De Groene Amsterdammer, no. 17, April 24, 2019, https://www.groene.nl/artikel/eindelijk-ruimte.
[12] For the text of Her Majesty’s speech on March 28, 1995: https://m.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/SpeechPdf/Beatrix.pdf.
[13] Rianne Oosterom, “Why the Netherlands is only now getting a National Holocaust Museum [Dutch],” Trouw, March 8, 2024.
[14] Speech by King Willem-Alexander, National Remembrance Day [Dutch], May 4, 2020, https://www.koninklijkhuis.nl/documenten/toespraken/2020/05/04/toespraak-van-koning-willem-alexander-nationale-herdenking-4-mei-2020.
[15] Speech by Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the National Commemoration at the Auschwitz Monument, Amsterdam, January 26, 2020, https://www.government.nl/documents/speeches/2020/01/26/speech-by-prime-ministermark-rutte-at-the-national-commemoration-at-the-auschwitz-monument-amsterdam.
[16] Oosterom, “Why the Netherlands is only now getting a National Holocaust Museum.”
[18] Oosterom, “Why the Netherlands is only now getting a National Holocaust Museum.”
[19] Claims Conference Netherlands Holocaust Poll, January 2023, https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Claims-Conference-Netherlands-Dual-Topline-1.pdf.
[20] Naomi Italiaander, “Enough is Enough [Dutch],” Jonet, March 12, 2024, https://jonet.nl/de-maat-is-vol-columnnaomi-italiaander/.
[21] “Don’t Say: You are an Antisemite. But: What You Said is Antisemitic [Dutch],” Nederlands Dagblad, November
6, 2023.
[22] Haim Levinson “Missing at Amsterdam’s New Holocaust Museum: The Dutch Collaborators.”
It Happened One Day by Noah Abrahams
Beyond the statistics about antisemitic attacks are shattered communities, threatened existences – and real people. Noah Abrahams, Associate Editor at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Jewry, documented six of their stories
Marcia Zimmerman (65, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States)
Marcia Zimmerman became the Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2001, becoming the first woman to lead a synagogue congregation of more than 2,000 families after serving as Assistant Rabbi since 1988. Responsible for Minnesota’s largest Jewish congregation, with more than 6,000 members, Zimmerman is a respected figure in the American Midwest, known for her work alongside former US President Barack Obama touting his health care bill among religious communities in 2010.
Founded in 1878, Temple Israel is the oldest synagogue in Minneapolis.
On December 16, 2024, at 7:20 am, Temple Israel was vandalized with painted swastikas defacing its exterior doors and pillars, one of the darkest chapters in the synagogue’s history.[1]
Zimmerman recalled: “For December, it wasn’t the kind of cold morning you would usually expect for Minneapolis. We had just had our security guard make a round, and then all of a sudden, on the cameras, one of our custodians saw the swastika being sprayed.
Just ten minutes before we spotted the vandalism, our cameras captured a white Honda Civic and a man getting out, spray painting a swastika on one of our pillars. We have five pillars and five doors at the front of the historic part of our building. On one of our doors, there was another swastika. The perpetrator then got back in his car and fled the scene.
“Temple Israel is 146 years old, and we have been in our current building for 96 years. The front of this building faces a very busy street called Hennepin Avenue. Hennepin is a congregational row of downtown churches and mosques. The front of our building was designed to look like the Lincoln Memorial because we wanted to express freedom of religion. The five doors symbolize the ghettos of Vienna, where synagogues traditionally had five windows and five doors. There is no name on the doors because, in the 1920s, Minnesota was the capital of antisemitism in the United States. Interfaith dialogue over time has made life better here for the now 66,000-strong Minnesota Jewish community.
“The swastikas appearing in that very area, where we wanted to open doors to interfaith dialogue and fight antisemitism, was extremely painful. This incident has seen us regress historically instead of progress. It took us a long time to identify the vandal because most people don’t come through our historic entrance. Our cameras didn’t capture the license plate of the perpetrator. However, we did eventually identify the person.
“I am a texting friend of the Minneapolis Chief of Police and was personally informed that the person who defaced our synagogue fled the country to avoid justice.
“The heightened antisemitism people have felt here since October 7 is real. The level of recent antisemitism has taken a generation by surprise. Parents of young kids here thought that antisemitism was something that only happened in the past. Now, they are confronted with it. There is an anger that we are going backward.
“This is the first time in 38 years I have seen anything like a swastika on our building. It felt particularly intense and violent. As a community, we spoke about the upsetting reality of the world we live in today but took comfort in the authorities and even the FBI, who gave us the all-clear of not being in any further danger.
“We are proud of our Judaism, and that won’t go away because of an act of hate. Our Jewish connections here are strong. Minnesota senators are Jewish, our Mayor, Jacob Frey, is Jewish, and the Attorney General of the District of Minnesota is a member of Temple Israel. We have strong leaders here in our community.”
Henry “Hank” Topas (74, Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec, Canada)
Henry “Hank” Topas has been the Cantor at his local synagogue, Beth Tikvah, for 49 years. Founded in 1964, Beth Tikvah is located in a small, predominately English-speaking southwestern suburb of Montreal called Dollard-des-Ormeaux. The Beth Tikvah synagogue has been firebombed twice since October 7 – November 7, 2023, and December 18, 2024; Hank was the spokesperson for the synagogue after both incidents.[2]
On November 7, 2023, exactly one month after the October 7 atrocities, we were hit with the first firebombing overnight. It caused damage other than awakening the community. It showed that these levels of terror are not just reserved for the Middle East.
“Services in our synagogue begin at 7 am. These are our weekday morning services. That means that some people are showing up as early as 6:30 am to open the doors. [On the morning of November 7], one member detected a faint odor of something that did not belong in our lobby and alerted me. We opened the door and realized that there were remnants of a Molotov cocktail in front of the front door of the synagogue and that there were scorch marks over the wooden panel of the door.
“Someone had thrown a bottle that was on fire at the doors of our synagogue. The incident probably happened after midnight in the early hours of November 7. At that point, I called the Montreal Police Department’s Hate Crimes Unit, and they immediately responded with [all their] investigative powers. Sadly, they have not brought anyone to justice.
“November 7 was spent with me and others being interviewed by various members of the Press, in French and in English. I was pleased to greet the local parish priest from the Saint Luke Catholic Church up the street, who came down and gave me a big hug.
“I was not pleased that members of the mosque that I had gone to console, along with other rabbis, when there was a murder in a Quebec City mosque, failed to show. There have been good relations between the two communities in our suburb for many years, and for thirty years, we have run a charity bazaar to help the Muslim community. When disaster has struck and there have been blood drives [to aid struggling Muslims], I have given blood. But no one showed up, not on October 7, not on November 7.
“The person behind the November 7 attack is unknown; we do not know who did it. The cameras did not pick up anything.
“My community is not a part of Montreal but of a self-regulated suburb, yet we share Montreal’s police services. Those police services, we believe, are somewhat restrained. Even though they [the police] have been there for us and are doing the best they can…We have said so publicly. The effect of that has led to unbridled permission for people to protest night after night in the streets of Montreal, with the flags of Hamas, swastikas, and symbols from every other terrorist organization. It’s free speech, they say.”
Following the November 7 firebombing, the Beth Tikvah Synagogue invested in better security cameras and was more vigilant. However, in the early hours of Wednesday, December 18, 2024, terror struck Beth Tikvah once again when a firebomb caused internal damage to the synagogue.
“December 18 was certainly the most grievous attack on our synagogue,” Hank explained.
“The incident happened overnight at approximately 2:00 am. Our improved cameras captured an image of the fellow [who attacked the synagogue], and we have more information that the police will put to good use, hopefully. The man approached the front of the synagogue and threw something through the glass, shattering our windows. It was some form of Molotov cocktail that was thrown into the vestibule separating the doors and the lobby.
“The fire that broke out was so hot that items on the vestibule’s walls melted. Thank God a neighbor reported the incident after she saw the flames. She called the local police, and officers on their morning patrol responded, using their own fire extinguisher to break down the doors and extinguish the flames before the fire department arrived.
“That morning, I was getting out of the shower, and I heard about [the firebombing] on the news. I was a little bit surprised that I had not yet heard about it. The synagogue was notified, and by the time we got there, the police would not let us enter the building because they wanted to ensure an undisturbed crime scene. It was not until the arson investigators arrived at approximately 9:30 am and had checked everything that we were allowed back into the building.
“Eventually, the Chief of Police, Fady Dagher, showed up, and I spoke with him and his number two in-command for some time. The police have been very supportive, and Mr. Dagher has already held two Zoom calls with me and others from the community, fielding questions. When I go to visit the station, I always bring a platter of danishes and food for the officers.
“I was a little disturbed that the smashed glass from the attack was repaired on the same day.
“Why was I concerned? The incident occurred on a Wednesday, and we were hoping to have a solidarity Shabbat with politicians and our members that weekend. The synagogue was packed. Now, for the two weeks before Christmas, that was unusual because the place is usually half empty. I wanted that piece of glass to serve as a token for people to look at, but it was gone.
“The physical damage was that items on the walls were melted. The thermostat, for example, was melted, and other things were covered with heavy soot from the smoke. The lighting fixtures in the ceiling were all melted and have to be replaced. The structure of the ceiling and the sheetrock also need to be replaced.
“We can’t only look at our congregation but at attacks on Jewish buildings and people across the country. In Montreal, there have been schools that have been shot at, and in all of these cases, we have not seen anyone prosecuted or incarcerated. Since October 7, there has not been a single incarceration related to an attack on a Jewish building.
“I send a weekly email to the local precinct commander to let them know what time candle lighting is and how long the walk home will be for those going back in the dark afterward. I carry a police baton on me because we don’t know what will happen.”
Dov Forman (21, London, United Kingdom)
Dov Forman is a 21-year-old history student at University College London (UCL) but is perhaps best known as a New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author. The great-grandson of the late Holocaust survivor, educator, author, and social media influencer Lily Ebert, Dov dedicates his life to sharing Lily’s story of surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau and to fighting antisemitism. For his contributions to the memoir Lily’s Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live (HarperCollins, 2022), Dov was praised by King Charles III for demonstrating “a determination to share his great-grandmother’s story with a global audience.”
Dov receives daily antisemitic abuse at its most extreme.
“In university, both because I am known for being an anti-antisemitism activist, but also because I am just a proud, loud Jew who wears a kippah and a hostage necklace, people target me and shout at me. People chant ‘Free Palestine’ or worse, because I am Jewish and because I speak up to defend the Jewish people and our narrative.
“University is supposed to be the time for people to speak up and develop political ideas within the confines of the law. When I am in the library and I hear people chanting outside, or when people say things directly to me, it makes life extremely difficult and it is hard to feel as though university is a safe space where you can learn just like everyone else.
“When we were lighting the Hanukkiah [at UCL], people put up Palestinian flags in response. There we were on a cold, gloomy English night, lighting the candles while a cohort of young people in their twenties were waving their Palestinian signage.
“Fellow students have called me ‘Dirty Jew’ [noticing me]. They know I am Jewish because I wear a kippah or perhaps because they saw me on the news. I have also been called a genocide apologist.
“We have to have security outside of our university Jewish Society and outside other Jewish events. It is not only other students at British universities who terrorize Jews; antisemitism also comes from professors.
“I sit in a classroom of 100 people, and I am singled out because I am the only outwardly apparent Jew or perhaps even the only Jew in the room. I study history, and professors not only distort the past but compare the Holocaust to what Israel is doing in Gaza. This is entirely unfair.
“I have to sit in these lectures where students point at me and make me feel uncomfortable. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that these lecturers are grading my work.
“My great-grandmother was a force of nature until the very last moments. She fought to teach people the dangers of unbalanced and unchecked hatred. Because of her work, particularly on social media and on TikTok, where her story has reached over a billion social media users, we received terrible antisemitic abuse.
“Every single day, especially in the aftermath of October 7, I woke up to thousands of antisemitic messages. It has now died down, and those messages come only in their hundreds.
“But, to wake up every single day and open my phone and read comments like ‘your great-grandmother, I wish she was raped like the girls on October 7,’ or ‘Hitler missed one,’ or that ‘we know you live in London and we are going to come to find and kill you and rape you,’ or things like ‘you and your great-grandmother are going to be kidnapped,’ well, it’s disgusting.
“[My great-grandmother and I] never spoke about politics; we rarely spoke about Israel. Rather, we educated others and told her story to share a message of hope, tolerance, love, and how to rebuild from the greatest darkness.
“Unfortunately, there have been just so many incidents of antisemitism that they are hard to individualize, and repeating them could put me at risk. It is all terrifying, and I have had to get extra security and help. But, I take strength from my great-grandmother, who taught me that, because of the hate, we have to keep going and fighting back.
“I think we are incredibly lucky to be living as Jews in London, in a place where we do have the CST [Community Security Trust] and various organizations looking out for us.
