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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 latest victim of the culture war over Israel is a leftwing, lapsed Catholic Bible scholar
The flames of cultural boycott of all things Israeli, Zionist and/or Jewish continue to spread across the European continent.
Yesterday, leftwing Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was prevented from serving on the jury at next month’s international film festival in Marseilles. Though Lapid has loudly denounced the “genocide” in Gaza, his crime — apart from being an Israeli who nevertheless lives and works in France — was that 10% of his most recent film Oui was financed by an Israeli source. (The irony is that the European Union, which Lapid first approached for the financing, refused on the grounds that the film was too anti-Israeli.)
Today, though, the latest victim is neither Israeli nor Jewish. Instead, he is a 76-year-old lapsed Catholic and equally lapsed leftwing extremist who also happens to be one of Italy’s most revered novelists, columnists and translators: Erri De Luca. Once again, it is not just hypocrisy that abounds in this affair, but also irony.
As a student during the anni di piombo, or “years of lead” — the grim period, stretching from the mid-1960s to late-1970s, when Italy was convulsed by political and social turmoil — De Luca became a leading figure in Lotta Continua, one of the militant ultra-leftwing groups. Upon quitting the movement, De Luca also quit the public scene, taking a series of blue-collar jobs, whether as plasterer or construction worker.
By the time De Luca reached his 40s, he also took to writing and has amassed an oeuvre of several dozen books that range across genres and have been translated into several languages; remarkably, he also taught himself ancient Hebrew in the 1980s, while working with a Catholic charity in Africa. It was there that De Luca began to read the one book he found in his room, a copy of the Bible. Fascinated, he acquired three different Hebrew-Italian dictionaries and began to translate the texts on his own. Forty years later, he continues this labor of love, recently publishing his own interpretation of Genesis.
Alessandro Carrera — a friend and colleague who is also a wildly prolific and prominent writer in Italy — told me that De Luca’s approach to the Hebrew Bible “follows Walter Benjamin’s suggestion to translate the Bible as literally as possible, yet without De Luca knowing Benjamin’s essay on translation.” (When I asked Alessandro how he knew this, he replied “I know that because I asked him.”) But why his fascination with the Bible? De Luca told an interviewer for the French newspaper Libération that he wanted to grasp “this language which had taken upon itself the weight of the first monotheistic religion.”
This attachment to the Bible, as unwavering as it is unideological, has had perverse and predictable consequences in our current era of sheer thoughtlessness. Last month, De Luca gave a long interview in Rome to Omer Lachmanovtich, the editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom. The occasion was his upcoming appearance at the International Writers’ Festival in Jerusalem. Over the course of the conversation, De Luca addressed the war in Gaza and the wasteland wrought by the Israeli military. Yet he refused to describe it as genocide. “Applying it to the war in Gaza is a historical and verbal distortion,” De Luca insisted. “What took place in Gaza is a brutal, modern war, in which the number of civilian casualties is enormous and horrifying because when fighting takes place inside a dense urban space, among schools and hospitals, the population will always pay the highest price.”
Of course, genocide scholars like Omer Bartov disagree, insisting the term is historically, semantically, and legally appropriate. Other critics take issue with De Luca’s understanding of the term “Zionist.” It is difficult to argue with his observation that “in Italy, and in large parts of the West today, ‘Zionist’ is a curse and an insult thrown at you to mark the boundaries of what is beyond the pale.” But it is far easier to take exception to De Luca’s definition of Zionism as “the simplest and most basic recognition of the Jews’ right to a national home, to existential and necessary defense.” This claim, the Italian writer Cinzia Sciuto remarked, suggests that De Luca is referring “to a reality, a Zionism of the kibbutz, that disappeared decades ago.”
Nevertheless, De Luca holds fast to his conviction, declaring that “I will say it out loud, and I do not care about the price.” The price appears to be a creeping banishment from Italy’s cultural scene. Earlier this month, De Luca’s invitation to speak at a literary festival in Salerno this summer was withdrawn by its directors. My friend Alessandro, who criticized this decision, suggested the festival directors feared a boycott by other writers or disturbances in the audience. “I am quite sure that a lot of people were ready to boo him and maybe force him to leave the stage,” he added, “but I don’t think that anything worse was going to happen.”
No doubt. But perhaps something worse in a different register is happening — namely, losing sight of what De Luca insists upon seeing: the humanity of our fellow men and women. Reflecting on a recent two-week experience on a Médecins Sans Frontières ship darting from one raft to another, all sagging under the weight of refugees desperate for new lives, De Luca writes that the experience had branded him with a single image: “a rope ladder trolling in the void.”
