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Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. What began as fury over Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has evolved, in significant parts of the progressive left, into a pathological hostility toward Israel that has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated not as a contested claim but as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and “armed resistance” can be romanticized or excused.
This week’s victory by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the Senate, alongside the popularity of voices such as Hasan Piker, suggests this is no longer simply the rhetoric of campus radicals. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Which is why what happened to Douglas Murray’s recent book is so interesting. On Democracies and Death Cults confronts precisely this mutation: the extraordinary difficulty much of the Western left now seems to have in distinguishing between a deeply flawed democracy and a murderous Islamist movement committed to its destruction. Yet despite Murray’s prominence and the book’s commercial success, much of the mainstream review culture simply ignored it. In the political climate of August 2026, that silence looks less like an oversight than part of the story.
Douglas Murray has never lacked critics. That is the inevitable consequence of writing about immigration, identity politics and the West’s growing loss of confidence in itself. His earlier books, The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West, provoked fierce disagreement, but they were treated as books that demanded engagement — reviewed, debated and rebutted.
On Democracies and Death Cults, published last year, received something different.
I believe the reason is plain. This was the first Murray book whose principal purpose was not simply to criticize fashionable ideas in the West but to defend Israel during the most contentious conflict of our time.
Had he written 250 pages arguing that Israel’s campaign in Gaza was criminal, reviews would almost certainly have followed. Instead, he argued that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the Western left has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy from an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians, including on its own side.
The media appears to prefer to ignore those arguments. And I consider that unfortunate, because I believe Murray is substantially right. If I were still with the mainstream media, where I spent decades of my career, I’m pretty sure I would be swimming against the tide on this, and getting called nasty names.
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it exists at all. Its central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition — and that this is controversial — says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Murray’s achievement is not merely to condemn Hamas but to explain it. He rejects the comforting fiction that it is simply another national liberation movement employing regrettable tactics. Barbarism, he argues, is not incidental to Hamas. It is intrinsic to its worldview.
Hamas does not merely accept death as the price of war. It glorifies death, sanctifies martyrdom and exploits the deaths of its own people as readily as those of its enemies. Its objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel’s destruction. Unless one regards Israel’s very existence as an occupation to be liberated, Hamas’s own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
Murray demonstrates this not through slogans but through reporting.
He describes an organization that — together with its fellow traveler and Iran proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon — systematically embeds itself within civilian life: storing weapons in homes, schools and places of worship, digging tunnels beneath residential neighborhoods and turning civilian suffering into a strategic asset. He recounts Hamas gunmen hiding behind civilians apparently attempting to surrender before opening fire, the abuse of ambulances that inevitably casts suspicion on legitimate ones, and the recruitment of fake journalists and even teachers employed by UN schools. None of this is an aberration. It is the strategy itself.
Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the cruel, vicious murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals — girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys’ heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Nor is Hamas’s contempt for life reserved for Israelis.
One of Murray’s most chilling stories concerns Yahya Sinwar during his years in Israeli prison. Discovering that the sister of a fellow prisoner had allegedly dishonored the family through an affair, Sinwar arranged from prison for her murder in the name of family honor. The anecdote is horrifying not simply because of its brutality but because it reveals a worldview in which individual human life carries almost no value beside ideological or tribal imperatives. The same mentality that celebrates the murder of Israeli civilians is perfectly capable of consuming its own.
Murray’s point is not that Israel is morally perfect. Israel has extremists of its own, including some whose politics deserve unequivocal criticism. But there remains an immense moral gulf between a democracy whose institutions regard civilian deaths as tragedies and an organization that celebrates death itself.
The distinction is visible not merely in military conduct but in culture. When General Gadi Eisenkot, now running for prime minister, lost his son fighting in Gaza, Israel mourned with him. When Ismail Haniyeh’s sons were killed, Haniyeh publicly celebrated their martyrdom. One response grieved the loss of life. The other glorified it. That is not merely a political distinction. It is a civilizational one.
