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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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Netanyahu joins Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ despite misgivings about Qatari, Turkish participation
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has joined U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” less than a day after telling Israel’s parliament about his “argument” over the board’s membership.
Trump invited roughly 60 countries to join the board, a global body that is expected to oversee the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Among those that received invitations are Qatar and Turkey, which have supported Hamas.
“We have a certain argument with our friends in the United States over the composition of the advisory council that will accompany the processes in Gaza,” Netanyahu said on Monday.
Netanyahu’s comments came after Trump touted the board on social media, in the latest bid to move the three-month-old ceasefire into a new phase. The invitations went out soon after Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff announced that the ceasefire deal had entered its second phase, ushering in the formation of a Palestinian committee to oversee Gaza’s governance.
“It is my Great Honor to announce that THE BOARD OF PEACE has been formed,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social last week. “The Members of the Board will be announced shortly, but I can say with certainty that it is the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.”
Some European countries have indicated that they are interested in joining the board, while others have rejected the invitations. Pakistan and Russia are considering joining, while Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko, warmly accepted the invitation in a statement Monday.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Argentinian President Javier Milei, United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña were among the first to announce their acceptance of the invitations on social media. Egypt accepted its invitation on Wednesday.
Countries that sign onto the board will be installed for three-year terms with the option of paying $1 billion to fund its activities and gain permanent membership.
The board’s creation comes as Trump is openly dismissive of U.S. participation in other international bodies. The invitations said the Board of Peace would “embark on a bold new approach to resolving global conflict,” a description that critics said could set up the body to rival the United Nations in global governance. While the United Nations authorized the board to oversee the management of Gaza for two years, the board’s charter does not specifically mention Gaza.
French President Emmanuel Macron rejected Trump’s offer in a statement Monday, writing that the board’s charter “goes beyond the framework of Gaza and raises serious questions, in particular with respect to the principles and structure of the United Nations, which cannot be called into question.” (Trump later threatened to impose tariffs on French wines and champagne over the refusal.)
Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee warned in a statement Sunday that the board “would have a mandate wider than the implementation of the Gaza Peace Plan,” adding that “while it may be imperfect, the UN and the primacy of international law is more important now than ever.”
Sweden and Norway turned down their invitations on Wednesday.
Still, other world leaders have expressed their interest in joining the board, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who said her country was “ready to do our part” and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who said they had agreed in principle, but that “unimpeded aid flows” to Gaza was a precondition for joining. Meloni is right-wing and Carney is liberal, indicating that the board is
A spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that he was reviewing the invitation and was “hoping to get more details from the US side.”
Trump is expected to hold a formal signing ceremony for the board as early as Thursday while he attends the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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How a Persian Jewish immigrant became the rodeo king of California
David Halimi grew up Jewish in Tehran, watching Bonanza. He now produces rodeos in Northern California and owns a bar modeled on Cheers.
At 73, Halimi is known around Chico as the man behind a Western wear store stocked with thousands of cowboy boots, a rodeo circuit that draws bull riders from across the region, and a U-shaped bar where locals joke about who might be the town’s version of Norm. Less obvious — but no less central — is that he is also a longtime synagogue president, a Hillel board leader, and a professor who teaches business analytics at the local university.
Asked how an Iranian Jew learned the rhythms of the American West, Halimi doesn’t mystify it. “I’m a quick learner,” he said.
Halimi still follows events in Iran closely. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “It’s my heritage.” He has no illusions about the imbalance of power. “People protesting with their bare hands are no match to machine guns and professional assassins.” Still, he allows himself hope. “I wish and I pray that the people will prevail.”
For Halimi, the distance between Iran and Chico is not just geographic. It is the distance between a life shaped by instability — he grew up in Iran in the aftermath of a coup — and one he has spent decades deliberately building.
On a recent afternoon inside the 6,000-square-foot Diamond W Western Wear, Halimi wore what he sells — black alligator boots, jeans, a button-down, blazer and a hat — and moved easily past towers of boots, glass cases of belt buckles, pausing as an employee steamed a cowboy hat back into shape. His wife, Fran, emerged from the back. Customers drifted in.