It was on the final step of this ladder that, “one by one, I saw faces pop up, the people climbing from the edge of the abyss to their salvation. Those hundreds of faces: I don’t have the force to hold them back. I’ve simply had the absurd privilege of seeing them. From them I have left only the rope ladder they climbed, half-naked and shoeless, up its wooden rungs.” This experience taught De Luca, who is also a mountain climber, a deeper meaning of the verb “to climb,” one that no peak had ever taught him. It is this way of seeing the world that is paying an even steeper price than a writer’s banishment from a literary conference.
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Antisemitic incidents in Germany remained elevated in 2025, fueled by rise-in far-right cases
(JTA) — BERLIN — The number of annual antisemitic incidents in Germany remains at a high, with right-wing extremism surging, according to a report issued Wednesday by the country’s leading antisemitism watchdog.
An average of 24 antisemitic incidents per day were reported in Germany in 2025, totaling 8,725, about the same as in 2024, according to the report from the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, a nonprofit that is known by its German acronym RIAS. The total has been consistently high since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, according to the group.
“These are not statistical outliers; it is the grim reality in Germany,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at a press conference in Berlin announcing the annual tally.
The numbers reflect a concrete impact on Jews in Germany, said RIAS executive director Benjamin Steinitz, who coauthored the report with researcher Bianca Loy. They urged continued funding for programs to report incidents and additional help for victims.
Many documented cases occurred in everyday settings, RIAS reported: In Kehl, four members of the Jewish community were insulted and spat on outside a Jewish prayer room. In Hesse, a rabbi was shoved in a supermarket in front of his children and had his cell phone snatched from him. According to RIAS, the victims in these incidents were blamed for Israeli actions.
But it was incidents with a right-wing extremist background that shot up most, amounting to 807, up from 562 in 2024 – the highest figure since nationwide surveys began in 2020. They outnumbered incidents of a left-wing imperialist (501) and Islamist extremist (166) background.
Right-wing incidents included conspiracy theories, glorification of the Nazi regime, and calls for a repeat of the Holocaust. The incidents also have become more openly violent, researchers said.
For example, a right-wing extremist group in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania shouted “Jews to the wall” on a bus, mocked the Holocaust and threatened refugees as well as passengers who intervened.
The release of the 2025 antisemitism tally came the same day as a new poll finding a best-ever standing among voters for the far-right party Alternative for Germany. The party’s rhetoric, which includes nativism and calling to move on from the shadow of the Holocaust, has ignited allegations of antisemitism from leading Jewish voices in Germany, even as the party and its defenders say its policies are ideal to keep Jews safe.
The RIAS report found that the internet continued to be a major platform for antisemitism: More than a quarter of all antisemitic incidents (2,314 incidents, or 27%) occurred online, including nearly 43% of documented threats, including death threats. It cited as an example messages received by a Jewish woman that included an image of a Zyklon B canister with the comment “Still in stock.” Zyklon B was the chemical the Nazis used to asphyxiate victims in gas chambers.
Four cases of extreme violence were reported, including a knife attack in February 2025 at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The victim, who was Spanish, was saved by an emergency doctor. The perpetrator was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March.
In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, Schuster said Jewish community members in major cities have told him they worry “about appearing in public as visibly Jewish — for instance, by wearing a kippah or a Star of David as jewelry.” He said the concern is not as acute in less populous areas.
RIAS — which subscribes to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — attributes more than two-thirds of the incidents (68%, or 5,916 cases) last year to Israel-related antisemitism.
Anti-Israel gatherings continued to be major hubs for antisemitic incidents, though the total number of such gatherings dropped slightly to 1,210 (from 1,358 the previous year), according to the report. There was also a drop in incidents at Islamic/Islamist gatherings, to 43 in 2025, down from 58 in 2024.
On the other hand, the number of incidents at gatherings had risen within left-wing extremist circles, from 131 in 2024 to 214 last year; and in the right-wing extremist camp, 96 incidents at gatherings were reported — nearly double that of 2024.
RIAS has rejected criticism by Diaspora Alliance, an international group that addresses antisemitism from a progressive stance, that its data overemphasizes Israel-related antisemitism and underestimates far-right incidents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
The poll posted by writer Emily May on X asked: “Married women, have you ever said yes to sex because you didn’t want to deal with his moodiness if you said no?”