Power of observation
Murray also did something that commentators often do not — he went. He entered Gaza. He entered southern Lebanon. He documented Hezbollah’s tunnel systems intended to facilitate an invasion of northern Israel. He described children’s bedrooms converted into weapons depots and the suffocating grip Hezbollah exerts over the Shiite communities it claims to defend. One may dispute some of his conclusions. It is considerably harder to dismiss his observations.
Yet the most unsettling chapters are not really about Hamas or Hezbollah.
They are about us. Murray argues that large parts of the contemporary Western left have become incapable of recognizing jihadist movements for what they are because they increasingly interpret every conflict through a single moral framework: oppressor and oppressed. Once Israelis are cast as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed, every other moral consideration recedes. Terrorism becomes “resistance,” massacres become contextual, and universal moral standards give way to political tribalism.
That, he argues, explains not only why so much of the world glosses over Hamas’s obvious evil, but why so many people seemed incapable of extending even the most basic sympathy to the victims of Oct. 7. Why were posters of kidnapped children, elderly civilians and Holocaust survivors torn down on Western campuses? Why was the instinct not to mourn, but to explain away, relativize or even celebrate?
He also asks why the outrage is so selective.
Do those denouncing Israel know that while more than half a million Arabs were displaced during the 1948-49 war, an even greater number of Jews were driven from or compelled to flee Arab countries, most of them finding refuge in Israel as citizens? Do they know that Palestinian refugee status — in neighboring Arab countries culturally and ethnically practically indistinguishable from the Palestinians! — has been uniquely preserved and inherited across generations, while other refugee crises have generally been resolved through resettlement and integration?
Do they know how many Muslims are dying today in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa with scarcely a fraction of the attention devoted to Israel? Do they know that, at roughly the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Partition of India uprooted many millions of people — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs — in one of history’s largest and bloodiest population exchanges?
Why does none of this provoke anything resembling the same moral fervor?
Israel is a tiny country, scarcely larger than New Jersey even including the Negev Desert, and closer in populated area to Rhode Island. It is fighting organizations openly committed to its destruction. Yet it has become the singular obsession of the activist left.
Is this extraordinary fixation simply the product of ignorance? Do many of those chanting Hamas slogans know little of the history they claim to invoke? Or is something darker at work? Is Israel judged by standards applied to no other nation because it is the world’s only Jewish state? Is it actually antisemitism??
One need not answer that question categorically to recognize that it cannot simply be dismissed. The sheer selectivity of the outrage demands an explanation. Pretending it does not is no answer at all. And yet the world’s media has ignored the main and probably only book written by an outsider that tries to set the record straight, despite his status as a celebrity public intellectual.
An uncomfortable place
Admiration for Murray does not require agreement with all of his conclusions. Indeed, it is here that I part company with him. His diagnosis of the contemporary progressive left is penetrating and absolutely correct. His political prescription is considerably less persuasive, to me.
Somewhere along the way, Murray’s entirely justified alarm at progressive illiberalism appears to have led him into an accommodation with a populist right that embodies many of the very habits he has spent years criticizing. His tolerance of Benjamin Netanyahu sits uneasily beside his insistence that democracies should be held to the highest standards. More troubling still is his increasing willingness to excuse or support Donald Trump.
I cannot follow him there.
Donald Trump is no defender of the civilization Murray wishes to preserve. Contempt for expertise, hostility toward science, casual and colossal corruption, attacks on independent institutions and the elevation of personal loyalty above constitutional principle are not expressions of the Western tradition. They are threats to it.
Many of us now occupy an uncomfortable place. We believe Hamas is evil and that Israel has every right to defend itself against organizations committed to its destruction. We believe Western civilization, for all its undeniable failures, deserves defending because it produced constitutional government, scientific inquiry, individual liberty and the very tradition of self-criticism that allows us to acknowledge its mistakes.
At the same time, we believe in climate science, vaccination, expertise, the rule of law, sensible gun regulation and a robust social safety net. We reject identity politics that reduces history to oppression, but we reject populism that dismisses knowledge, institutions and liberal norms just as firmly.
