Uncategorized
How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis
WEIMAR, Thuringia, Germany — Walking through Weimar, Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust seems inescapable. Stolpersteine — German for “stumbling blocks” — are placed outside the homes of people killed during the Shoah, essential evidence of Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, a national commitment to memorializing, and learning from, the Nazis’ atrocities.
But this commitment is being challenged. Alan Bern, a Yiddish musician described to me as “the man who solved the Shoah,” had just returned from a press conference when I met him, where he spoke alongside local law enforcement officials about a 51-year-old man charged with the 33rd case of vandalism of the memorial stones in the Eastern German city this year.
Bern, 70, an American who came to Germany nearly 40 years ago and holds the nation’s highest civilian honor, said, “Attacks on Stolpersteine are not primarily attacks against Jews, but rather against society and, not least, against human dignity.”
Bern, a composer, founded a school called the Other Music Academy, where he and his colleagues are creating encounters critical to the fight against Jew-hatred in Germany.
They bring together Jews and the descendants of Nazis, Israelis and Palestinians, and Germans and Syrian migrants in an attempt to apply the lessons of the Holocaust forward to the issues facing Germany today. Democracy is in the center’s DNA both in ethos and architecture — the entrance to their dance hall is a 100 year-old door from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, where Germany’s first constitution was written and ratified.
“I believe that the encounter with otherness,” Bern said, “is essential to transforming yourself and transforming society.”
Bern’s work helps extend Germany’s memory culture, applying its lessons beyond the Holocaust to address threats against democracy posed by the far-right, which is gaining popularity around the country.
Although not all incidents of antisemitism in Germany are coming from the right, the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has forced a new debate over Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. AfD holds a plurality in Thuringia’s state parliament, and, after this year’s February elections, became the main opposition party in Germany’s federal parliament. The party’s most radical wing says that memory culture is a “guilt cult” and calls for a “180 degree turnaround” in the nation’s approach to remembering its history.
And while many Jews are deeply concerned about the right’s desire to abandon memory culture, some Jews in Germany, particularly those on the left, feel that the societal commitment to preventing another Holocaust has caused the state to police their ability to act and think freely, particularly when critiquing Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish activists have lost awards and speaking engagements, and have even been labeled extremists and put under surveillance by Germany’s state intelligence service.
Memory culture is not just essential to Germans, however; it’s a key for Jews around the world, who take heritage trips to concentration camps and ancestral homes there as part of memorializing the Holocaust. And worldwide, memory culture is essential to remembering global atrocities — yet its tenets are under attack. The Trump administration has criticized the Smithsonian’s approach to slavery, while Turkey refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian genocide.
I went to Germany to speak with both Jews and non-Jewish Germans who are doing the work of bringing memory culture to life, to see how their work is being impacted by these political shifts, and to find out: What is lost if Germany loses its memory?
A brief history of memory culture
After the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, the newly reunited and democratic Germany defined its national identity as a state committed to learning from the atrocities it committed in the past, thus preventing them from ever happening again.
But this devotion to the Holocaust wasn’t always the case. At the end of World War II, fewer than 15,000 Jews remained in Germany, the majority of whom went to West Germany when the country was partitioned after World War II. West Germany largely avoided accepting responsibility for the Holocaust until 1970, when Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland, and laid a wreath at its memorial.
Meanwhile, under East Germany’s Soviet-style system, Nazi crimes were stripped of their antisemitic motivations and recast as offenses to communism; the small Jewish community of less than 1,000 people who remained there continued to be persecuted by the Stasi for perceived opposition to socialist values.
After the Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunified the following year, Chancellor Helmut Kohl oversaw the immigration of some 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union. The majority of Germany’s new Jews moved to Berlin, but others repopulated Jewish communities in the former East.
With the formation of the new German republic, the government moved back to Berlin, and in 1999, voted to construct the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of the city — next to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate. They expanded concentration camp memorials to include details about the Holocaust and built a world-renowned Jewish museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Visits to these sites became a regular part of German school curricula. A centralized national Jewish council — The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, or the Central Council of Jews in Germany — today receives €22 million in government funding to serve as the official voice of Jewish people and to advocate against antisemitism across society.
