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The JTA conversation: Pogrom? Terrorism? What do we call what happened in Huwara?
(JTA) — On Sunday, after a Palestinian gunman shot and killed two Israeli brothers in the West Bank, Jewish settlers rioted in the nearby Palestinian town of Huwara, burning cars and buildings. A Palestinian was killed and dozens were injured.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Jewish rioters for “taking the law in their own hands,” but many observers — including the top Israeli general in the West Bank and Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the the Anti-Defamation League — used stronger language, calling the attacks a “pogrom.”
The use of the word, which most famously refers to a wave of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian empire beginning in the late 19th century, in turn became the subject of debate. Does using “pogrom” co-opt Jewish history unfairly and inaccurately by suggesting Jews are no better than their historical persecutors? Does avoiding the term mean Israel and its supporters are not taking sufficient responsibility for the actions of its Jewish citizens?
The debate is not just about language, but about controlling the narrative. Political speech can minimize or exaggerate events, put them in their proper context or distort them in ways that, per George Orwell, can “corrupt thought.”
We asked historians, linguists and activists to consider the word pogrom, and asked them what politicians, journalists and everyday people should call what happened at Huwara. Their responses are below.
Sidestepping the real issue
Dr. Jeffrey Shandler
Distinguished Professor, Department of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
The meanings of the word “pogrom” in different languages are key here. In Russian, it means a massacre or raid, as it does in Yiddish; in neither language is it understood as specifically about violence against Jews. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs that pogrom means an “organized massacre… of any body or class,” but notes that, in the English-language press, it was first used mostly to refer to anti-Jewish attacks in Russia, citing examples from 1905-1906.
Therefore, though the association of pogrom with violence targeting Jews is widely familiar, its meaning is broader.
That said, because of English speakers’ widely familiar association of the term with Jews as victims, to use pogrom to describe violence perpetrated by Jews is provocative. As to whether it is appropriate to refer to recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians, it seems to me that this question sidesteps the more important question of whether the actions being called pogroms are appropriate.
Call it what it is: “settler terrorism”
Sara Yael Hirschhorn
’22-’23 Research Fellow at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the ADL, and author, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement”
Let me say first with a loud and clear conscience: What happened in Huwara was abhorrent, immoral, and unconscionable and certainly was not committed in my name.
But to paraphrase Raymond Carver’s famous formulation: How do we talk about it when we talk about Huwara? What kind of descriptive and analytical framework can adequately and contextually interpret that horrific event?
The shorthand of choice seems to be “pogrom” — but it isn’t clear that all who deploy the term are signifying the same thing. For some, pogrom is a synonym for pillage, rampage, fire, property damage and violence in the streets — a one-word general summary of brutal acts. For others, pogrom refers to vigilante justice, an abbreviated story of the non-state or non-institutional actors and their motivations.
More specifically, however, pogrom is seemingly being mobilized as a metaphor to Jewish history, juxtaposing the Jewish victims of yesterday to the Jewish-Israeli perpetrators of today, an implicit analogy to the prelude to the Shoah, recasting Zionists as organized bands of genocidaires (with or without regime sponsorship) like the Cossacks, the Nationalist Fronts or even the Einsatzgruppen. Some would use the word to incorporate all three meanings (and more).
As a historian, I am troubled by the haphazard and harmful use of terms that are attached to a specific time and place — such as the thousand-year history of Jews in the Rhinelands and Eastern Europe, with many layers of imperial, national, local, economic and religious forces that precipitated these events — in such an ahistorical manner. Nor do I find the parallels between Zionists and Nazis to be historically careful (if deliberately offensive) — the State of Israel is committing crimes in the West Bank, but not a genocide. The equivalence also all too easily and incorrectly grafts tropes of racism and white supremacy drawn from American history into the West Bank’s soil.