And we know Netanyahu is a vile and venal schemer who cannot be trusted. We also know the West Bank occupation is not sustainable and plain wrong – even if the Palestinians twice rejected fair offers for a partition and a state.
Twenty years ago, those views would have described a fairly conventional liberal. Today they seem to describe almost no political constituency at all.
You do not have to agree with everything Murray says or believes or does to understand that On Democracies and Death Cults deserves engagement.
The lack of engagement with On Democracies and Death Cults is almost more revealing than the book itself. Murray’s central claim, that Hamas is a murderous, nihilistic organization whose ideology glorifies death, and which helps the Palestinians not at all, ought not to require elaborate demonstration. It should be self-evident to anyone with any information and minimal intelligence.
Yet much of the mainstream intellectual and media establishment simply chose not to grapple with the argument. That silence reflects a profound unseriousness. Institutions that pride themselves on intellectual openness inadvertently reinforced Murray’s broader thesis: that important parts of the Western intellectual establishment have become unable — or unwilling — to make moral distinctions that once lay at the heart of liberal civilization.
If that diagnosis is even partly correct, we face a genuine crisis. The populist right, with its contempt for expertise, institutions and often for truth itself, cannot be the answer. But neither can a left that increasingly struggles to recognize reality.
I am not prepared to believe that this battle for liberalism has already been lost. Perhaps liberals can beat back the progressive challenge. But it is a battle that must be fought. If the political right continues its descent into populist illiberalism while important parts of the left continue to abandon the moral clarity that once defined liberal democracy, then we are in very deep trouble indeed.
The post Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse appeared first on The Forward.
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In the Southwest, public libraries are becoming Yiddish hubs
Think of Yiddish today and you might picture Hasidic Brooklyn, Haredi neighborhoods in Israel or scholars working to preserve a language too often falsely written off as “dead” or “dying.”
But Texas? Ikh ken es nisht gleybn! (I can’t believe it!)
Sebastian Shulman, director of partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center, has spent the past year traveling around the U.S. and working with communities interested in Yiddish. Through the program, public libraries establish reading groups focused on English translations of Yiddish literature. Libraries in small towns across the Southwest, the Deep South and rural Michigan and Illinois have participated.
In Dallas, one library organized a daylong Yiddish festival that drew more than 500 people.
In Austin, Shulman gave a talk about Yiddish history during the city’s huge annual event, South by Southwest. The room for his lecture filled up, in spite of having to compete with the popular festival.
“There were young people and old people and Jewish people and non-Jewish people,” Shulman said. “It was such a deep hunger and a deep interest.”
At the end of the talk, a young Indigenous woman approached him and described similarities she saw between Yiddish and the culture and storytelling tradition of her own Cherokee Native American Nation. He was moved by the encounter, which served as a testament to the bridges forged by Yiddish literature and history.
“Yiddish kind of blows apart the concept of the unexpected place,” Shulman said, calling it “a language of everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time.”
In a Santa Fe, New Mexico public library, Yiddish literature and history is preserved by those who didn’t necessarily inherit the language from their grandparents. Many of them aren’t even Jewish and encountered it for the first time in libraries, archives, classrooms, festivals and books.
Yiddish culture in New Mexico got even more of a boost last year when Jordan Wax, a Santa Fe-based composer and performer of Yiddish and New Mexican regional music, released an album of original secular Yiddish children’s songs.
Letters from history
David Katz, a longtime Texas resident who has spent years collecting and translating Yiddish archival material from the state, said he’s found a life-long mission of preserving not only the language and idioms – but also the human stories of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated to towns across Texas.
Katz regularly receives requests from families around Texas, asking him to translate Yiddish letters and documents that are between 70 and 150 years old. He’s also assisted in translating materials donated to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. Some contain ordinary family news. Others document poverty, illness, migration and the desperate search by Jews in Europe for a way out, as antisemitism intensified in the 1930s.
One letter from Germany from the early 1930s particularly stayed with him. The family wrote to relatives who’d already resettled in the U.S. about trying to obtain a visa to settle elsewhere, debating whether Canada, the United States or somewhere in South America might be the best destination.
