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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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Mamdani has made ample efforts for Jews. How come no one is telling that story?
There is a familiar feeling I get these days when I hear about the supposedly unraveling relationship between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the city’s Jews. It is the same feeling I remember from the early days of the campus encampments protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, when a certain media narrative of out-of-control friction and my own lived experience felt as though they were taking place on different planets.
I remember reading alarming reports about campuses becoming hotbeds of violent division in late 2023. Jewish students, some pundits said, were allegedly under siege at every moment. Then I went to a nearby campus myself. What I saw was not a utopia. It was not an environment free of tension, politics, anger, confusion or pain. But nor was it a match for the apocalyptic portrait being painted over and over again in public discourse.
I saw young people trying, awkwardly and imperfectly, to navigate one of the hardest issues imaginable. I saw some Jewish students wearing watermelon kippahs, and others reciting Birkat Hamazon after a meal. I saw kaffiyehs and Free Palestine posters. I saw disagreement and activism, but also, on all sides, earnest engagement.
Multiple realities can exist simultaneously. I did not visit every campus in the United States, andI know there were genuinely frightening incidents in some places. But the disconnect between what I was repeatedly told I should be seeing and what I actually witnessed left me asking a question I still cannot shake: What does our community lose by constantly buying into a narrative of inevitable Jewish peril and division?
I find myself asking the same question now, as some New York City Jews accuse Mamdani of abandoning our community — as hundreds did during a Tuesday protest — and the New York media obsessively problematizes the relationship between Gracie Mansion and New York’s Jewish community.
Last week, I attended Mamdani’s Shavuot gathering honoring Ruth Messinger, an event that sparked yet another media furor over Mamdani’s relationship with his Jewish constituents, after some leaders boycotted the gathering. What much coverage missed: the event felt exactly like every other official Jewish gathering I have ever attended. There were rabbis, nonprofit leaders, Israeli and American Jewish activists, funders, organizers, old friends, awkward networking moments, mediocre wine, decent bagels and small talk.
And there was, above all, the deep sense of a genuine relationship. When the mayor roared “chag sameach!” into the room, smiling broadly, it did not feel performative to many of us because many of us actually know him. Personally. Through him showing up in Jewish spaces across New York over these past few years.
I have run into Mamdani on Yom Kippur. At Oct. 7 vigils. At Passover events. And looking around that room, it seemed many others shared that experience.
Why is our experience treated as somehow less significant when it comes to assessing how Mamdani stands with the Jewish community?
Why are we hearing so much more about the Jews who object to Mamdani’s policies than the many of us who embrace them? Last week’s gathering included progressive Jews, anti-occupation Jews, Israeli expats, liberal rabbis, artists, nonprofit workers, old-school establishment figures and more. Are our reasons for joyfully engaging with Mamdani so much less interesting than the boycotters’ reasons for questioning him?
Again, I am not suggesting antisemitism is fictional. It is real. It is rising. I have experienced it both online and offline.
Nor am I arguing that all criticism of Mamdani is inherently cynical or bad-faith. Politicians should be scrutinized.
But there is a meaningful difference between scrutiny and popularizing an incomplete narrative. And increasingly, it feels as though parts of our media ecosystem have become invested in telling a story about Jews and public life that leaves very little room for complexity, coexistence, contradiction or ordinary human interaction.
A story in which Jews are perpetually under threat from everyone around them. A story in which Muslim politicians and Jewish communities are naturally destined for conflict. A story in which any evidence to the contrary must be minimized, reframed or treated as suspicious.
It’s true that at least one poll shows that a majority of New York City Jews remain skeptical about Mamdani. But it’s also true that those views have in part been shaped by breathless coverage that neglects to engage with how much Mamdani’s viewpoint actually reflects that of many American Jews. After all, almost 40% of American Jews believe Israel committed a genocide in Gaza. Is a mayor who has opened the door to those viewpoints — when those of us who hold them have often been excluded from official spaces — neglecting the Jewish community, or just engaging with it in a different way?
I left Gracie Mansion last week wondering whether some people have become so attached to the performance of Jewish communal crisis that moments of genuine civic warmth now feel almost threatening to the narrative itself. I wondered that again, reading about Tuesday’s protest. Mamdani has spent years intentionally building relationships inside Jewish New York; I saw them on display last week, in a way that felt profound and meaningful.
Actual coexistence isn’t just possible; it’s happening. Why not tell that story, rather than endlessly forecast an inevitable fracture?
