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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes
(JTA) — Nazi salutes. A swastika flag. Fights in the stands. They were all part of the scene at a recent combat sports event in Orlando that pitted an Israeli Jew against an avowed racist with SS bolts tattooed on his chest – and ended with the latter mocking his defeated foe as “a short little f–king Jew prick.”
The condemnation that followed the Aug. 29 event was aimed in a number of directions: at Paul Miller, the fighter who performed the Hitler salute after his win; at the attendees who returned the salute and displayed the Nazi flag; and at the Kia Center, the city-owned arena best known as the home of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, which hosted the fight night.
Politicians were shocked by the display and wrote statements condemning the event — but the Nazi symbols were nothing new for Duel, the online cryptocurrency casino behind the promotion.
Founded last year and billing itself as “the first casino that gives a f–k,” Duel has used Nazi symbols and racist language in its gambling programming. And its owner, Ossi Ketola, a Finnish high-stakes poker player, is himself a self-described First Amendment absolutist with his own history of racially charged comments. He celebrated his free speech devotion just one week after the Orlando event, in a social media post featuring a photo of himself with Donald Trump Jr.
One of Duel’s blackjack dealers, Nelli Levonyan, has worn a Nazi outfit with a swastika armband on multiple occasions while dealing cards on the blackjack stream. In a skit from the blackjack table that circulated online, a man, dressed up as an Orthodox Jew and holding an Israeli flag, attacked Levonyan by throwing coins at her. Levonyan’s character then sprayed something at the Jewish man — “Gassing!” he yelled — and said, “Go away from me, you dirty kike.”
In another blackjack stream, the dealer imitated one of the two San Diego mosque shooters, who killed five people in May. Levonyan has sung the lyrics to “Heil Hitler,” the Ye (formerly Kanye West) song, during a stream. She has also appeared alongside Miller while hosting the card game.
Earlier this month, Ketola joined a neo-fascist rally in Helsinki staged by the far-right party Sinimusta Liike, or the Blue-and-Black Movement. Ketola, who was dressed in a Spongebob costume, livestreamed the rally and posted the footage with the title “Saving white Finland.” Speaking about immigrants, he said that people “need to be educated about how the genes work, and how these people realistically cannot be integrated here.”
He then attended an anti-fascist rally held elsewhere in Helsinki simultaneously, prompting left-wing demonstrators to chase him and his video crew back to their car. Ketola could be heard off-camera yelling “Sieg heil” as they drove away.
“What f–king violent pussies. Imagine what f–ing leftists,” Ketola said after taking off the Spongebob costume. “You see? These right-wing people, white people, the most friendly people. I just walked there, we didn’t say anything, we didn’t do anything — we go to these leftists and they try to f–ing attack us. F–ing dumb stupid f–ing n–ers.”
The following night, Ketola attended the dinner with Trump and about a dozen others in Tallinn, Estonia, hosted by Studioworks, a company that develops software for online casino sites. Ketola posted a photo of himself and the U.S. president’s son on Instagram, and wrote that he discussed “Duel, the state of the world and current political climate with him and his staff.”
“The political situations in our respective countries have become increasingly similar, with a rising tide of violence and radical leftism in both America and Finland,” Ketola wrote. “As a firm 1st amendment absolutist and an individual with many values that coincide with Republicans and Donald Trump himself, this was a great chance to align on many things important to both.”
Neither the Trump Organization, Miller, Ketola nor Levonyan responded to requests for comment.
Duel was founded last summer and has featured some prominent personalities on its streams, including boxing great Mike Tyson — who told Levonyan, “You dumb b–h, you like Hitler” — and the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, who is known as Clavicular.
The fight night that it organized and promoted in Orlando was its first foray into combat sports, and made for the company’s biggest splash yet. It also caught the attention of at least one watchdog and a local lawmaker.
“Right after the event there was a lot of criticism put on the venue, which didn’t have much responsibility in this, and not enough eyes on the people who actually made it happen,” Mark Pitcavage, senior fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (The city had said that, as an operator of public venues, it “cannot deny access because we disagree with the political ideology, opinion or perspective, regardless of the message.”)
State Rep. Anna Eskamani called for the Florida Athletic Commission to revoke Duel Arena’s license. The commission’s members were appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not commented on the event. The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from JTA.
DeSantis’ immediate predecessor and fellow Republican, U.S. Senator Rick Scott, posted that the event was “utterly disturbing” and that “Antisemitism has NO PLACE in Florida.”
Pitcavage said that combat sports are “a draw for far-right extremists and white supremacists” who often view themselves as “white warriors.” He noted, however, that they make up a small portion of the participants and fans.