“Thankfully, there haven’t been incredibly violent attacks against Jewish people on the streets, but of course, words can lead to actions. I do think, on the whole, that London is a safe place for Jews; however, some areas are not safe, especially on Saturdays, when thousands of people scream for violence against Jewish people, not just in Israel but here in the UK.
“We are now at a crossroads where people have to speak up and decide if they want to change the current course or if they want to allow the situation to get worse. It is now the time for people to stand up and take serious, meaningful action.
Moshe (70, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Moshe is not the actual name of the Rabbi who asked to remain anonymous due to safety and security concerns. Originally from the United States, Moshe has been a resident of South Africa since 1984, where he spends time in several different synagogues across the Johannesburg area, serving a diverse mix of Jewish communities and denominations.
As a volunteer rabbi, Moshe makes his income as a small business owner, volunteering with Chabad and other synagogues on high holidays and the occasional Shabbat. On a November afternoon in 2023, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the visibly Jewish Moshe was targeted and attacked.
“It was a warm, sunny Friday afternoon on November 10, 2023, and I was meeting a client. I was driving in my car and approaching the end of the highway, leaving a Jewish area called Sandton and heading for a different suburb. As I got off the four-lane highway, the exit forked, and a car coming from the left side tried to go into my lane.
“I swerved to the right around him and went forward. The guy seemed to have some serious road rage. He didn’t like the fact that I was able to swerve around him and get in front of him, so he came up beside me and stared at me. The man was visibly Muslim, between 35 and 40 years old. He was driving a Renault Kwid, and I was in a much bigger Nissan Sentra Sedan.”
When the man looked at the Rabbi, he got out of his car and started shouting at him, using brutally obscene language to swear and curse him referring to his Jewish identity.
“He told me to get out of my car so that he could beat the… out of me. I did not get out of my car because it would have been too dangerous; he could have had a weapon or something. The traffic light was red, and as soon as he saw that I wasn’t going to get into a confrontation with him, he got back in his car, drove directly in front of me, and reversed. He rammed the rear end of his car into the front of my car and then continued to do so. I immediately knew I had to get out of there.
“I drove off, but he chased after me, following me all around the area, frantically trying to ram my car. I got back on the highway, got off the highway, and even drove against traffic and through lights to get away from him. I returned to the highway, where he tried to hit me from the side.
“In the end, I knew that I had to get off the highway, and I pulled into a BP petrol station. He came chasing after me in the garage and banged on my window with his fist. I didn’t leave the car because that was my protection. He ripped my windshield wiper off and banged on my window, trying to smash it.
“While all of this was going on, people started to realize what was happening, and they held the guy down. This gave me the chance to call the local security company, which escorted me home, where I had an opportunity to look at the pictures I had taken of him.
“I sent the images to the police, and they opened a case. I even managed to take down his registration number, assuming the license plates would link to an address. But, somehow, the police have found nothing.
“The Jewish community organization here has a private investigator for these things, and to cut a long story short, we spent time with the police investigating, but catching this guy would have meant going to court. I was genuinely worried about exposing myself and my address, concerned that he would find where I live.
“I was quite frightened for a long time, primarily because this guy mentioned during the attack that his brother was in the police department. What if the brother could use my registration number to find out where I live? For quite a while, we were really on tenterhooks, thinking he could come after me. Police patrol cars regularly checked on us, and every time I left the house, I looked right and left to see if he was there.
“Nothing ever happened. The police did say that they managed to get a hold of an address but couldn’t find anything.
“The bottom line is that this guy damaged my car, and it cost thousands to fix. Insurance may have covered most of it, but I still had to pay the excess. The damage to my car was significant, but thank God he didn’t smash me up. He was violent and very dangerous, like a raging bull out of control. We’ll leave it up to God to sort him out. What goes around, comes around. He’ll realize one day that he should have behaved himself.”
Kit Boulton (21, Norwich, England)
Kit Boulton is a psychology student at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norfolk County, England. Originally from just outside of North-West London in the heavily Jewish-populated town of Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, Kit is now in his second year of studies at a university with one of the fewest number of Jewish students in the country. The UEA has a Jewish Society (JSoc) of approximately 30 members.
Towards the end of May 2024, Kit was working as a bartender in the UEA Student Union bar, Bar SU. As ever for a Wednesday sports night when the weather is warm towards the end of the summer semester, the venue was busy and filled with students, mostly in their twenties.
“It was last summer, and I got a job at the student union bar. I was working there one night, and I believe that I served this guy, who was clearly hammered, the wrong drink. He then turned around to me and called me a ‘kike.’ He knew I was Jewish because I wear a Magen David around my neck, and it was clearly on display. My mates were right there. They told him that he couldn’t say that and called him out over it. You would hope everyone would do the same in that situation. Things got a bit heated, but eventually, the guy backed away and left.
“The Jewish situation here [at UEA] is that we have the JSoc, a very strong Jewish student association that is well run by an amazing committee. There aren’t many Jewish people on campus. If you saw a Jew on campus, you would be like, ‘Oh my God, you’re Jewish?’ Whereas at universities like Leeds or Nottingham, you would be less surprised.
“You expect antisemitism in London; it’s a lot more common. Here in Norwich, however, especially on a university campus, experiencing antisemitism was crazy to me. But, at the time, it didn’t feel like a big thing, so I didn’t report it. Had I reported this to my managers at the Student Union, I know they would have been all over it.
“It was a lot more stressful to be Jewish on campus towards the end of 2023, especially after October 7. But this past year, especially with the support of JSoc, it feels safe again to be a Jew on campus.”
Katrien Van Der Schueren (51, Los Angeles, California, USA)
Born and raised in the small Flemish-speaking town of Leuven, Katrien Van Der Schueren is a Los Angeles-based Belgian-American artist. The mother of two teenagers, born to Catholic Belgian parents and raised a practicing Catholic, Katrien discovered her Jewish heritage at the age of 47 through a DNA test trying to establish the identity of her biological father, who turned out to be a Belgian Jew. Since discovering her origins, she has dedicated herself to learning more about Judaism, her family history, and what it means to have a Jewish identity. She has also become active in her Hollywood Jewish community.
“I grew up in Belgium, where we didn’t really know any other Jewish people. In general, I did not encounter one Jewish person growing up. The only thing that people thought of when discussing Jews were the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Antwerp. People had no other notion of the religion or of Israel. There was no hope for Jewish people there. “After letting the world know that I was Jewish, I immediately was on the receiving end
of remarks like ‘You count your money’ and other preconceived notions that people have about Jews. Now, in the United States, most of the people I know are Jewish. On a recent trip back to Belgium, however, most of my friends and family were against Israel.
“I received messages from people who told me that I wasn’t a real Jew. I decided to order a t-shirt that said, ‘I’m that Jew,’ and I wore it in Belgium in order to start a conversation, however obvious it may have been that people did not want to have it.
“Everybody was surprised when they found out I was Jewish. Five years ago, there was a documentary on Jewish people in Belgium, and people were telling me to watch it as though they were referring to some strange species. [There’s a common perception in Belgium] that Jews are only ultra-Orthodox Jews. It’s just bizarre.
“Recently, I co-organized an event with people who survived the October 7 massacre. I invited the Belgian Consul and sent pictures to the Belgium Press – which I write for all the time. No one responded to my email. It is common for Belgian-Americans to say that Joe Biden lost the election over Gaza and that Jews are extremists. I find myself in a situation where I am frequently the only Jew in a group. I get into fights about Israel all the time.”
Katrien has become accustomed to hearing antisemitic comments in Belgium. However, when cycling back to her Hollywood home from Manhattan Beach in October 2024, a bright sunny day turned dark.
“I was cycling to my home in Los Angeles after a day at the beach. On the way back, I crossed over into a merger lane on my bike, and this white woman with blonde curly hair, also on a road bike, who looked in her mid-40s, started yelling at me, ‘Get out of the way, you fucking Jew.’ I was like, ‘wow.’ I couldn’t believe it. I felt two emotions. The first was proud to have been recognized as a Jew. Even though I don’t know how she knew I was Jewish. But the second thing I felt was my disappointment that ‘Jew’ is now a bad word used to insult people.
“For so long, I didn’t know my identity, but now I am so invested in Judaism. On the front of my studio building in Hollywood, I have posters for freeing the hostages. People are so uncomfortable with it; I don’t know why.
“I have been constantly targeted for being Jewish ever since my discovery. It has been so bad since October 7 in Los Angeles. And in Belgium, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, people would say to me, ‘Your people are killing people.’ Or they were saying that in American society, only Jewish people hold important posts and jobs.
I am so happy that I found out I was Jewish.”
[1] Howard Thompson, “Temple Israel in Minneapolis Defaced with Swastikas,” Fox9, December 16, 2024, https://www.fox9.com/news/temple-israel-minneapolis-defaced-swastikas.
[2] On the November 2023 firebombing see: Thomas MacDonald, “‘Deeply Disturbing’: Montreal Police Investigating Two Firebombings at Jewish Institutions,” Global News, November 7, 2023, https://globalnews.ca/news/10075973/ montreal-synagogue-firebombing/. On the December 2024 firebombing see: Kalina Laframboise, “Fire at Montreal Synagogue Prompts Police Probe, Widespread Condemnation,” Global News, December 18, 2024, https://globalnews.ca/news/10923867/montreal-jewish-synagogue-arson/, and Leora Schertzer, “Beth Tikvah Synagogue in D.D.O. Hit by a Firebomb,” The Montreal Gazette, December 18, 2024, https://www. montrealgazette.com/news/local-crime/article627196.html.
The Muslim World: Holocaust Memorial Museums in Indonesia, Dubai and Albania
Indonesia
Aryo Brahmantyo
I enter the small room that is the museum. The collection on display is impressive, with each piece carefully curated to educate and evoke knowledge and empathy. At the center of the room, a massive triple-decker wooden bunk bed that replicates the bunk beds used in Nazi concentration camps. A photo of Jewish prisoners living in horrible conditions, taken from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, is displayed on the middle bunk. Informational posters on the walls chronicle the rise of Adolf Hitler, the ideology of the Nazi regime, and the horrific crimes of the Holocaust. The posters feature several disturbing images, including black-and-white photographs of Nazi soldiers executing Jewish civilians and piles of corpses discovered in concentration camps.
None of this is unique in comparison to other Holocaust memorial museums. It is the location that makes this history museum historical in and of itself. The Indonesian Holocaust Museum, inaugurated in January 2022, is the first of its kind in the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, where the majority of the population either knows almost nothing about the crimes committed by the Nazis and their allies or, worse, entertains antisemitic notions and denies the Holocaust.
The founder of the museum is an Indonesian Rabbi, Ya‘akov Baruch. It is part of the complex of the Sha‘ar Hashamayim (The Gate of Heaven) synagogue, which Baruch opened in 2004 in Tondano, a secluded town with 68,000 residents on the island of Sulawesi in the predominantly Christian (67.3%) province of North Sulawesi in Indonesia.[1] Known for its natural splendor, the Province has a reputation for religious tourism and inter-faith tolerance.[2] The museum uses both Indonesian and English. Its construction took nearly three months.[3] The inauguration took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in a ceremony attended by the German Ambassador to Indonesia, Ina Lepel, and high-ranking local Indonesian government officials.[4]
Rabbi Baruch was born in 1982 in Jakarta to a Minahasan Protestant father and a Mongondow Muslim mother, Toar Palilingan. Raised a Christian, he only discovered his Jewish roots as a teenager in a conversation with his maternal grandmother, Sylvia van Beugen.[5] She revealed to him that his relatives on his mother’s side descended from a 19th-century Dutch Jewish immigrant named Elias van Beugen.[6] He also learned that up to 40 of his relatives perished in the Holocaust, including in Auschwitz and Sobibor.
Acting upon this knowledge and his grandmother’s wishes, Baruch adopted Judaism as his religion and took the initiative to open Sha‘ar Hashamayim together with Oral Bollegraf, a Jew living in Manado.[7] Since then, he has led a small congregation of Sephardic-Orthodox Indonesian Jews.
Baruch told me he decided to dedicate a museum to the Holocaust rather than to Judaism in general in order to highlight a universal message. The Holocaust, he said, serves as a stark warning to humanity about the dangers of hatred, racism, and religious intolerance that must never be forgotten.[8]
The synagogue complex where the museum is situated is guarded by metal fences that separate the site from the street, adding to its secluded atmosphere. A small black monolith resembling a guard post is situated near the entrance, while a handful of tiny surveillance cameras monitor the premises, ensuring the museum’s and synagogue’s security. The museum’s physical presence is complemented by its online presence on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Admission to the museum, which is private and does not receive public funding, costs approximately one American dollar. Opening times are from Monday to Friday, from ten in the morning until six in the evening, but they are not strictly adhered to. For instance, during my visit, the gates were occasionally sealed and padlocked. This is because Baruch, who oversees the complex, lives in Manado, a city a few hours drive away, where he also serves as a lecturer at a local university. He attends the synagogue mainly on Friday evenings to lead the Shabbat service, returning to Manado after Shabbat concludes. This irregular schedule means visitors who arrive without prior notice may find themselves waiting at the locked gate. Locals, familiar with the situation, are generally sympathetic and direct visitors to a nearby Christian neighbor, Mr. Alfons, who serves as the caretaker in the rabbi’s absence.