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Why children in Rio de Janeiro are singing in Yiddish
By the time the children began singing in Yiddish on their own at a playground in Rio de Janeiro, Sonia Kramer realized something important had changed.
The songs were not part of a formal lesson. No teacher had prompted them. The children — classmates from a Jewish day school — simply started singing melodies they had learned in workshops organized by Viver com Yiddish (“Living for Yiddish”), the educational and cultural initiative Kramer founded a decade ago.
“For me, that was the moment the language felt truly alive,” she said. “Maybe later they will forget some of it. Maybe not. But at that moment, the songs became part of their memory.”
In Brazil, where Yiddish disappeared from Jewish day schools by the early 2000s (they used to teach the language once or twice a week), such moments are rare enough to feel historic.
Kramer, an emeritus professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor from Ostrowiec, Poland, doesn’t describe what’s happening as a “revival.” The word feels too grand for Rio’s context. There are no Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods anymore, no immersion schools, no daily life conducted in the language.
Something else, though, is emerging: a cultural rediscovery led through music, literature and children’s education. Yiddish is circulating again — at shows, at parties, in university classrooms. It’s not yet a revival, but Yiddish is undeniably alive.
“We skipped a generation,” Kramer said. “The immigrants wanted their children to learn Portuguese. Yiddish reminded many people of sorrow and survival. But now we are beginning to value what was created in that language — the literature, the songs, the poetry, the theater, the cinema.”
A spark that grew into a program
The roots of Viver com Yiddish reach back to 2016, when Kramer attended the annual Yiddish immersion retreat, Yiddish Vokh.
“For the first time in my life, I was in a place where 150 people were speaking and singing in Yiddish — every day, all week,” she recalled. “Not as nostalgia. As a language that is alive.” One day at the event, an educator familiar with Kramer’s work in childhood education encouraged her to create Yiddish workshops for children in Brazil.
Back in Rio, Kramer approached several progressive Jewish schools with a proposal: Not traditional language instruction, but cultural workshops built around shmuesn (daily conversation), Yiddish songs, stories, games and children’s literature. One school, Escola Eliezer Max, agreed to join the project.
Today, the initiative encompasses university classes, research projects, a musical ensemble and workshops that reach 400 to 500 children annually.
Some of the educators came through those university courses. Alice Fucs began studying Yiddish through Kramer’s courses at PUC-Rio and has taught in the children’s workshops ever since.
“I started studying Yiddish in 2020 and soon realized I would never stop,” she said. “It connected me with my family’s past and opened up a new and amazing world. The workshops with the children are both a chance to pass on what I’ve already learned and a chance to learn more every month.”
Teaching has its own challenges. “Some of the children find it hard to grasp a language that isn’t tied to a country,” Fucs said. “We bring in contemporary Yiddish work to try to build that bridge.”
The workshops run once a month, preschool through fifth grade — far from enough to create fluency. But fluency isn’t the immediate goal.
“Our first objective was to create an emotional memory,” she said. “Positive feelings connected to Yiddish.”
Teaching a language that “disappeared”
A couple of years ago, one encounter crystallized the challenge: During a workshop, a 10-year-old boy told the teachers that learning Yiddish was pointless.
“My parents told me not to pay attention to this,” he said. “The language disappeared from the world.”
The comment deeply affected the workshop educators who decided to respond not with argument, but with evidence.
A month later, they returned carrying a large bag of Yiddish children’s books; many bilingual.
The children protested immediately.
“But we can’t read Yiddish,” they told her.
“You can read some of it,” Kramer replied.
Kramer showed them Yiddish interviews produced by the Yiddish Book Center and Yiddish music clips performed abroad, explaining that the language is alive in many countries. The children seemed impressed.
For Kramer, moments like this counter a familiar misconception: that Yiddish belongs only to the past, or that it was merely a “dialect.”
“People still say that it’s not really a language, then you have to explain: No, it has literature, poetry, theater, philosophy. It developed across centuries.”
Growing seeds through music and stories
The workshops at Eliezer Max begin with four-year-olds. Meeting only once a month, teaching grammar isn’t the goal. Instead, the project meets children where they already are: in songs and stories. Before launching the workshops, Kramer noticed that Yiddish songs had virtually vanished from Rio’s Jewish schools. “In my childhood, Yiddish music was everywhere,” she said. “And suddenly there was nothing.”
So the workshops focus on repertoire: songs, stories, emotional connection. Teachers explain who wrote the lyrics, introducing children to Yiddish poets and writers. “What is extraordinary in Yiddish culture,” Kramer said, “is how deeply literature lives inside the music.”