Memory culture is palpable everywhere in Germany, whether in large memorials and historical sites like concentration camps, or the small plaques and reminders, like the stumbling blocks, about the Jews who once lived there.
For years, however, shame over the Holocaust has muted national pride. Many Germans avoided flying their flag for fear of invoking the kind of nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazi party. (Though in the past two decades, flags have become more common at German sporting matches and events.)
That has led some, such as the far-right AfD party, to claim that memory culture has harmed Germany. Former party leader Alexander Gauland referred in 2018 to the Nazi era as a speck of “bird shit” in an otherwise grand national history, a speck that was given outsize importance.
And more recently, memory culture has become complicated by modern political concerns. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that supporting Israel was Germany’s “reason of state,” and the government has consistently operated with an iron-clad support for Israel as a form of reparations for the Holocaust.
But as Israel’s actions have come under increasing international condemnation since Oct. 7, Germany’s memory culture too has come under broader criticism by Jews and non-Jews alike. Some Jews in Germany are concerned over what they see as Germany abandoning Israel after Chancellor Friedrich Merz halted weapons exports to the Jewish state in August to curb the supply that could be used in Gaza. Other Jews, meanwhile, feel unable to speak out against the war given the national devotion to Israel.
And the Central Council, the state Jewish voice, believes that AfD is taking advantage of the war to inflame tensions between a new wave of Muslim immigrants and Germany’s Jews — and, in turn, win Jewish support for their party, including their belief in dismantling memory culture. Before this year’s elections, the Council circulated a letter signed by the leaders of every Jewish state organization warning that the AfD “uses Jews as an excuse to spread its racist and anti-Muslim slogans.”
The right-wing critique of memory culture in Germany
The AfD was officially designated a ‘rightwing extremist’ force by Germany’s intelligence agency, a status the far-right party is contesting in court. Still, it is the largest party in Thuringia and is poised to take over at least one state in next year’s elections. This would give it control over the educational and cultural agencies that fund memory culture in Germany, agencies it hopes to defund. Clearly, the AfD is not a fringe group.
And it is gaining increasing influence nationally and visibility internationally. Prior to their strong showing in February’s elections, both vice president JD Vance and President Trump’s ally Elon Musk encouraged German voters to vote for AfD.
The official voice of the Jewish community in Germany unambiguously says that the AfD is a growing threat to German Jews, and Jews around the world. In their 2024 annual report, the Council called the AfD a “legitimizing bridge” between the political mainstream and extremist actors — like the man who livestreamed himself ranting about the Great Replacement Theory before trying and failing to break into the synagogue in Halle with a gun in 2019, killing two people outside its doors.
“There is a will in this party to change the remembrance and the memory of National Socialism in focusing on the positive parts of German history,” said Shila Erlbaum, the Council’s director of policy. “This is an attack on Jewish history and Jewish memory.”
But not all Jews agree the AfD is such a threat. In 2018, a group of Jewish party members founded the Federal Association of Jews in the AfD (JAfD), a small caucus within the party’s 70,000 members. Today, JAfD has only 25 members, along with another 80 supporters who are not full members.
Artur Abramovych, the JAfD’s 29-year-old chairman, told me that they established the caucus after anti-immigrant demonstrations broke out in the eastern city of Chemnitz, when two Kurdish immigrants stabbed and killed a man.
Like the party’s leaders, the JAfD believes, according to its website, that “the greatest threat to Europe in the 21st century is the growth of the Muslim population” and adds that “the rise of political Islam is also primarily a threat to Jews.” While party leaders’ statements contradict AfD’s official support for Israel, the JAfD is strongly and unequivocally pro-Israel.
In January 2024, the German investigative newsroom Correctiv reported that AfD members secretly met with neo-Nazis and wealthy businessmen to plan the mass deportation of immigrants from Germany in a plot called “remigration.” The news brought hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets in protest.
AfD initially disputed what was discussed at the meeting, though eventually party leader Alice Weidel embraced remigration as the official party platform. Though the party is once again trying to distance itself from the controversial remigration concept to create a broader appeal among the mainstream electorate, JAfD still believes that the plan is essential. Abramovych himself is an immigrant — from Ukraine — but claimed that immigration is threatening German society due to Muslim fertility rates.
