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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains.
In the aftermath of 9/11, New Yorkers found countless ways to help. They lined up in record numbers to donate blood, delivered meals and medical supplies to first responders, and opened their homes to strangers with nowhere else to go.
And then there were the people who sat with the dead.
Starting on Sept. 20, 2001, Jewish volunteers took four-hour shifts at the city medical examiner’s temporary morgue in lower Manhattan, reciting psalms and keeping watch over the remains.
Without fail, a member of the Jewish community was there — 24/7, for more than seven months.
They were sitting shmira, fulfilling the Jewish tradition of staying with the dead from the moment of passing until burial. The volunteers — some of them college students — sat with and prayed for each of the victims, whether or not they were Jewish.
“Right after 9/11, all the way down till the next May, it was never a missed moment,” Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Congregation Ohab Zedek, which organized the shmira, told the Forward. “We never had a problem filling a spot.”
A congregation responds
Like many houses of worship, Congregation Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, mobilized after 9/11. Congregants collected masks, filled boxes with clothing, and set up an assembly line to make sandwiches for those in need.
Schwartz also recognized the importance of shmira — determined that the horror of 9/11 would not interrupt the tradition that brings dignity to the dead. He asked a congregant, recently retired shoe salesman Armin Osgood, to coordinate.
“When Rabbi Schwartz asked you to do something, you did it,” Osgood, now 91, told the Forward. “There was not a question at that point.”
Osgood sketched out a schedule on a big yellow legal pad and began filling it in with names. Many Ohab Zedek congregants signed up. Others heard about the effort through word of mouth, sometimes from friends of friends. Some traveled from out of state.
The group included people with different levels of religious observance. All that mattered to Osgood was that they were willing to help.
“People called, and they said, ‘I don’t speak Hebrew. I can’t read Hebrew.’ I said, ‘So read the Psalms in English.’ ‘Well, I’m in a congregation where women wear pants.’ I said, ‘So wear pants,’” Osgood said. “Nobody gets excluded. If they want to do it, I’ll find a way.”
Ely Razin, 35 at the time, was among the Ohab Zedek congregants who volunteered. He took a shmira night shift, reciting tehillim next to the remains and trying to concentrate on the meaning of the ancient words.
“It helped me feel like I was doing something,” Razin told the Forward. “The act of shmira, in and of itself, somewhat gives you a sense of personal peace.”
Rabbi Schwartz took a weekly Friday morning shift, where he found himself providing spiritual comfort to people of all faiths. He befriended a Protestant minister who was often there to pray with bereaved families. Once, a Catholic family, unable to find a priest, asked Schwartz to say the last rites.
Unfamiliar with the Catholic tradition, Schwartz recited the Jewish memorial prayer kel maleh rachamim in English.
“I don’t know what their last rites look like, but I said the [Jewish] prayer we say at the funeral,” Schwartz said. “So it was a kiddush Hashem. That was a very meaningful moment.”
Keeping the chain
Keeping the morgue staffed 24/7 was no easy task. It was even more difficult on Shabbat — partly because Ohab Zedek, on the Upper West Side, was too far from the morgue in lower Manhattan to walk.
An Ohab Zedek congregant reached out to Jessica Russak-Hoffman, then a senior studying English at Stern College, Yeshiva University’s women’s college. Its dormitories were within a few blocks of the morgue.
“My dad always said, ‘If a mitzvah lands on your lap, you’ve got to pick it up,’” Russak-Hoffman said. “So I grabbed a clipboard, and I went outside and started recruiting.”
She ended up enlisting more than a dozen women. One was Judith Kaplan, then a junior at Stern, who often took the midnight-to-4 a.m. shift — spending many Friday nights as a college student at the morgue.
Kaplan’s nearby apartment became a home base for the volunteers. She cooked lunch and dinner for those sitting shmira, many of whom were missing communal Shabbat meals to take their shifts.
