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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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Woody Allen’s biggest fans were easy marks for a fake monologue about antisemitism
Those still wondering “what would Woody Allen say about today’s antisemitism” were treated to what looked like an answer last week in the form of a viral monologue bemoaning the price of coffee in a roast of Ivy-educated anti-Zionism.
The only issue: It seems to be entirely fake.
The post, according to X, where the post first gained traction, was initially posted in Spanish by a pro-Israel writer named Simy Benarroch and was originally the work of a previous Russian writer named Rami Yudovin.
As hoaxes go, this one seemed credible at first glance. It’s hard not to read it in Allen’s nasal voice. It has his cadence, his references to philosophers and the inclusion of an intrusive female relative that are his hallmarks, leading many who didn’t believe this to be genuine to conclude a prompt was fed through an AI mimic. (It’s not the first time something like this has happened.)
But there are tells for those looking. See the fourth paragraph, in which Allen encounters protesters outside a synagogue: “I was walking through Brooklyn thinking about death.”
From a ripe young age, Allen has perseverated on the end, but walking through Brooklyn? Now? That far from the Upper East Side? I’m skeptical.
This could all, of course, be a rhetorical flourish. The types of woke stereotypes the author plays with, i.e.: “someone with a scarf [presumably a keffiyah], who looks like he writes poems about his own beard, explains to you — with help from Heidegger and Nietzsche — why the existence of Jews is a form of aggression and a threat to humanity,” have a home in his native borough.
The thrust of this argument, that pro-Palestinian protesters use the language of the academy to justify the oldest hatred is hardly novel. They are in fact facile to the point of tracking with Allen’s own “witch hunt” comments about #MeToo (for which he said he should be the poster boy; he achieved this in a sense, but not in the way he meant.)
But if this is any type of Allen, it’s one of his characters, not the man himself.
“My grandmother, by the way, lived through actual Nazis,” the author writes, of hearing a protester indulging in Holocaust inversion. “She hid in a basement in Poland with a man who coughed so hard the Germans could have found them just from the bronchial racket.”
Allen’s grandparents were in the U.S. during World War II, but nice line.
John Podhoretz slammed this forgery, remarking how the real auteur has been “shamefully silent since October 7.”
This is an odd kind of indictment, aside from not being strictly true.
Who, exactly, would Allen reach in his activism for Jews? Should he shift to advocacy, he would likely find the exact same audience that shared the fake and found themselves nodding reverently along.
Perhaps this bodes well for Allen’s continued influence on the segment of the population still dying to hear his insights. Woody Allen may be 90, cancelled and taking a break from making movies, but Woody A.I.len can live forever.
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U.S. launches attacks on Iran as negotiations over a peace deal drag out
(JTA) — The United States announced it had launched defensive strikes on Monday in Southern Iran, targeting Iranian missile sites and boats it believed were placing mines.
The move threatens to derail an already fragile ceasefire between the United States, Iran and Israel aimed at giving the U.S. and Iran space to hammer out a deal to end the hostilities. It also comes as U.S. President Donald Trump told several Muslim allies participating in consultations over a deal that they should normalize relations with Israel in exchange for the U.S. inking the agreement.
U.S. Central Command Spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkin said in a statement issued Monday that strike targets “included missile launch sites and Iranian boats attempting to emplace mines.”
He added that U.S. forces “conducted self-defense strikes … to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” and that CENTCOM “continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.”
The attacks were conducted in the port city of Bandar Abbas around the strait of Hormuz, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as cited by CNN.
The strikes came just 24 hours after President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had instructed his representatives to “not rush into a deal,” stressing that “time is on our side.” Trump emphasized in the message that Iran “cannot develop or procure a Nuclear Weapon,” a key aim of the American military effort but one the president had not referred to in comments over the weekend that a deal was close.
Trump noted in another post Sunday that the deal was not yet “fully negotiated,” but that if he makes a deal with Iran it “will be a good and proper one,” and that he does not “make bad deals.”
