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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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New record label boasts young (and female) singers of cantorial music
Khazonim, or cantors, like Yossele Rosenblatt and Gershon Sirota — once household names that commanded massive respect and even bigger paychecks — have lost their luster since their heyday in the “Golden Age” of the early 20th century.
To the dismay of fans of khazones — the unique blend of traditional prayer and classical opera that once dominated the Ashkenazi synagogue and stage — few people today have the specialized cultural knowledge required in passing the musical tradition down from teacher to student.
Another traditional Jewish musical genre once found itself in a similar situation: klezmer music. Then, in the 1970s, the Balkan Arts Center of New York City, which later became the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, became the focal point for a remarkable klezmer revival. They recorded legends like Dave Tarras who taught new generations of musicians, and became a supportive ecosystem for a genre that had been nearly discarded.
Following this example, Jeremiah Lockwood and Judith Berkson, founders of the new Brooklyn-based record label Khazones Underground, are using a combination of recordings, concerts and community organizing to achieve a revival for this genre as well. They are well-qualified for this massive undertaking: Lockwood is the grandson of khazn Jacob Konigsberg, and a scholar. He is also the long-time frontman of the khazones-infused–rock group The Sway Machinery. Berkson is a cantor, composer and teacher.
Aside from a symposium and concert at the upcoming Yiddish New York festival, they have been teaching and writing about khazones, cultivating a new generation of dedicated performers from diverse backgrounds.
As part of their efforts, Lockwood and Berkson are officially releasing three albums on Dec. 1 that includes a reissue of an album of contemporary Hasidic cantors; an album from The Sway Machinery which uses surreptitiously-taken “bootleg” recordings of Golden Age cantors as jumping-off points, and perhaps most excitingly — an album of all-female cantors, or khazntes.
The album, The Return of the Immortal Khazntes featuring Judith Berkson, Riki Rose, Rachel Weston and Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, draws on the history of female cantors who used to perform on the theater stage. Berkson noted in an interview that what made this album special was that their inspiration is the sound of the old khazntes.
“A lot of women cantors now are trained to sing quite high, in a soprano range,” Berkson said. But these four khazntes sang in a wider range, including alto, imitating the often baritone ranges of their male counterparts.
Berkson opens the album with “V’hu Yashmiyeynu,” accompanied by San Francisco’s renowned Kronos Quartet. The piece, originally performed by the cantor and Yiddish actor Moishe Oysher, is, as Lockwood describes it, “an amazing kind of knock-’em where it hurts, showstopper piece.”
Riki Rose, originally from the Satmar Hasidic community, expressed a similar kind of revelatory feeling. Even though she didn’t hear women singing this kind of music earlier in her life, it seemed very natural to her to sing in a lower register.
The other two featured cantors have equally interesting backgrounds: McKinney-Baldon is researching Madame Goldie Steiner, the only known African American woman performer of khazones in the Golden Age; and Weston is a British cantor trained extensively in Yiddish music.
The album, The Dream Past, is, on the face of it, aggressively different from “The Return.” Lockwood, reviving The Sway Machinery, which once toured the world inserting khazones themes under the guitar and drums, is now more revealing about the Jewish background of its pieces. Each song begins with an introduction from a “bootleg” recording of live prayer as a jumping-off point.
Golden Ages: Brooklyn Chassidic Cantorial Revival Today is a reissue from 2022, but it’s every bit as notable for bringing in modern Hasidic cantors. Interestingly, even the deeply traditional Hasidic community had abandoned khazones, leaving the few remaining Hasidic fans of the genre feeling marginalized by their own community.
Singer Yanky Lemmer, whom Lockwood met while observing Brooklyn’s Hasidic khazones singing circles, will be part of the performance at Yiddish New York — a truly remarkable occurrence due to the well-known chasm between the Hasidic and Yiddishist worlds.
Lockwood says that this current trio of records is just the beginning. Archival recordings are coming next, as well as various events and gatherings. He definitely sees positive signs that Khazones Underground could uplift this kind of music. “I wouldn’t say that’s an institution yet, but we have aspirations that it can support this kind of work,” he said.
The post New record label boasts young (and female) singers of cantorial music appeared first on The Forward.
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Syrian Security Forces Use Gunfire to Disperse Rival Protests in Alawite Heartland
Alawites gather during a protest to demand federalism and the release of detained members of their community, in Latakia, Syria, Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Syrian security forces used gunfire on Tuesday to break up two rival groups of demonstrators in the coastal town of Latakia, heartland of the country’s Alawite minority, witnesses and officials said.
Syria has been rocked by several episodes of sectarian violence since longtime leader Bashar al-Assad, who hails from the Muslim Alawite minority, was ousted by a rebel offensive last year and replaced by a Sunni-led government.
Witnesses said hundreds of Alawite protesters had gathered to demand a decentralized political system in Syria and the release of men they say were unjustly detained by the country’s new authorities. Supporters of the government then gathered and began shouting insults at the Alawites.
About an hour into the Alawites’ rally, gunshots were heard in Agriculture Square, one of two town squares where the protesters had gathered, according to two witnesses and videos verified by Reuters. One of the verified videos showed a man lying motionless on the ground with a wound to the head.
There was no immediate official word on casualties.
Noureddine el-Brimo, the head of media relations in Latakia province, told Reuters security forces had fired into the air to disperse the rival protesters, and added that unknown assailants had also fired on civilians and on the security forces.
He gave no further details but witnesses said both protests had broken up by the afternoon.
