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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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Jewish authors get a lifeline
Susan Blumberg-Kason, a Jewish author whose work explores Jewish history and identity, was deep into a book about Golda Meir’s Milwaukee childhood when her literary agent abruptly dropped her early last year.
The agent offered only a vague explanation, saying, “We can no longer champion your career.”
Blumberg-Kason was surprised at the 180-degree turn by an agent who had been with her for years. But she soon discovered three other Jewish writers in her online community also had been suddenly dropped by their agents with little explanation other than the same phrase she heard: “We can no longer champion your career.”
It didn’t feel like coincidence.
“It wasn’t just that she dropped me,” Blumberg-Kason said. “It was that suddenly several of us were hearing the exact same sentence. It felt coordinated. It felt like something had shifted under our feet.”
It turns out many other Jewish writers have had similar experiences over the past two years, since the beginning of the Oct. 7 war and the boom in anti-Israel and antisemitic ferment that followed. In writers’ groups and forums, Jewish authors describe a sense that their work is being railroaded because they are Jewish. They’ve lost agents, publishers and book events. Some report that editors have cooled the moment Jewish themes appeared in their work.
In May 2024, anti-Israel boycotters propagated a shared spreadsheet called “Is your fav author a Zionist?” that went viral, “outing” Jewish writers for any kind of connection to Israel.
Author Elissa Wald felt the anti-Jewish sentiment so strongly that she created the Never Alone Book Club for Jewish authors to give one another support. The group now has 3,500 members, a Facebook community and a Substack, and it hosts Jewish book events and shares resources for writers who no longer feel safe in mainstream literary spaces.
The challenging climate prompted UJA-Federation of New York to begin funding projects aimed at helping Jewish authors, awarding a total of $300,000 in grants to six organizations working in different areas of the literary ecosystem.
“Supporting Jewish writers is an important part of UJA’s overall strategy to confront rising antisemitism,” said Eric S. Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York. “Efforts to marginalize Jewish voices in culture and the arts must be met by even greater efforts to ensure they’re heard.”
The organizations receiving UJA grants are helping Jewish writers with everything from publishing logistics and visibility to offering emotional support.
“Jewish writers were being dropped, disinvited, and sidelined — and many were questioning whether they could continue writing Jewish stories,” said Rina Cohen, who manages strategy across UJA’s Combating Antisemitism portfolio. “By supporting them with tools and resources, UJA is sending a clear message: You deserve to create freely, and we’ll stand behind you as you do.”
The Jewish Book Council used funding from UJA for a unique program to kick off the 100th anniversary of Jewish Book Month: The council designed and distributed 100 Jewish Book Kits to libraries and public spaces across New York City that offer a curated selection of Jewish literature, visual displays, QR codes and author highlights. The aim is to give librarians and community centers an accessible way to showcase Jewish books, helping make Jewish writing visible in the very spaces where many writers feared their work was being erased.
“Jewish books need visibility,” said Jewish Book Council CEO Naomi Firestone-Teeter. “We said: Let’s bring more Jewish books out into the world — into more readers’ hands — and build community around them. That’s what the kits do. They let people see Jewish books where they live their lives.”
It’s not always clear that a Jewish writer’s professional setback stems from antisemitism. Publishing is a brutal industry, and even successful writers experience abrupt and opaque rejection.
But many Jewish writers say that what they’re experiencing suggests something nefarious. They’ve felt their Jewishness was treated as suspect in classrooms, critique groups or conferences. They’ve felt pressure from editors to strip Jewish elements from their work.
When the Jewish Book Council opened a portal inviting Jewish writers to share incidents affecting their creative or professional lives, over 400 authors wrote in.
“Some of what we see is subtle and hard to pinpoint, and some of it is very direct: events canceled, students pushed out of MFA programs for being ‘Zionists,’ bookstores refusing to stock books,” Firestone-Teeter said. “Things are not okay. This is not just the normal difficulty of publishing.”
In addition to the Jewish Book Council, UJA’s other five grants went to Artists Against Antisemitism, PJ Library, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Life Foundation and 70 Faces Media (the parent organization of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency).
In October, 70 Faces Media held a one-day Jewish Authors’ Summit, offering writers practical tools, digital strategy training and community-building to navigate this increasingly hostile publishing environment.
PJ library will hold a Jewish children’s book festival for authors and families at New York’s 92nd St. Y on Jan. 11, 2026. In just the first few days, an unprecedented 3,500 registrants signed up.
The Jewish Theological Seminary held a literary festival in September that brought together 450 writers, students and community members for masterclasses, public panels and craft development.
The Jewish Life Foundation is creating a TV and podcast series, “The People of the Book with Josh Radnor,” that will spotlight Jewish authors and conversations about Jewish identity and culture.
Artists Against Antisemitism created a full-day gathering for 140 authors, the Jewish Writers Mifgash, that included pitch sessions with literary agents, professional development workshops, mentorship matching and mental health support. Project Shema, a training and support organization focused on contemporary antisemitism, led a session at the conference on how to recognize antisemitism in creative spaces.
Elizabeth Berkowitz, one of the event’s organizers, said several authors came away with promising leads.
“Agents were asking, ‘Can you send me the full? I want to see more,’” Berkowitz said. “We definitely had some shidduchs made — real follow-ups between writers and agents who were actively seeking Jewish authors.”
Zeeva Bukai, a longtime editor who said she’d experienced open hostility in a professional editing group, said just being around others experiencing the same challenges was a welcome relief.
“I realized it’s not just me experiencing this; other are too,” she said. “That validation was just as important as the tools we learned to deal with it.”
That’s the point, said the Jewish Book Council’s CEO.