Trump’s comments came as several GOP voices have expressed concerns about a deal he said Saturday was “largely negotiated.” Trump’s posts Sunday came after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted on X that the reported terms of the agreement would be a “disastrous mistake.”
Trump also stated on Truth Social Monday that Muslim countries should “mandatorily” sign on to the Abraham Accords as part of any agreement to end the war between Iran and Israel.
He named Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, though he said it might be possible for a couple to be exempted.
Following the U.S. strikes on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in India Tuesday that the Strait of Hormuz has to be open, “one way or the other,” and that negotiations with Iran could “take a few days.”
Meanwhile, several media outlets reported that Iran announced Tuesday that it had executed Gholamreza Khani Shekerab for alleged espionage and intelligence cooperation with Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A stronger shekel has become a pressing problem for Americans building lives in Israel
(JTA) — Yisrael HaBahiyir saved for more than a year to make his dream of moving to Israel come true.
But just weeks after leaving upstate New York, where he had been managing operations for a synagogue, he got a cruel reality check when he transferred his rent money from his American bank account to Western Union to pay his Tel Aviv landlord.
“I sent the same amount I normally transfer and went to pick it up. It was about 300 shekels short. I said something to the cashier, like, ‘I think you gave me the wrong rate,’” HaBahiyir recalled. “That’s when I realized the shekel was strengthening.”
It’s an experience that Americans in Israel — and Israelis who depend on American dollars — are increasingly facing, as the Israeli shekel has strengthened to near-record highs. While the currency’s strength has been good news to many Israelis who worried that years of war would harm the economy, it is having wide-ranging and often challenging ramifications for immigrants and Israeli nonprofits.
Many Americans who move to Israel have chosen to keep some or all of their assets in dollars, whether to hedge against shekel volatility, maintain financial ties to the United States or preserve flexibility should they ever return.
When the dollar is relatively strong compared to the shekel, as was the case for much of the past decade, that arrangement is advantageous. Assets held in dollars go further in an Israeli economy priced in shekels, giving American immigrants greater purchasing power for everyday expenses.
But now, with the shekel trading at less than three to a dollar, its most favorable rate in three decades, anyone trying to make a life in Israel using U.S. dollars is feeling the squeeze.
“Before, $1,500 would get me close to 6,000 shekels and cover my bills,” said Lauren Adilav, who works as a freelance editor for American authors. “I’m relying on money from the U.S. to cover my rent. If the shekel gets any stronger, I don’t know if I can.”
The exchange rate isn’t just punishing Americans in Israel. It’s also putting extreme pressure on the many Israeli charities and organizations that depend on donations from Jews abroad. Aish Hatorah, the Orthodox outreach organization based in Jerusalem, announced last month that it had laid off several employees and twice delayed salary payments to staff amid funding shortfalls driven largely by the strengthening shekel.
Leket Israel, the food rescue organization, has also felt the pressure. Its founder, Joseph Gitler, said the shift had made clear that Israeli nonprofits can no longer rely solely on overseas support. Shmulie Russel, director of Makom LaLelev, told JTA that his nonprofit, which provides direct aid to those recovering from addiction, is facing a similar financial crunch and might soon be forced to find ways to cut expenses.
“This is the biggest conversation happening in the Israeli NGO sector right now — how to deal with the strength of the shekel,” said Leah Aharoni, executive director of the group Our People, which helps Russian-speaking Jews immigrate to Israel. The majority of donations to Our People are made in dollars.
So far, Aharoni said, the organization has delayed making new hires. She anticipates more challenges ahead.
“It has made it absolutely impossible to plan,” she said. “This is happening across the NGO sector. We haven’t been forced to cut programs yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Aharoni added that she hasn’t wanted to raise the issue with her donors. “Everyone is reluctant to speak out, as donors are already feeling the fatigue of three years of war. Israel just isn’t at the top of their priorities anymore, and now we’re coming back to ask them to make up the difference,” she said. “So we cut where we can.”