‘THERE’S NO MORE SECURITY’
The rally had been called for by the head of the Supreme Alawite Islamic Council, Ghazal Ghazal, on Monday. He urged Alawites to protest peacefully.
“We demand to live in security, to go to school safely without kidnapping. This was the only place we used to feel security. Now there’s no more security and we’re exposed to kidnapping and fear,” said Leen, who attended the protest but declined to give her last name out of security concerns.
Nearly 1,500 Alawites were killed by government-linked forces in March after Assad loyalists ambushed state security. Reuters reported that dozens of Alawite women were later kidnapped, though authorities deny they were abducted.
Syria‘s President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former militant Islamist, has vowed to rule for all Syrians but the country’s nearly 14-year civil war and the bouts of violence over the last year have prompted fears of further instability.
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Zelenskiy Says Ukraine Ready to Move Forward With US-Backed Peace Plan
A rescuer walks next to a body of a resident killed by a Russian missile strike at a compound of the supermarket warehouse, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Handout via REUTERS
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that Kyiv was ready to move forward with a US-backed peace deal, and that he was prepared to discuss its sensitive points with US President Donald Trump in talks he said should include European allies.
In a speech to the so-called coalition of the willing, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Zelenskiy urged European leaders to hash out a framework for deploying a “reassurance force” to Ukraine and to continue supporting Kyiv for as long as Moscow shows no willingness to end its war.
Ukraine had signaled earlier in the day support for the framework of a peace deal with Russia but stressed that sensitive issues needed to be fixed at a meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump.
Kyiv’s message hinted that an intense diplomatic push by the Trump administration could be yielding some fruit but any optimism could be short-lived, especially as Russia stressed it would not let any deal stray too far from its own objectives.
US and Ukrainian negotiators held talks on the latest US-backed peace plan in Geneva on Sunday. US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll then met on Monday and Tuesday with Russian officials in Abu Dhabi, a spokesperson for Driscoll said.
US and Ukrainian officials have been trying to narrow the gaps between them over the plan to end Europe’s deadliest and most devastating conflict since World War II, with Ukraine wary of being strong-armed into accepting a deal largely on the Kremlin’s terms, including territorial concessions.
“Ukraine – after Geneva – supports the framework’s essence, and some of the most sensitive issues remain as points for the discussion between presidents,” a Ukrainian official said.
Zelenskiy could visit the United States in the next few days to finalize a deal with Trump, Kyiv’s national security chief Rustem Umerov said, though no such trip was confirmed from the US side.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that over the past week the US had made “tremendous progress towards a peace deal by bringing both Ukraine and Russia to the table.” She added: “There are a few delicate, but not insurmountable, details that must be sorted out and will require further talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States.”
Oil prices extended an earlier decline after reports of Ukraine potentially agreeing to a war-ending deal.
Underlining the high stakes for Ukraine, its capital Kyiv was hit by a barrage of missiles and hundreds of drones overnight in a Russian strike that killed at least seven people and again disrupted power and heating systems. Residents were sheltering underground wearing winter jackets, some in tents.
ZELENSKIY: WILL DISCUSS SENSITIVE ISSUES WITH TRUMP
US policy towards the war has zigzagged in recent months.
A hastily arranged summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August raised worries in Kyiv and European capitals that the Trump administration might accept many Russian demands, though the meeting ultimately resulted in more US pressure on Russia.
The 28-point plan that emerged last week caught many in the US government, Kyiv, and Europe alike off-guard and prompted fresh concerns that the Trump administration might be willing to push Ukraine to sign a peace deal heavily tilted toward Moscow.
The plan would require Kyiv to cede territory beyond the almost 20% of Ukraine that Russia has captured since its February 2022 full-scale invasion, as well as accept curbs on its military and bar it from ever joining NATO – conditions Kyiv has long rejected as tantamount to surrender.
The sudden push has raised the pressure on Ukraine and Zelenskiy, who is now at his most vulnerable since the start of the war after a corruption scandal saw two of his ministers dismissed, and as Russia makes battlefield gains.
Zelenskiy could struggle to get Ukrainians to swallow a deal viewed as selling out their interests.
He said on Monday the latest peace plan incorporated “correct” points after talks in Geneva. “The sensitive issues, the most delicate points, I will discuss with President Trump,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
Zelenskiy said the process of producing a final document would be difficult. Russia‘s unrelenting attacks on Ukraine have left many skeptical about how peace can be achieved soon.
“There was a very loud explosion, our windows were falling apart, we got dressed and ran out,” said Nadiia Horodko, a 39-year-old accountant, after a residential building was struck in Kyiv overnight.
“There was horror, everything was already burning here, and a woman was screaming from the eighth floor, ‘Save the child, the child is on fire!’”
MACRON WARNS AGAINST EUROPEAN CAPITULATION
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said an amended peace plan must reflect the “spirit and letter” of an understanding reached between Putin and Trump at their Alaska summit.
“If the spirit and letter of Anchorage is erased in terms of the key understandings we have established then, of course, it will be a fundamentally different situation [for Russia],” Lavrov warned.
A group of countries supporting Ukraine, which is known as the coalition of the willing and includes Britain and France, was also set to hold a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
“It’s an initiative that goes in the right direction: peace. However, there are aspects of that plan that deserve to be discussed, negotiated, improved,” French President Emmanuel Macron told RTL radio regarding the US-proposed plan. “We want peace, but we don’t want a peace that would be a capitulation.”
In a separate development, Romania scrambled fighter jets to track drones that breached its territory near the border with Ukraine early on Tuesday, and one was still advancing deeper into the NATO-member country, the defense ministry said.