One particularly poignant experience for Baruch involved a group of conservative Muslim women in hijabs and niqabs. Upon seeing the photos of Jewish victims, they were moved to tears, unaware of the Holocaust before their visit.[9] Baruch recalled how deeply this experience impacted him, as it was a profound reminder of the museum’s power to educate and inspire empathy, as well as a reminder of Indonesians’ unfamiliarity with the Holocaust.[10]
Another group of Indonesian elementary school children also left a lasting impression on the rabbi. Although he felt uneasy introducing young children to the horrors of the Holocaust, he believed it was a vital part of their learning experience, even if they left the museum somber.[11]
In addition to educating visitors about the Holocaust, the museum also highlights the ongoing dangers of Nazi ideology. Several posters address modern manifestations of neo-Nazism, Holocaust denial, and the use of Nazi symbols. The posters avoid mentioning Israel, a decision that reflects the museum’s sensitivity to Indonesia’s official stance on the conflict in the Middle East.
The museum also features a collection of Judaica artifacts from the Nazi era. These include a Chanukiah from the Netherlands (1940), Shabbat candelabras, a 1940s shtreimel from Poland, and a memorial book listing the names of victims of Nazi persecution in the Netherlands, including those of the Rabbi’s family, the Van Beugens.
Despite the museum’s achievements, it faces challenges. Limited space has led to removing some exhibits, such as a video display featuring testimonies from Holocaust survivors. Additionally, the museum’s location in a small town means it is subject to occasional blackouts, and noise from the nearby street can disrupt the otherwise solemn atmosphere.
Visitor numbers have declined since the opening. To date, the museum has had as many as 2,000 visitors in three years of operation. After a busy start, the flow of visitors has gradually slowed from as many as 50 visitors a day to one visitor a day. Most visitors were from Indonesia, but others have come from Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Israel. Baruch remains optimistic, stating that the message of the Holocaust has already reached many Indonesians.[12]
One visitor, Fernando Bororing, a Christian Minahasan from nearby Tomohon, told me he came because “I want to know the history.”[13] Bororing said he learned about the Holocaust through YouTube videos but had never visited a museum dedicated to the subject. He was awestruck as he walked through the exhibits, touching the wooden bunks and examining the displays. The words “impressive” and “amazing” escaped his lips. His visit, he explained upon leaving, allowed him to experience history beyond what he had previously seen online. “In my heart, I feel relief that I can experience it and not only watch it on YouTube,” he said.[14]
The establishment of the museum and its continued operation have more than symbolic importance. Discussion of the Holocaust in public, the media, and among academics has been pages of government-prepared history textbooks.[15] There are few Indonesian resources and experts on the Holocaust, making accessing and acquiring knowledge difficult. When raised in academic discussions on Indonesian campuses, the Holocaust is usually discussed as part of a broader context, rarely treated on its own.
The lack of proper education on the Holocaust has resulted, as well as was encouraged, by the proliferation of antisemitic propaganda. Antisemitism is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia. It predated the Republic’s founding, with influences reaching back to the colonial era.
In 1943, during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, Sam Ratulangi, a teacher, journalist, and first governor of the Island of Sulawesi, considered today a “national hero” in Indonesia, introduced excerpts from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in an article published in the journal Asia Raya. This publication, part of a Nazi-influenced Japanese propaganda campaign, marked the first time Indonesian readers encountered the notorious antisemitic forgery.[16]
Another Indonesian considered a “national hero,” the politician and diplomat Sukarjo Wiryopranoto, contributed to the spread of antisemitic ideas by depicting the Second World War as a conflict between Japanese collectivism (Hakko Ichiu) and Jewish individualism.[17] Fascist-inspired political parties like Parindra and Partai Fasis Indonesia (PFI) emerged in the 1930s, adopting symbols and practices from European fascism, including the infamous Nazi salute.[18]
After the establishment of Israel in 1948, antisemitism in Indonesia was grounded primarily in anti-Israel sentiments. As the newly-independent, Muslim-majority nation aligned itself with the Arab world, Indonesian Jews were viewed with suspicion, including as agents of Israeli interests. Criticisms of Israel devolved into antisemitic rhetoric, with some Indonesians failing to distinguish between Judaism, Zionism, and the state of Israel.
Consequently, Indonesian Jews, some of whom descended from European colonists, became targets of hostility, linked to both Israel and colonialism. Rabbi Benjamin Meijer Verbrugge, an Indonesian Jewish leader, lamented that “people call us bastards because our grandfathers occupied Indonesia.”[19]
In the 1980s and 1990s, antisemitism remained widespread, fueled by the revival of Islamist groups.[20] In 1992, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was translated into Indonesian, and various adaptations of the text spread.[21] A republication of Ratulangi’s antisemitic article in 1993 underscored the persistence of these ideas, with Indonesian editors seemingly remaining unaware that the Protocols were an antisemitic fabrication.[22]
In the 2000s, antisemitic activities took new directions. From 2005 to 2006, Angkasa, a military and aviation magazine, offered Nazi-themed souvenirs like Iron Crosses and Waffen-SS keychains to attract readers to a trilogy of issues on Nazi military history.[23] Several years later, the Indonesian language version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published after years of being banned. The book quickly became a bestseller, selling over 15,000 copies.[24] In 2013, the closure of the Beth Hashem Synagogue in Surabaya was forced by Islamist extremists protesting Israel’s military actions in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.[25] Despite being a historic site, the oldest synagogue in the country, and a cultural landmark, it was targeted during anti-Israel demonstrations and was eventually demolished.[26] That same year, global attention was drawn to the Soldatenkaffe in Bandung, West Java, after the Jakarta Globe exposed its Nazi-themed décor, which included Swastika flags, portraits of Adolf Hitler, and servers dressed as SS officers. It turned out that the café had operated as a Nazi-glorification hub for two years. International outrage forced it to close down.[27] A survey conducted in 2014 found that 48% of the adult population at the time harbored antisemitic sentiments.[28]
Jews in Indonesia are too few to have a political impact. The origins of today’s Indonesian Jews can be traced to Ashkenazi Dutch and European Jewish migrants who came to the Dutch East Indies in the 19th century.[29] They were also joined by Jews from Iraq, Aden, and other areas of the Middle East.[30] The number of Jews in the colony already exceeded 2,500 in the late 1930s.[31] It declined sharply after the Second World War, and by 1963, only around 50 community members were left in Indonesia.[32] The small Jewish population that exists in present-day Indonesia is estimated at around 500 people in a country of over 270 million.
Indonesia has not ratified the Stockholm Declaration of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and Judaism is not officially recognized as one of the country’s six major religions, complicating efforts to address the circulation of Nazi and other antisemitic texts.[33] Days after the Holocaust Museum was officially inaugurated, several Muslim organizations in Indonesia protested, calling for its closure. Sudarnoto Abdul Hakim, Head of Foreign Relations and International Cooperation of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), the country’s top Islamic clerical body, voiced opposition: “We demand any exhibition to be stopped, and the Museum to be discontinued.”[34] He linked his disapproval to the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, arguing that Jewish communities worldwide, including those in Indonesia, should recognize what he described as the atrocities committed by Israeli Zionists against the Palestinian people since 1948.[35]
Leaders in the Islamist political party, Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS), joined the criticism. Hidayat Nur Wahid (HNW), a senior PKS figure and Deputy Speaker of Indonesia’s parliament, the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR-RI), argued that the museum was part of an effort to whitewash Israeli crimes in Palestine.[36] He noted that the museum was opened in cooperation with Israel’s Yad Vashem, whose chairman, Dani Dayan, is a prominent supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are considered illegal by the United Nations.[37] Wahid claimed that the museum undermined Indonesia’s long-standing support for Palestinian independence and criticized it as counterproductive to the government’s efforts to advocate for Palestinian statehood.[38]
However, not all Indonesians shared these sentiments. Some offered more nuanced perspectives, emphasizing the educational value of the Holocaust Museum. Mukti Ali Qusyairi, Head of Lembaga Bahtsul Masail Nahdlatul Ulama (LBMNU), Jakarta, a branch of the world’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, stated that having a Holocaust Museum was reasonable as long as it did not promote the political interests of any specific state. He stressed that the exhibition could offer important lessons about dehumanization.[39]
In North Sulawesi, the local community largely embraced the museum, viewing it as a nonpolitical initiative that conveyed universal humanitarian values. Steven Kandouw, the Vice Governor of North Sulawesi, expressed support, noting, “Mistakes of the past, especially regarding human rights, must be fought against.”[40] Sandra Rondonuwu, a politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) and a member of North Sulawesi’s Regional House of Representatives, also voiced no objection to the museum, noting the importance of remembering dark chapters in history in a television interview.[41]
Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs chose to downplay the controversy. Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah stated that the museum was a community’s social, cultural, and religious initiative and did not affect Indonesia’s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. He emphasized that the country’s stance on Palestinian independence remained unchanged.[42]
The museum also received initially some positive media coverage, with national outlets like Kompas, tvOne, and TribunNetwork expressing surprise, pride, and curiosity at the development. However, as protests grew, media coverage shifted, using terms like “controversy,” “polemic,” and “rejection” to describe the public reaction. On social media, opposition intensified, with the hashtag #TolakMuseumHolocaust (Reject Holocaust Museum) trending on X.[43] Some Indonesians speculated that the museum’s inauguration was part of a broader effort to normalize relations with Israel. These suspicions fed into pre-existing antisemitic stigmas, further complicating the museum’s reception.
In response to the growing backlash, the news channel tvOne hosted a live debate on its program, Catatan Demokrasi, titled “Geger Museum Yahudi di Indonesia” (Jewish Museum in Indonesia Controversy).[44] Rabbi Baruch participated in the discussion, explaining his motivation for founding the museum, but was confronted with various forms of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
One of the guests, Ustadz Haikal Hassan, made inflammatory remarks, calling the Holocaust “the greatest hoax” and claiming it was used to generate financial support for Israel. Hassan also questioned the historical accuracy of the confirmed historical depictions of the Holocaust. He presented distorted census data and said there may have been six million rats in Europe but not six million Jews.[45] He argued that supporting Holocaust education was equivalent to supporting Israel, reflecting the deep entanglement of the two issues in the minds of some Indonesians.[46]
Despite the initial heated opposition, tensions gradually subsided after Baruch engaged in dialogue with museum critics, including representatives from MUI. In a phone call with Sudarnoto Abdul Hakim, he clarified that the museum had no connection to Zionism or Israeli politics.[47] He invited MUI representatives to visit the museum to address any misunderstandings.[48] Abdul Hakim appreciated the gesture, calling it a positive step towards resolving the issue through dialogue. He also acknowledged the humanitarian message of the museum, stating, “The Holocaust is a crime against humanity that goes against all religions.”[49]
Gradually, the controversy faded. Baruch attributes this success to the role of dialogue in dispelling misconceptions and reducing antisemitic sentiment. He explains: “In Indonesia, we just need to sit together and talk heart to heart, and all the problems will be solved.”[50]
The United Arab Emirates
Prof. Uriya Shavit and Dr. Ofir Winter
In a year that witnessed the proliferation of antisemitic rhetoric in Arab countries, the continued existence of the Holocaust memorial exhibition entitled “We Remember” at the Crossroad of Civilizations Museum in Dubai was a source of encouragement. Opened in May 2021 following the signing of the Abraham Accords, the exhibition was – and, sadly, remains – one of its kind in the Arab world.
Its initiator, Ahmad ‘Ubayd al-Mansuri (b. 1971), served as a Member of Parliament from 2011 to 2015. A businessman who gives the impression of having landed in our era directly from Victorian times, he established the museum in 2012 as a private enterprise in a building provided by the authorities to present his eclectic, passionate collection, including a magnificent gallery rich with Islamic books and artifacts and an equally impressive gallery showcasing pearls and how their trade shaped the region.
The Center for Study of Contemporary European Jewry discussed the courageous exhibition on the Holocaust in its first For a Righteous Cause Report in 2022[51] as well as in an issue of Perspectives in 2023.[52] When we approached al-Mansuri in October 2024, he explained that it was and remains important to separate the teaching of the history of the Holocaust from politics, and emphasized the singularity of the crimes committed by the Nazis compared to other genocides.