So what to say about Huwara? Israel — for reasons both political and lexiconographical — has failed to consistently adopt a term for such attacks. (Often the euphemism of “errant weeds” who are “taking matters into their own hands” is the choice of Knesset politicians.) To my mind, the best term is “settler terrorism,” which puts Jewish-Israeli acts on par with Palestinian terrorism. It should also mean that these actions merit the same consequences under the occupation like trial, imprisonment, home demolition and other deterrents enforced against all those who choose the path of violence.
Last but not least, a pogrom was historically an unpunished crime against humanity that led only to war and annihilation. Don’t we aspire for more in Israel/Palestine?
Palestinians call it “ethnic cleansing”
Ibrahim Eid Dalalsha
Director, Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, Ramallah, and member of Israel Policy Forum’s Critical Neighbors task force
Palestinians generally view and describe what happened during Sunday’s Huwara attacks as “racist hate crimes seeking to destroy and dispossess the Palestinian people of their homes and properties.” While no specific term has been used to describe these attacks, it was likened to the barbaric and savage invasion of Baghdad by Hulagu, the 13th-century Mongol commander.
Palestinian intellectuals tend to use “ethnic cleansing,” savage and barbaric ethnically motivated violence against innocent civilians, as another way of referring to these attacks. When such events include killing, Palestinian politicians and intellectuals tend to use the term massacre, or “majzara,” to underline the irrational and indiscriminate violence against defenseless civilians. I don’t think the term “pogrom” and its historic connotation are widely known to most people here. From a Palestinian perspective, using such terms, including “Holocaust,” is not considered a mistake. In fact, even using “Holocaust“ to describe violence against Palestinian civilians in and around 1948 was not considered a mistake until very recently when it caused such a saga for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Germany.
View of cars burned by Jewish settlers during riots in Huwara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, Feb. 27, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
In the name of historical accuracy
Rukhl Schaechter
Yiddish Editor, The Forward
The recent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in Huwara are abhorrent. I commend those in Israel calling them peulot teror, “actions of terror,” and I trust that the perpetrators will be brought to justice. But these riots were not pogroms.
The word pogrom refers to one of the many violent riots and subsequent massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe between the 17th and 20th centuries. These attacks were committed by local non-Jewish, often peasant populations. They were instigated by rabble-rousers like Bogdan Chmielnicki, who led a Cossack and peasant uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine in 1648 and ended up destroying hundreds of Jewish communities. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers also committed atrocities on pregnant women.
Note that the massacres of Jews carried out by the Nazis, and the murders of Armenians by the Turkish government at the turn of the 20th century — as horrific as they were — were never called pogroms because in both cases, there was a government behind it. In the name of historic accuracy, let’s continue to use the word pogrom solely for mob attacks on and massacres of Jews.
When the Poles banned “pogrom”
Samuel D. Kassow
Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
In Poland in the late 1930s, altercations between a Jew and a Pole sometimes ended with either the Jew or the Pole getting badly hurt or even killed. When the victim was a Pole, mobs of Poles rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods smashing windows, looting shops and often beating or even killing Jews. Poles often held Jews collectively responsible for the death of one of their own. This happened in Przytyk, Minsk-Mazowieck, Grodno and other places. Jews called these riots “pogroms,” which they were. But the Polish government banned use of the term in the press. After all, “pogrom” was a Russian word, and “pogroms” happened only in a place characterized by barbarism and ignorance. Since Poland was not Russia, and since Poles were eminently civilized, logically speaking, pogroms simply did not take place in Poland. What happened in these towns were to be called “excesses” (zajscia). But certainly not pogroms!
I take it that since we Jews are so civilized, we too are incapable of pogroms. So should we label what these settlers did “‘excesses”? Or perhaps we should take a deep breath and call them pogroms?
A Jewish, but not exclusive, history
Henry Abramson
Historian
The word “pogrom” is rooted in time and place, although the type of violence it describes is as old as human history. It is a Russian word, but it entered the English language in the late 19th century through the medium of Yiddish-speakers, outraged at the wave of antisemitic disturbances that surged under rule of the last tsar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Russians themselves used a variety of words for the ugly phenomenon, with translations like “riot” or “persecution,” but the term “pogrom” proved the most evocative: the Slavic prefix “po” suggests a directed attack, and the root “grom” is the word for “thunder.” A pogrom, therefore, meant a focused point where a great deal of energy was dissipated in a single dramatic act of violence.