Over 5,000 people responded. The majority — 72% — were men, despite the fact that the question was directed at married women. Manosphere influencers, including self-proclaimed misogynist and antisemite Andrew Tate, jumped in to use the post as a proof that women use sex to manipulate men, and generally denigrate any woman who turns a man down. Gendered ideas of marriage and sexual drive — that men need sex physically, that women want to “trap” men into marriage — percolate constantly in manosphere and incel circles, and May’s posts sent the internet into a predictable tizzy.
The question of sex within marriage — how often to have it, whether it requires consent, and whether women owe it to their husbands — has been a matter of debate for, arguably, centuries. Marital rape wasn’t outlawed in all 50 states until 1993. The U.S. imported British common law, in which, as 17th century English jurist Matthew Hale put it, a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape” because marriage means that “the wife hath given up herself in this kind to her husband which she cannot retract.” In short, a wife cannot turn down her husband.
Marital rape is illegal in the U.S. in the contemporary era, but the presumptions that women owe their husband sex have continued. And undergirding all of these assumptions in many of the discussions is a Christian idea of marriage and sex.
In Christian subreddits, people discuss the idea that, in marriage, the two become one flesh, and the women must submit to their husbands, concluding that this means the woman cannot refuse the man as her body belongs to him. They cite First Corinthians 7:4-5, which says a couple cannot “deprive” the other except by mutual agreement to abstain for prayer, and that the “wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband.”
It says the same of the husband’s body, though few commenters note this line. But in Judaism, this is in fact the main focus. While both religions agree that sex is a fundamental part of marriage, the emphasis in Judaism is not that the wife owes it to her husband. Instead, it’s that a husband owes it to his wife. Within limits.
The Talmud is very specific on those limits. First of all, there are the menstrual purity laws, which forbid sex during menstruation as well as for seven days after the bleeding has stopped, which means that for about two weeks out of the month, observant couples are forbidden from having sex.
More to the point of the current debate, the Talmud — in the Ketubot tractate, dealing with the laws of marriage — also speaks very explicitly to the realities of life: That people get tired, exhausted and aren’t in the mood for intimacy. Still, it says, there are limits on the excuses. And these relate to exactly how taxing one’s job and daily duties are.
The rules are as follows: A man who is unemployed must offer his wife sex every day, because there is nothing exhausting him. Workers or laborers must be available twice a week if they work in the city in which they live. Donkey drivers — e.g. those whose work requires traveling shorter distances — are obligated to offer once a week, while camel drivers, who must travel long distances, must return home and offer their wives sex at least once a month. Sailors must return home to do the same every six months. And students of the Torah may leave home to study for up to 30 days — but they must then spend a full month at home with their wife.
In each of these cases, the wife isn’t obligated to accept any offer of sex; in fact, the wife can give permission for her husband to be gone longer — perhaps to take a job in another city to support the family, which would result in less sex. But she can also demand he stay closer to home so he can fulfill his conjugal duties. Sex is her right, not her obligation.
Her pleasure is also the focus. Men are instructed to court their wives, not simply rush to sex — to learn from “the rooster, which first cajoles the hen and then mates with it.” In tractate Eruvim, a man is not only explicitly forbidden from having sex with his wife without her consent, but also from doing so in any way that causes her discomfort, emotional or physical — e.g. pushing for her consent or making her unhappy, or even having sex that isn’t pleasurable for her.
What is clear from all of the writing is that the presumption of the rabbis is that it is more likely that the man, for reasons of exhaustion or work or even another wife, might avoid having sex with a desiring woman. This isn’t to say that Jewish text is perfect in its conception of women; there are, of course, plenty of other problematic, less empowering ideas about women in Jewish text. A man has a right to divorce his wife, for example, for all kinds of reasons, including spoiling his dinner, while she cannot divorce him. Still, it’s fascinating that the Jewish approach to sex and gender turns the common gender expectations around sex in modern Western society upside-down.
Today, the dominant stereotypes presume men are horny and desirous at all times, and women are far less sexual. Those are not neutral ideas; just looking at the discourse raging online right now, it’s clear those presumptions drive a lot of misogynistic hate, like the idea that women would only use sex as a way to entrap men. People take these gendered beliefs about sex as though they’re unassailable truisms about the world.
But they’re clearly not; for millennia, Jewish culture has believed the opposite. The reality is nothing is so clearcut, and different people of any gender have different relationships to sex, and different libidos. The internet isn’t a great place for that kind of nuance, but maybe — just maybe — if people realized their conclusions aren’t as foundational, or as God-given, as they thought, they might reexamine their assumptions.
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