It is not clear how many Arabs have visited the exhibition since it opened. When we visited the museum in the spring of 2022, we found in the guestbook almost only comments from Israelis: some emotional, some patronizing. In October 2024, al-Mansuri said that the war had caused a sharp decline in the number of Israeli visitors, but not in the number of other visitors.
Since the establishment of the exhibition, only one school has refused to visit it; al-Mansuri could not remember a single case of visitors leaving the exhibition in protest after seeing its contents. He estimated that, to date, some 2,500 people from the UAE and the Gulf at large have been to the exhibition, along with several thousand schoolchildren, but said it was hard to know how many of the latter are Arab because some schools in the UAE are mixed nationally. He holds that one of the most important contributions of the Museum are visits by Arab teachers, who know nothing or very little about the Holocaust.
Al-Mansuri told us that he did not receive a single demand or threat to close down the exhibition following October 7. It did result in one change of plans, as he decided not to hold Holocaust memorial events. He explained: “when Israel described what happened on October 7 as a Holocaust, it made my work more difficult. I deplore what happened [on October 7], I do not belittle it, but these statements mean that Holocaust memorial events will become politicized. The history of the Holocaust should be taught as history.”[53]
In the more than three years that the exhibition has existed, al-Mansuri faced a few unexpected questions, although not from Arabs. He was surprised when Jewish visitors from Tel Aviv asked him why he did not dedicate space to teach about the Nakba. Ironically, it was for him to tell them that the Nakba occurred within the context of a war between two national movements, whereas the Nazis murdered Jews for no other reason than to see their total annihilation. He was equally surprised when several American Jews told him they had no idea that Jews lived in Palestine already before the Holocaust.
The exhibition includes information on the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany from Kristallnacht to the implementation of the Final Solution, photos and exhibits commemorating the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust, including Anne Frank, and personal testimonies of Holocaust survivors. At the center of the exhibition hall is a full-size figure of one of the most heartbreaking images of the Holocaust – the boy who raises his hands in surrender after the crashing of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Mishnah saying “whoever saves one life saves the world entire ” and its Quranic (5:32) equivalent are presented on a poster. Another poster explains that Jews were the only group singled out for systematic annihilation by the Nazis. On a poster in a glassed cabinet to which a Star of David is attached, the eternal lines of the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Al-Mansuri believes the history of the Holocaust should be conveyed primarily through the stories of heroes who fought evil, and that this approach can be useful in Israel as well. The exhibition thus tells the story of the hundreds of Jews who found refuge in Albania in 1943 and were welcomed by its majority-Muslim population. It also tells the story of individual heroes, including Muhammad Hilmi, an Egyptian medical doctor who lived in Berlin and, at great personal risk, saved the life of a Jewish friend, Anna Boros, and several members of her family. Hilmi, who was helped by a German friend, Frieda Szturmann, was the first Arab to be recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
A large, colorful mural created by Israeli and Emirati artists graces the museum courtyard. It shows two young men, an Emirati and an Israeli, chatting and drinking coffee together against the backdrop of a sunset and skyscrapers. Above them is the word “cousins” in Arabic and Hebrew. Al-Mansuri belongs to a small group, yet one that deserves more attention, of patriotic Arabs who believe that peace is something that requires constant effort and patience. The establishment and uninterrupted operation of his memorial exhibition could not take place in the UAE without the government’s consent, indicating the strength of the Abraham Accords.
Asked why the existence of the exhibition about the Holocaust has been received so well in the UAE, as opposed to the controversies a similar enterprise initially stirred in Indonesia, al-Mansuri explained that his country allows people to develop in different ways, but not to attack others based on their race or religion: “We have people from places of conflict, for examples Indians and Pakistanis, Russians and Ukrainians, who live here in mutual respect. Here, it is not acceptable for Arabs to attack Jews or for Jews to attack Arabs.”[54]
Albania
Premton Asllani
The Albanian government is currently funding and promoting the construction of two museums in the country, one in the capital Tirana and one in the coastal city Vlora, dedicated to the history of the Albanian Jewish community and the story of how Jews in Albania were saved during the Holocaust. Slated to open by 2026 and by 2027, respectively, the museums will celebrate the traditional honor code “Besa,” which highlights trust, faith, and keeping promises in all aspects of life, and motivated Albanians to protect Jews during the Second World War.
During the Second World War, Albania was invaded by fascist Italy in 1939 and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1943.[55] Throughout the war, Albanians, Muslims and Christians alike, risked their lives by refusing to turn over lists of Jews to the Nazis, providing fake documentation to protect Jews, and sheltering Jewish citizens and Jewish refugees from deportation to concentration camps. Because they did so, Albania was the only country in Europe in which the Jewish population increased during the Second World War rather than decreased.[56]
Protecting Jews was a matter of principle for Albanians. Their courage was grounded and born out of the centuries-old Besa code of honor.[57] Besa is rooted in the Kanun (Code) of Lekë Dukagjini, a 15th-century collection of customary laws that has governed Albanian society since.[58] Passed down through generations through proverbs and judgments until it was codified in the late 19th century, the Kanun serves as the foundation governing Albanian society and relationships between and among people, including sojourners and guests.
Under Besa, betraying a guest among Albanians is inviolable, as “the house of an Albanian belongs to God and to the guest.”[59] Moreover, according to the Kanun, “what is promised must be honored,” and giving one’s word forms an unbreakable pact. Failure to abide by this code of honor by disrespecting oaths or acting unfaithfully brings not only dishonor and shame but also community punishment on the one who transgresses.[60]
Announced by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in 2023, the Besa Museum in Tirana will be situated in the historic House of Toptans in Tirana.[61] The 19th-century residence belonged to the Toptani, a large noble Muslim landowning family in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Albania, several of whose members sheltered two Jewish families with whom they had no previous relationship, the Levis and the Altaracs, out of their commitment to Besa.[62] For their courageous act, Yad Vashem designated Atif and Ganimet Toptani as Righteous Among the Nations.[63]
Designed by Oppenheim Architecture and funded by the Albanian government and private donations, the museum aims to commemorate Albanians who sheltered and rescued Jews during the Holocaust in embodiment of the spirit of Besa, and to highlight the broader historical context of Albania’s relationship with the Jewish people and Jewish tradition, culture, and art.[64] Integrating the original architectural elements of the Toptani house with modern exhibition spaces, the museum will feature galleries that tell the story of Albanian hospitality, the concept of Besa, and the specific instances during which Albanians provided sanctuary to Jews.
The museum experience is planned to be immersive, including interactive exhibits that engage visitors in understanding the cultural and ethical significance of Besa. While the museum’s construction has not garnered much press coverage to date, the Albanian government is firmly committed to its advancement as a means to highlight a proud historical moment for Albanians and pass its lessons on to the next generations.[65]
In Vlora, the Albanian government is establishing the country’s first Jewish Museum. Until the 1990s, the city was home to Albania’s largest Jewish community. The museum will be housed in the historic synagogue located in the city’s Old Town. Eneida Tarifi, the chairwoman of the Vlora Municipality’s Committee for Education, Culture, and Sports, told me that the museum will be part of a larger cultural complex in the historical center of the city near three other museums: the National Museum of Independence, the Historical Museum, and the Ethnographic Museum.[66]
Supported by the Albanian-American Development Foundation and the Albanian Jewish Community, and designed by the Israeli firm Kimmel Eshkolot Architects, the project has faced delays due to funding issues.[67] It will focus on the history of the Albanian Jewish community in the historical territory of Albania and the diaspora dating back to the second century, placing the Holocaust, Albanians’ role in protecting Jews, and the concept of Besa within the context of this broader, longer history.[68]
With the aim of becoming a cultural landmark, the Vlora Jewish Museum will highlight the long-standing coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Albania, showcasing the good relations and the mutual respect that have characterized their interactions for centuries. Its exhibitions will include personal stories, historical documents, and artifacts that illustrate the shared history of Albanians and Jews. The museum will serve as a center for education and reflection, emphasizing the importance of preserving these historical memories and the values of tolerance and humanity.[69]
According to Tarifi, the local public has welcomed the project: “The Vlora Municipality, together with the Albanian people, will always be part of this cooperation [with the Albanian Jewish community], celebrating the connection between the two communities. We are very happy that this project will be in such a historic place as Vlora.”[70]
There are good reasons for Albanians to be proud of their relations with and protection of Jews during the darkest days in modern history. Protecting the Jews who lived in their country already makes Albania shine as a force for good among European nations in the shameful historical chapter of the Holocaust. Protecting the Jewish refugees who entered it makes it all the more of an exception.
Under the rule of King Zog (September 1928 – April 1939), before the Italian takeover in 1939, the Albanian government welcomed and assisted Jewish refugees from neighboring countries, integrating them into the local Jewish communities, granting them visas and citizenship, and serving as a safe point of transit.[71] By the eve of the Second World War, hundreds of Jews had found refuge in Albania, joining the country’s two-hundred-member community.[72] During the Italian occupation (April 1939 – September 1943), hundreds more Jewish refugees continued to arrive in the country, and Albanian authorities ignored Italian orders to repatriate them to their countries of origin.[73]
Under the Nazi occupation (September 1943 – November 1944), despite the risk and threat of death for anyone hiding Jews, Albanians remained steadfast in protecting and supporting hundreds of Jewish families and individuals. When upon the occupation, the Nazis asked for a list of Jews living in Albania, intending to deport them to concentration camps, the Albanian government refused.
The following spring, the Nazis demanded the Regent Mehdi Frashëri (head of the Albanian Government under their occupation) once again to list and to gather all the Jews. Jewish leaders in Albania, including Rafael Jakoel and Mateo Matalia, appealed to Frashëri, who directed them to the Interior Minister, Xhafer Deva. Deva refused the Nazis’ request, arguing it violated Albania’s sovereignty and meddled in the country’s internal affairs, both of which, he claimed, violated the country’s agreement with the Germans. Deva also assured the Jewish community of their safety and that they would not be deported.[74]
While reporting Jews to Nazi authorities was theoretically possible, in practice, it was not – disgracing one’s family and village was out of the question. Adhering to and being motivated by Besa, Albanian Muslims and Christians inside and outside the country committed themselves to protecting their fellow Jewish Albanians and Jewish refugees fleeing persecution.
When the Axis powers invaded and occupied Yugoslavia in April 1941, hundreds of Jews from the country’s northern regions sought refuge in the Italian-controlled southern ethnic Albanian regions, which were annexed to following the Axis invasion to Italian-controlled Albania, joining some 90 Jewish families who lived there at the time.
The following year, the Nazis ordered the arrest of all Jews in Kosovo, prompting Albanian authorities to urge Jews to relocate to Albania proper. Approximately 500 Jews relocated and settled in Berat and Krujë, where local Albanians sheltered them. Those Jews who remained in Kosovo were afforded protection by Albanians there, who provided them with shelter and false documents.[75]
Among those Albanians in Kosovo who helped the Jews were members of my mother’s family: Arif Alickaj, her grandfather, and Rexhep Cufë Lokaj, her great-uncle.
Arif Alickaj served as Executive Secretary in the Deçan Municipality and was one of the key collaborators in the effort to save Jews in Kosovo. His son, Skender Alickaj, recalled in our conversation that his father’s actions were driven by profound empathy and a deep sense of honor. Witnessing the brutal and senseless persecution of Jews, Arif Alickaj felt compelled to act. Guided by Besa, he undertook extraordinary measures to protect Jewish refugees arriving from Macedonia and Serbia.
Arif skillfully created fake identities and false documents, often assigning Muslim names to Jewish families. This clever disguise allowed them to blend in and avoid the watchful eyes of the Nazi forces, providing these desperate souls a chance to escape and survive.
In one of his documents, preserved by Skender, Arif wrote, “I provided identities to two, three Jewish families who came from Skopje, to hide from the Germans in the Roshkodol mountains.”[76]
Rexhep Cufë Lokaj’s nephew Musa was a young boy during the Second World War. In our conversation, he recalled how his family opened their doors to two Jewish families from Skopje that Arif Alickaj had sent to his uncle for protection. Despite the risks, his uncle and the entire Lokaj family treated the two families as their own and sheltered them for several years. At the time, Musa was the same age as some of the Jewish children who found shelter with them, and they spent time together. When the Nazi occupation became more brutal in the winter of 1943-1944, Lokaj decided to send the Jewish families he sheltered to the Roshkodol Mountains because it was an isolated location out of reach for the Nazis. All survived the war and went on to live in the Americas.