The focused point, in the context of that dark history, was the civilian Jewish population in the tiny shtetls that dotted the Pale of Settlement. In this regard the word could be used to encompass attacks on Jewish populations from as long ago as the year 38 in Alexandria, Egypt. It does not, however, have any specific designation to indicate that Jews are the victims.
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Atlanta movie exec who complained of ‘nasty Jews’ is running for Congress
Ryan Millsap, a prominent film and real estate executive in Atlanta who made antisemitic and racist comments in private text messages, is now running for a congressional seat in rural Georgia.
ProPublica and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported two years ago that Millsap had sent the offensive texts to a girlfriend.
“Just had a meeting with one of the most nasty Jews I’ve ever encountered,” Millsap wrote in a 2019 text message viewed by the Forward. John Da Grosa Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, filed the text messages in Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia in 2024.
The news outlets also reported that Smith said in court documents that Millsap had allegedly made derogatory comments about Jews while they worked together, including referring to his Jewish colleagues as “the Jew crew” and calling one of them “a greedy Israelite.”
ProPublica and the AJC reported that during arbitration with Smith, Millsap said the comments Smith had described represented “locker room talk.”
Millsap apologized for the offensive text messages in a 2024 statement to the news outlets, saying “comments which I never intended to share publicly have come to light, and people I care about and who put their trust in me have been hurt.”
He also spoke directly at the time to the racist and antisemitic remarks.
“I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” his statement continued. “My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks.”
Millsap is running in the Republican primary for the open seat in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, which stretches from the far outskirts of Atlanta to the South Carolina border and includes the college town of Athens. The district is outside of the major Jewish population centers in Georgia and had fewer than 7,000 Jewish adults, according to the American Jewish Population Project.
The election is on May 19 and Millsap is running against a popular state lawmaker Houston Gaines in what is expected to be a competitive race.
Gaines called Millsap’s reported text messages “disqualifying.”
“Antisemitism has no place in this country, and as a Christian, I’ll always stand firmly against it,” Gaines said in a statement to the Forward.
Millsap did not respond to a request for comment about the text messages or whether he has conducted any outreach to the local Jewish community as part of his campaign.
In an interview last month with the Washington Reporter, Millsap said that negative interactions with local protesters had pushed him into politics. Millsap’s studio controlled land adjacent to the construction site for Cop City, a planned police training ground near Atlanta, and both sites were targeted by activists.
“They tried to ruin my reputation,” Millsap said in the interview. “Leftist journalists at ProPublica were enlisted to write hit pieces on me, call me a racist, antisemite, anything they could do to hurt my life and put me in a bad political position, because obviously DeKalb County is mostly black Democrats.”
Millsap’s Blackhall Group, whose studio produced movies including “Venom,” “Blockers,” and “Loki,” purchased the property in a county forest near the future Cop City site in 2021. Millsap said activists violently attacked construction workers on his property, burned a pickup truck and left threatening messages in 2022.
He has referred to the demonstrators as “antifa” and made his dispute with them a cornerstone of his campaign.
Antisemitism does not seem to be a major issue in the congressional race, in which Millsap and Gaines have focused on immigration and election security. The seat is considered a safe Republican district and the winner of the GOP primary is expected to win the general election.
According to the text messages filed in court and reviewed by the Forward, Millsap and his then-girlfriend, Christy Hockmeyer, complained about Jews and Black people on several occasions. “F—king Black people,” Millsap wrote in one message reported by ProPublica and AJC after Hockmeyer complained about a Black driver whose car she hit.
Hockmeyer also apologized for her role in the text message conversations with Millsap. “Those comments do not reflect who I am and I disavow racism and antisemitism as a whole,” she wrote in a statement to ProPublica and the AJC.