“It’s not at all surprising that some of them will get into various types of what they would consider manly, or warrior-like athletics,” he said.
Duel’s involvement in the Orlando event put the intersection of online gambling sites and far-right ideologies on his radar. “It’s something we’re starting to look into,” Pitcavage said. He noted that Duel is registered and licensed offshore on the autonomous island of Anjouan, making it more difficult to investigate.
Eskamani, who is running for mayor of Orlando, told JTA that Duel should not be allowed to operate in Florida, citing reasons that she says would beat the city’s First Amendment defense.
“These offshore cryptocurrency — I mean, there are so many red flags in how this entity is operating that from a purely financial security position for a public venue, I would not want to accept a reservation,” Eskamani said.
Duel set and promoted the matchups on the fight card, which included the kickboxing match between Miller, who goes by the moniker “Gypsy Crusader,” and his fellow influencer Ben “King” Azoulay.
Miller, who has made numerous appearances on Duel’s casino games streams, has been known to use racial slurs and denigrate minority groups in his online content. He was convicted in 2021 of felony weapons charges, and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison. He had posted about initiating a race-based civil war.
During a livestreamed conversation with Adin Ross, a Jewish streamer who has interviewed or maintained friendly relationships with controversial figures including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, Miller said there are no exceptions in his feelings toward Jews.
“I respect you for having an opinion that is different from the Jews,” Miller told Ross. “But that doesn’t mean that I would not laugh if I see you in a gas chamber.”
Clips from the Orlando event showed Miller performing the Nazi salute twice after his victory — something he has done after winning previous fights — prompting a number of attendees to do the same. One fan brought a Nazi Germany flag and waved it in his seat.
“He’s not a tough guy, he’s not an alpha male. He’s a short little f–ing Jew prick,” Miller declared about his opponent Azoulay in his post-fight interview, eliciting some cheers from the crowd.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, the Jewish Republican firebrand whose district includes Palm Coast and Daytona Beach, posted a video of the Nazi flag being unfurled and wrote, “This is not a joke and it is not edgy. The guy who did this is old enough to know exactly what that symbol means and to know that it’s not funny. We will make an example out of him.”
Asked what he meant by making an example of the attendee, Fine told JTA, “We put the video out so he would be recognized and be held publicly accountable. Most folks are unwilling to associate with Nazis.”
Cheering Miller on ringside was Jake Shields, a former mixed martial artist-turned far-right influencer who has espoused conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel. Shields wore a shirt reading “FCK ISRL.” Myron Gaines, a prominent streamer who has spread similar conspiracy theories and performed Nazi salutes, was in the stands, and told Miller before the fight, “You fight for the goyim,” according to clips shared on social media.
Pitcavage said he has been tracking a trend of the far-right getting involved in combat sports since the late 1990s, as mixed martial arts and UFC became a more mainstream phenomenon and amateur gyms became widespread and increasingly accessible.
The ADL has flagged that in recent years “active clubs,” or “localized white supremacist crews” that gather for fight training, have become more common. The ADL writes that these groups “see themselves as fighters training for an ongoing war against a system that they claim is deliberately plotting against the white race.”
As news outlets covered backlash to the Orlando fight night, Duel issued its own statement saying it was horrified “to learn that a group of viewers were displaying symbols of hate at our event.” The company criticized the city’s “shocking remarks that the ‘First Amendment’ applies and that ‘free speech’ is permitted at their arena,” and pledged to “work with local activist groups to push back on this and ensure that this kind of hate does not fester ever again.”
The statement appeared to be an example of Duel trolling with deadpan, buttoned-up language. Before the fight, Ketola had similarly released a promotional video that appeared to be condemning Miller’s views. “Paul Miller is a Nazi. Being a Nazi is bad,” Ketola narrated, over footage of him shaking his head. “We cannot support this. The only reason we are allowing him to fight is to ensure the good guys get to add another victory to their record.”
Then, after Miller’s win, Duel’s Instagram account left a comment that told a different story.
“The good guys won,” Duel wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes appeared first on The Forward.
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I want to rescue the word Zionism. We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment.
On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about my predecessor Rabbi Alexander Kohut. He was the renowned European scholar who gave his first sermon here in 1885 and began with the Gomel prayer, thanking God for bringing him safely to America, to this promised land.
I need to tell you how the rest of that sermon went down. Our new German-speaking rabbi proceeded to warn our congregation about the changes he saw happening in American Judaism that threatened our connection to the Jewish people as a whole.
Two years earlier, when Hebrew Union College ordained its first class of American-trained Reform rabbis, its celebratory dinner included littleneck clams and shrimp salad: the infamous Trefa Banquet. It was a provocative declaration that American Jews were no longer bound by archaic laws that separated us from our neighbors.