“We want authors to know we’ve got you on the other side,” Firestone-Teeter said. “Your job is to keep writing. Our job is to deal with the industry issues and build a community that celebrates you and your work. Jewish writers need to feel confident writing the books only they can write.”
The post Jewish authors get a lifeline appeared first on The Forward.
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Iceland joins 4 other countries in boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The public broadcaster of Iceland announced on Wednesday that it will not participate in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest after Israel’s participation was confirmed by the European Broadcasting Union last week.
The decision drew support from prominent Icelandic artists, including the singer Björk and the former Eurovision representative Paul Oscar, as well as a supportive rally outside of the broadcaster’s Reykjavik headquarters.
The decision by the Icelandic public broadcaster Ríkisútvarpið, or RÚV, makes it the fifth country to bow out of the competition, following similar calls made by the public broadcasters of Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia. RÚV first signaled it would boycott competition with Israel in September.
The boycott decisions came after the EBU, which organizes the competition, dismissed calls for a vote on Israel’s participation last week. Instead, the EBU approved a new set of rules prohibiting voter interference from governments and third parties following allegations that Israel interfered in last year’s competition.
In a press release Wednesday, RÚV said its board had requested that the EBU remove Israel from the song competition, saying that such a move had the support of the Icelandic public.
“Given the public debate in this country and the reactions to the decision of the EBU that was taken last week it is clear that neither joy nor peace will prevail regarding the participation of RÚV in Eurovision,” it said in a press release. “It is therefore the conclusion of RÚV to notify the EBU today that RÚV will not take part in Eurovision next year.”
Iceland came in 25th out of 37 countries in the 2025 competition, where Israeli listeners noted that its song sounded remarkably similar to an Israeli pop hit. The Icelandic contestants denied knowing about the Israeli song before writing their own.
RÚV’s boycott decision came hours before the final deadline to withdraw from this year’s Eurovision, which is slated to take place in May in Vienna.
“We respect the decision of all broadcasters who have chosen not to participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest and hope to welcome them back soon,” said Eurovision director Martin Green in a statement, according to the BBC.
The post Iceland joins 4 other countries in boycotting Eurovision over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
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IDF Warns of Growing West Bank Threat, Presence of Iranian Weapons Amid Major Counterterror Operations
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is sounding the alarm over a growing terrorist threat from the West Bank, warning that Iranian-backed arms smuggling could spark an Oct. 7-style attack.
Concerns over the presence of significant Iranian-supplied firepower in the hands of Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank has prompted Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to a new report from Israel’s Channel 14, a senior IDF official warned that the West Bank presents a growing threat to Israeli communities, with the potential to spark an attack similar to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have to start from the clear fact that weapons in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred name for the West Bank] could upset the current stalemate,” the IDF official told Channel 14.
However, while the military has prioritized preparing for large-scale scenarios, such as an Oct. 7-style attack, the senior IDF official also warned that more attention needs to be paid to “smaller” threats — like a situation in which a small group of terrorists infiltrates a settlement home and kills an entire family — an event he described as “highly probable.”
“We shouldn’t see this scenario only as an attack on dozens of communities. A single deadly strike is enough — we must also prepare for lethal, localized attacks,” the IDF official said. “Our responsibility is to protect both individuals and the broader community.”
He warned that terrorists in the West Bank are believed to possess arms capable of breaking Israeli defenses, including what he called “standard Iranian weapons.” However, he also noted that security forces are actively working to intercept these arms and dismantle any terrorist cell in the area.
On Tuesday, the IDF uncovered a major terrorist infrastructure in the Tulkarem area in the northern West Bank, including three rockets at various stages of assembly, explosive devices, operational equipment, and materials for making bombs.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
At the time, the IDF completed a three-day, multi-branch military exercise in the West Bank called “Lion’s Roar,” designed to enhance operational coordination and joint capabilities in the region, with scenarios shaped by lessons learned from the Oct. 7 atrocities.
More than 180 Israeli Air Force aircraft supported ground troops during training for over 40 scenarios, including attacks on outposts, simultaneous terrorist infiltrations into multiple communities, urban combat, mass-casualty rescue and medical evacuation, multi-casualty response, intelligence integration, and real-time command and control.
“We have many lessons to implement from this exercise and from Oct. 7,” the IDF spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
“The IDF will continue to conduct regular exercises to ensure high readiness, strengthen cooperation among all troops, and maintain the security of residents in the area and of all Israeli civilians,” the statement read.
According to a survey released earlier this year by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 70 percent of all respondents — and 81 percent of Jewish respondents — expressed fear of an Oct. 7-style attack coming from the West Bank. In contrast, 53 percent of Arab respondents said they were not worried about such an attack.
“The stipulations of the ceasefire in Gaza, mainly the requirement for Hamas to fully disarm in future phases, should also be applied to the terrorist organization’s operatives in the West Bank,” Aaron Goren, research analyst at FDD, said at the time.
“Otherwise, Israel may face a threat from Hamas, which, unlike in Gaza, where it is relatively contained, is dispersed amongst Israeli communities in the West Bank,” he continued.
Earlier this year, the IDF arrested a Hamas and Fatah terror cell from Ramallah that was planning a bombing attack on a bus in Jerusalem, with investigators saying the group intended to remotely detonate an explosive device smuggled into Israel.
As of February, Israeli security forces had foiled nearly 1,000 terrorist plots over the past year, with senior military officials increasingly worried that the volatile situation in the West Bank could lead to a large-scale attack similar to the Oct. 7 onslaught against Israeli settlements and communities near the security barrier.
In response to these concerns, the IDF has established a special command to address potential threats in the West Bank and launched a nearly unprecedented counterterror operation in the northern part of the territory.