The ProPublica and AJC article noted that Millsap had built close ties with the Black and Jewish communities in Atlanta after relocating to the city from California and seeking to become active in its robust film industry. He had also been applauded for embracing workplace diversity.
His apology received a mixed response from those he had worked with in Atlanta.
Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, filed the text messages in a lawsuit after the two became embroiled in a heated legal dispute. An arbitrator found that Smith had violated his contract with Millsap when the two were working together and ordered him to pay $3.7 million for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.
Millsap said in his 2024 apology that Smith had “violated the most basic and fundamental principle of attorney client privilege and released private text messages between myself and a former romantic partner.”
The post Atlanta movie exec who complained of ‘nasty Jews’ is running for Congress appeared first on The Forward.
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A new book explores the vibrancy of pre-war Warsaw
The Last Woman of Warsaw
Judy Batalion
Dutton, 336 pages, $30
Don’t be misled by the title of this debut novel by Judy Batalion, nor by her previous book, The Light of Days, about the role of Polish-Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Though the specter of the Holocaust looms over The Last Woman of Warsaw, the novel is not really Holocaust fiction. It does not portray a final female survivor of that embattled city. Its subject is instead the odd-couple friendship of two young Jewish women embroiled in the artistic and political ferment of pre-World War II Warsaw.
For Batalion, recreating the atmosphere and quotidian life of this cosmopolitan city, which once elicited comparisons to Paris, was a major aim. “In our contemporary minds, historical Warsaw conjures images of gray and death,” she writes in a lengthy author’s note. But that shouldn’t negate its more vibrant past. “Long before Vegas,” Batalion writes, “Warsaw was the capital of neons, its night skyline dotted with glittering cocktail glasses and chefs carrying platters of roasts. Much of this artistic production was Jewish.”
Even this brief excerpt shows that Batalion isn’t much of a prose stylist. But awkward locutions and diction mistakes aside — including the repeated use of “cache” when she means “cachet” — Batalion generally succeeds in immersing readers in Warsaw’s lively urban bustle and heated street politics. Here, skating on the edge of catastrophe, Polish Jews of varying ideologies and backgrounds face off against antisemitic persecution and violence.
Batalion’s handling of the historical backdrop is defter than her fledgling fictional technique. The narrative of The Last Woman of Warsaw is a plodding and repetitive affair that ultimately turns on an improbable coincidence.
The plot involves the sudden disappearance of a photography professor with communist ties and the halting efforts of the novel’s two protagonists to find and free her. The pair, whose initial antagonism mellows into friendship, are Fanny Zelshinsky, an upper-middle-class Warsaw University student, and Zosia Dror, who hails from a religious shtetl family. Her adopted surname references the Labor Zionist group that now claims her loyalty. Despite their differences, the two women have in common a desire to shake off the past and forge new lives. They also share an attraction to a single man, Abram, who can’t seem to decide between them.
When the story begins, Fanny is engaged to the perfectly nice, highly suitable Simon Brodasz, whom she’s known since her teenage years. Her mother is pushing the match. But Fanny is not in love and dreads the loss of freedom marriage entails. Her true passion is photography – in particular, fashion photography, to which she brings an idiosyncratic, modernist flair.
Zosia’s passion is political activism, and she aspires to a more prominent leadership role in Dror. Like Fanny, she is at odds with her mother, who is urging her to return to the shtetl for the festivities preceding her sister’s wedding.
What brings these women together is the arrest of the famous photographer Wanda Petrovsky, to whom both are connected. Wanda is one of Fanny’s professors, and Fanny needs her help to enter a potentially career-making exhibition. Wanda also happens to be a political activist, a leader of Zosia’s Zionist group, and Zosia hopes she’ll provide her with a visa for Palestine.