Kohut cautioned that discarding tradition would leave Judaism a skeleton “without spirit and heart.” If every Jew could simply pick which rules to follow, what would hold us together as a people?
Kohut illustrated this point with a famous Midrashic parable. A group of people are traveling together on a boat. When one passenger begins drilling a hole beneath his seat, the others cry out, “What are you doing?” He responds, “Why do you care? The hole is only under my seat.” Kohut’s sermon sent shock waves through the Jewish community.
The next Shabbat, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the leading voice of radical Reform, answered from his own pulpit just eight blocks uptown, arguing, “Judaism is a living faith, not a religion confined to dead letters.” For weeks, the two rabbis traded sermons before packed pews. The Kohut–Kohler debates even made the front page of The New York Times.
Later that year, Kohler helped author the Pittsburgh Platform, defining the principles of a new American Reform Judaism. Its most consequential statement was not about kashrut or ritual garb but about peoplehood, declaring, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
America had offered Jews a radical promise: you could be fully Jewish and fully American. With America gratefully embraced as our new nation, Judaism could just be our religion, like our Protestant neighbors’ down the street. It was liberating, but it also amputated a part of Jewish identity that had been essential for thousands of years.
Of course, Judaism is a religious practice. But for centuries, it was also our law and calendar, our language and literature. Jewish identity runs through how we speak and argue and tell a joke, and through that inexplicable pull that, when something happens to a Jew we have never met in a place far away, we somehow feel it happened to us.
The 20th-century philosopher Martin Buber understood why. Most religions, he noted, begin with an individual revelation. A prophet or a spiritual teacher has an encounter and shares it with others. But Judaism’s defining religious encounter is different. At Sinai, revelation happens to an entire people. Buber wrote, “In the hour of faith, the group becomes a nation. Only as a nation can it hear what it is destined to hear.” Jewish faith and peoplehood cannot be pulled apart.
But we kept trying. Modernity asked us to check a box. Religion, race, nationality: What are we?
The author Dara Horn gives the best answer I’ve heard. She says, “It’s not complicated. It’s just old. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.” That’s a whole sentence in English, but in Hebrew, it’s just two letters: Am. We are Am Yisrael, the people Israel.
Around the turn of the 20th century, just as Reform Jews were loosening their claim on nationhood, Europe told our Jewish brethren, “Not so fast.” Pogroms swept through the Russian Empire. Political movements in Germany demanded the rollback of Jewish rights. Vienna, the glittering capital of European culture, elected an openly antisemitic mayor. And in France, Alfred Dreyfus, a Frenchman by birth, language, and military service, discovered that to his accusers, he was simply a Jew.
Europe kept asking what was called the Jewish Question: What to do with the Jews? Could they assimilate enough to belong, or would they always remain strangers in the lands they called home?
Jewish leaders began asking a different question: How can we take our future into our own hands? Different Jews gave radically different answers. Their answers came to be called Zionism.
The political Zionist Theodor Herzl asked, “How do we save the Jews?” His answer was sovereignty. Jews could no longer depend on the tolerance of other nations for our safety.
The cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am pushed back: “What good is saving the Jews if we fail to save Judaism?” His answer was cultural renewal, a Hebrew spiritual and cultural center that could renew Jewish life everywhere.
The Labor Zionist A.D. Gordon pushed the question further: But what kind of Jews are we trying to become? His answer was labor. Jews would become rooted again by working the soil, remaking not only a homeland but ourselves.
The religious Zionist Rav Kook asked, “How can this national rebirth also be a spiritual rebirth?” His answer was redemption. By rebuilding Jewish national life, even secular pioneers participated in a sacred process larger than they understood.
There was never just one Zionism, and there still isn’t today. Early Zionists disagreed about every aspect of the state they hoped to build. Zionism was a family argument about how an ancient people takes responsibility for its future.
Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has defined Zionism as a rescue project, because underlying all of those competing visions was one urgent conviction: There has to be somewhere in the world where we do not need another nation’s permission to live as Jews.
The Holocaust made that need undeniable. Even after the world witnessed the Nazis’ machinery of extermination, hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons camps because most nations still refused to take us in. Later, more than 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Iran, erasing Jewish communities that had endured for thousands of years.
And in the 1990s, Israel took in over a million Jews fleeing persecution from the former Soviet Union, and tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews escaping famine and civil war. After the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish survival never again had to depend on whether someone else would open the door.
And that brings me to a rescue project for our generation. I want to rescue the word Zionism.