“It’s not everybody’s cup of tea to do this kind of thing, so you have to find someone who has the stomach for it, and the emotional capacity for it,” Kaplan said. “This is not an easy mitzvah.”
As the months went on, the group had fewer volunteers. Kaplan began taking eight-hour shifts, sometimes in the dead of winter and in the middle of the night. Stern College security guards accompanied her on the walk to the morgue.
“I felt a very big responsibility,” Kaplan said. “I felt very strongly that if we can’t find someone to sit, then I have to do it. I didn’t want to break the chain.”
Russak-Hoffman also took night shifts. She recalled how, whenever a first responder’s remains were identified, everyone would pause, stand and pay their respects.
For Kaplan, those moments underscored how the Jewish volunteers had become part of the broader recovery effort. Shmira, she emphasized, was never about distinguishing Jewish victims from others.
“They could have told me that every single Jewish body was identified, and I still would have sat there,” Kaplan said. “It did not matter what your faith was or what your culture was — we were all there for the same reason.”
Looking back
There would never be a moment when all the victims’ remains were identified. But at some point, identifications slowed. Schwartz decided to end the shmira on Lag B’Omer — a Jewish holiday that marks the end of a mourning period.
But for so many of the volunteers, the shmira’s conclusion was not the end of mourning.
“I definitely spent the next 20 years looking at open sky and expecting planes to go by and hit things,” said Russak-Hoffman, who now lives in Seattle. “Every time a proper commercial plane went by without context, it flashed me back.”
Razin, who now lives in Israel, said similar emotions resurfaced for him after the Oct. 7 attacks. Sitting shmira is considered chesed shel emet, the highest level of mitzvah because it is truly selfless, as the dead cannot repay the act. But Razin came to understand that the ritual also serves the living.
“They’re there to help not only the person who’s departed, but the people who are left behind,” Razin said. “It put a frame around something that otherwise was incomprehensible and monstrous.”
For Kaplan, who now lives in Jerusalem, the experience was formative. The tehillim — its pages now held together with a hairband — became a keepsake of that time. She has since brought the prayer book to her wedding and to the birth of her child.
“That’s how meaningful the experience was for me,” she said.
Schwartz plans to reflect on 9/11 and its aftermath in his Rosh Hashanah sermon this year, which falls on Sept. 11. Twenty-five years later, he said, the volunteers’ mitzvot offer a reason for hope.
“This was barbaric evil on the part of some people, but it really brought out the most incredible goodness in many more people,” Schwartz said. “We shouldn’t give up hope in mankind.”
The post After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains. appeared first on The Forward.
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With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays
As Jewish New Yorkers prepare for the High Holidays amid continued worries about rising antisemitism, City Council Speaker Julie Menin says her historic role as the chamber’s first Jewish leader has become even more important than she expected when elected in January.
In an exclusive interview with the Forward earlier this week, Menin pointed to her synagogue-protection law and successful fight against the Met’s John Galliano exhibition as proof that having a Jewish leader with a powerful bully pulpit matters.
“It’s incredibly important at this pivotal time,” Menin said. “We need to be standing up loudly, clearly, unequivocally in the fight against antisemitism.”
Many Jewish leaders see Menin, 58, as a check on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric on Israel and handling of antisemitism have strained relations with parts of the Jewish community.
Mamdani has met in recent weeks with Jewish leaders and visited the Orthodox-populated neighborhood of Borough Park. The administration was expected to release a comprehensive citywide strategy to combat antisemitism before the High Holidays. Mamdani’s spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the rollout timetable. Menin said that City Hall has not briefed her on its plan.
Services at synagogues across the city this year come against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. Synagogues already spend millions of dollars a year on security, a reality her children have noticed, Menin said. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. “This has now become the new normal,” she said. “It’s terrible. It is just shameful that we have entered this new era.”
Menin is scheduled to speak at Central Synagogue, the site of an antisemitic attack last month, at its evening services before heading to a friend’s home, where she and her eight-year-old daughter will bring an apple pie they bake together as an annual tradition.