Like the party’s hardliners, JAfD is also critical of Germany’s memory culture. Abramovych said that it didn’t originally hurt Jewish people, but now does “because people are forcing German politics to keep the borders open and let millions of Jew haters into the country” due to the state’s Holocaust guilt.
Germany’s immigration politics have moved to the right since Oct. 7, 2023. In an interview with Der Spiegel after the Hamas attack, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the magazine, “We have to deport people more often and faster.” Earlier this year, Merz’s government tightened border controls, and in October the Bundestag, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives, voted to revoke a fast-track to citizenship law passed by Scholz.
While he smoked handrolled cigarettes and drank a cup of black coffee outside of a Ukrainian cafe in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, I asked Abramovych if he was concerned that Jewish immigrants like himself could be deported from Germany in the future if the AfD gained power and remigration became government policy.
“What? Who would deport the Jews? That’s ridiculous,” Abramovych said.
An alternative critique of memory culture from the left
AfD had its first electoral win in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower parliamentary house, in 2017, becoming the third-largest party in the parliament. Shortly after, poet and political scientist Max Czollek published the best-selling De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century, a polemic about Jewish assimilation into German culture. As a result of his edgy take on memory culture in Germany, Czollek has become something of a celebrity, and a bit of a pariah.
For Czollek, AfD is the symptom of a greater problem in Germany where the nation’s guilt over the Holocaust creates a “theater of memory” — a term borrowed from the late sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann — in which Jews play out their dutiful role on the national stage, held up by the state as model minorities, but are subject to losing its protection if they deviate from accepted norms.
Thuringian AfD leader Bjorn Höcke gained infamy when he called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame,” but Czollek wrote that the idea was not new; in 1998, famed German left-wing intellectual Martin Walser called Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture “monumentalization of shame” in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Publishers’ Association.
To Czollek, AfD is just the latest step in a proud German tradition of tacitly accepting Nazism, albeit by a different name, in the East.
Behind Balenciaga sunglasses outside of a Kreuzberg cafe, Czollek described his family’s life in the former East Germany, part of a very small community of Jews who stayed after the war instead of departing for West Germany, America or Israel.
“The Jewish rituals I grew up with when my father started to reconnect to this tradition is more like the old, dark, empty synagogue singing of 20 people,” he explained. “And it’s like, ‘Why are there no people?’”
Czollek was born just before the Berlin wall came down, but for his family in East Germany, the Shoah was ever present in the absence of Jews. And it was magnified by what he described as a betrayal by the communist government that took over, which declared itself, its state and all of its citizens to be anti-Nazi — even if they had previously been active members of the Nazi party.
A report by the CIA in 1959 identified over 150 former high-ranking Nazi officials then working in positions of power within the communist East German government, and called it “doubtful” that they were sincere in the “change of political thinking.”
“You have this first generation of Jewish communists who came to Germany to build a better Germany and build up on this idea of anti-fascism as a proper fighting position,” he explained. “Suddenly, a lot of former Nazis were declared anti-fascist. So this is where the memory work fails.”
After the wall came down, Czollek argues that memory culture became a branding tool for Germany to prove itself as a democracy on the international stage — a tool that never offered anything meaningful to the few East German Jews like him, and that has proved ineffective at preventing the revival of a new ethno-nationalist right.
“Memory culture has become a tool in legitimizing and justifying the pride in Germany,” he said. But, he noted, memory culture is a relatively young part of German life; its widespread adoption came, ironically, during the “Years of the Baseball Bat” in the ‘90s, when neo-Nazi violence against migrants escalated severely.
After Oct. 7, Czollek believes that memory culture warped into something else entirely; today, anyone who speaks out against Israel’s response to the attacks in Gaza faces cancellation, disinvitation or even arrest.
“Memory culture used to be a pretty self-centered process of German self-improvement and reinvention,” Czollek said. “By now, it has become a tool of dominance and hegemony.”
“It’s almost like we have done the worst, and we have remembered the best,” he continued, opining that Holocaust and concentration camp memorials boost Germany’s national self-esteem and identity as a moral actor. Then, “you can start accusing migrants of not being as good as you are.”