Over the years, his footprint downtown has expanded to include two restaurants and a soon-to-open coffee shop, all within walking distance of his store.
Halimi didn’t arrive in America looking for a job. He arrived looking for an opportunity. When he moved to the United States at 16, in 1969, he worked full time while going to school, bussing tables at a restaurant and saving aggressively. By 18, he had pooled his earnings with his older brother to make his first real estate investment. “I was never looking for a job,” he said. “I always wanted to do my own thing.”
That instinct carried him through college, where he studied mathematics and economics, and later into commodities trading — “the stock market on steroids,” as he put it — before settling in Chico in 1979. It had the virtues he was looking for: a small-town feel, a university’s energy, and room to build.
Mending fences, building community
For all the boots, buckles and bull riders, Halimi’s most consequential work happens closer to home. He has served on the board of Congregation Beth Israel of Chico for decades, including numerous stints as president, and has been a steady presence through the cycles that define small Jewish communities.
Rabbi Lisa Rappaport, who leads the congregation, said that constancy matters. In a community with limited resources, leadership often means stepping in wherever the need arises.
That was especially true after the synagogue was targeted with antisemitic graffiti in late 2022. What followed, Rappaport recalled, was an outpouring of support. Donations funded a new security system. A local metalworker volunteered to create a new sign. Another family, moved by the response, offered to pay for a fence.
Halimi volunteered to design and help build it. Vertical bars, he insisted, would make the synagogue feel like a jail. Instead, he created diagonal metal panels inspired by math’s golden ratio, incorporating stainless-steel symbols of the Twelve Tribes — a boundary meant to protect without closing the place off.
Rappaport credits both Halimi and his wife, a former religious school director and longtime sisterhood leader, with helping sustain the shul. “They’re in it till the end,” she said. In a small community, she added, that kind of commitment is existential. “If you have a couple of people who have that frame of mind,” she said, “it keeps the community alive. It’s people like that that keep it pulsing.”
Halimi, now a grandfather, carries that same lesson into his classroom at Chico State, where he has been teaching since 2009. Each semester he leads two courses: business analytics and the evolution of management theory. He doesn’t think of it as a job so much as a responsibility. “I like seeing the light bulb go on,” he said. Former students, now entrepreneurs themselves, sometimes track him down to say thank you. The payoff, he said, is “psychic income.”
Halimi teaches what he learned: “Even when the odds are against you,” he said, “you can still succeed.”
His rodeo business began, improbably enough, as a marketing complaint. Halimi had been sponsoring country concerts and rodeos to promote the store, but he was unimpressed with the results. Other sponsors, he noticed, felt the same way. So he launched his own production company. First, they hosted country music concerts. Soon, they built a rodeo: the National Bullriding Championship Tour, which just marked its 30th year.
He had expected resistance from the industry. Instead, he found acceptance, and eventually respect. “It’s very unusual,” he acknowledged, “for an Iranian Jew to be a successful rodeo producer.”
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Argentina’s chief Sephardic rabbi reaffirms century-old ban on local conversions, sparking backlash
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s Sephardic chief rabbi reaffirmed a 100-year-old ruling that conversion may not be performed in Argentina and is considered valid only if carried out in Israel.
Representatives of non-Orthodox movements reacted angrily, asking why the ruling was issued now and saying it would essentially subject Argentinian converts to the tight hold that Israel’s Orthodox rabbis have on conversion.“Orthodoxy is attempting to present itself as the sole legitimate source of Judaism and halachic [Jewish legal] authority,” Rabbi Ariel Stofenmacher, the rector of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, the Masorti/Conservative movement’s seminary in Buenos Aires, told JTA. “We are concerned that members of the Jewish community in Latin America, where about 80 percent or more are not Orthodox, may read that statement by an important rabbi and feel confused.”
The document, issued on Jan. 13 and signed by Chief Rabbi Yosef Chehebar, reaffirms a takanah, or rabbinical ban, first established in Argentina in 1927. The authors of that ban, Rabbi Shaul Sitehon Dabah of the Syrian-Aleppo tradition and the Ashkenazi Rabbi Aharon Goldman, emerged in response to a proliferation of lax or irregular conversions, particularly in rural areas among Jewish immigrants.