A High Holidays test
Menin said she hopes the Council’s recent efforts to combat antisemitism will help Jewish New Yorkers feel safer and more protected as they head to synagogues for the High Holidays.
One of Menin’s first legislative priorities after taking over the Council was a package of bills that included protest protections for houses of worship, a hate-crime reporting hotline, Holocaust education initiatives and additional security assistance. “I do see that we have made some real progress,” Menin said.
The most controversial part of Menin’s agenda focused on limiting protests outside synagogues. The Council ultimately passed legislation requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The law now faces its first big test. The High Holidays coincide with the annual United Nations General Assembly, which is expected to draw protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, encouraged by Mamdani.
Menin said the new law should help protect people entering and leaving synagogues if tensions rise around Netanyahu’s visit, and demonstrations cross the line into intimidation. “I think that bill is really important in terms of making a difference to assure congregants of their safety and security as they enter and leave,” she said.
Asked directly what she would say to Jewish New Yorkers who remain worried about Mamdani, Menin avoided criticizing the mayor by name. But she also offered a pointed message about the political climate. “It is incumbent to ensure that the rhetoric is turned down,” Menin said, because there remains a “heightened sense of fear within the Jewish community.”
On Wednesday, Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a lifelong member of Central Synagogue who spoke at services after the attack, announced increased NYPD security outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions for the High Holidays. Mamdani acknowledged that some Jews are “understandably afraid to come together and celebrate openly,” and said their safety “during these sacred days is of the utmost importance to our administration.”
The power to speak out
Menin has also used her position to speak out beyond the Council chamber, pointing to her recent fight over a Metropolitan Museum of Art planned exhibition as an example of the power of her bully pulpit.
Menin scored a significant victory as fashion designer John Galliano — who has a history of antisemitic remarks — bowed out following mounting criticism. Menin said she privately warned museum officials before the exhibition was announced that she would oppose it. She later went public after realizing that others who objected were reluctant to speak out.
“They might have been upset by the decision, but they weren’t comfortable speaking out,” Menin said. “We can’t shy away from speaking out. We have to be loud.” Menin called the development “a huge victory in the fight against antisemitism.”
A wish for unity
When Menin became speaker in January, she told the Forward that she hoped to use the position to help bridge some of the deep divisions in the city. Nearly a year later, she said that mission has only become more urgent.
Menin traced her own path into public service to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when her Lower Manhattan business was devastated. She later chaired Community Board 1 and became involved in efforts to rebuild the neighborhood. What she remembers most from that period, she said, was a sense of unity that she believes New York has lost.
“Right now, it just feels very divided and very divisive,” Menin said.
As she approaches her first Rosh Hashanah as speaker, her wish for the new year is for some of those divisions to ease.
“As we really focus on the issue of atonement, we need to figure out how we can ensure the safety and security of the Jewish community at this very, very difficult time,” Menin said. “It’s my fervent hope and wish that we can try to galvanize the community together, and that we can bring along many of our allies who are not Jewish as well.”
The post With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish audience applauded when this speaker called for Muslims to leave America. Here’s a better response.
A video from the Jewish American Summit in Los Angeles shows a speaker using wildly inflammatory, dehumanizing language to describe Muslims — as the Jewish American audience members stay silent, or applaud.
“I don’t want Muslims in America,” the activist Mosab Hassan Yousef said at the sold-out event last Sunday. “Get the f— out of the United States. Go back to the s—holes where you came from and reform your own countries.” Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder, converted from Islam to Christianity and worked for the Israelis for 10 years.
His words were horrifying. But the cheers arising from some in the room were even more jarring, as was the refusal of the event’s organizers and most of its sponsors and speakers to condemn Yousef’s hate speech.