Katz found it distressing that the family who wrote the letter seemed, ironically, to be unaware of the dangers facing them under the Nazis.“They’re debating about which climate might be better,” Katz recalled. “From their standpoint, they don’t know how bad things are about to get; it’s tragic to read that history so intimately.”
For Katz, translating these letters creates a connection to their senders and recipients.
“You read them, and even though the letters are maybe 100 years old, 80 years old, they very much make an impression on you that this is very understandable or approachable, because it’s Jewish life, not that different from today,” he said.
But that preservation work is only part of the story.
Susan Bronson, president of the Yiddish Book Center, said the center has increasingly worked with public libraries and Jewish communities around the country, and was inspired by the cross-generational and interfaith excitement to engage with Yiddish.
Many people attending these programs don’t speak the language. But translated literature, music, theater and lectures can provide an entry point.
Bronson has seen this among younger people through the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program, which introduces high school students to Jewish literature, including Yiddish works. Some students have said the experience helped them feel closer to a grandparent or better understand their family’s background.
The Yiddish Book Center’s oral history work has found Yiddish speakers in places people don’t typically associate with the language, including towns across the South and among Jewish farmers in New Jersey.
“It’s unexpected only because our perception of Yiddish became, in some ways, so narrow, but reality is more complicated and this narrow image obscures the breadth of Jewish life in America,” Bronson said.
Back in Texas, Katz is excited about the future possibility for Yiddish in the state, in the form of thousands of letters that remain untranslated and the old Texas Yiddish newspapers sitting on microfilm at university libraries.
“There are stories still waiting to be read,” he said, building on the state’s rich history.
Jewish immigrants spoke mame-loshen in homes and synagogues in Galveston, Dallas and San Antonio. They published newspapers in it, built community institutions around it and gathered to hear visiting writers and Jewish leaders speak the language.
In 1921, the Russian-born Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger traveled to Dallas and delivered a lecture in Yiddish to hundreds of people. A few years earlier, David Grün — better known as David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of Israel — visited San Antonio, Texas twice where he addressed a packed room in Yiddish. He was meeting members of the Texas Labor Zionist chapter of Poale Zion (the Socialist Zionist movement), advocating for a sovereign Jewish state and raising money for Jewish immigrants to settle in Eretz Yisroel (The Land of Israel),
A lesser known historic Jewish community, deep in the “Bible Belt”, Waco, Texas had its first Jewish immigrants arrive in the mid-19th century. The first wave was Sepahardic, the second — Ashenazi. They built an Orthodox synagogue and later established an active chapter of the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, holding meetings in Yiddish.
A century after Ben-Gurion addressed Texan Jews in Yiddish, the language is still moving through the state — and far beyond it— not simply as a relic, but as a phenomenon people can continue to discover.
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These college students have favorable views of Israel. They also think it’s committing genocide.
A quarter of college students who view Israel favorably also believe its government is committing genocide.
That’s according to a Brandeis study published earlier this month, which surveyed nearly 4,000 students across 303 colleges in fall 2025 about their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and concluded views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more nuanced than often portrayed.
So how do students reconcile those views?
Researchers can’t say for sure, but one possibility is that students are distinguishing between supporting Israel’s existence and the actions of its current government.
The fact that many of the same students who say Israel is committing genocide also affirm its right to exist is not a contradiction, according to the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. In an Instagram post referring to the Brandeis study, the group lauded the nuance of the report.
“Collapsing both views into a single all-encompassing camp of ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ erases the gray area where most students actually live,” the post said.
Another explanation, the study says, is that the “genocide” label has less to do with actual views on Israel than political affiliation. Respondents who identified as liberal were much more likely to agree that Israel was committing genocide than those who identified as moderate or conservative. In fact, political ideology was a better predictor of whether someone said Israel was committing genocide than their stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the study found.
Overall, condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza is the more popular position on campus. Close to three-quarters of all students agreed with the statement that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
Students may also have different interpretations of the term “genocide,” said Graham Wright, first author on the study and an associate research scientist at Brandeis.
