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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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My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future
Dear Rabbi Cosgrove,
Thank you for your letter this week. Although you envision my electoral defeat two years from now, I recognize that it comes from a place of genuine concern, for me and for our shared future.
While your letter imagines my political fate, I think it’s really the future of the Jewish community that’s at stake. I know you care about the safety and thriving of Jews in New York City and beyond — so do I. We just have different ideas about how best to achieve it.
Two thousand years ago, Hillel prescribed us a challenge, in two questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, what am I?”
You believe that I am falling short on the first of Hillel’s questions. In our tradition of tokhecha, of accountability, I’ll sit with your criticism and take it seriously. I fight fiercely to keep our people safe, here in New York City, across the United States, and in Israel. I urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner; to discourage the use of phrases like “globalize the intifada”; and to increase funding to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate. I’m pleased he’s done those things, and I’ll keep pushing for more.
I believe in the vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel, as imagined in its Declaration of Independence. I just don’t believe there can be democracy with occupation, or that Israel’s present actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are consistent with that vision. On Election Night, I spoke about Israelis who provide protective presence in the West Bank, putting their lives on the line to help protect Palestinian neighbors from settler terrorism, as heroes whose courage I hope to emulate. And I pleaded with people not to use “Zionist” as a slur.
But even if I were an anti-Zionist, I would still be deeply within Jewish tradition and values.
My son is named after Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a Bundist (Jewish democratic socialist) who was not a Zionist. Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes, a leading American rabbi who moved to Israel in 1922, both worried presciently about the dangers of sovereignty in a “Jewish state” and preferred to imagine a bi-national one. Many Jews are rediscovering those traditions, and concluding that they fit better with the Jewish values they learned in Hebrew school.
Your efforts to define them, and me, outside the Jewish community, are dangerously short-sighted. Jews are not made safer by proscribing a particular vision of Israel as the price of full belonging, or by insisting on unconditional support for Israel while it commits human rights violations against Palestinians.
Like the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Israeli-American historian and eminent Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, and the Lemkin Institute — the legacy of the Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who developed the term — I believe with great sadness that Israel’s destruction of Gaza meets the definition of genocide. But whether one uses the term or not, surely we can agree that the scale of Palestinian death and suffering should trouble every Jew. Our obligation is not to ignore it, or explain it away, but to reckon with it — and to change it.
You recently urged candidates for office seeking the Jewish community’s support to march in the Israel Day Parade. But if representing Jewish New Yorkers requires marching alongside Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, perhaps we should ask whether we’ve confused loyalty with moral leadership.
I believe that we need more attention to Hillel’s second question. Our tradition asks us never to become indifferent to the suffering of children. I cannot reconcile Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children with the Judaism that shaped me — most deeply, with the idea that every one of them was created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, just like my kids.
The future you imagine presumes that the greatest danger facing Jewish life is that Jews will leave Zionism. But it seems to me the real danger is that young Jews will conclude there is no room for them inside Jewish institutions unless they silence their conscience. A community cannot thrive if the choices it offers the next generation are hypocrisy or excommunication.
At the end of your letter, you welcome me “back,” presumably to a position of always defending Israel against its critics, insisting that Zionism is an essential part of every Jewish identity and refusing to be in political coalition with people who disagree.
I’d like to invite you forward, to a belief in shared safety, where we don’t compromise on anyone’s humanity.
Or, at least, I’d like to invite us together to attempt a more productive conversation, to continue a debate that Jews have been having for at least 2,600 years. You recently called for Jews “to avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist aggressors.” Let’s model that together.
Our differing points of view represent a longstanding debate amongst our people about the best way to achieve safety and flourishing, for ourselves and our neighbors. There’s room to keep that debate going — through conversation and dialogue, not through exclusion and shaming.
The door is open, rabbi. Welcome forward.
The post My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future appeared first on The Forward.
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After 4 years and a stubborn leak, a landmark mikveh is finally whole again
Unveiled in the suburbs of Boston more than two decades ago, the Jewish ritual bathhouse known as Mayyim Hayyim offers an intimate space for people of all genders to mark life’s transitions. The facility’s pair of pools beckoned thousands from miles around, effectively reinventing the ancient Jewish practice of mikveh immersion for the modern era.
Then one of the tubs sprung a leak that took more than an ordinary plumber to fix. Now, more than four years later, the mikveh itself has had a rebirth, with the reopening of the immersion pool on the building’s left side, restoring a source of strength in suburban Boston that has become a pillar of American Jewish life.