And Jews who criticize the government’s version of memory culture risk losing state protection.
“There’s a tempting quality to playing along with the theater of memory, because being Jewish is rewarded if you do it in a specific way,” he continued. “Being a non-aligned Jew comes with a price.”
Although solidarity between Germany’s minorities — particularly Jews and Muslims — has become strained post-Oct. 7, exacerbated by the AfD, Czollek believes it’s the only way through the crisis brought about by memory culture and the rise of the far-right.
That’s why Czollek’s new book is called Alles auf Anfang — or, Everything Back to the Beginning. It’s a search for a new culture of remembrance in German life that includes not just Jews, but recognition of other migrant victims in German society.
Currently, much of Germany’s memory culture, exemplified in memorials like the Buchenwald concentration camp, keep their focus firmly in the past. But Czollek believes that, to address the current era, Germany needs to also find ways to commemorate violence perpetrated against its other minority groups.
“If you want to have memory culture as a living, active and productive thing today, it has to be updated every generation,” he said. “Sadness or grief is not a limited resource. We can all grieve together.”
The weaponization of memory culture against Jews
Immediately after Oct. 7, Wieland Hoban, a Jewish German living in Frankfurt am Main, began demonstrating against Germany’s support for Israel, and was arrested multiple times — the first time for wearing a shirt displaying a revolutionary fist logo, which is associated with the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel organization Samidoun that was banned in Germany a few days following the attack.
The next month, Hoban gave a speech where he said, “Germany can’t wash away its Holocaust guilt with the blood of Palestinians.” Afterwards, he was taken aside by police and charged on suspicion of Volksverhetzung — “incitement to hatred” — a charge that has been used by the German government to prosecute neo-Nazis and far-right extremists, and carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
In Hoban’s view, memory culture had extended past its logical limits to charge him, a Jew, with a violation of the German criminal code for invoking his own history.
“They explained to me that I had mentioned the Holocaust and that in Germany, they take the Holocaust very seriously,” Hoban said. “This was a bit surreal.”
Hoban, a composer and translator, has been chairman of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East) since 2021. He told me that, like many artists in Germany, the cause of Palestinian self-determination has been important to him.
“This occupation of Judaism, through Zionism, had just pushed me away from any identification with Jewishness,” Hoban said. But joining Jüdische Stimme helped him resolve “an inner contradiction” he felt in being Jewish and also supporting Palestinians.
This June, Hoban received a text from a journalist asking him if he’d seen the latest report from the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, on extremist groups in Germany. He hadn’t, but when he looked it up, Hoban learned that his organization had been labeled as a “foreign-related extremist” group.
While AfD is using the courts in an attempt to clear their domestic extremist label, Jüdische Stimme is not pushing back. Hoban doesn’t dispute the reasons for the label — he does criticize Israel and Germany’s memory culture — so his group sees no way to clear its name.
“I wish more people would just have the balls to say, ‘I don’t care if you call me antisemitic, I’m sticking to my guns here,’” Hoban said.
With the BfV’s extremist designation, Jüdische Stimme is now vulnerable to surveillance by the intelligence agency, as well as infiltration by informants.
But while the state is adamantly opposed to their cause, Hoban believes that public opinion is changing. The week that we spoke in September, a poll showed that 62% of all German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including a majority of both Christian Democratic Union and AfD voters. A report by the International Federation for Human Rights also found in October that Germany, among other nations, has weaponized the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent.
And, over a year after Hoban was charged with incitement to hatred, he received a letter from the public prosecutor’s office informing him that the charge against him had been dropped.
A concentration camp gets political
The Buchenwald Memorial was established in 1958 on the site of the former concentration camp by the government of East Germany to commemorate communist resistance fighters; it did not memorialize the dead Jews. But after reunification, the Memorial’s focus expanded to include the more than 56,000 people killed and 280,000 who were imprisoned at the site, becoming a centerpiece in Germany’s tapestry of memory.