“It’s possible that some of them think, ‘I do generally support the Israeli government, but I don’t like some of the things they’re doing,’” Wright said. “The word genocide is just a stand-in for, ‘I don’t think they’re doing a good thing.’”
The very word genocide has also been a subject of debate.
Some Jewish groups, such as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have argued genocide is an accurate term to describe what they see as the deliberate destruction of Palestinian society.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel advocates loathe the word genocide, legally defined as the intentional destruction of any national, racial, ethnic, or religious group, to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza following Oct. 7, 2023. They argue that Israel is seeking the destruction of Hamas, a terror group that states its intent to destroy the Jewish state.
Here are two other key takeaways from the study.
1. Most students differentiate between governments and their citizens — but not all
The study divided students into four groups based on their stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The largest group, 49% of students, supported civilians on both sides of the conflict.
Those students viewed both the Israeli and Palestinian people positively, while they expressed disdain toward the Israeli government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
“This suggests that most people are able to make that distinction and have fairly nuanced views about a lot of these conflicts,” Wright said.
The vast majority of students, 85% of those surveyed, had unfavorable views of the Israeli government. But those views did not always extend to hostility toward the Israeli people. Students were split about half and half between favorable and unfavorable views of Israeli citizens.
Out of the 20% of students who held strong anti-Israel views — meaning they were likely to view both the Israeli government and its people unfavorably — half also viewed Hamas favorably.
“Certainly, I think that’s concerning,” Wright said. “You have a relatively small number of students who have very extreme views on Jews in Israel, and that seems to be contributing to a lot of the hostility that Jewish students are experiencing.”
Those students may make headlines, Wright said, but most undergraduates aren’t thinking about Israel day-to-day. In fact, 56% of surveyed students said they had low knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the topic was of low to moderate personal importance to them.
2. Jewish students have diverse views on the conflict, but they were also more likely to view Israel favorably than their non-Jewish peers
The survey included responses from 743 Jewish students. About 29% of those respondents viewed Israel favorably, the largest share of any ethno-religious identity surveyed.
That higher support for Israel among Jewish students held across political divides. Both politically liberal and politically conservative Jews were less likely to hold anti-Israel views than their non-Jewish peers, the study found.
The largest proportion of Jewish students, 56%, were “civilian sympathizers” — the group that views both Israeli and Palestinian civilians favorably while disliking both governments.
A minority of Jewish students, 9%, held unfavorable views of both the Israeli government and its people and favorable views of Palestinians.
Overall, the results show subtleties in how college students view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the media rarely captures, Wright said. “You only detect the nuance if you ask about it specifically.”
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In a forest where Jews fought the Nazis, a German military base and Lithuanian politics encroach on memory
(JTA) — Rūdninkai, LITHUANIA — Deep in the trees and swampy thickets of Lithuania’s Rūdninkai Forest, a series of makeshift forts is sinking into the earth.
These represent the remains of underground bunkers where Jewish partisans resisted their annihilation in the Holocaust. Under German occupation, some 400 Jews escaped the Vilnius ghetto to this forest and organized attacks against the Nazis.
After World War II, the story of these partisans was folded into Soviet propaganda, leaving a shroud of mystery over the bunkers. Now, construction of a new German military base in the area is throwing into question the fate of the forts — and the memory of their fighters.
Jewish former partisans and their descendants have traveled for decades to visit the bunkers, which mark the only memorial to their resistance in Lithuania. But in recent months, new obstacles have appeared: Signs forbidding entry and demarcating a “dangerous area” are installed on the road to the forest and pinned on trees approaching the forts.
Lithuania is nearing the final stage of constructing a military base for German troops in Rūdninkai Forest, nestled about 27 miles south of Vilnius. The training ground near the former partisan camps was planned after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to shore up NATO’s eastern flank. Strategically located some 12 miles from the border with Moscow-allied Belarus and east of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, the troops will be Germany’s first permanent deployment abroad since World War II. About 5,000 German soldiers will begin arriving this fall.