As Batalion’s narrative alternates between their perspectives, the antisemitic fervor in Warsaw mounts. Polish right-wing groups have started terrorizing Jews. Police invade clubs where Jewish comedians are mocking antisemitism. At Warsaw University, where Jewish students already have been subject to admissions quotas, the humiliation of being consigned to a “Jew bench” in class comes as a humiliating shock to Fanny.
Zosia, by contrast, has seen far worse. She and her family were victims of one of the murderous pogroms that periodically roiled the Polish countryside. She has been traumatized by the burning of her home, her father’s injuries and the refusal of her neighbors to offer refuge from the catastrophe.
In late 1930s Warsaw, Polish Jews are fighting back – with protests, hunger strikes and more. But what will any of this accomplish? Will Wanda attain her freedom, with or without the help of her protegees? Will Zosia and Fanny successfully defy their families and find meaningful lives? Which woman will Abram ultimately choose? And will any of this matter as both Poland and Polish Jewry hover on the brink of destruction?
Batalion answers these questions in an epilogue describing the fate of both women and of Fanny’s photographs, which eventually take a political turn, and in her author’s note. In the note, she reveals that all four of her own grandparents “spent their young adulthoods in interwar Warsaw.” That heritage helps account for her own passion: “to memorialize Warsaw’s golden age of creativity and the Jewish art and culture that, along with six million lives, was also decimated in the Holocaust.” A worthy endeavor, however clumsily executed.
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Mahmoud Khalil’s anti-Zionist case to Jews shows the case for skepticism
Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure the Jewish community. In an extensive new interview with the Forward, the pro-Palestinian protest leader recognized “a Jewish connection” to Israel, and promised that a free Palestine would include safety and security for Jewish residents.
And yet I read the interview and felt a sense of alarm.
Not because Khalil seems insincere. I believe he means much of what he says. But rather because his attempts to instill confidence fall short in ways that illuminate exactly why so many Jews remain afraid and skeptical of the anti-Zionist movement.
Serious causes for serious concerns
Khalil describes himself as a pragmatist. In his activism, however, he envisions a utopia.
He is adamant that a two-state solution preserving a Jewish majority in Israel is a nonstarter. He argues, instead, for a democratic country — or multiple countries — across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, with equal rights for all and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
“I know it might sound like a very ideal utopia,” he told the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld, “but this is what we should aspire for.”
Khalil is concerned that Jewish fear is an obstacle to Palestinian liberation, and suggests that this fear is misplaced. “People think that we want to drive all Jews to the sea,” he said. “We don’t believe that.”
But history has long shown that Jewish safety without Jewish autonomy often proves conditional. In the ideal that Khalil advances, Israel would lose the self-determination that leads so many Jews to view it as a safe haven. My late grandfather, who was deported to a Siberian gulag by the Soviets from Lithuania — where about 90% of his fellow Jews were murdered by the Nazis — put it simply: Israel was a place where he felt his fate was in his own hands.
Nor is apprehension of anti-Zionism misplaced. Report after report has cataloged persistent harassment of Jews, threats of violence against Zionists, and invocations of antisemitic tropes within anti-Zionist movements. Yes, there are moderates, many of whom are driven by a commitment to a better future for Palestinians. But there are also extremists, and scenes on campuses and city streets around the world have shown that their tactics often prevail.
Adding to Jews’ sense of alarm are decades of violence within Israel — including the Second Intifada and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack — and globally, including recent violence against American Jewish institutions. Jews are not scared because we misunderstand the aims of the anti-Zionist movement. We are scared for good reason.
Political abstractions
A genuine effort at reassurance would engage with that truth. Instead, Khalil dances around it, suggesting that the thing we’re worried about doesn’t actually exist. He says, for example, that the pro-Palestinian campus movement did a good job of keeping antisemitism at bay. It did not.
Even when it comes to the well-established facts of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, he demurs: “I wouldn’t rule out that Hamas targeted civilians,” he said, “but I wouldn’t confirm it either.”
When referencing the excesses of pro-Palestinian campus protests, Khalil retreated into vague language. “There were maybe some bad actors,” he said. His denunciations of antisemitism remained safely generic: “some anti-Zionist actions may touch on antisemitism that we absolutely oppose.”