A Jewish Federation survey earlier this year grabbed my attention. Nine out of 10 American Jews believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Nine out of 10. But only a third of us are willing to call ourselves Zionists. Why does that matter? Because when a majority of Jews reject the name Zionist, it obscures just how mainstream support for the Jewish state and attachment to Jewish peoplehood is for Jews.
Zionism, simply put, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. If you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state, you are already standing inside the Zionist argument.
Let me tell you why I am a Zionist. To me, Zionism is what becomes possible when the Jewish people can fully shape our own lives. In Israel, Jews not only live from January to December, but from Nisan to Adar, from Rosh Hashanah to Tisha B’Av. Children order ice cream in the language of our prophets. Jews have built amazing universities and hospitals where Jewish and Palestinian citizens study side by side and save lives together. Engineers make the desert bloom one drip at a time. And we live again in a land toward which Jews in exile have directed our prayers for 2,000 years.
With that return comes the responsibility to build a society worthy of our deepest Jewish values, always striving for peace. And because I know how essential safety and self-determination are for my people, my Zionism cannot deny those same fundamental rights to another. Palestinians, too, must live with dignity, security, and freedom in that land. That, too, is my Zionism.
Today, I’m not addressing the one in 10 Jews who reject the very idea of a Jewish state, though my door and this synagogue remain open to you. I’m speaking to the majority of Jews who believe in the Jewish state but refuse the Zionist name. And you’ve told me why.
You’ve said, “I don’t want to call myself a Zionist because I can’t support the Israeli government’s or military’s treatment of the Palestinians.” But Zionism is older and larger than any government. Dissent, even contempt for an Israeli leader or policy, does not place you outside Zionism. It puts you alongside Israelis who have filled the streets for years protesting their own government because of their Zionism.
You’ve said, “I’m ashamed of Israeli extremists who commit crimes in the name of religious Zionism.” But all of us should be appalled by extremist settler violence. No one should stand in the same camp with racist ministers who excuse or enable this Hillul Hashem, this desecration. Hundreds of prominent Zionists, including prime ministers, former IDF generals, and heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, have all condemned this Jewish terrorism and demanded an end to the violence and displacement in the West Bank.
You’ve said Zionism has become a slur, “She’s a Zionist” is now shorthand for colonialism, racism, apartheid, even genocide. But these words have a history. In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda deliberately recast the Jewish national liberation movement as a colonialist and imperialist project, while using anti-Zionism to oppress Soviet Jews, even sponsoring a 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The label Zionist has been weaponized against Jews for more than half a century.
We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment. As British writer Howard Jacobson says, “Zionism is not a country or a system of government. Zionism is an expression of a people’s soul. It is a longing and a necessity, a utopian fantasy. It’s an understanding of history and a solution, an act of reasoning, an act of despair, a prayer, a poem, and a song.”
And since when do we Jews let other people do our naming for us? If we refuse the Zionist name because others have smeared it, or because some have stained it with violence, we hand the word to its most fanatical followers and its most hostile opponents. We abandon the Zionists working every day to build a more just, secure, and peaceful Israel for all its inhabitants. And we surrender a word that has carried the dreams, sacrifices, and hopes of Am Yisrael for generations.
One of our young Central members spent the last year in Israel, and he said his time there both increased his love for the Israeli people and his disgust for the current government. He’s not the type to join in protests, but on Fridays he traveled to the West Bank to accompany Palestinian shepherds and farmers so they could work with less fear of harassment or violence from settlers. Israeli groups call this “protective presence.” This young man called it his Zionism.
I especially want the next generation to know that claiming Zionism means believing in Jewish sovereignty and insisting that it’s not exempt from our tradition’s moral demands. It means seeing clearly where Israel has been a beacon and a blessing, and where it has failed to live up to the values stated in its own Declaration of Independence: freedom, justice, and peace, and equal rights for all its citizens.
When we fall short of our promise, as every person and every nation does, the Jewish response is not abandonment. It is teshuvah, a return to who we are meant to be. That is what Yom Kippur asks of us. Teshuvah requires honest accounting and change. But the goal of teshuvah is not shaming. Teshuvah is fundamentally an act of hope, the hope of return.
When the Israelites first returned to Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE after their first exile, they sang.
“When God returned us to Zion, we were like dreamers.” They couldn’t believe it. They were living inside what once seemed impossible: to be back in their land.
Zionism has always required that kind of imagination. Theodor Herzl looked at a scattered, vulnerable people and imagined us sovereign again in our ancestral homeland, saying, “Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.” Less than half a century later, the State of Israel was born. Impossible, until it happened.