“You cannot easily find the forts, so those who know how to get there, we just go,” Aušra Mikulskienė, a Jewish history tour guide from Vilnius, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But now, there are ‘don’t enter’ stickers and stop signs. It’s becoming impossible to get there because they are closing all of the forest.”
Mikulskienė has brought the children and grandchildren of Jewish partisans to Rūdninkai for 10 years. They need her guidance to find eight standing forts, covered in logs and soil, which are not marked on maps and GPS systems. In such remote corners of the forest, partisans planned to ambush their enemies, lay explosives on German trains and equipment and sabotage telephone lines and infrastructure in Vilnius.
The bunkers are not protected by the Lithuanian government as cultural heritage sites, and they have deteriorated over years of neglect. But as the German base is completed and military training begins, Mikulskienė worries that prohibitory signs related to construction will turn into more serious barriers to the forts, and visitors could lose access altogether.
Twists of history over decades plunged the forts into obscurity. Lithuania was occupied from 1944 to 1990 by the Soviet Union, which honored hundreds of Soviet partisans who went to Rūdninkai Forest to battle the Germans. The Jewish partisans who joined them, and who helped Russian forces liberate Vilnius from the Nazis in 1944, were not part of this narrative.
The Lithuanian Soviet Republic, or Lithuanian SSR, began to commemorate Soviet partisans on the site of the Rūdninkai forts in the 1970s. Soviet and Jewish fighters only had access to wood and soil to build their bunkers. But the forts standing today are reinforced with concrete, an indication that the Soviet government fortified the structures to serve as memorials, said Mikulskienė. She remembers visiting the site on a school trip in the 1980s and listening to lessons about how the forebears of Soviet citizens resisted the fascists.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, researchers have debated how much of the structures is original, and how much was reconstructed by the Soviet government for propaganda purposes. The first sign memorializing Jews was installed in the area by Bildungswerk Stanisław Hantz, a German educational group, in 2024. A small silver plaque reads, “In memory of the Jewish partisans who fought out of these forests against the Nazi occupiers and their helpers.”
The legacy of the forts — and the memory of Jewish partisans — is now mired in Lithuania’s repudiation of its Soviet past. Thousands of Lithuanian intellectuals, dissidents and other citizens were arrested, deported to Gulags and executed under Soviet rule. Once Lithuania gained independence in 1990, the stench of Soviet repression overpowered that of the Nazi occupation for many Lithuanians.
Lithuania was for centuries a center of rich Jewish thought, religious life and secular culture; Vilna, as the capital was known in Yiddish, was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of the North.” But after more than 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, few remained to commemorate the Holocaust.
“The collective memory of Lithuanians basically sees only one occupation: the Soviet occupation,” said Ilya Lempertas, a researcher and editor of books on the Holocaust in Lithuania. “Soviet partisans, in Lithuanian memory, are those who deported Lithuanians to Siberia.”
That means the Jewish partisans of Rūdninkai Forest are often viewed not as heroes, but as traitors, according to Mikulskienė. “They are not considered as fighting against Nazis, these Jews,” she said. “They are considered to be fighting with the Soviets.”
Fania Brantsovsky, the last living Jewish resistance fighter of Rūdninkai Forest, died in 2024 at 102. She joined a Jewish partisan unit under the command of the writer Abba Kovner, known as the Nokmim, or Avengers. On Sept. 23, 1943, the same night she was smuggled out of the Vilnius ghetto, the Nazis began their final liquidation of the ghetto. None of her family survived.
Brantsovsky led tours to the forest bunkers in the 2000s. Until her death, she advocated for the structures to be preserved and protected as a site of learning about the Jewish partisans’ struggle.
Dovid Katz, a Brooklyn-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust who runs the online journal “Defending History,” was a friend of Brantsovsky’s. “Her one last request was, ‘Dovid, please, never stop reminding Jews around the world to speak up for the existence of the forts,’” said Katz. “‘Let our grandchildren be able to come to this place in the forest and see wooden forts in the ground, which were the only postwar physical remnant of Jewish resistance.’”