Who, exactly, is “we” here?
Political movements are not abstractions. They consist of real people doing real things. When excesses are common enough, they become characteristic. This is something I’ve long argued about the Israeli right as well. We cannot dismiss settler violence or anti-Palestinian abuses as fringe when they keep escalating and enjoy support from those in power.
It’s easy to say you oppose antisemitism or suffering by Palestinians, or that a utopian future is possible if we all look past our fear. It’s much harder to look within your political coalition and call out the specific negative acts your allies have committed — or acknowledge their very real consequences.
Denial and Oct. 7
Circle back to Khalil’s alarming equivocation about Oct. 7.
He frames the killings as civilians being “caught up” in violence, not targeted by it. Notice the evasive grammar: Khalil says “there were crimes committed” and Hamas has “a responsibility,” rather than “Hamas committed crimes.”
Khalil does explicitly say that he thinks Hamas is “not up to the Palestinian aspiration for liberation” and that he “doesn’t believe in political Islam.” But for someone so attuned to the language of liberation and justice, he is remarkably comfortable with passive voice when it comes to Hamas carrying out horrific murders on Oct. 7.
As I’ve previously written, the evidentiary record is overwhelming. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, organizations critical of Israel, independently concluded that Hamas deliberately and systematically targeted civilians. In one intercepted call, a Hamas terrorist bragged to his parents, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”
Neutrality on established facts is no different than denialism. If you are trying to reassure Jews but can’t acknowledge that Hamas killed Jews as such, any reassurance you have to offer will ring hollow.
A practical peace
Khalil says he is opposed to any violence against civilians but cannot dictate what Palestinians who experience Israeli human rights abuses should do. He says he understands why Palestinians turn to resistance, even violence, in the face of oppression.
But if you say you understand why decades of oppression push Palestinians toward resistance, then you should also understand why decades of terrorism push Israelis toward aggressive security measures, including ones that harm Palestinian civilians. If every act is merely a justified reaction to a prior act, we will end up in a world in which it’s too easy to argue that all violence is legitimate, rather than none of it.
The deep culture of mutual suspicion that this painful history has bred may be the biggest obstacle to Khalil’s utopian vision.
I share Khalil’s aspirations for peace. But Israelis, even most liberals, leftists and the millions who have protested the right-wing government, say they won’t accept a one-state solution. One 2025 poll by The Institute for National Security Studies, an independent think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University, found that only 4% of all Israelis, and 1% of Israeli Jews, prefer a one-state solution with equal rights. Palestinians, too, are skeptical of a single state with equal rights.
At the same time, many Israelis oppose a two-state solution. So do many Palestinians. The people who live in the region hold complicated and often contradictory ideas of the path forward, and Khalil does not necessarily speak on their behalf.
Any anti-Zionist looking to reassure Jews needs to, at minimum, acknowledge that Hamas killed civilians deliberately, because they were Jews; condemn specific instances of antisemitism rather than just the concept in the abstract; and ask why Jews are scared right now, rather than telling us we shouldn’t be.
Yet Khalil’s reticence to be honest about his own movement’s flaws is a mirror of our own. Supporters of Israel have long been reluctant to name the failures of the Israeli right and to reckon with how settlements and the occupation harm Palestinians.
Khalil recounts being born in the Palestinian refugee camp Khan Eshieh in Syria, and raised on stories of his grandparents’ expulsion from a village near Tiberias. He was shot by an Israeli soldier when he was just 16. His effort to nevertheless engage with Israeli perspectives, like by reading Ari Shavit, is admirable. Jews should similarly listen to Palestinian perspectives and sit with Palestinian stories, including Khalil’s and those of Palestinians living today in the West Bank and Gaza.
The only way for any of us to build a durable political movement is to be exactingly honest about the ways in which we have, so far, failed, and to ask others with open ears: Why are you so scared?
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