Reflecting on this family legacy, Musa said, “In our culture and tradition, religious differences do not exist when someone needs help. For Albanians, tradition, culture, and honor come first, then other aspects like religion. The most important thing is ‘Besa’ – to help and protect those in need and to welcome them into our homes as honored guests.”[77]
For their bravery, Arif and Rexhep are among those honored on the “Wall of Honor” in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Located in Pristina’s City Park, the wall bears the name of the twenty-three families of the Albanians of Kosovo who sacrificed or risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.[78]
[1] Jon Emont, “A Small Holocaust Museum Springs Up in a Remote Town – and Stirs a Big Backlash,” The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-small-holocaust-museum-springs-up-in-a-remote-townand-stirs-a-big-backlash-11644677414; “Number of Population of Minahasa Regency by District (Souls), 2020-2022 [Indonesian],” Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten Minahasa, November 3, 2023, https://minahasakab.bps.go.id/id/statistics-table/2/OTEjMg==/jumlah-penduduk-kabupaten-minahasa-menurut-kecamatan.html; and “Percentage of Population by Regency/ City and Religion, 2022-2023 [Indonesian],” Badan Pusat Statistik Provinsi Sulawesi Utara, September 12, 2024, https://sulut.bps.go.id/id/statistics-table/2/NzMyIzI=/persentase-jumlah-penduduk-menurut-kabupaten-kota-dan-agama-yang-dianut.html.
[2] “North Sulawesi Becomes the Proper Place for the Opening of a Holocaust Museum, Why? [Indonesian],” KumparanNews, January 29, 2022, https://kumparan.com/kumparannews/sulut-jadi-tempat-yang-pantas-untuk-pembukaan-museum-holocaust-kenapa-1xOzWiEWitO/full.
[3] Skivo Marcelino Mandey and Teuku Muhammad Valdy Arief, “Holocaust Museum is Built in Minahasa North Sulawesi, This Is Its Purpose [Indonesian],” Kompas, February 4, 2022, https://regional.kompas.com/read/2022/02/04/060700878/museum-holocaust-didirikan-di-minahasa-sulut-ini-tujuannya?page=all#page2.
[5] Rizali Posumah, “Rabbi Yaakov Baruch, a Dutch Jewish Descendant Who Grew Up in an Interfaith Family [Indonesian],” Tribun Manado, July 14, 2022, https://manado.tribunnews.com/2022/07/14/rabi-yaakovbaruch-keturunan-yahudi-belanda-yang-tumbuh-di-keluarga-beda-agama.
[6] Norimitsu Onishi, “In Silver of Indonesia, Public Embrace Judaism,” The New York Times, November 22, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/world/asia/23indo.html.
[7] Interview by the author with Rabbi Ya‘akov Baruch, September 21, 2024.
[8] Interview by the author with Rabbi Ya‘akov Baruch, June 26, 2024.
[9] Interviews by the author with Rabbi Ya‘akov Baruch, June 26, 2024, and September 20, 2024.
[15] Martina Safitry, Indah Wahyu Puji Utami & Zein Ilyas, History [Indonesian] (Jakarta, Pusat Perbukuan Badan Standar, Kurikulum, dan Asesmen, Kementerian Pendidikan, Kebudayaan, Riset, dan Teknologi, 2021), https://static.buku.kemdikbud.go.id/content/pdf/bukuteks/kurikulum21/Sejarah-BS-KLS-XI.pdf, and “We Hope to Help Indonesian Teachers to Better Inform Their Students about the Holocaust and Genocide,” UNESCO, April 20, 2023, https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/we-hope-help-indonesian-teachers-better-inform-theirstudents-about-holocaust-and-genocide.
[16] Jeffery Halder, “Translations of Antisemitism: Jews, the Chinese, and Violence in Colonial and Post-colonial Indonesia,” Indonesia and the Malay World 32, no. 94 (Carfax Publishing, 2004), 292-313.
[18] Rahadian Rundjan, “How People Understand Hitler in Indonesia [Indonesian],” Deutsche Welle, February 7, 2018, https://www.dw.com/id/bagaimana-orang-orang-memahami-hitler-di-indonesia/a-42440753, and Yannick Lengkeek, “Parindra’s Loyal Cadres. Fascism and Anticolonial Nationalism in Late Colonial Indonesia, 1935-1942,” International Institute for Asian Studies The Newsletter 83 (2019), 22-23.
[19] Sebastian Strangio, “Opening of Indonesian Holocaust Museum Met with Islamist Backlash,” The Diplomat, February 4, 2022, https://thediplomat.com/2022/02/opening-of-indonesian-holocaust-museum-met-withislamist-backlash/.
[23] “The Superpower of Nazi Germany (1933-1945) [Indonesian],” Edisi Koleksi Angkasa, Angkasa, 2005; “The Nazi’s War Machines [Indonesian],” Edisi Koleksi Angkasa, Angkasa, 2006; “Nazi’s Special Forces Core Troops of Nazi’s Power [Indonesian],” Edisi Koleksi Angkasa, Angkasa, 2006; and “Angkasa: Doesn’t Subside Flying Across Time [Indonesian],” KumparanNEWS, February 9, 2017, https://kumparan.com/kumparannews/angkasa-tak-surut-terbang-lintasi-masa/full.
[24] Abdul Khalik, “ ‘Mein Kampf,’ ‘Das Kapital’ Free for Sale in Indonesia,” The Jakarta Post, August 7, 2008, https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/08/07/039mein-kampf039-039das-kapital039-free-sale-indonesia.html.
[25] Sudarto Murtaufiq, “Anti-Israel Demonstrators Seal Synagogue,” NU Online, January 8, 2009, https://en.nu.or.id/news/anti-israel-demonstrators-seal-synagogue-KHidG.
[26] Indra Harsaputra, “Group Protests Synagogue Demolition,” The Jakarta Post, September 17, 2013, https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/09/17/group-protests-synagogue-demolition.html.
[27] Ynetnews with AFP, “Indonesia: Nazi-themed Café Sparks Outrage,” Ynetnews, July 23, 2013, https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4408386,00.html.
[28] “Global 100: Indonesia,” Anti-Defamation League, 2014, https://global100.adl.org/country/indonesia/2014.
[32] Jordyn Haime, “Despite Unrest in Indonesia, a Jewish Community Finds Peace Among Other Faith Groups,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 29, 2023, https://www.jta.org/2023/11/29/global/despite-unrest-inindonesia-a-jewish-community-finds-peace-among-other-faith-groups, and Rotem Kowner, “Indonesia’s Jews,” Inside Indonesia, June 20, 2011, https://www.insideindonesia.org/archive/articles/indonesia-s-jews.
[33] The People’s Consultative Assembly of the Republic of Indonesia, “HNW: Closing Holocaust Museum Proof of Indonesia’s Solidarity with Palestine [Indonesian],” MPR-RI, February 6th, 2022, https://www.mpr.go.id/berita/HNW:-Tutup-Museum-Holocaust-Bukti-Solidaritas-Indonesia–Dengan-Palestina; “Prosecuting Beliefs Indonesia’s Blasphemy Laws,” Amnesty International, 2014, https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/asa210182014en.pdf; Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs – East Java, 1965, https://jatim.kemenag.go.id/file/file/Undangundang/owiz1398054257.pdf; and Johannes Nugroho, “Indonesia’s Jews Come Out,” Tablet, March 21, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/indonesia-jews-come-out.
[34] Jordyn Haime, “Indonesia Muslim Groups Demand Closure of Country’s First-ever Holocaust Exhibition,” The Times of Israel, February 10, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/indonesia-muslim-groups-demandclosure-of-countrys-first-ever-holocaust-exhibition/.
[36] The People’s Consultative Assembly of the Republic of Indonesia, “HNW: Stop the Holocaust Museum at Tondano [Indonesian],” MPR-RI, January 31, 2022, https://www.mpr.go.id/berita/HNW:-Stop-Museum-Holocaust-Di-Tondano.
[38] The People’s Consultative Assembly of the Republic of Indonesia, “HNW: Closing Holocaust Museum Proof of Indonesia’s Solidarity with Palestine [Indonesian],” MPR-RI, February 6, 2022, https://www.mpr.go.id/berita/HNW:-Tutup-Museum-Holocaust-Bukti-Solidaritas-Indonesia–Dengan-Palestina.
[39] Dedik Priyanto, “Polemic on Jewish Holocaust Museum in Minahasa, NU DKI Asks Not to Bring Interests of Certain State [Indonesian],” KompasTV, February 2, 2022, https://www.kompas.tv/nasional/257602/polemikmuseum-holocaust-yahudi-di-minahasa-nu-dki-minta-tidak-bawa-kepentingan-negara-tertentu?page=all.
[40] Devira Prastiwi, “The First Jewish Holocaust Museum in Indonesia is Officially Opened in Minahasa [Indonesian],” Liputan 6, February 3, 2022, https://www.liputan6.com/news/read/4876893/museum-holocaust-yahudipertama-di-indonesia-resmi-dibuka-di-minahasa?page=2.
[41] tvOne, “MUI Criticizes Holocaust Museum [Indonesian],” Kabar Petang, February 2, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwDPx_GLo1o&t=48s.
[42] Fathiyah Wardah, “The First Holocaust Museum in Indonesia is Opened at Minahasa [Indonesian],” VOA Indonesia,
January 29, 2022, https://www.voaindonesia.com/a/museum-holocaust-pertama-di-indonesia-dibuka-diminahasa/
6418015.html, and Larasati Dyah Utami, “Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Response to the
Attendance of German Ambassador in the Inauguration of the Holocaust Museum in Minahasa [Indonesian],” Tribunnews, February 3, 2022, https://www.tribunnews.com/nasional/2022/02/03/respons-kemenlu-ri-sikapikehadiran-dubes-jerman-dalam-peresmian-museum-holocaust-di-minahasa.
[43] Dhea Alifia Firdausi and Nuraeni, “The Fight of Diasporic Jews against Antisemitism through Indonesian Holocaust Museum [Indonesian],” Indonesian Journal of Religion and Society 5, no. 2 (2023), 96-111.
[44] tvOne, “Uproar over Jewish Museum in Indonesia [Indonesian],” Catatan Demokrasi tvOne, February 8, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdIB_gkuGvs.
[47] Fathiyah Wardah, “The Long Road Education Effort of Holocaust Museum [Indonesian],” VOA Indonesia, March 1, 2022, https://www.voaindonesia.com/a/jalan-panjang-upaya-edukasi-museum-holocaust/6464275.html.
[48] Interview by the author with Rabbi Ya‘akov Baruch, June 26, 2024.
[49] “Pro Contra of Holocaust Museum by Jewish Community in Minahasa [Indonesian],” CNN Indonesia, February 3, 2024, https://www.cnnindonesia.com/nasional/20220203062643-20-754330/pro-kontra-museum-holocaustoleh-komunitas-yahudi-di-minahasa.
[50] Interview by the author with Rabbi Ya‘akov Baruch, June 26, 2024.
[51] Ofir Winter, “Discovering the Past, Building a Future,” For A Righteous Cause, January 2022, 6-7, https://cst.tau.ac.il/for-a-righteous-cause/, and Uriya Shavit, “Notes From the Emirates,” Perspectives 23, April 2023, https://cst.tau.ac.il/perspectives/notes-from-the-emirates/.
[55] Bernd J. Fischer, Albania at War, 1939-1945 (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1999), 5, 157.
[56] Harvey Sarner, Rescue in Albania: One Hundred Percent of Jews in Albania Rescued from Holocaust (California: Brunswick Press, 1997), 63-65.
[57] Yad Vashem, “Besa – A Code of Honor,” nd, https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/besa/index.asp.
[58] Alma Kushova, “Besa,” OpenDemocracy.net, July 21, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20151117234832/https:/www.opendemocracy.net/arts/article_2114.jsp.
[59] Albana Mehmetaj, “Ernest Koliqi – Albanian Besa [Albanian],” International Seminar for Albanian Language, Literature and Culture Journal 37 (2018), 14, https://web.archive.org/web/20191014210448/https:/filologjia.uni-pr.edu/getattachment/Seminari/Seminari-37—v–2-(per-shtyp).pdf.aspx, and Tomer Misini, “Trust or Honor [Albanian],” Medium, February 16, 2019, https://medium.com/@tomor73/besa-ose-nderi-1b4724a50de1.
[60] Tonin Çobani, “Lekë Dukagjini [Albanian],” Kanuni.org, nd, https://kanuni.org/lek%C3%AB-dukagjini, and EltonVarfi, “Besa in the Canon of Lek Dukagjini [Albanian],” Kronika Shqiptare, June 12, 2011, https://eltonvarfishqip.blogspot.com/2011/06/besa-ne-kanunin-e-lek-dukagjinit.html.
[61] Interview by the author with architect Jurtin Hajro, August 5, 2024.
[63] Yad Vashem, “Atif and Ganimet Toptani,” nd, https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/righteous/4021521.
[64] Zvika Klein, “Albanian Gov’t Announces Museum Celebrating Albanians Who Rescued Jews in WWII,” The Jerusalem Post, March 1, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-733034, and interview by the author with Jurtin Hajro, August 5, 2024.
[66] Interview by the author with Eneida Tarifi, August 8, 2024.
