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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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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
The post Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
(JTA) — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”
This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.
“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”
Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.
He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.
“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”
Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”
“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob—the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”
When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.
Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first place.”
Turx, the senior White House correspondent for Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox publication, said the meeting took place after he reached out to Langer multiple times.
Langer did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, and efforts to reach Gage were unsuccessful.
During the nearly two-hour interview, Gage recounted his journey from an Iraq war veteran to antisemitic activist and, more recently, to a public critic of the online movement he once helped build.
Gage, who is Roman Catholic, said his descent into antisemitic conspiracy theories began after serving in Kuwait and Iraq, when he became obsessed with identifying who was responsible for sending him to a war he described as “a lie.”
“I went through all the conspiracy theories until I ran into the Jews and that was in 2012 when I read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I was like ‘whoa,’” Gage said.
That year, Gage began posting on the racist Web forum Stormfront that he had recently found out about “the real Jewish question” and that “EVERYTHING connects and leads back to the jews — the evil jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stormfront played a role in one of the best-known recent conversion-from-white supremacy stories, in which the child of the site’s founder renounced extremism and antisemitism after being invited to Shabbat dinners in college.
For Gage, Stormfront was a site of his radicalization. After beginning to post there, he became a regular fixture in white nationalist circles, appearing on far-right podcasts, organizing activists and eventually taking a shot at elected office.
In 2014, Gage ran unsuccessfully for the House in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District under the far-right white supremacist American Freedom Party but was disqualified before the campaign season began because of incorrectly filed paperwork. Following that bid, he served as the chairman of the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the party.
Gage’s online presence and influence within white nationalist circles grew rapidly, appearing alongside former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and Stormfront founder Andrew Anglin on their platforms. He also frequently promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widely considered antisemitic and claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in Western countries with nonwhite immigrants.
Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Gage said that he shifted the focus of his online accounts to railing against Israel, posting on X over the ensuing months that “every supporter of Israel is a terrorist” and that “Zionists are worse than pedophiles,” according to screenshots of his account posted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Gage said his departure from the movement was driven in part by frustration with what he called “low-IQ antisemitism,” or conspiracy theories that reflexively blame Jews for unrelated events.
“What was the final straw? Charlie Kirk. Okay. Why? Because I keep talking about low IQ antisemitism. What is that? It’s when you blame Jews for things they haven’t even done,” Gage said, explaining that he couldn’t agree with conspiratorial claims swirling on the far-right that Israel had been behind the Turning Point USA leader’s murder.
Gage said that he believed even if it was proven that the man accused of Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, had committed the crime, the far-right crowd he had surrounded himself with would have still blamed the Jews.
“There’s no hope for these people, and then they’re turning on me just for disagreeing,” Gage said.
Gage’s shift quickly earned him the ire of antisemitic influencers he had once aligned himself with, including far-right antisemitic media personalities Jake Shields and Stew Peters.
“Imagine if Lucas Gage had never existed. What a beautiful world it would be. The world would be a much better place if Lucas Gage did not exist in it,” Peters said during a podcast appearance with Shields last month. “I mean, that guy singlehandedly destroyed the most cohesive movement in modern history.”
Looking ahead, Gage stressed the importance of engaging with figures who hold antisemitic views, citing the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia in December.
“I want to talk to different groups of people and say, look, yeah, we have to sit down and have these conversations, because if we don’t, if we isolate the antisemites, ‘oh, they’re just maniacs, they’re jealous, we don’t care,’ they’re going to go crazy,” Gage said. “I didn’t, but someone else did. Remember the guy who shot up the beach in Australia?”
Since announcing the interview, Langer said that his inbox had been “flooded” with messages asking him if he believed Gage was sincere, to which he responded “100%.”
“I wish more people were as authentic and honest as he is,” Langer said. “While it wasn’t easy to make change in his life, he did it.”
The post Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement appeared first on The Forward.
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This year’s biggest World Cup upset came from its most Jew-ish team
Cape Verde, an island nation of about 530,000 people off the coast of Africa, shocked soccer fans around the globe by holding Spain without a goal in their debut World Cup match this week. But Carol Castiel saw it coming.
For the better part of four decades, Castiel has been working to document and preserve the island nation’s rich but little-known Sephardic heritage. And while there are no known practicing Jews in Cape Verde today, Castiel said connection to Jewish identity remains in the country and in its soccer team.
The proof, she said, was in the team’s first result.