The approach resonates. The school coordinator now includes Yiddish songs at school events, alongside the Portuguese, Hebrew, and English repertoire. Music teachers prepare children to perform them; families hear the music at holiday celebrations; classroom teachers incorporate elements into broader cultural programming.
Sometimes the songs travel home. “Is there a greater fargenign (joy) than receiving a video of my 12-year-old granddaughter and 9-year-old grandson spontaneously singing Tumbalalaika before bed?” said Sonia Tucherman, grandmother of two children in the workshops. “It was a seed planted by my grandparents, and I see it bearing fruit in my grandchildren.”
Still, the program’s reach has clear limits. Yiddish isn’t part of the school’s curriculum — the workshops sit alongside it, not within it. They end at fifth grade, which means older children often drift from the songs they once knew. And one meeting a month, said Kramer, isn’t enough to anchor a language.
Building something to last
For all that it has built, Viver com Yiddish still rests on a fragile structure.
Most of the educators and musicians involved work multiple jobs. Much of the organizational labor — translating materials, adapting books, preparing lessons — falls to volunteers. Kramer herself works largely as a volunteer, but that arrangement isn’t sustainable for the younger teachers and musicians who built the project into what it is.
Viver com Yiddish’s current fundraising campaign aims to train a new generation of Yiddish educators and create paid positions to coordinate educational materials and programming.
“You cannot sustain this on passion alone,” Kramer said. “We have to train the next generation, and give the people already doing this work the conditions to continue.”
“We’re trying to bring back a language and a culture considered lost by our generation, and pass it to another generation,” she said. “That feels deeply Jewish to me: taking something from the past and carrying it into the future.”
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Massive fire breaks out at kosher supermarket in London’s Golders Green
(JTA) — A huge fire broke out Tuesday morning at the Kosher Kingdom supermarket in Golders Green, London’s heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Firefighters were still working to put out the blaze six hours later.
Metropolitan Police posted on X that officers were called to the scene on Golders Green Road around 7 a.m. by the London Fire Brigade. “Officers responded and are at the scene assisting firefighters with road closures and evacuations,” said police.
London Fire Brigade Assistant Commissioner Craig Carter provided an update on the scene at 12:30 p.m., saying that 15 engines and around 100 firefighters “have been tackling the fire at its height, which has affected a ground floor shop and a storage area to the rear, which has partially collapsed.”
He noted that the flats above were not affected but residents were evacuated as a precaution.
“Our specialist Fire Investigators, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Service, have worked at pace to establish that the circumstances of the fire are not believed to be suspicious and investigations on the cause and origin of the fire are ongoing,” Carter added.
The news that Kosher Kingdom did not appear to be deliberately targeted comes as a relief to Jewish residents, who have been on edge for months amid a string of attacks. The blaze broke out in the same area where four Hatzola ambulances were torched in March, two Jewish men were stabbed in April and a Jewish man said he was attacked for speaking Hebrew this month.
Rochel Cohen, who lives near the supermarket, is among those whose street has been cordoned off. Her first thought was the incident was another antisemitic attack, she told JTA in a phone interview.
Cohen said she looked out the window around 7 a.m. and saw “just huge plumes of black smoke and we heard all the sirens. And the police have roped off all our roads again.”
That “again,” Cohen said, was because it was the third time in two months that her family had witnessed “crime scenes in our neighborhood.”
“The ambulance fire was just on the next street from us and the stabbing situation was 100 meters down the road from us,” she said.
Prior to the fire department’s update, speculation spread on social media that the fire was electrical, potentially caused by faulty freezers. London has seen an unprecedented heatwave over the last several days, with temperatures soaring over 90 degrees.
Cohen said two of her family members previously worked at Kosher Kingdom. They believed from the outset that there was an electrical fire in the freezers “because it’s exactly from the roof footage that we saw where those freezers are located,” she said.
Nonetheless, another incident in the neighborhood has left her shaken. “It’s just a bit of a nightmare, really,” she said. “It’s all these incidents adding up, and it makes it quite scary, this climate of fear we’re currently in. It’s really oppressive.”
Cohen said she has been traveling to jury service the last several weeks about 10 miles from Golders Green in Wood Green, which has a higher than average crime rate.
“I actually felt safer there than I do walking the street here in Golders Green because I’m constantly turning around, checking what’s going on,” she said. “It’s not a nice feeling.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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