Today, Buchenwald — one of the centerpieces of Germany’s memory culture — finds itself caught in the middle of the debate over how to remember the Holocaust. It’s using its mission to confront its dark history in a new way: fighting back against politicians who distort the Holocaust.
When an AfD member ran for mayor of Nordhausen, a city in Thuringia, in 2023, the Memorial’s official social media pages called him out online for dog whistling to right-wing extremists, invoking a false Holocaust-distorting conspiracy theory. The post changed the course of the election; in the first round of elections, the candidate had more than 45% of the vote, but after the Memorial’s statement, he failed to win in the second round.
“Many older inhabitants of Nordhausen who had not voted for many years said, ‘No, we don’t want to have a Holocaust denier as a mayor,’” the memorial’s director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said in an interview.
Last year, Wagner pursued a more extensive outreach with 300,000 letters mailed to seniors in Thuringia ahead of the state’s elections. The letters warned of the ways in which AfD party leaders have used Nazi language and distorted history.
The AfD fought back, taking the Memorial to court and accusing the Memorial of interfering in “political decision-making.” They lost.
“The court says explicitly that we can’t be neutral against any kind of Holocaust distortion,” Wagner explained to me.
With that mandate, Wagner now considers it his duty and the mission of the Memorial to combat Holocaust distortion, especially when it might affect elections. The Memorial has a particular interest; it’s located in Thuringia, where the AfD is gaining power, and it could lose its funding if the party wins control.
“With our interventions, we don’t think that we can change the positions of the AfD,” Wagner said. “We want to reach all these people who are not specifically voting for the AfD, who are in the gray zone, who can be rescued for democracy.”
Looking towards Germany’s future generations
The AfD has lately focused on reaching youth voters, spending heavily on digital outreach. As a result, young people in Germany are becoming increasingly anti-migrant, embracing far-right political ideas that were once verboten in Germany for being too close to Nazism.
Despite the Memorial’s successful interventions to deter adults from voting for AfD, Wagner is concerned about the rightward shift of younger generations, who are less likely to treat information from a Holocaust memorial with reverence — or even respect its history.
The director described young people who visit the Memorial on school trips displaying the Hitler salute, shouting “Sieg Heil” and photographing each other in front of crematory ovens.
“There were some right-wing young people in every school class for years, but these were only one or two, and the majority was against them, and this has completely changed,” Wagner said. “Now, spreading Holocaust distortion, being right-wing, is common sense in these school classes, and it’s very, very difficult for our educators to have a discourse with them.”
The Memorial has been attempting to revise their educational programming to make visits longer and more in-depth, and even built a youth hostel on the site so that school groups can stay and have extended experiences that they hope will make a lasting impact.
Alan Bern, of the Other Music Academy, also is also worried about the younger generations; he sees resonating with Germany’s youth as one of his most urgent and important challenges.
“Young people in Weimar have almost no real relationship to what it is that we’re doing,” Bern said. “So when they’re told ‘You shouldn’t be antisemitic,’ it’s just some adult telling them ‘Don’t do this.’”
Like at Buchenwald, where the education department has placed its hopes for the future into its youth hostel, Bern wants to transform the former youth prison next to Other Music Academy into a dormitory of sorts where young people can stay for several days. The dichotomy of the prison’s barbed wire courtyard and its painted exterior wall, which artists have covered with colorful Keith Haring murals, pose a striking question about the direction of Germany’s future: Which way?
Pointing towards the floor and then to the prison across the driveway, Bern said, jokingly: “It’s either this or that.”
Challenged from both the left and the right, it’s unclear what is next for Germany’s memory culture. For now, the younger generations are caught in the middle.
While waiting at the bus stop to head back from Buchenwald, I found myself unexpectedly sandwiched in the middle of a high school tour group as they posed for a class photo. After we all boarded the bus, about half of them sat quietly — maybe contemplating the horrors they’d just seen, maybe dozing off. But as we drove down the hill toward Weimar, the bus also filled with the sound of laughter.
The future of memory culture, ultimately, will be up to them.