As leaders of NewGround, an organization dedicated to building healthy relations between American Muslims and Jews, we know that the grief of Oct. 7, the days before it, and every day since in Gaza and elsewhere, is too much to bear. But we also know that when we choose to amplify or excuse rhetoric that dehumanizes our neighbors, we don’t just jeopardize their safety, we jeopardize our own.
We fuel a cycle of hatred that makes everyone less safe — including our loved ones. The impact isn’t necessarily direct, and it isn’t immediate. But it sets the stage for escalating rancor which can easily slip into violence.
Both our traditions teach that life is sacred. The Quran (5:32) and the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) concur: To take a life — or destroy the dignity of a human being — is to destroy all of humanity; to uphold that dignity is to save all of humanity.
When we sit silently or applaud rhetoric that erases the humanity of the “other,” we are participating in a dangerous, destructive feedback loop: You hurt me, so I must hurt you to keep myself safe. Circulating exaggerations, expelling our neighbors, silencing and deporting our political opponents in the pursuit of security will only leave us all increasingly isolated, vulnerable, and broken.
That is why relationships across communities matter, especially when they are difficult. Meeting one another, challenging false claims, letting go of our rigid certainty, holding our own leaders accountable and refusing to let fear define entire groups are not symbolic gestures. They are active practices to keep isolation from hardening into hostility.
At the same time, we need to confront those who deliberately exploit fear and misinformation to pull communities further apart. If we want others to stand up for us, we have to stand up for them, especially when hateful rhetoric comes from within our own circles.
That didn’t happen when Yousef made his vile remarks at the Jewish American Summit. As Louis Keene reported in the Forward, there were no boos, only applause. Afterwards, only two co-sponsoring organizations — the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation Los Angeles — criticized his remarks.
But our communities need even more than just condemnations of hate speech. We need a substantial, structural response. We need teshuvah — a process of self-reflection and return to integrity in which many Jews engage as Rosh Hashanah approaches.
This is not a theoretical exercise, nor a process limited to Jews. It is a human endeavor. The Quran echoes similar teachings — “Indeed, God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.” (Quran 13:11)
At NewGround, we see this work happening on the ground every day. The people in our programs challenge one another. They engage in a rigorous, often agonizing process of naming their truths, navigating anti-Palestinian racism and antisemitism, and honoring the humanity of the person sitting across from them. They communicate through their disagreements — especially when it is difficult.
The recent shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego took place the day after our current fellows’ Israel Palestine intensive. Our fellows rallied around our Muslim community members, as they had around the Jewish fellows during our first intensive when news of the Bondi Beach massacre hit. Several of our current fellows and alumni mobilized networks in solidarity gatherings at Friday congregational prayers at the Islamic Center of Southern California and Masjid al-Thoir in Koreatown. Fellows traveled to vigils and to the mosque in San Diego to show support. After the vandalism of a mural this summer at the Pasadena Jewish Temple Center, NewGround fellows showed up to stand in solidarity, once again.
Real teshuvah requires more than just responding to harm. It requires taking steps to prevent harm from occurring again. It means asking ourselves: Why do we uplift speakers who stoke hatred? What safeguards can we implement to ensure we are not providing a platform for division? In pursuit of our own safety, are we inadvertently endangering other communities, and can we change our approach to foster mutual care? If we are not exceptionally thoughtful, we will undermine the shared society we seek to build.
The two of us have spent 20 years convening Muslims and Jews who can do the deep, courageous work of truth-telling and listening. We know that real change only happens when we don’t shy away from challenging perspectives, but instead dive deeper into them.
This work requires the courage to stand in one’s truth while respecting and listening to those who may hold opposing viewpoints. It requires the grace to acknowledge the anger and grief we all carry, and the discipline to channel that energy into building — rather than destroying.
We invite our community leaders, especially those who organize and sponsor meetings like the American Jewish Summit, to join us in this work. Stop choosing animosity. Choose instead to interrupt it. The safety of our children and grandchildren depends on whether we continue to build higher walls, or commit to building resilient bridges.
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