The strength of the shekel has come as a surprise to many Israelis, who expected the economy to be weakened by yet another war, this time with Iran, that cratered tourism and heightened instability in daily life. Yet much of the shekel’s gain against the dollar has actually stemmed from the war, as the dollar has weakened and investors have flocked to Israel’s high-tech sector, and particularly its defense industry, which has been buoyed by the conflict.
“The high-tech industry, which historically leads growth in Israel, has been minimally hurt by the war given its reliance on international connections — and it continued to grow even in 2024, the worst year of the war,” said Michel Strawczynski, professor of economics at Hebrew University.
High-tech exports reached $78 billion in 2024, and in the first half of 2025, high-tech accounted for 57% of all Israeli exports, the highest share ever recorded.
For Adilav, who moved from Jerusalem to the West Bank to manage her costs since moving to Israel from upstate New York more than two decades ago, spending in the tech sector is cold comfort.
“The shekel being strong might be good for the 10 billionaires who dream up some app and sell it to Google for $40 billion, but it really affects the rest of us,” she said.
Exporters, meanwhile, have counter-intuitively watched their profit margins dwindle as the shekel gains. They are paid for their products in dollars, so as the shekel strengthens and the dollar weakens, they end up with fewer and fewer shekels to fund their operations and pay workers’ salaries.
The pinch is also coming for Americans who are buying Israeli real estate — a transaction that often happens “on paper,” or with Americans entering a contract to buy an apartment or home that is still being built. Those contracts rarely account for a volatile exchange rate.
“When their upcoming payment might have been 400,000 shekels, now they’re getting hit harder in dollars,” said Nachi Paris, a Jerusalem-based real estate agent who specializes in high-end properties.
Paris said contracts for apartments in development typically prohibit transfers before a buyer takes possession, leaving buyers legally obligated to spend more than they expected when they signed.
He said he believed concerns about antisemitism in the United States could drive middle-class American Jews who cannot afford second properties to make Israel their primary residence instead. But the exchange rate could be an obstacle.
“There’s a point where they can’t afford it,” Paris said. “Right now, it’s still psychological. They can still afford it, and Zionism is involved, and they want to move here, but there comes a point when you can’t afford it.”
With economists warning a stronger shekel can lead to employment drops and other negative consequences, calls have been growing on the Bank of Israel to intervene. But its options are limited, according to Strawczynski, who noted that paused rate cuts and rising inflation from oil prices and flight costs constrain the bank’s ability to act at least until the war ends.
For now, Americans in Israel are paying the price. Judy Diamond moved from New York four years ago with the goal of fully retiring from her career in finance. Not only has she set that aside as an immediate ambition, but she is trying to break her lease in the upscale Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem because she can see that her savings, in dollars, won’t stretch as far as she anticipated.
“I just can’t afford my rent anymore,” Diamond said. “It’s keeping me up at night. It worked for three and a half years, and now the financial aspect of it has fallen apart.”
For Joel Haber, a Jerusalem-based guide who moved to Israel in 2009, the shekel’s rise has come at an especially painful time, when yet another war stopped the flow of travelers who pay hundreds of dollars for his food tours of his adopted city and its famous market.
“The battered dollar has been more of an added insult to the injury of the war,” he said.
Haber always quotes his prices in dollars, even for visitors not from the United States. “It’s a lot less scary to see a price of $300 than 900 shekels, especially for unfamiliar tourists,” he said.
Now, due to the strength of the shekel, Haber has taken what amounts to a 20% pay cut over the last year. He would like to raise his prices, but with the cost of visiting Israel already so high and a 50% reduction in tourist visits compared to 2022, Haber can’t afford to lose any more customers.
“I want to raise my prices so I can still pay my bills,” he said. “But if I look at it from the tourists’ perspective, it’s getting even more difficult for them to afford Israel. It hurts us both.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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