The post How Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture kicked off a democratic crisis appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Psychology Behind the Rise in Right-Wing Antisemitism
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
Over the past year or so, there has been a strange and unsettling shift on parts of the political and cultural right. Figures who built their influence by pushing back against progressive excess, moral confusion, intellectual laziness, and the erosion of democratic values have begun drifting into territory that should have been left behind long ago — antisemitic tropes, conspiratorial thinking, and flirtations with ideas they themselves once would have dismissed as corrosive and dangerous.
It has been very upsetting to watch, not least because many of these voices rose to prominence by presenting themselves as more serious, more grounded, and more responsible than the alternatives they criticized.
Some have pointed to foreign money and malign external influences – with Qatar chief among them as a reliable patron of some of the most destructive forces in the modern world – as an explanation. It would be naïve to deny that such actors play a role. But that explanation, on its own, is not enough to explain this phenomenon.
Even if Qatari money helps shape narratives at the top of the pyramid – and their possible involvement absolutely deserves scrutiny – it does not explain the sheer number of willing followers who nod along to contentious statements and ridiculous conspiracies without being paid a cent by anyone.
Elite influencers may be driven by incentives tied to financial or political power, but the grassroots level is clearly motivated by something else. Money may help light the match, but it does not explain why so many people are eager to watch the fire burn – and then cheer it on.
The instinctive response is to frame all of this as ideological betrayal – and then to draw battle lines, or to declare that the political culture of Western democracies is fundamentally broken. But that reaction is the wrong approach. It shuts down thought precisely when careful thinking is needed most. Because at its core, something more human – and far more familiar – seems to be going on.
What makes this moment so counterintuitive is that this regression on the right has not emerged from defeat or marginalization. It has emerged from success.
The stunning political victory by the Republicans in November 2024 should, in theory, have been followed by a period of consolidation – a sharpening of ideas and a renewed sense of responsibility. Instead, we are witnessing a growing rift between principled conservatism and a darker, more reckless version of right-wing beliefs. That paradox suggests we are dealing less with ideology than with a psychological response to the sudden expansion of freedom and power.
We tend to assume that success produces stability and confidence. History suggests otherwise. When people or movements feel genuinely embattled, they often develop discipline, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose – an understanding of what matters and what must be set aside for the greater good.
But when the wind is at their backs, and a threat – real or imagined – appears on the horizon, the result is often anxiety: “We might lose what we have!” And anxiety is dangerous. It clouds judgment and tempts people to reach for ideas they already know are corrosive, simply because they feel familiar.
History offers some sobering examples. After years of devastating war under Napoleon, France in 1814 finally rid itself of him and he was exiled to Elba. The country had a rare opportunity to step back, recover, and build something more stable and restrained. But when Napoleon escaped from Elba a year later and returned to France, large parts of the country welcomed him back.
Soldiers sent to arrest him joined him instead. Within weeks, France had re-embraced the very man who had brought it to ruin, and 100 days later, they paid for it at Waterloo. The regression was not imposed from above. It was embraced from below – and it was an utter disaster.
Ancient Rome offers a similar lesson. The Roman Republic was built on restraint, combined with a sophisticated system of checks and balances and a healthy suspicion of the concentration of power into the hands of one man. And yet Julius Caesar’s rise was welcomed by many as a solution to a period of dysfunction.
He was appointed dictator, and what followed was not renewal but the oppressive age of emperors. Rome gained order but lost its liberty. Once again, faced with uncertainty, a civilization chose a familiar system that was bad over the harder work of repair and healing — and they called it progress.
The Torah identifies this same flaw in human nature at the very beginning of Jewish history, in Parshat Beshalach. Just days after experiencing one of the most dramatic liberations ever achieved by a slave nation – the Exodus from Egypt – the newly freed Jewish people find themselves trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s approaching army.
Despite everything they know – that God has redeemed them, that awesome miracles have carried them this far – panic sets in. They turn on Moses and cry out: “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you took us out to die in the wilderness?”
And then comes a line so jarring that it almost feels like parody (Ex. 14:12): טוֹב לָנוּ עֲבֹד אֶת־מִצְרַיִם מִמֻּתֵנוּ בַּמִּדְבָּר – “It would have been better for us to serve Egypt than to die in the wilderness.”
