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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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Pomona College Agrees to Settlement Over Civil Rights Complaint Alleging Antisemitism on Campus
A pro-Hamas activist posts a banner near an encampment to demonstrate at the Claremont Colleges on May 7, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Qian Weizhong via Reuters Connect
Pomona College in Claremont, California, has settled a civil rights complaint which accused school officials of having “permitted severe discrimination of Jewish students” in the months which followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and Hillel International were part of the coalition of civil rights groups that brought legal action on behalf of Jewish students. According to a statement they released this week, the settlement calls for the college’s adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, updating its non-discrimination policy to stress that antisemitism is verboten, and hiring a new official to manage the college’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“After Oct. 7, Jewish and Israeli students and teachers across the country were forced to live in fear on their own campuses. But there were many, including those at Pomona, who exemplified strength and stood up to the bigotry and hatred that threatened them,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement commenting on the resolution of the case. “The action steps outlined in this settlement will address the blatant and egregious antisemitism faced by Pomona’s students, therefore protecting students from facing similar treatment in the future. And we hope it encourages others to take legal action against those who violate our constitutional rights.”
Pomona College president Gabrielle Starr issued her own statement on Wednesday, saying, “Antisemitism has persisted for thousands of years, and this settlement is not a one-size-fits-all toolkit. It’ll be up to our community to put it in place — and to live it. We will work with the Executive Committee of the Faculty, Staff Council, and [Associated Students of Pomona College] to navigate the complexities and challenges together. I am grateful to their leadership in these times.”
The settlement announcement comes just over a month after Pomona College, working with its sister institutions in the Claremont consortium of liberal arts colleges in California (5C), imposed severe disciplinary sanctions on some of the members of a pro-Hamas student group who attempted to raid a campus Jewish event held to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre, which claimed the lives of 1,200 people and resulted in 251 hostages being kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, footage of the incident showed the group, whose members concealed their faces with keffiyeh scarves, attempting to storm the event venue while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas slogans. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they were forced to mount on their own because campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance.
Later, the group behind the incident issued a disturbing open letter on social media.
“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” the note said, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. “Immediately, zionists [sic] swarmed us, put their hands on us, shoved us, while Viloga retreated like he did on October 7th, 2023.”
Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”
After an exhaustive investigation which drew in every member of the 5C, Pomona College determined that two of the young people involved in the raid are enrolled in sister schools it would not identify due to privacy laws. It has banned them from the Pomona campus. Two other individuals remain at large.
“Given the gravity of the alleged offense — and the published statement that has raised significant concerns about similar disruptions in the future — I have initiated an interim campus ban for both individuals, pending further inquiries, and in line with our policy,” Starr said in her last update on the matter. “The alleged behavior here is serious, and to ensure an appropriate adjudication is reached, the college is committed to maintaining a fair process.”
She added, “I assure you that Pomona hopes for — and will advocate for — an outcome that ensures our campuses are free of the kind of targeted harassment we witnessed.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Bill to Help Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art Passes US Senate Unanimously, Heads to House of Representatives
A drone view of the “Arbeit macht frei” gate at the former Auschwitz concentration camp ahead of the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Oswiecim, Poland, Jan. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
The US Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bill that would help Holocaust survivors and their families reclaim artwork stolen by Nazis during World War II.
The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (Hear) Act of 2025 updates and expands on the original 2016 HEAR Act, which created a six-year window for a Holocaust survivor or their family to file a legal claim starting from the time they discovered the location of their stolen art. The 2016 HEAR Act is set to expire at the end of 2026.
The new bill passed by the Senate this week clarifies legal protections for Holocaust survivors and their families who are seeking the return of art looted by the Nazis by making sure that their claims are considered based on factual merits and not dismissed due to legal deadlines or time-based technicalities. The new bill states that if a Holocaust survivor or their family members file a claim within six years of discovering their artwork’s location, their case cannot be dismissed just because of how much time has passed.
The bill now heads to the House of Representatives, and if it’s passed there, it will be sent to US President Donald Trump to be signed into law.
“This bipartisan effort will assist Holocaust survivors and their families who are seeking the return of artwork now held in museums and collections across the United States,” said Mark Weitzman, chief operating officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which supports world Jewry in pursuing claims for the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust.
“By clarifying and strengthening the legal framework, the bill helps ensure that these claims can be evaluated on their merits, advancing justice and accountability,” added Weitzman. “The bill now moves to the House of Representatives, and we encourage swift support to bring us closer to ensuring that claims for Nazi-looted art can be heard on their merits.”
The bill was cosponsored by US Sens John Cornyn (R-TX), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Fetterman (D-PA), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), and Katie Britt (R-AL). Cornyn spearheaded the 2016 HEAR Act.