“It felt like we were cut off from a really important part of our space and our connectedness,” said Sarah Quiat, a mikveh guide at Mayyim Hayyim who has been guiding immersions for seven years. “Being able to give the immersee the option of the left pool in and of itself feels like a core part of how Mayyim Hayyim approaches mikveh. To be able to offer and facilitate the immersion that a person is looking for comes down even to the details of which pool is calling to you.”
Tucked into a butter-yellow, 19th-Century New-England-style home in Newton, Mass., Mayyim Hayyim, Hebrew for “living waters,” grew out of a vision developed by author Anita Diamant and collaborators affectionately known as the “Mikveh Mamas.”
The founders grounded Mayyim Hayyim in a desire to enrich ancient ritual with contemporary life and make it accessible to Jews of all identities and types of observance.
Since ancient times, traditional Judaism has called for married women to immerse themselves in a mikveh after their menstrual period or childbirth before resuming sexual relations with their husbands. In the 1970s, as the Jewish feminist movement began picking up speed, thought leaders including Diamant looked beyond the patriarchal origins of mikveh and sought to reimagine and reclaim it.
“We, as a Jewish community, had to do better,” Diamant said in an interview. “We needed a mikveh where everyone who entered felt welcomed and valued.”
Today, Mayyim Hayyim offers a wide range of non-traditional immersion ceremonies — including for gender transition milestones, survivors of domestic violence or abuse, or individuals recovering from long-term illness — in addition to more conventional ceremonies for occasions like b’nei mitzvahs, the High Holy Days, and conversions.
The pool’s restoration was made possible by a joint gift last year from Mikhveh Mama, Paula Brody, and her husband, Merrill Hassenfeld.
For their 20th wedding anniversary in 2004, the couple immersed in the waters on the house’s left-hand side.
But in February 2022, that pool sprung a leak, and the water level began declining at a rate of more than one inch per day. A leak of such magnitude rendered the pool not Kosher by halachic standards, forcing the organization to close the pool until further notice.
Contractors began work to diagnose the source of the leak. Then came another setback — the particularly frigid Boston winter of 2023. Burst pipes caused a major flood in the building. Now other repairs to the building had to be prioritized.
Brody and Hassenfeld had not been aware that the mikveh where they marked their 20 years of marriage was out of commission. Together, they donated the money to finance the restoration ahead of their 42nd anniversary on June 24.
Since then, members of an adult B’Mitzvah class from a local temple have sought the waters of the mikveh and, during Pride Month in June, Mayyim Hayyim and Keshet, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Jews, hosted an evening of affirming immersions for the queer community.
“It was always envisioned with the two pools,” Brody recalled. “When I realized that it had been dysfunctional, we really wanted to help.”
“It enables Mayyim Hayyim to be whole again,” she added.
Mia Peloquin traveled from Connecticut to immerse themself at Mayyim Hayyim last year to mark their conversion. In August, they will return with their friend who converted a year earlier. The pair will celebrate their conversion anniversaries together.
“I was actually surprised that the left pool was open,” Peloquin said. “We thought we would have to go in one after another, which would extend our trip in Massachusetts a bit longer, but finding out that the left pool was open was very exciting for us because we get to immerse at the same time.”
During the closure, the organization has been guiding immersions solely using the pool on the right side of the building. Even with one operational pool, more than 900 people visit Mayyim Hayyim for roughly 1,600 immersions annually, many hailing from the surrounding Boston area, while others plan international travel to experience the one-of-a-kind space.
In addition to increasing the organization’s capacity for immersions, having both pools back to full functionality allows for expanded partnerships with Jewish institutions.
Beginning in 2023, then-Brandeis student and Hillel Tfilah Coordinator Zac Gondelman saw the power of ritual immersion and identified a critical education gap on the subject among his peers.
“Reform Jews came into Brandeis feeling like there was a world of Jewish ritual and practice that they had never heard of or accessed or lived in,” he said. “And so, I thought there was no better way to bridge those things than to bring a whole bunch of college kids to the mikveh.”
Despite Mayyim Hayyim’s decreased capacity at the time, Gondelman helped organize an annual trip for Brandeis students each year ahead of the High Holidays. With the second pool now open, more students can participate.
Harvard Hillel recently organized a trip to the mikveh for graduating seniors to mark the completion of college.
Engaging with the community through the mikveh has long been central to Diamant’s founding vision for the space. In doing so, Mayyim Hayyim has helped the ritual expand and grow, and even interact with other ancient practices. In 2024, the North Shore Hevra, a Boston-based community of Jews seeking to revive Jewish death and burial rituals called tahara, began working with Mayyim Hayyim to offer mikveh immersions for its tahara leaders.