And after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israelis regarded Egypt as their most formidable enemy, and the vast majority of Israelis did not believe peace was possible. But soon thereafter, Israel’s mightiest adversary became the first Arab state to make peace with it. Impossible, until it happened.
And in recent memory, after 738 days of despair and fear that we would never see every hostage out of Gaza, on Simchat Torah, two years after their kidnapping, every last living hostage came home. It was a miracle made possible by the relentless work of so many and the prayers of Am Yisrael from around the world. Impossible, until it happened.
Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.
There is so much that still feels impossible in Israel right now. But if our history teaches us anything, it’s not to underestimate what is yet to come, or our responsibility to help shape it.
Rabbi Kohut served this congregation around the time of the birth of the modern Zionist movement. His message to us in 1885 is no less true today. We Jews are in the same boat. Half of the Jews of the world live in the State of Israel. No Jew should say, “Why should I care? The hole is only under their seat.” We cannot walk away from the most important sovereign project of the Jewish people. We must proudly claim the name Zionist and take our place in the unfolding story of Am Yisrael.
The post I want to rescue the word Zionism. We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment. appeared first on The Forward.
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Canadian leaders condemn shooting outside Ontario synagogue at the start of Yom Kippur
(JTA) — Canadian leaders have condemned a shooting outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, at the start of Yom Kippur that left a police officer seriously injured and forced the congregation to cancel services on the holiest day of the year.
“Jewish people must be able to practice their faith safely. They deserve to live their Jewish lives proudly, freely, and openly,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote on X on Monday.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford joined in the condemnation with his own X post. “I’m disgusted by the shooting that took place outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue,” he wrote. “My thoughts are with the Jewish community in Belleville and across Ontario, who have every right to gather and worship safely and without fear.”
At a press conference on Monday, Belleville’s deputy police chief Sheri Meeks identified the shooter as Shawn Ward, 29, from the neighboring city of Quinty West and the injured officer as Constable Jeff Smith.
The incident occurred at 7:10 p.m. Sunday, according to brief statements by the Belleville Police Service and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). Belleville is a little more than 100 miles east of Toronto.
Both Meeks and SIU spokesperson Kristy Denette gave details of the gun battle that unfolded outside the synagogue, which is located at the corner of a residential street of single family homes.
The synagogue posted on social media that “there were no injuries of anyone inside the building.”
Ward allegedly arrived at the scene in a truck with a shotgun and fired at Smith, who was stationed outside the synagogue. Smith returned fire and as did a second officer who arrived at the scene.
Some 20 to 30 shoots were fired, with some hitting nearby vehicles and homes, Denette said, explaining that Ward was now in “life-threatening condition” at a hospital. Meeks added that Smith was in a hospital’s intensive care unit with serious injuries but was expected to recover.
There is a team of four investigators and two forensic investigators who are speaking to witnesses and looking through surveillance and body camera video footage, Denette explained.
A CBC report showed footage of Smith’s black unmarked vehicle parked outside the synagogue, which is now riddled with bullets, and explained that Ward’s truck was parked just across the street.
Synagogue president Norm Weddum recalled the attack for the CBC, explaining that he was ushering worshippers into the sanctuary to start the Yom Kippur services when they heard noises that sounded like “boom, boom.”
When it became clear it was gunfire, everyone ran into the synagogue auditorium and closed the doors, recalled Weddum as he described yelling at everyone to “hit the floor.”
Once the gunfire stopped, he and a number of members went to the synagogue doors and saw the impact of the gun battle and the evacuation of the shooter and the police officer from the scene by ambulance. After the attack, he said, police also entered the synagogue.
Weddum said he believed the gunman had intended to attack the synagogue but was thwarted by Smith, who had been in an unmarked vehicle.
At the press conference on Monday, a reporter asked Denette if the incident could be considered a “terrorist attack aimed at the Jewish community.”
She responded that said “common sense would say that probably was the case,” but that her department’s investigation was limited to the exchange of fire and that the Belleville police were looking at motive.
Meeks characterized it as a hate crime in a statement she made at the press conference aimed at the Jewish community.
“We recognize the concern and uncertainty many may be feeling, particularly given that this occurred near the Sons of Jacob synagogue during one of the holiest days in the Jewish faith. Let me be very clear: Antisemitism, hate and violence have no place in our community,” Meeks said.
“Every person deserves to feel safe when attending a place of worship, gathering with loved ones or participating in community life,” she stated.
There are increased patrols and heightened police presence through the city, including houses of worship, Meeks added.
A number of Canadian politicians spoke out on X against the attack, including opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Canadian leaders condemn shooting outside Ontario synagogue at the start of Yom Kippur appeared first on The Forward.