How is this even possible? These are people who have just witnessed the collapse of the most powerful empire on earth for their benefit – who are, in that moment, at the very top of their game. And yet, even as they bask in the glow of victory, the instant their freedom begins to feel fragile, their instinct is not to move forward into the rational unknown but to retreat into what they already know is irrational evil.
That is the crucial point. It is not a calculation that makes sense, nor is it a carefully thought-out strategy; it is a psychological reflex, and a dangerous one. Faced with what feels like an existential threat, people often reach for the familiar – even when that is the worst possible thing they could do.
Which is what makes the current flirtation with antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on certain parts of the right so disturbing. These are old instincts, long known to be destructive, that have now resurfaced because they feel familiar, as some on the right feel tinges of anxiety.
But familiarity is not necessarily wisdom; far more often, it is a dangerous trap. A recent study suggests that engagement with antisemitic conspiracy theories on the right has risen dramatically since the November 2024 election. Unless this trend is halted, it won’t end well.
The Torah’s message at the sea is uncompromising. The way forward is not to turn backward. Redemption does not come from retreating into the habits and ideas that once enslaved and degraded us. The sea will open up and offer salvation only when someone is willing to step into it – to take the risk, and to trust that moral clarity and courage still matter.
Regression may feel comforting, but it leads nowhere. The only way forward is through.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
Uncategorized
Karen Jones and the Institutionalization of Medical Dhimmitude
Illustrative: Health workers move a woman on a stretcher to an ambulance after a deadly terrorist shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The reports emerging from Sydney’s Liverpool Hospital are not merely a localized administrative failure; they represent a chilling indicator of a new, institutionalized “dhimmitude” taking root in the heart of Western society.
Rosalia Shikhverg, a survivor of the horrific Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre on Dec. 14, was admitted for treatment of shrapnel and gunshot wounds to the head. While she lay in her hospital bed, terrified and recovering from a terror attack that claimed 15 lives, staff — without her knowledge or consent — snipped her medical wristband and replaced it with a new one. Her name was gone. In its place was the alias “Karen Jones,” with her religious status completely scrubbed from official records.
The hospital’s defense, offered through state health officials, is perhaps more terrifying than the act itself. Officials claimed the name change was a “protective measure” to shield a high-profile victim from media intrusion following the heightened risks in Sydney. But Shikhverg’s own account points to a more sinister and systemic motivation: the hospital administration apparently did not trust its own staff to provide equal, safe care to a patient identified as Jewish. Shikhverg recounted how the switch left her more focused on a fear of her caregivers than her physical injuries, crying incessantly and pleading for an early discharge because she felt profoundly unsafe.
This incident represents the logical culmination of a process by which the values of the Middle East’s most regressive ideologies are imported into Western civil society. When a premier medical institution in a Western democracy feels compelled to erase a Jewish patient’s identity to ensure her safety from the very people hired to heal her, we are no longer talking about a mere “spillover” of the Gaza conflict. We are witnessing the surrender of Western professional ethics to the mob.
This is the rebirth of dhimmitude. In the classical tradition, the dhimmi was a protected non-Muslim subject granted life and property only on the condition of submission and the public erasure of their distinct identity.
In 2026, a modern hospital has effectively recreated this status. By stripping Shikhverg of her name and her religion, the hospital sent a clear message: Jewish identity is a provocation and a “safety risk” that the state can no longer manage. It suggests that the only way to protect a Jew in a modern metropolis is to ensure that they are no longer recognizable as a Jew.
This betrayal is not an isolated event. It follows the recent suspension of nurses at other nearby facilities who were caught on video bragging about their refusal to treat Israelis and expressing a desire to kill Jewish patients. The “Karen Jones” incident shows that instead of purging these radical elements from the health-care system, administrators have chosen a path of appeasement. They have decided that it is easier to erase the patient than to confront the radicalization of the workforce.
The “long march through the institutions” by radical ideologues has finally reached the bedside. We have seen this pattern on campuses, where “Jew-free zones” are established under the guise of “safe spaces,” and in the courts, where legal harassment is used to silence critics of extremism. Now, the hospital ward has become the next frontier of exclusion. If a nurse or a doctor cannot look at a patient with a Jewish name without the administration fearing for the patient’s life, then the social contract of the Western democracy has been fundamentally breached.