“The thousands of missing pieces of art looted from Jewish families by Hitler’s regime during the Holocaust are a painful reminder of a time when cruelty and hatred reigned,” Cornyn said in a released statement. “This legislation renews our commitment to Holocaust survivors and their families by ensuring cases are heard on their merit, offering a path to restitution and assurance that such injustices are never forgotten.”
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Middle East Scholars Hope New Book on Oct. 7 Will Combat the ‘Promotion of Fallacies on Campus’
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
A consortium of Middle East scholars, as well as one student, has published a new book examining the impact of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel on geopolitics, media, and the landscape of higher education, The Algemeiner recently learned.
Edited by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East executive director Asaf Romirowsky and Smith College professor Donna Robinson-Divine, the book, titled October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds, includes essays by esteemed thinkers such Andrew Fox, KC Johnson, and Alex Joffe and it has already been acclaimed by professors representing higher education institutions across the Western world, from the University of California, Berkeley in the US to Kings College London in the United Kingdom.
On Friday, The Algemeiner spoke with Romirowsky and Robinson-Divine for nearly two hours to discuss their hopes for the project. One hope, they said, is breaking higher education’s dialogue on the Middle East out of a conceptual prison in which the convulsions of campus activism preclude careful analysis of a region whose rich history and effect on global stability demand seriousness. Wars Over Words and Deeds, they said, achieves this objective by contributing to “the academy” sound scholarship on the Middle East which respects the complexities it has posed to statesmen, scholars, and presidents since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the conclusion of World War I.
“We saw constantly a dearth of information and the promotion of fallacies on campus — a kind of rapid fire of lies and disinformation. We felt that we needed to actually look at the question of Israel and the Middle East from a rigorous academic standpoint,” Romirowsky said. “As historians, politic scientists, and analysts, we came together as a group to actually look at the historical patterns of behavior and historical evidence and describe the events which led up to Oct. 7 and what has transpired since.”
As previously reported by the Algemeiner, since the Oct. 7 massacre college faculty and students have treated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the subject of regional order in the Middle East, as a political and ideological issue, holding rallies, occupying buildings, and demanding sweeping policy changes such as divestment from Israel and the expulsion of Jewish academics. In dozens of incidents documented by The Algemeiner, they translated their zeal into speech which drew from Nazi-era rhetoric and other classic antisemitic tropes.
These activists have created an unusual convergence of interests connecting political Islamists, classical, white supremacist antisemites, and even far-left activists who advocate non-heteronormative gender roles and sexualities, Robinson-Divine noted.
“Anti-Zionism seems to be a vehicle for cementing ties between progressives who might not otherwise share a policy consensus,” she explained. “Muslim activists might have little in common with LGTBQ activists striving freedom and expanding social rights but they can unite around the issue of Israel.”
A coalition comprising factions which are normally at odds over the biggest political questions can only arise in a climate of deception, she noted.
“The incentives for distorting terms and concepts, for pushing an agenda, have been powerful over the past 10 years,” Robinson-Divine continued. “Higher education confers valuable material and social rewards to those who join the anti-Israel movement. But there are people who want information and accuracy, and I haven’t entirely despaired.”
One of the issues explored by The Wars Over Words and Deeds is the anti-Zionist left’s denial of reports that Hamas fighters sexually assaulted men and women on Oct. 7 and continued to do so after the fact to hostages it kidnapped and transported to Gaza. The Yale Daily News, for example, helped to popularize this denialism in higher education in November 2023, when it censored a column which discussed the sexual assault, calling the accounts of victims “unsubstantiated” — an outrage for which it later apologized.
“What is interesting about some Western responses to Oct. 7 is that groups which fall on the liberal side or the political spectrum, who claim to be invested in the well-being of women and disposed peoples,’ contribute to mass dehumanization which enables conditions for horrific gender-based violence to occur on nationalistic grounds,” writes Smith College student Skylar Ball in her contribution to the book. “When we turn our backs on truth, we enable dehumanization, and we subsequently turn our backs on humanity.”
Romirowsky, Robinson-Divine, and the scholars they brought together have a tall task, as anti-Zionist extremism in higher education has proven to be infectious.
Just last month, a New York City college saw a portentous incident in which a student and local imam disrupted an interfaith event by issuing a verbal fatwa which called for imposing sharia law on Americans, defended amputating the limbs of misdemeanor level criminals and the wealthy, and denigrated a Jewish co-panelist, Baruch College professor Ilya Bratman.
“If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately,” said Abdullah Mady, who is enrolled in the Master’s in Translational Medicine (MTM) program. “Sharia … stands against the oppressor. When sharia is implemented, pornography — gone. Alcohol industry — gone. Gambling system — gone. Interest is gone, which is what they use to enslave you.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.