Linda Goodspeed, cofounder of North Shore Hevra, said a shared passion for breathing contemporary life into ancient practice helped forge a relationship between the two organizations. Now, tahara volunteers can receive a newly created immersion blessing before the High Holidays, one adapted ancient practice to prepare for another.
“They were really our mentors,” Goodspeed added.
That mentorship extends far beyond Boston. Through the Rising Tide Open Waters Mikveh Network, 39 facilities in the U.S. and an additional nine internationally draw on Mayyim Hayyim’s extensive training resources to prepare their guides to serve the local community and foster mikvehs around the world.
Rabbi Miriam Berger, founder of Wellspring, another pluralistic mikveh in the network located in London, England, considers Mayyim Hayyim to be “the mothership.”
“Judaism gifted us mikveh,” she said. “Mayyim Hayyim gifted it back to us.”
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‘There’s nothing I can say to her’: Boulder attack survivors have words on antisemitism for Congressional nominee Melat Kiros
For Natalya Reznik and Ed Victor, Tuesday’s primary victory of Melat Kiros, now a Democratic congressional nominee for much of Denver, cut deep and took them back to the horrific first day in June 2025 when they attended an 18-minute protest walk to call for the release of hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on Oct. 7.
That day, Reznik, 54, and her husband carried posters of hostages Lior Rudaeff and Yair Yaakov whose bodies were later returned. As always, the mostly Jewish group of 28 walked quietly, letting their signs do the talking.
“Since 10/7 I was devastated. I expected people everywhere, not just in America, to take to the streets to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages,” said Reznik who came to the U.S. 30 years ago from St. Petersburg, Russia “I was so naive — I really thought this was so horrific that it just couldn’t go unnoticed. But what I saw was the opposite — people took to the streets to protest Israel.”
Reznik didn’t hear a man shouting “Free Palestine” — others did — before she noticed her feet getting hot. She looked down to find much of her lower body on fire, likely from a Molotov cocktail. She rolled over on the grass to put them out. Another woman, Karen Diamond, was engulfed in flames.
Dressed up as a gardener so as not to be noticed in the park outside the Boulder County Courthouse, the attacker, Mohamed Soliman, 46, later told prosecutors he had researched “Zionist” events in the area.
But when a news anchor ahead of the primary asked Kiros whether the attack had been antisemitic, the former lawyer turned doctoral candidate drew a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. She tried to make the case that no one could presume Soliman’s motive.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told a local Colorado station last month. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
That logic found little purchase with Ed Victor, a resident of Louisville, Colorado, who had also been at the Boulder courthouse that day.
“You don’t have to look at his heart,” Victor said. “You can look at his actions.”
Soliman pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony charges in state court but not guilty to hate crime charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The success of Kiros, 29, a Democratic Socialist of America in her first run for public office, echoed the victories of DSA-backed candidates Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, who similarly drew a line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Like those candidates, Kiros has advocated for one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.
Reznik does not live in the deep-blue district Kiros will be favored to win in November, which represents the largest Jewish community in Colorado. But she said Kiros’ victory was the result of a callousness toward Jewish people that now defines the attitude of the general public.
“It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” said Reznik, a Russian Jewish immigrant. “This is not the country I came to 30 years ago. I no longer feel that people in Congress even hold the same values that I do.”
Reznik’s burns from the attack that day covered 40% of her legs and left arm. She spent one week in intensive care and another in the hospital recovering from surgery. It was in the ICU that she first encountered people online trying to downplay the attack as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic – a discourse that seemed to legitimize violence against Jews and continued to unfold in the hours and days after the firebombing.
“They’re encouraging people who are antisemites, who are simply scum, to feel as political activists,” Reznik said. “They speak the language of the murderers.”
Kiros’ equivocating comments ahead of Tuesday’s primary divided Denver Jews, with one rabbi who described herself as a “liberal Jew” writing in the Denver Post that Kiros’ candidacy “scared her.” Another Jewish writer defended Kiros, arguing that the candidate’s criticism is directed at the Israeli government and military, not the Jewish people.
In an interview on CNN the day after her primary win, Kiros tried to allay fears, adding that the “conflation of the actions of the state of Israel and the Jewish people … is putting them at greater risk.”
“My commitment is to protecting the sanctity of human life and dignity and that includes combating the hate and the rising antisemitism that we are seeing,” she said.
But for the survivors of that day’s attack who heard Kiros’ equivocation ahead of the primary, it was hard not to feel fear – and fury. Reznik saw Kiros’ refusal to call the attack antisemitic as the height of hypocrisy.
“There’s nothing I can say to her,” she said, “because I know she’s one of the people who’s not listening.”
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