[67] Ibid. At present, the project has a 6.5-million-dollar budget.
[68] Zvika Klein, “Albania to Open Two New Jewish Museums in Vlora and Tirana,” The Jerusalem Post, June 8, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-745686, and interview by the author with Eneida Tarifi, August 8, 2024.
[69] Interview by the author with Eneida Tarifi, August 8, 2024.
[71] Sarner, Rescue in Albania, 42-44; David Cesarani, Daniel Fraenkel, Guy Miron, David Silberklang, and Aharon Weiss, “Albania,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, eds. Robert Rozett and Shmuel Spector (New York: Routledge, 2013), 104, and “Albania’s King Zog Extends Invitation to Jewish Settlers,” The American Jewish World, June 7, 1935, 3.
[72] Yael Weinstock Mashbaum, “Jews in Albania,” Yad Vashem, nd. https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/general/jews-in-albania.html.
[73] David Straub, “Jews in Albania,” in Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, ed. Mark Avrum Ehrlich (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 942-946.
[75] Qazim Namani, “The Jews of Kosovo between the Two World Wars [Albanian],” Izraeli Sot, January 3, 2023, https://www.izraelisot.com/2023/01/03/dr-qazim-namani-hebrenjte-e-kosoves-mes-dy-lufterave-boterore/.
[76] Interview by author with Skender Alickaj, July 4, 2024.
[77] Interview by author with Musa Lokaj, July 2, 2024.
[78] Sylejman Kllokoqi and Llazar Semini, “Kosovo Inaugurates ‘Wall of Honor’ for 23 Albanians who Rescued Jews from Holocaust,” Times of Israel, August 24, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/kosovo-inaugurates-wallof-honor-for-23-albanians-who-rescued-jews-from-holocaust/.
A Historical Inflection Point by Prof. Irwin Cotler
We are witnessing and experiencing an unprecedented global explosion of antisemitism. Canada is one looking glass, but whether you look from Melbourne to Montreal or from Berlin to Berkeley, the trend is clear. There is an unprecedented global explosion of antisemitism, not only in terms of the incidents of antisemitism, but also because of the nature of the antisemitism itself.
The dramatic rise in antisemitic hate crimes and the intensification of sundry antisemitic hate speech – along with their convergence – underpins this unprecedented explosion. This comes against the backdrop of an international inflection moment that coincides with it – the intensification of what I call the “axis of authoritarianism,” consisting of Russia, China, and particularly Iran. These powers are working collaboratively, strategically, and in concert, incorporating the weaponization of antisemitism as part of their broader strategy of disinformation and misinformation. They contribute to the “antisemitic ecosystem,” now anchored within the axis of authoritarianism.
At the same time, we see an upending of the transnational Atlantic alliance. The United States, which was once the linchpin of the global rules-based order, is now itself destabilizing that order. We are witnessing, on the one hand, the upending of the community of democracies and an intensification of the axis of authoritarianism on the other. Antisemitism feeds off this larger ecosystem, and these dynamics are underpinning the unprecedented explosion of antisemitism.
This crisis escalated in the aftermath of October 7. It is sometimes forgotten that the unspeakable mass atrocities of that day, including mass murder, rape, mutilation, forcible abduction of hostages, and the execution of hostages in captivity, were not only perpetrated by Hamas as a terrorist organization under international law, but by an antisemitic, genocidal terrorist organization. This is not because I say so, but because Hamas itself affirmed it in its 1988 Charter and repeatedly since. Under international law and the Genocide Convention, incitement to genocide is a standalone breach of that convention, regardless of whether mass atrocities follow. In this case, genocidal atrocities directly followed genocidal incitement on October 7.
And it did not end there. On October 8, another antisemitic, genocidal terrorist group, Hizballah, joined in. Before long, seven fronts, each of them antisemitic, were acting in concert, led by the Iranian regime, which continues to receive a pass because attention remains focused on its proxies rather than the regime itself. When taken together, these forces create a critical mass of antisemitism that underpins this unprecedented explosion.
And the worst part of it? One would have thought that such unspeakable mass atrocities, carried out by a genocidal antisemitic organization that, after October 7, openly declared its intention to commit October 7 “again and again” until Israel’s annihilation, would have resulted in global condemnation and global action against antisemitism, against these genocidal antisemitic proxies, and against Iran, the head of the campaign. Instead, rather than being diplomatically isolated, Iranian diplomats and leaders continue to be received in Davos and elsewhere, chair United Nations (UN) human rights groups, and enjoy a disturbing level of international legitimacy.
I first coined the term “genocidal antisemitism” at the beginning of the 21st century, when Ayatollah Khamenei declared that there could be no resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict without the annihilation of the Jewish state (without even resorting to the euphemism of “Zionist regime”). That genocidal incitement by the Iranian regime has continued, unchallenged and without accountability. Thus, we have not only an explosion of antisemitism but also a culture of impunity that allows it to flourish. The coming together of these dynamics is the most disturbing.
Even before October 7, however, the embers of antisemitism were burning, but we were not paying attention. In 2021, at the end of my first year as Canada’s Special Envoy on Combatting Antisemitism, a role with a global mandate, I reported that the most disturbing finding was not just that we already had the highest levels of antisemitic incidents, hate crimes, and incendiary hate speech (all of which have since exploded) since reporting began in the 1970s, but that we were witnessing the normalization, mainstreaming, and legitimization of antisemitism in politics, culture, entertainment, sports, media, and particularly campus life.
Worse of all was an absence of outrage; a prevailing indifference and inaction to the rise in antisemitism prior to October 7. This reminded me of the words of my mentor, Elie Wiesel, who often said that indifference and inaction always mean siding with the antisemites, not with their targets and victims.
At this point, our responsibility is clear: we need a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach to combatting antisemitism, with concrete actions taken country by country and internationally. We can no longer continue with complacency, indifference, and inaction because this leads to impunity, and impunity leads to an absence of accountability.
What is at stake here, and what continues to not be sufficiently appreciated, is recognizing this is not only a threat to the safety and security of Jewish communities, which should be reason enough to protect a vulnerable minority that is targeted by the longest, most enduring, most toxic, and most lethal of hatreds, but also the security of democracies themselves. It is a standing threat to the safety and security of citizens within those democracies because this metastasizing antisemitism is now evolving into antisemitic terror, and the next terrorist attack, possibly another mass atrocity terror attack, is just stalking around the corner.
Democracies must preemptively act to hold antisemites accountable and combat the normalization and mainstreaming of antisemitism across all cultural spheres. This is an urgent historical moment that demands equally urgent action domestically in each country, among the community of democratic nations, and at the highest levels internationally.
This brings us to the United Nations. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the UN Charter – a document intended to uphold human dignity, which birthed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and which spoke in its preamble of unspeakable atrocities that shock the conscience of humankind – we must confront the reality that antisemitism has not been eradicated. October 7 were the unspeakable atrocities that should have shocked the conscience of humankind, but did not. The explosion of antisemitism in the wake of October 7 should have shocked the conscience of humankind, but did not.
So, as we approach the 80th anniversary of the UN Charter and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, we are at a historical inflection point, with these two historical dates linked to the present by antisemitism. Auschwitz, the worst extermination camp of the 20th century, saw 1.3 million people deported there, 1.1 million of whom were Jews. Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism.
But antisemitism did not die at Auschwitz. It remains the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global hatred and violence. And history has taught us, time and again, that while antisemitism begins with Jews, it never ends with Jews.
As we mark the 80th anniversary of the UN Charter, I recall the words of a former UN Secretary-General, who told me when I was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada: “A United Nations that does not put the combatting of antisemitism at the forefront of its agenda is a United Nations that has betrayed its past and forfeited its future.”
This is the historical moment that the UN faces today. As a longtime supporter of the UN and its institutions like the International Criminal Court, I regrettably say that instead of leading the fight against antisemitism, the UN has often provided cover for it. Under the protective shield of international law, human rights advocacy, and anti-racism efforts, antisemitism has been laundered and, worse, weaponized.
International law is being weaponized to single out one member state – Israel, the Jew among the nations – in the international community for selective opprobrium and indictment.
This is not to say that Israel, like any other state, should not be held accountable for human rights and humanitarian law violations. The Jewish people and the State of Israel do not enjoy any particular privilege or preference because of the horrors of the Holocaust. No one should seek that Israel be above the law. But as the UN Charter proclaims, Israel is entitled to equality before the law and deserves equal respect. It must not be subjected to a different standard or singled out for disproportionate condemnation, but standards must be applied equally.
Human rights standards must be applied equally. The selective targeting of Israel, mirroring historic patterns of antisemitism, is itself a manifestation of contemporary antisemitism. This fuels a culture of impunity, allowing antisemitism to flourish unchecked.
At this inflection point, the international community must recognize that combating antisemitism is not just about protecting Jewish communities. It is a fundamental necessity for preserving democratic values and global security. The time to act is now.
Irwin Cotler is former Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada
Call for Submissions – Sports and Religion
The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, Tel Aviv University, and the Department of History, Bielefeld University, hereby invite scholars to submit contributions for an edited, peer-reviewed volume on the relations between sports and religious doctrines and practices in Judaism, Christianity and Islam from late antiquity to the present.
Sporting cultures have challenged religious creeds and establishments in a number of ways: by emphasizing the physical rather than the spiritual; distracting believers from their duties; establishing rituals that substitute religious ones; and involving behaviors deemed immoral or undesired. In addressing those challenges, theologians and religious establishments have chosen one of two paths: accommodation – infusing religious meaning and hierarchies into sports; or rejection – defining religiosity through its total or partial opposition to sports.
The edited volume does not seek to answer one specific research question and does not draw on one discipline or methodology. Rather, by bringing together diverse case studies of Jewish, Christian and Muslim attitudes to sporting institutions and activities at different historical periods, it aims to present a rich perspective on how the three monotheistic religions have treated challenges different sporting activities have presented, and how they have utilized these challenges to define and re-define their essences.
Contributions already included explore, for example, how early versions of tennis played in medieval monasteries were interpreted by Christian theologians as manifestations of God’s presence in the world; the emergence of the understanding of sports as antithetical to “true” Judaism as a backbone of ultra-Orthodox Jewish creeds; and the transformation of debates on religio-legal norms regarding sports into a definer of Muslim religious identity in the West, and how these contributed to changes in Western sporting culture.
Contributions are welcomed from scholars of all relevant disciplines. Contributions from early-career scientists are encouraged. Contributions should be original, written in English, and between 7,000 to 10,000 words.
Abstracts (not more than 300 words) of proposed contributions and CVs should be sent to the editors by August 1, 2025. Decisions on potential suitability will be sent to authors within two weeks. Submissions of articles will be required by no later than January 10, 2026.
Gaza, Ireland: The Hour Will Not Come – Dr. Ofir Winter
In early 2024, Amazon offered for sale an English translation of the novel The Thorn and the Carnation by Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza and the mastermind behind the October 7 attack and war crimes. Sinwar authored the novel in Arabic almost two decades earlier, when he was still a relatively unknown Hamas operative serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for the murder of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.
The sale of Sinwar’s translated work on Amazon sparked protests from pro-Israel organizations and was halted within days. The protesters argued that its content incited violence, was full of antisemitic rhetoric, and promoted terrorism. They also expressed concerns that the profits from its sale would ultimately fund Hamas.[1]
After Sinwar was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in October 2024, becoming a “martyr” in the eyes of his supporters, his novel gained renewed attention and was marketed by sympathizers as his final testament. The novel was re-published in Arabic and was translated into Turkish, Kurdish, and Chinese. Within months, The Thorn and the Carnation became the top-selling book at book fairs in Amman, Jordan; Sulaymaniyah, Iraq; and Idlib, Syria. It also did well at book fairs in Kuwait, Algeria, and Egypt.[2]
The English translation was sold in bookstores in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States. Connolly Books in Dublin, which was founded in 1932 and describes itself as “Ireland’s oldest radical bookshop,” regarded the selling of the novel as a political mission. The store’s website praised the author, describing Sinwar as someone who was “martyred while bravely fighting against Israeli genocide in Gaza.” Potential readers were invited to “traverse the corridors of his mind, where the seeds for the heroic ‘al-Aqsa Flood’ operation initiated on October 7, 2023, were sown.”[3]
The book and its author also received positive reviews in media across the world. A month before Sinwar was killed, Sõzarn Barday, a lawyer with an interest in human rights in the Middle East, wrote in the South African weekly Mail & Guardian that the novel is “an intimate and heart-wrenching perspective on the Palestinian resistance.” She portrayed Sinwar as demonstrating leadership “through the escalating violence and genocide.”[4]
In Turkey’s Yeni Şafak daily, Selçuk Türkyılmaz wrote that “for us, reading and reflecting on [Sinwar’s] book is a duty.” He portrayed Sinwar as a “great warrior” who secured his place in history by sacrificing his life defending Muslim lands. He further described Sinwar’s biography as a source of inspiration for “Palestinians and those living in the heart of the Islamic world.”[5]
Indeed, Sinwar’s novel, largely overlooked by Hamas researchers before and oddly enough also after October 7, represents a unique attempt by a Hamas leader to provide a literary expression of his movement’s ideology.
