Shulem Deen 🎗️

I’m sorry, but the Holocaust does not belong in the same sentence or paragraph or library as the Nakba. This isn’t meant as a criticism of this person, who seems entirely well meaning. It’s about the implicit comparison, which is common among Palestinians and western liberals. The Holocaust’s death toll was 6,000,000, the Nakba’s somewhere between 9,000 and 13,000. The importance of the Nakba wasn’t mass death but mass displacement. Here’s the thing: Understood that way, the Jews suffered half a dozen major nakbas in the 20th century, alongside waves of mass murder that reached into six figures (for example, in the Russian civil war) and then ultimately the Holocaust. Most Israeli Jews are descendants of such displacements and survivors of those great campaigns of mass murder. Maybe the reason this difference isn’t obvious to some diaspora Jewish discourse (I have books on my shelf that talk about Nakba and Holocaust in the same breath) is that most western Jewish communities are the products of a Nakba-style mass flight from Eastern Europe in 1881-1921. They then largely sat out the twentieth century’s great evils from their perch in the West, saved by Anglophone liberalism from wars and killings and Holocaust. Maybe it makes a kind of intuitive sense to these Jews to think of Jewish history in terms comparable to Nakba, and not the unimaginably larger tragedy that produced the other half of the Jewish world. We need to learn about the Nakba, we need to understand our neighbors, we need to respect their history and identity. But we also need to acknowledge that the Jews were emphatically and brutally told to “get over” their own many nakbas. Iraq and Poland and Yemen and Lithuania and Hungary and Algeria do not pretend that there’s any chance in hell that the Jews will ever be allowed to contemplate mass return to their lost homes and decimated ancient communities. And the world agrees with them. People who compare displacement to Holocaust mean well. Most of them are not trying to diminish the Holocaust but only to reach across today’s divides. I get that. It’s still historically unjustifiable and in my view morally wrong.

It is not a great surprise but it it's not about anti-Zionism at all. Satmar anti-Zionism is nominal and theological and not of the same kind of Mamdani's leftist anti-Zionism. Many other anti-Zionist Hasids sects won't back Mamdani. I don't think Israel is the main reason for their decision-making in either case

There's a critical point here to understanding American and Israeli Jews—especially in the generational shifts we're seeing. The majority of non-Orthodox Ashkenazi American Jews are rooted in pre-1924 immigration (German Jews in 1st half to mid 19th century, and Eastern European Jews beginning ~1880). So for a full century, American Jews have experienced comfort and privilege unprecedented in Jewish history, with little living memory of antisemitic persecution. Ancestors who came through Ellis Island are known only from photos and family lore. OTOH: Israeli Jews live with the memories of the hellfires that came later. For Ashkenazim: the apex of European antisemitism, including pogroms across Russia/Poland followed by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; for Sephardim/Mizrahim, the mass displacement after 1948. Many who have borne witness are still alive. This means Israeli Jews are generationally far closer to the lived experience of real anti-Jewish persecution. Then consider that Israeli Jews have never known a day of peace, with an ongoing existential threat that's as unrelenting as ever, visceral and immediate. Try forgetting it, and you're reminded in global news headlines. Tune out the news, and you're reminded with rocket attacks. Try a music festival in the desert, and that's no safe bet either. To be sure, American Jews always felt deeply distraught over anti-Jewish persecution elsewhere, and felt (and largely continue to feel) a strong affinity for Israel. But from a distance. Kinship and allyship. Advocacy. Fundraisers. Donations. FIDF. AIPAC. Birthright trips, and pride over Israel's accomplishments. But with a home in America, far removed from the threats that brought Jews here in the first place, and without the ongoing literal threats of annihilation. Add in assimilation, an attenuating Jewish identity that's a mix of Larry David and Jon Stewart, and Jewish culture as a punchline; then add 2-3 generations, a tablespoon of progressive politics, stir vigorously and pour onto an American college campus and garnish with Judith Butler. That's the Jewish generation coming up in America. It's not even the pressure to conform—it's never having even known that pressure. And now their friends tell them that their people are committing genocide. "Not in my name." Of course that's the best some can muster, while Israeli kids go off to train and serve, bc one day 'kill or be killed' might be the only two options they have. This isn't a criticism of American Jews. (And of course, many brave and principled young American Jews are standing up to the bullying of the anti-Israel left; I don't mean to discount that.) But the historical context is key to understanding American Jews vis a vis Israelis. Every "As a Jew" take is colored by it, as are the TikTok clips of Jewish kids crying because they "feel so alone" in their pro-Palestine activism. I don't know the remedy, nor am I suggesting there need be one—it's not for me to say. But it is to argue that how young American Jews react to events in Israel is strongly connected to how proximate their lives have been to real episodes of anti-Jewish persecution. At the very least, if it were up to me, I sure as hell would like for young Jews to know how they ended up here; how they were spared the anti-Jewish ravages of the 20th century, how a world of Jews weren't nearly so fortunate—and not just the Holocaust but also what came before and after—and to properly place their own Jewishness as everyday news headlines add new chapters to Jewish history.

What is happening in Gaza has shaken the conscience of the world. Man-made famine can never be a weapon of war. This must stop. EU aid to Gaza far outweighs that of any other partner. But of course, Europe needs to do more. Here are measures for a way forward ↓