The statement signed by Cheheber describes the ban as “general and binding.” It emphasizes that the decree was enacted permanently, “with no temporal limitation or expiration whatsoever,” and frames it as a safeguard for “the purity of lineage and the sanctity of our families.”
In the years since the original ban, however, non-Orthodox rabbis say the conversion process has been standardized, and that the level of preparation in Argentina is considered very high. The Masorti seminary, which has conducted conversions since its founding in 1994, argues that the reasons for the restriction “are no longer applicable.”
Critics of Cheheber’s document say there have been no recent incidents or developments that would have prompted such a reminder.
“We reject recent statements that invoke a cherem from the 1920s to invalidate conversions carried out outside the State of Israel and by non-Orthodox rabbis, as well as the use of language that appeals to notions of ‘lineage,’ ‘purity’ or ‘contamination,” the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano and its affiliated Rabbinical Seminary said in a statement Jan. 15. “Such claims are halachically unsustainable and ethically unacceptable, particularly when they introduce categories alien to Judaism and morally offensive.”
Rabbi Isaac Sacca, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Buenos Aires, posted Chehebar’s ruling on social media and defended it in an interview with JTA.
“The regulation represents a self-imposed limitation by Argentina’s Orthodox rabbis on their own authority, undertaken in order to ensure security and peace of mind that a practice as delicate and sacred as conversion is carried out with due seriousness, and that neither the convert, nor families, nor the community are misled,” he said.
Conversion has been a flashpoint between the diaspora and Israel, where the Orthodox rabbinate for decades held a near monopoly on Jewish lifecycle events, including conversion. Non-Orthodox conversions were recognized in Israel under a landmark ruling handed down by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021, but non-Orthodox groups continue to object to government regulations that complicate the recognition of these conversions.
Conversion has been particularly fraught in Latin America, including the controversies that led to the 1927 takanah and, more recently, the mass conversion in Brazil, Colombia and other countries of people who identify as Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forcibly converted during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Within Orthodox circles in Argentina, preparatory stages for conversion may take place in the country, but the bet din, or rabbinical court, that validates them operates in Israel. According to sources who asked to remain anonymous, the target of the latest ruling was not the non-Orthodox movements but Orthodox rabbis who had been offering more flexible alternatives to prospective converts, such as completing an Orthodox conversion in neighboring Uruguay and then returning to Argentina to seek its recognition in Buenos Aires.
Chehebar’s recent statement specifies that the takanah “applies both to any person residing in Argentina, as well as to anyone coming from another country with the intention of establishing residence in national territory, even in cases in which the giyur [convert] has already been carried out in their country of origin or another country, outside of Eretz Israel.”
Asked whether any specific incident had triggered the statement, Sacca replied: “We are not aware of any particular event. It is simply a reminder that the Sephardic Chief Rabbinate of Syrian-Aleppo tradition has conveyed to our rabbinate for public dissemination.”
The ruling “does not constitute a rejection of the convert, nor does it devalue those who sincerely seek to join Judaism,” he added. “On the contrary, it functions as a halakhic safeguard designed to preserve a core commandment linked to Jewish identity, in a context marked by social pressures and institutional weaknesses. It also seeks to prevent hasty decisions that could affect the spiritual and personal lives of those seeking conversion, as well as those of their descendants.”
The Masorti movement insisted that its own rabbis conduct the conversion process in a manner that is “serious, demanding, and deeply Jewish,” based on rigorous study, commitment to Jewish life and responsible rabbinical guidance. “Those who join the Jewish people through this path,” the statement affirms, “are received as full Jews, with dignity and complete belonging, in accordance with rabbinic tradition.”
Said Stofenmacher: “We reaffirm that we conduct legitimate conversions in accordance with the halacha, as we have done for decades, with thousands of individuals who have joined the Jewish people in our region, and we will continue to do so in all the communities where our rabbis serve.”
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