If the West is to survive this ideological assault, the response must be uncompromising. There must be a full, independent audit of radicalization within the public health systems of major Western cities. The administrators who authorized the erasure of Rosalia Shikhverg’s identity must be held legally and professionally accountable for civil rights violations. Furthermore, governments must recognize that non-violent subversion of Western values is just as dangerous as the violent jihad that targeted Boni Beach on Hanukkah.
Rosalia Shikhverg survived the bullets of a terrorist only to be erased by the bureaucracy of a hospital. We must ensure that “Karen Jones” is the last alias a Jew is forced to wear in a Western democracy. Peace and security cannot be built on a foundation of coerced invisibility. The survival of pluralistic society depends on the ability of every citizen to exist openly, without fear that their identity will become a death warrant in the hands of those sworn to protect them.
Uncategorized
Palestinian Terrorists Admit Their Own Rockets Kill Gazans, and the Media Look the Other Way
People inspect the area of Al-Ahli hospital where Palestinians were killed in a blast from an errant Islamic Palestinian Jihad rocket meant for Israel, in Gaza City, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
A document seized in Gaza and reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster exposes a reality that sharply contradicts much of the global coverage of the Israel-Hamas war: Palestinian civilians have long been killed by Palestinian rockets and terrorist leaders knew it, discussed it, and accepted it.
The document records a meeting between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials held before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the war that followed. In it, Hamas representatives confront Islamic Jihad leaders over a deadly and recurring problem: rockets misfiring and landing inside Gaza, killing civilians.
“Your rockets are falling on people’s homes, and this is a recurring issue,” a Hamas official is quoted as saying.
The response from Islamic Jihad is even more damning. “We are at war,” a senior representative of the terrorist group replies. “Even if a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that is the price of war.”
This is not a battlefield mishap acknowledged after the fact. It is an explicit, pre-war admission that Palestinian terrorist groups were aware their weapons routinely killed civilians and that they viewed those deaths as acceptable.
The document also records Islamic Jihad officials admitting that they knew their rockets were defective. According to the report, the weapons were manufactured using blueprints supplied by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In other words, unreliable rockets were knowingly produced, launched from densely populated areas, and expected to fall short.
Image of the seized document, as presented by Kan Public Broadcaster
This matters because it directly undermines a central assumption that has dominated coverage of Gaza for years and intensified after Oct. 7: that civilian casualties are almost entirely the result of Israeli fire.
Kan’s report does not quantify how many Gazans have been killed by Palestinian rockets. But it does establish something journalists have consistently avoided confronting: terrorist groups themselves acknowledge that their own fire kills civilians and that this has been happening for years.
That reality burst briefly into view 10 days after the war began, when a PIJ rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Gaza hospital, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel was immediately blamed across much of the international media. Only later did evidence emerge that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
This newly revealed document shows that the incident was not an anomaly. It was a known risk discussed internally long before Oct. 7.
So, why has this revelation barely registered outside Israel?
Journalists often justify their reliance on casualty figures and on the fog of war. But here, there is no ambiguity. This is a primary source document describing internal discussions between terrorist groups, criticizing each other for weapons failures and explicitly accepting civilian deaths as collateral.
If such a document emerged showing Israeli officials dismissing civilian deaths as “the price of war,” it would dominate headlines worldwide. When terrorist groups say it among themselves, it is met with silence.
This selective attention has consequences. Media outlets routinely report Gaza casualties without asking how many were caused by Palestinian fire. They rarely revisit earlier claims when new evidence emerges. And they almost never scrutinize the conduct of terrorist groups with the same intensity they apply to Israel.
The Kan report exposes not just the recklessness of Palestinian terrorist organizations but the media’s unwillingness to reckon with it. By ignoring evidence that complicates a simplified narrative, journalists deprive audiences of essential context and accountability.
This document does not absolve Israel of scrutiny. But it does demand that journalists stop treating Palestinian armed groups as passive actors whose actions are irrelevant to civilian harm.
Terrorists killing their own civilians is not a footnote. It is a central fact of this conflict. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists.
It is why so many in the media choose not to report it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.