Hamas, the “Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine,” was founded in the Gaza Strip in late 1987 following the start of the First Intifada. It was headed by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, a charismatic Palestinian theologian confined to a wheelchair who was inspired by the teachings of Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. It emerged as the self-declared Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, aiming to offer an Islamist alternative to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).[6]
The strategic vision of Hamas, as outlined in its August 1988 charter, considers Palestine an endowment belonging to all Muslims. It calls for the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea and for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. It declares (article 15) that this goal can only be achieved through an armed jihad, and views jihad as a personal duty, i.e., a religio-legal duty incumbent upon every Muslim.
Permanent peace agreements with Israel are framed in the charter (Article 11) as a betrayal of Islam. Therefore, it states that no Arab state or leader has the right to relinquish even an inch of it.
The charter is an antisemitic document envisioning a world without Jews at the End of Days (Article 7). It depicts Jews as a collective as the enemy of Muslims (Article 32) and describes them as Nazis (Article 20). Echoing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the charter accuses Jews of controlling world media and orchestrating through financial means conspiracies against humanity in general and Muslims in particular, including instigating the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution and forcing the start of the First World War and the Second World War (Article 22).[7]
Over the years, Hamas leaders translated these ideological tenets into a political terrorist, annihilationist program. When Yasser Arafat engaged in negotiations with Israel and signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, establishing mutual recognition and endorsing at least rhetorically the two-state solution, Hamas vowed to thwart the diplomatic process by force at any cost. The movement launched a violent terror campaign that included suicide bombings, kidnappings, shootings, and stabbings, killing hundreds of Israeli men, women, elderly, and children.
Hamas justified the killing of Israeli civilians on religious grounds, arguing that Israeli society was militaristic, rendering every Israeli a de facto soldier whose blood was permissible to spill.[8]
In 2006, following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, democratic elections were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council, in which Hamas won. The following year, the movement forcibly seized control of Gaza, becoming the enclave’s ruling authority. Since then, the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been divided between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, respectively.
The Middle East Quartet, the international body overseeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, comprising the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia, set three conditions for Hamas in 2006 to be recognized as a legitimate political actor: recognizing Israel, renouncing terrorism, and accepting previously signed agreements between Israel and the PLO.[9] Hamas flatly rejected these conditions, arguing that it would not abandon its core principles or disregard the will of the Palestinian electorate who voted for the movement.[10]
In the years that followed, Hamas solidified its rule in Gaza. However, between 2013 and 2017, it faced strategic difficulties due to strained relations with Egypt. The Egyptian government accused Hamas of supporting terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula, which had claimed the lives of thousands of Egyptian security personnel.[11] Cairo tightened border restrictions at the Rafah crossing, increased efforts to uncover and destroy smuggling tunnels between Gaza and the Sinai, and even threatened to classify Hamas as a terrorist organization.
In July 2015, after the assassination of Egypt’s attorney general by jihadist operatives trained in Gaza, the Egyptian government intensified its campaign against Hamas, branding it the “military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Hamas found itself increasingly isolated both regionally and internationally, facing financial hardship and eroding public support among Palestinians.
Against this backdrop, Hamas began reconsidering its policy and rhetoric to ease external and internal pressures, even drafting a new charter. Following internal debates, the movement retained the 1988 charter while publishing a supplementary ideological vision called the “Document of Principles” in May 2017. This document did not replace the original charter, which remained officially intact. Still, it favored more secular-nationalist terms such as “armed resistance”; denied any formal ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood; distanced itself from explicitly antisemitic rhetoric by claiming that “the struggle against the Zionist enterprise is not a religious struggle against Jews”; and expressed willingness to accept a temporary Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital based on the 1967 borders, without recognizing Israel, the Oslo Accords, or any permanent settlement based on the two-state principle.[12]
While this document did not facilitate reconciliation with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, it paved the way for tactical understandings between Hamas and Egypt. However, the document offered no substantive change regarding its stance toward Israel. Hamas leaders had proposed since the late 1980s a temporary hudna (ceasefire) in exchange for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but never shifted away from their ultimate goal of liberating all of Palestine from the river to the sea, rejection of Israel’s existence, and opposition to any permanent peace agreements.[13]
Sinwar played significant roles during formative periods in Hamas’ history, both in its early days and during the challenging transitional phase of consolidating its rule in Gaza after his release from prison. Born in 1962 in Khan Yunis to a family of refugees from Majdal (Ashkelon), he studied Arabic at the Islamic University of Gaza in the early 1980s. He was arrested by Israel in 1982 and 1985 for his student activism and sentenced to short prison terms.[14]
With the establishment of Hamas, Sinwar was responsible for its internal security apparatus, al-Majd, which was tasked with identifying and killing collaborators with Israel. From this unit, the movement’s military wing later emerged. He was arrested again in 1988 and convicted in 1989 of murdering four Palestinians.
During his imprisonment, Sinwar learned Hebrew, engaged in translation from Hebrew to Arabic, wrote two so-called research books, and authored The Thorn and the Carnation, which he smuggled out of Eshel Prison in Beersheba in late 2004.
According to testimonies from Israeli prison guards, Sinwar instilled fear in fellow Palestinian inmates and acquired a special status among them. After his release in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, he rapidly climbed Hamas’ ranks and was elected the movement’s leader in Gaza in 2017 and 2021. Following the assassination of Hamas’ political bureau chief, Isma‘il Haniyya, by Israel in July 2024 in Tehran, Sinwar was chosen as his successor, a role he held until he was killed in a confrontation with IDF forces in Rafah in October 2024.
The Thorn and the Carnation is a fictional novel, yet there are clear parallels between the author’s life and his characters. The blend of fiction and reality is anchored in the novel’s chronological storyline, which transitions between real milestones in the conflict with Israel, including wars, agreements, intifadas, and terror attacks.
The book tells the story of a Palestinian family uprooted from its home in 1948, migrating to the Gaza Strip and struggling with life in the al-Shati refugee camp under Israeli occupation. The mother raises alone three children and two nephews who are separated from their fathers against their will. The sons are divided between different Palestinian resistance factions and disagree on their paths. Ahmad, the first-person narrator, is a science student who gradually leans toward Hamas, influenced by his cousin Ibrahim. The latter is the novel’s second protagonist, symbolically named after both Sinwar’s father and future son. Ibrahim is a Hamas operative and a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, working to instill the movement’s ideology among those around him.[15]
The Thorn and the Carnation is primarily a political essay, an ode to the violent struggle against Israel rather than an antisemitic manifesto designed to incite hatred toward Jews as such. However, precisely for this reason, the Jew-hatred that emerges from many of its pages is so revealing. It reflects, unintentionally, the deep immersion of antisemitic perceptions into Hamas’s discourse and ideology, and indeed, among a significant portion of the Palestinian public that supports the movement.
The antisemitic motifs expressed through the novel’s characters include depicting Jews as the eternal enemies of Muslims, attributing to them inherent, vile characteristics, and calling for their killing, even their annihilation.
A common antisemitic motif in Islamist discourse is the portrayal of Jews as the eternal enemies of Muslims, linking Muhammad’s 7th-century conflict with the Jews of the Arabian Peninsula to Hamas’s present-day struggle against Jews in Israel. A particularly popular Islamic tradition that recurs throughout Sinwar’s book is the Battle of Khaybar in 628, during which Muslims defeated the Jews of the city and forced them to surrender half of their property to avoid conversion to Islam.
In descriptions of violent clashes between Palestinians and the IDF, the book repeatedly invokes the chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Muhammad’s army will return!” in various contexts: Gaza youths celebrating after damaging the tires of Israeli military vehicles;[16] Arab and Muslim demonstrators rallying in support of the intifada in their capital cities outside Palestine;[17] and a young man named Muhammad, preparing for a suicide attack in Gush Etzion, calling his proud mother for a final farewell and leaving his cellphone line open so she could witness the moment of his martyrdom:
He shouted ‘Allah Akbar, I am heading to Khaybar’ and threw his bombs one by one. Then he stormed the main hall, firing… A firefight ensued, with the forces rushing to the scene. Muhammad fell and repeated: ‘I testify that there is no God but Allah, and I testify that Muhammad is His messenger.’ Then a wail escaped his mother’s lips as she said: ‘Praise be to Allah, who honored me with his martyrdom.’[18]
The book presents the inherent and unchanging evil of Jews as an explanation for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, selectively drawing from Islamic sources. For example, Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron is depicted as representative of Jewish behavior rather than as an individual act of terrorism that was widely and unequivocally condemned in Israel at the time.
According to the novel, Goldstein’s attack occurred just after the imam recited a Quranic verse condemning Jewish violence and evil from the days of the First and Second Temples: “We decreed to the Children of Israel in the Scripture: ‘Twice you will spread corruption in the land and become highly arrogant’” (Quran 17:4). The moment after, the novel describes how a settler, “a tall man with a wild, dirty beard,” snuck into the mosque and opened fire on the worshipers.[19]
The novel’s opposition to the Oslo Accords is also justified through the alleged treachery that characterizes Jews as a whole. In one debate between the protagonists, Hassan, a Hamas supporter, challenges Mahmud, a Fatah supporter: “Since when have [the Jews] honored agreements and treaties?” He then cites a verse from the Quran, commonly interpreted as referring to the Jews’ betrayal of their covenant with Muhammad and their support for the infidels: “How is it that whenever they make a covenant or pledge, some of them throw it away? In fact, most of them do not believe” (Quran 2:100).[20]
Mahmud, however, refuses to be convinced, accusing Hassan of irrationality and of conflating the Jews of the past with those of today. In response, Hassan asserts that it is only a matter of time before Fatah members realize that Jews have deceived and manipulated them, just as they did to Muslims in the early days of Islam, when they “killed innocent people and fought against Allah and His messenger.” He insists:
This is what Allah has told us about them. We know them, their souls, and the way they operate. They do not honor covenants or agreements… Do you not understand that history repeats itself, and the Jews are the Jews? You will see, Mahmud. You will see, and I will remind you—if we survive.[21]
The terms “Jews” and “Israel” are used interchangeably throughout the novel. However, the hatred toward Jews does not stem solely from their role as representatives of the oppressive and occupying “Zionist entity,” which has allegedly violated Palestinian national rights. Instead, it is rooted in their very religious identity.
One example presented in the book is an attack in Gaza on an Israeli military vehicle, which later turned out to have been manned by Israeli Druze soldiers. Although Druze are described in the book as violent and immoral, having allegedly abused young Palestinian women, the Hamas adherents in the story express disappointment and sorrow when they realize they had targeted Druze instead of Jews. “If only they had been Jews!!” Ibrahim sighs to himself as he watches the victims’ mothers, sisters, and wives weeping on television.[22]
The novel’s portrayal of Jews as the perpetual enemies of Muslims, depicted as inherently vile and incapable of peaceful coexistence, leads to a desire for their mass extermination. Toward the book’s conclusion, just before Israel assassinates him, Ibrahim recalls “The Promise of the Stones and the Trees,” a Prophetic tradition cited in Hamas’ charter that encourages the killing of Jews on Judgment Day: “The Prophet of Allah said: The Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims will kill them, until the Jews hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and trees will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.”[23]
This tradition, ultimately, was Sinwar’s personal wish and mission.
The seeds of devastation sprout from the pages of the novel, where literary expressions align with the operational agenda that materialized on October 7: the glorification of sacrificing life in the path of jihad against Israel as a sacred value and a supreme goal, despite its high costs; the aspiration to kill as many Israelis as possible, indiscriminately targeting soldiers and civilians alike; approval of kidnapping and hostage-taking attacks as a means to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners; and the ambition to thwart peace and normalization agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors through violent means, while rejecting the political path associated with the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas named the October 7 attack, directed primarily against southern Israel, as the “al-Aqsa Flood.” By placing Jerusalem at the forefront, Hamas sought to give the campaign a religious-Islamic character, expressing its vision and ultimate strategic goal: recruiting Arabs and Muslims to the liberation of the entire sacred land of Palestine, with al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, at its heart, through an uncompromising religious war.
This ideology is fully reflected in Sinwar’s novel. The narrator shares a formative event from his youth as a high school student in Gaza, when he first visited al-Aqsa Mosque in the late 1970s, at a time when access from Gaza to Israel was largely unrestricted. The tour was organized by the “Islamic Bloc,” later Hamas’ student movement, and was guided by cousin Ibrahim.