Cape Verde’s stout defense — led by 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha’s seven saves — shut out the team FIFA ranked second-best in the world, and a country whose GDP is 600 times greater than its own. Cape Verde, ranked 67th, didn’t buckle as Spain fired shot after shot on the goal. The game ended in a 0-0 stalemate.
“In the face of hardship, they just keep going, and they find ways,” Castiel said. “They’re the underdog.”
But there was also a Jewish genealogical connection on the Cape Verde team sheet: Reserve forward Gilson Benchimol’s surname dates back some 150 years to Sephardic Jews on the island.
The 2026 World Cup’s biggest upset to date has put the spotlight on the 10-island archipelago about 350 miles west of Senegal. Castiel, an American Jew and ex-journalist who is obtaining citizenship in Cape Verde, is also hoping it brings attention to her effort to preserve Jewish memory there.
An island nation’s Jewish roots
Jewish life on Cape Verde dates back to the 16th century, when the Portuguese Inquisition caused Jewish converts to Christianity — known then as “New Christians” — to emigrate en masse from the Iberian peninsula. (The Portuguese Inquisition started a couple decades after the Spanish Inquisition.)
The islands were far from the center of the Inquisition, perhaps allowing some of the exiled to resume practicing Judaism in secret. They also offered New Christians the chance to pursue commercial opportunities in international trade. These New Christians lived under surveillance even in Cape Verde, though, and one of the islands had a Jewish ghetto in the 16th century.
That first wave of migrants eventually assimilated through marriage or out-migrated, and the archipelago’s Jewish footprint largely disappeared. Some historians suggest that last names on the island related to trees and animals, like Carvalho (oak) or Pinto (chick), hint at possible Jewish ancestry. (Some Sephardic Jews and conversos adopted or were assigned last names during the Inquisition.)
Cape Verde became a popular Jewish destination again in the second half of the 19th century, after the Inquisition ended. The territory was still a Portuguese colony with a powerful grip on transatlantic trade, and Jewish emigres — many from the northern Morocco city of Tetouan — found success in agriculture and international shipping.
“They were key to the economy in those days,” Castiel said.
Some of the primary exports from that era, like coffee and rum, continue today. (The islands were also a hub of slave trade, and historians believe New Christians were among the slave traders.)
Few in number and mostly male, the latter wave of Jewish immigrants also married out of the religion, Castiel said, and their descendants today are Catholic. But their Jewish surnames remain prevalent on the islands. Castiel said names like Cohen and Levy, as well as variations on common Sephardic names like Ohayon and Benchimol, show that “the blood of Jews is running through the veins of a lot of people there.”
Castiel said she did not believe the national team’s Benchimol — who plays professionally for the Russian club Akron Tolyatti — identifies as Jewish. (The Forward has reached out to the player for comment.)
Though the Cape Verdeans with common Jewish surnames don’t tend to identify as Jewish, many embrace their Jewish ancestry.
One of them is Jose Levy. His great-grandfather, Fortunato Levy, emigrated from Morocco in the late 19th century and started a business doing sea-transportation around the islands. His father worked for the Portuguese government until Cape Verde won independence in 1975.
Levy, who worked for the United Nations before retiring recently, said many Jewish Cape Verde families returned to Portugal after independence. But to this day, many of his friends in Praia — the Cape Verde capital, where he lives — have Jewish names.
“Neither me nor my father were directly exposed to Jewish religion,” Levy, 68, said in an interview. “But our grandparents and great-grandparents were proud Jews, and they made a great contribution to what Cape Verde is now.”
Historic preservation
There are no known synagogues on the islands — even historic ones — and Cape Verde is one of the rare places in the world without a Chabad. But there are at least four small Jewish cemeteries spread across three islands, Castiel said. Modeled after Moroccan cemeteries, each has white horizontal stones with inscriptions in Hebrew and Portuguese — but they were overgrown, eroding or otherwise disarrayed when Castiel first visited.
“In Judaism, the most important thing is to create burial grounds to rest the souls,” Castiel said. “In that regard, these Jews did that. It’s just that they couldn’t sustain it.”
The nonprofit she founded in 2007, the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project, aims to restore the sites and expand the documentation and of Jewish life on the island through research, oral history and tourism. In 2018, the nonprofit installed a series of plaques to commemorate the 19th-century Jewish settlers interred at the cemeteries.
According to Castiel, the nonprofit’s primary funder is Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, whose Jewish historic preservation efforts in Morocco — the ancestral homeland of many Cape Verde migrants — are well-documented. Levy sits on the board.
“We carry the last name, but the religion aspect was not transferred, so we are Catholic,” Levy said. “But we are very proud of our Jewish ancestors.”
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