Germany’s federal government has signaled that it will not disturb the site. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the Bundestag announced in July that it was “committed to preserving the former World War II partisan camp in Rūdninkai Forest, located on the training grounds of Panzer Brigade 45 stationed in Lithuania, as a place of learning and remembrance.”
The government added that the former partisan bunkers were not part of Germany’s training facilities and would not be affected by construction, but it was in Lithuania’s hands to manage the site’s preservation and access.
“The Lithuanian government has been asked to examine whether the area in question merits protection and to take this into account in further planning,” said the Bundestag.
Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture told JTA that the bunkers do not have protected status as cultural heritage sites because they “are not authentic and are not located at their original sites.” Instead of being linked to Jewish fighters, the ministry said the forts were “associated with Soviet partisans.”
“During the Soviet era, they were included in the list of historical monuments of the Lithuanian SSR, while a significant proportion of such ‘monuments’ were intended to reinforce Soviet ideology and historical narratives,” the ministry said in a statement.
The area will be maintained in the future with an information board installed nearby, according to the ministry, which said the content of that information has yet to be decided. Visiting the forts won’t be prohibited altogether, but those who wish to go will have to comply with military rules and obtain advance approval from the Rūdninkai Training Area Command, the ministry said.
Katz believes nationalist factions in the Lithuanian government are revising the history of a site that hosts genuine remnants of Jewish bunkers. He views the government’s resistance to protecting the site as an outgrowth of the “double genocide” theory, a nationalist narrative that emerged in Lithuania after the fall of the Soviet Union. This theory equates World War II atrocities committed by the Soviets, who occupied Lithuania in 1940-1941 following a non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, with those of the Nazis, who took control after Hitler broke the agreement and invaded the Soviet Union. (The Soviets reoccupied Lithuania in 1944.)
In this framework, the Soviets committed genocide against Lithuanians through mass deportations — with the complicity, some add, of Jewish communists — and only afterwards came the killing of Jews by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
“The Soviets and their Jewish friends, as the narrative has it, committed the first genocide, and then came the reaction, the tragic second genocide,” which was the Holocaust, said Katz.
The equating of Soviet deportations with the Holocaust has been widely rejected by international scholars and Jewish institutions. The Soviet regime deported some 17,500 Lithuanians in 1941 to remote parts of Siberia and northern Russia. While individual Lithuanian Jews served in the Soviet administration, Jews were also disproportionately targeted in the deportations.
Lempertas, who like Katz is Jewish, does not believe the forts standing in Rūdninkai Forest include genuine remains of Jewish partisan bunkers. He supports the government’s view that the structures were built entirely as Soviet propaganda — but even so, he believes they should be protected.
“It has to be saved, from my point of view, for those who are coming there because of family,” said Lempertas. “It serves as an exhibition.”
Mikulskienė said the forts are deeply important to the families of Jewish fighters. She watches visitors stand before them, recite memories of war and sing partisan songs passed down through generations.
Yet in recent years, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked security threats and surging anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania, Mikulskienė has found it increasingly difficult to advocate for the memory of Jews who fought alongside Soviets.
“You are seen as a follower of Soviet propaganda, and also now Putin’s propaganda,” she said. “That’s a bit dangerous, being this person in Lithuania.”
Anna Avidan, who was born in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors and founded the Jewish history nonprofit Jerusalem of the North, said the bunkers should be treated as a memorial site with educational opportunities.
“There is a strong stereotype here that Jews were communists and they deserved the killings — this simplified worldview,” she said. Dispelling such stereotypes “is a good case for explaining why it has to be commemorated.”
One the eve of World War II, about 4 in 10 people in Vilnius were Jewish. But decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Avidan said the city has yet to fully recognize the Jewish world that vanished from Lithuania’s cities, towns and forests.
“Lithuania has been independent for more than 35 years already,” said Avidan. “Still, we have no clear memorial in this city to the victims of the Holocaust, and for me, that’s a message.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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