On the way to Jerusalem, their bus stopped in the Latrun area, where Ibrahim, teary-eyed, lifted a handful of soil, claiming it was soaked in the pure blood of the Prophet Muhammad’s Companions, who, according to tradition, fought there in 637 under the command of Abu ‘Ubayda Ibn al-Jarrah during the conquest of the land. He expressed his wish that the soil would mix with the blood of today’s Palestinians, the rightful successors of those ancient Muslim warriors, until liberation was achieved.[24]
The peak of the journey came, of course, when the students entered al-Aqsa Mosque. They prayed at the site, listened to the Friday sermon, visited the Dome of the Rock, and heard the story of the Prophet’s night journey to the city.
While absorbing the sanctity of the place, they noticed an intolerable injustice: Israeli soldiers controlled the access to the site, deciding who could enter and who could not. At that moment, they were filled with rage, wondering how the enormous Islamic nation that stood behind the Palestinians, despite its wealth and armies, had failed to liberate the al-Aqsa from the “gangs” that had seized it. Then, the narrator testifies, they realized that “the struggle had other dimensions than we had known. It was not just about territory and displaced people, but a war of faith and religion.”[25]
For the protagonists of the novel, the outrage over the oppression in al-Aqsa and what they call Palestine had to be translated into violent action, into jihad for the defense of the holy site and the liberation of the land, with a willingness to sacrifice life in the footsteps of Islam’s heroes, from the Prophet Muhammad’s time, through Saladin during the Crusades, to the present day.[26]
At times, the ideal of sacrifice took on faces and names, such as when a friend or relative of Ibrahim and Ahmad lost their life in the struggle against Israel. In one case, the grief over the death of a friend named Yasser was mixed with joy that God had honored him with martyrdom (shahada), and the mourning tent was filled with ululations, sweets, and large, colorful posters of the fallen fighter.[27] In another instance, Ibrahim’s wife is described as having “a smile that never left her face” upon receiving the news of her husband’s assassination by an Israeli airstrike.[28]
For Sinwar, Palestinian lives, let alone Israeli lives, are not sacred. In fact, the October 7 massacre pales in comparison to some of the fantasies voiced by the characters in The Thorn and the Carnation. The book describes how, during the 1991 First Gulf War, there was anticipation in Gaza that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would launch chemical warheads and wipe out half of Israel’s population (about five million people at the time). Thus, when the air raid sirens first blared, Palestinians cheered for the Iraqi leader: “With spirit and blood, we will redeem you, O Saddam… O Saddam, beloved, strike, strike Tel Aviv.” However, when they learned that the missiles carried only conventional explosives, frustration set in: “It was as if ice water had been poured over us.”[29]
Having been disappointed in their hopes of killing millions of Israeli civilians with chemical weapons, the characters in Sinwar’s novel settled for smaller-scale murders, yet their objective remained the same: to make the occupiers “curse the day they came to our land and took over our sacred sites.”[30]
The novel glorifies a series of shooting, bombing, and suicide attacks from the early Oslo years through the Second Intifada, including the shooting of a father and his children at a hitchhiking station in the West Bank as they traveled to a religious school in Jerusalem;[31] the October 1994 bombing of Dan Bus Line 5 on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, which killed 22 and injured 104;[32] the January 1995 Beit Lid junction bombing, which killed 22 and wounded 66;[33] the June 2001 Dolphinarium nightclub bombing in Tel Aviv, where 21 young people were killed and about 120 injured;[34] the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem, where 16 were killed and 140 wounded; and the first mortar and Qassam rocket attacks on settlements in the Gaza Strip and Israeli communities surrounding it.[35]
The Palestinian attacks deep inside Israel’s territory, including major cities like Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya, and Ashdod, are portrayed in the book as proof of Palestinians’ ability to inflict heavy damage on their enemy despite its military superiority. According to the narrator, these attacks resulted in many achievements: they sowed panic among the occupiers, deepened divisions in Israeli society over the peace process, emptied Israeli streets, shuttered shops, and left cafés and restaurants deserted. Only a handful of Israelis dared use public transportation. Sandbags appeared in shopping centers, making Israeli cities resemble military outposts with checkpoints and thousands of soldiers and police officers.[36]
Anyone looking at the devastation in Gaza following the October 7 War may wonder whether Sinwar would have carried out the massacre had he known its consequences in advance. Based on his novel, the answer seems to be positive.
His protagonists justify the heavy toll paid by Palestinians for their terrorist acts during the Second Intifada. At one point, Ibrahim scoffs at calls for Hamas to lay down its arms and allow Palestinians to live in peace, joking that after Israel assassinated Hamas operatives, invaded Palestinian cities, and left them in ruins, the only thing left for Israel to do was rebuild them, so it would have something to destroy again in the future.[37]
Another issue that draws a direct line between the novel and the October 7 attack is Sinwar’s keen interest, as expressed in his book written while in prison, in hostage-taking and bargaining attacks to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners. The Jibril deal, in which 1,151 Palestinian prisoners were released in 1985 in exchange for three IDF captives in Lebanon, is described in the novel as a moment of joy in the Palestinian territories, as well as a boost to the national struggle.[38]
The novel also provides a detailed account of two kidnapping operations for which Hamas was responsible: the 1992 abduction of Border Police officer Nissim Toledano, intended to secure the release of Sheikh Yassin, which ended in Toledano’s murder and the expulsion of 415 Hamas operatives to Lebanon;[39] and the 1994 kidnapping of soldier Nachshon Wachsman, aimed at securing the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners, including Sheikh Yassin, which ended in a failed IDF rescue operation.[40]
One of Sinwar’s objectives in launching the October 7 attack was to derail the normalization agreement that was on the verge of being signed between Israel and Saudi Arabia.[41] The agreement was expected to grant Israel recognition from the country where Islam originated, draw additional Arab and Muslim states into the circle of peace, and shatter Hamas’ hopes of uniting the Muslim nation in a struggle to eliminate the Jewish state.
The novel Sinwar authored extensively addresses the divide between the Arab-Palestinian strategic choice of peace on one end and Hamas’ unwavering commitment to armed struggle and rejection of any permanent settlement with the Jewish state on the other. The roots of this divide trace back to the peace initiative of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat. According to the novel’s account, the speech delivered by Sadat at the Knesset in November 1977 sparked shock and opposition among the Palestinian people. In an act of protest, Palestinian terrorists assassinated Egyptian journalist Yusuf al-Siba‘i, a close associate of Sadat who had accompanied his delegation on the visit to Israel.[42]
Several of the novel’s conversations depict the intense debate between PLO activists, seeking peace agreements with Israel for pragmatic reasons, and Hamas activists, who adamantly reject political compromises and prefer to establish a sovereign reality not bound by permanent agreements that go beyond hudna. They state: “Israel is an oppressive state that was established on our land and should cease to exist.”[43]
The novel’s protagonists categorically reject the claim that the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian entity necessitates acceptance of Israel’s existence. In a conversation between Mahmud, a PLO supporter, and Ibrahim, the latter insists that a Palestinian state can be established without recognizing Israel’s territorial rights over any part of the land.
Several years before the Israeli implementation of the disengagement plan and Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, Ibrahim, one of the novel’s protagonists, had already predicted that the killing of hundreds of Israelis by Palestinian resistance will pressure Israel into a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, paving the way for a Palestinian state in the liberated territories, without requiring Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state.[44] When Mahmud asks about the difference between a withdrawal conditioned on recognizing Israel and an unconditional withdrawal, Ibrahim replies that if Israel leaves the Palestinian lands without an agreement and under the pressure of resistance, the door to continuing their struggle will remain open whenever circumstances allow.[45]
Not accidentally, Sinwar does not mention in the novel the names of Yasser Arafat or other Fatah leaders, and ignores events such as their dramatic return to the West Bank and Gaza, while mentioning Hamas leaders like Ahmad Yassin and Yahya ‘Ayyash and the major terror attacks carried out by the movement. The Egyptian columnist Sami al-Buhayri wrote in January 2025 in this context that reading The Thorn and the Carnation “proved to him beyond any doubt that Hamas, like all extremist ideological organizations, will not accept any [Palestinian] partner in governance.” [46]
The novel also demonstrates Hamas’ refusal to accept the agreements signed between the PLO and Israel and the authorities granted to the Palestinian Authority based on those agreements. The technical argument presented in the book by Hamas-affiliated characters for this position is that Palestinian opposition factions do not consider themselves bound by agreements they did not sign, especially since the PLO did not consult them before signing or approve them through a public referendum.[47]
According to the novel, this argument adds to Hamas’ fundamental rejection of the agreement’s terms, which include ending violent resistance, establishing relations of cooperation, coordination and security liaison with Israel, and, worse of all, recognizing the so-called Zionist entity’s right to control most of Mandatory Palestine under broad international guarantees.[48] In one episode, Ibrahim is summoned for interrogation at the Palestinian Preventive Security offices. An official explains the new reality in which there is one legitimate Palestinian Authority, which has signed internationally backed agreements with Israel, and warns him that he will be arrested if he does not comply with its regulations. In response, Ibrahim accuses the official of collaborating with Israel’s scheme to divide the Palestinians into two groups: one committed to the agreements and the other to the resistance. At the same time, he emphasizes that Palestinian national goals will not be achieved through negotiations but only through armed struggle, as “our enemies understand only the language of the rifle and fire.”[49]
In one of the debates presented in the novel, Mahmud, the PLO supporter, accuses Hamas of carrying out attacks in order to take unjustified credit for prospective Israeli territorial withdrawals enabled by the Oslo Process. The response he receives is that there is no reason for Palestinians to wait for an Israeli withdrawal based on bilateral agreements since the Zionists are bound to “flee under the pressure of resistance” from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank anyway.[50]
When examining the ideological continuity between the novel and the October 7 massacre, one concludes that the seeds of that attack were sown not only in Sinwar’s operational planning but also in his literary work. Thus, to the series of failures by Israeli decision-makers, intelligence agencies, and academic researchers before October 7, one must add the insufficient attention given to literary texts that could have served as a stark warning.
That a novel written by a murderous antisemitic psychopath is being sold and glorified today on the streets of European capitals without any penalty is another warning sign that is being ignored.
[2] “Yahya Sinwar’s Novel ‘The Thorn and the Carnation’ is a Best Seller at Jordan Exhibition after His Martyrdom [Arabic],” Masr Times, October 19, 2024, https://www.masrtimes.com/448127, and Nizar
al-Rihani, “Translated into Turkish: The First Edition of Yahya Sinwar’s Novel is Sold Out [Arabic],” Bawabat Tunis, April 29, 2024, https://tinyurl.com/2whm6spt.
[10] Gilead Sher, Liran Ofek, and Ofir Winter, “The Hamas Document of Principles: Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?,” Strategic Assessment 20, no. 2 (July 2017), 85-98.
[11] Jony Essa and Ofir Winter, “On the 40th Anniversary of Israel’s Withdrawal from Sinai: Is the Peninsula Becoming Integrated into Egypt?,” INSS Special Publication (May 19, 2022), https://www.inss.org.il/publication/sinai/.
[12] Sher, Ofek, and Winter, “The Hamas Document of Principles,” 85-98.
[13] Shavit and Winter, Zionism in Arab Discourses, 53-54.
Hundreds of leading media organizations across the globe and in Israel covered last week our Annual Antisemitism Worldwide Report, authored jointly by the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Justice and Human Rights, both at TAU. Many media organizations noted that the Report, now in its 25th year, is considered the most cited and authoritative publication of its kind. We take the opportunity to thank again the research team and all involved in working on this flagship TAU study.
On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, the Center hosted Rabbi Zamir Isayev, the Chief Rabbi and Chairman of the Sephardi Jewish Community of Baku, Azerbaijan. Prof. Uriya Shavit, Head of the Center, and Dr. Carl Yonker, the Center’s Senior Researcher, discussed various topics related to Jewish life in Azerbaijan. They touched on the rich history of Jews in Azerbaijan and on community life in the country today, including education in Jewish schools and the makeup of the community, estimated at 30,000.
Ethnic or Religious?
On Friday, February 14, 2025, the Center, together with the Friends Association of Tel Aviv University and Think & Drink Different, hosted a seminar, Ethnic or Religious? The Path of Israeli Politics from “The National Camp” to “The Faith Camp.” The seminar commemorates the publication of Prof. Uriya Shavit’s (Head of the Center) new book, The Jewish War (Yedioth Books, 2025 [in Hebrew]). The event was held in Hebrew.
How Does it Feel in War
On January 9, 2025, the Center, together with the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, hosted a seminar commemorating the publication of Prof. Orit Rozin’s new book, “Emotions of Conflict: Israel 1949-1967” (Oxford University Press, 2024).
In the News: Antisemitism Worldwide Report
On Monday, April 17, 2023, the Center released its annual report on the state of antisemitism worldwide. The publication of the report has been widely covered in the international and Israeli press. Below are links to some of the coverage the report has received in English, Hebrew, and other languages.
