Last month, the Dutch city of Rotterdam became the latest stage for antisemites parading as anti-Zionists. It occurred at the city’s Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, named after Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist best known, rather ironically, for the satirical work, In Praise of Folly. In this instance, however, the academic fools strutting as anti-Zionists made the mistake of targeting the wrong person, Eva Illouz.

A member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, Illouz is a renowned sociologist who has published several influential books on the role played by emotions in politics and economics. No less important, Illouz is a prominent public intellectual in France, where she is a frequent contributor to Le Monde, and Israel, where her byline is often found in the pages of Haaretz.

Illouz also holds the dubious distinction of winning but not receiving the prestigious Israel Prize. Earlier this year, the prize committee chose her for the award — previously given to figures like Amoz Oz, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem — but their decision was nullified by Yoav Kisch, the minister of education. Outraged that Illouz signed a petition sent to the International Crime Tribunal in 2021 to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes in the West Bank, Kisch denounced her “anti-Israel ideology.”

This was not the last folly that would befall Illouz this year. Invited to give a talk, “Romantic Love and Capitalism,” at the Love Lab, a research department at the Erasmus School, Illouz was then abruptly disinvited. Last month, she learned from the lab’s director that “not all the members of the faculty were “comfortable with the initial invitation.” The reason, predictably, was Illouz’s former affiliation with Hebrew University, even though she no longer taught there. While the decision was not unanimous, the director added, it was nevertheless arrived at “democratically.”

In the spirit of Erasmus, Illouz replied that she was “delighted to learn that a truly antisemitic decision was arrived at democratically” for which the “faculty members must feel all the more virtuous.” But Illouz also asked a lawyer to challenge the decision which, earlier this week, led the school’s rector to issue both an official apology and a new invitation to speak at the school.

While Illouz will not pursue her case, the significance of this affair remains pertinent.  I asked Illouz to sit for a Zoom interview on her thoughts about this affair and the lessons we might take from it. The following conversation, slightly edited for reasons of space and style, begins with Illouz’s response to my question about the disinvitation.

Eva Illouz: If you are disinvited it could mean one or two things. First, it can be your opinion, but then, you know, there is nothing in my opinions that really changed since the time I was invited. And usually, if it is an opinion, people care to let you know. They want to let you know it’s because you spoke badly of trans people or because you express an offensive view about the biology of men and women or the hierarchy between the sexes, whatever. If it’s not an opinion, and of course it was not, then it means that it’s something about you.

This is where I think it gets interesting. The journalist from Le Monde managed to get a hold of one of the persons at the Love Lab, and the person told her that I still had a connection to Israel, And the proof of it was my email address. This is getting, I mean, really bizarre. But in fact, it’s not so bizarre because I think modern antisemitism is this capacity to turn Jews into an essence. An essence is something you cannot change. In the Christian world Jews could convert. They were evil, but not an essence. Modern anti-Semitism makes Jews into an evil essence. And this has been simply transposed to Israelis and Israeliness via decolonial discourse. An essence is something you can never leave behind. It defines your being. Like an email address.

Robert Zaretsky: But the notion of being Israeli, as an essence, that’s simply a surrogate, is it not, for anti -Jewish sentiment, a form of anti-Judaism? 

Yes, absolutely. Israelis are Jews but because hating Jews is out of fashion, Zionism and Israel become code words, conceptual substitutes for Jews. And the effects, interestingly enough, are exactly the same as they were in the Middle Ages or later times, namely to ostracize and isolate. To create a real or symbolic ghetto. IA ghetto is a place to which Jews are assigned because they are not allowed to interact with others. BDS ostracism and exclusion are strangely and eerily reminiscent of the ghetto.

So then, in a way, what you’re suggesting is the BDS movement or what took place with the Love Lab at Rotterdam was the making of a virtual ghetto. 

Absolutely, yeah. By the way, I think it’s interesting to note that in the homepage, I believe, of the BDS, they mention only institutions and not individuals.

Exactly, but they made an exception in your case.

In my case and in many other cases. I am not sure BDS speaks in good faith, because it is very unclear who does or doesn’t represent institutions and when an individual starts and a representative ends. Unsurprisingly Israeli institutions have become Israeli individuals, Israeli individuals have become Zionists at large, and Zionists are, surprise, Jews. All of these categories are intricately connected to each other. But they can hide safely behind these thick layers of obfuscations which turn anti-Zionism into an opinion.

How odd that earlier this year you were awarded the Israel Price, which was then clawed back by Netanyahu’s government because, in their eyes, you advocate an “anti-Israel ideology.”

Exactly. And it shows that the left, the extreme left and the extreme right use the same tactics.

Extremes meet.

They meet, they use the same tactics, and they are basically the same kind of people. They are bullies. They simply are bullies. As Trump says. If you’re not 100 % with me, I’ll go after you. Each side is a Trumpist at heart. If you’re not 100 % with them, they go and they come after you.

Which makes him the most dubious of allies for American Jews who think that Donald Trump, in fact, will protect Israel which, in fact, this not Donald Trump’s motivation. It’s purely transactional. And for an older generation of American Jews, unlike my children’s generation, they see Trump as a shield. And I think they are profoundly mistaken.

I mean, look at what is happening now. All the neo-Nazis ghosts are coming out. i They are like a Frankenstein creature which you can no longer control.  Trump in power has unleashed the darkest forces in America. The darkness of these forces has perhaps no precedent in the history of your country and the Jews will be in the middle.

It’s created a permission structure for people who have always felt this way to finally speak out aloud about what they feel towards Jews, what they feel towards blacks, what they feel towards women. 

In my opinion, Nick Fuentes is the real scary stuff. Judith Butler and Masha Gessen and Pankaj Mishra are adversaries (people I disagree with) but not enemies.

At first glance, the Rotterdam affair seems to have a happy ending. The university issued a public apology for what took place and made it very clear that what they did should not have been done. And so, one is tempted to say all’s well that ends well, but is that true?

It’s a small battle, but I’ve won it and its important for many reasons. One is that I went and took a lawyer who decided to go to the European court of justice and say, this is a blatant case of discrimination, which on the basis of nationality is prohibited as much as race or gender. Each one of us needs to refuse and fight against any act of discrimination not only because we are Jews but because we believe in the constitutional values of our countries.

Do you believe really that it was just legal pressure or that the administration realized that it had committed a mistake?

I will never know. I mean, you and I can speculate about it, but we will not know empirically what made them change and do this. They disavowed their faculty member and they took a position that is today, you know, not easy to take, certainly in Holland, where the freedom of expression is extremely wide. I have to credit the rector;  it must not have been a very easy decision to make.

What does this suggest about the role of university administrators?

I think university presidents need to be empowered. They need to be given more power to be able to make these kinds of judgments. Academic freedom has been the cover to excuse many egregious actions. I think it needs to be much clearer that academic freedom is actually much more limited than freedom of expression. Academic freedom is a misnomer. It is only the freedom to decide the content of your research and of what you teach. The classroom context actually prohibits you from saying a great deal many things and it’s a very good thing too.

Don’t you worry this would be considered a form of censorship?

As a French woman, I take it for granted that we have to do balancing act between freedom and the collective good. This is why we French people prosecute hate speech. We have rules and limits to protect the integrity and dignity of people. Strangely enough this applies to every single minority except for the Jews. It doesn’t work for them. If I had been a black woman, I want to hope there would have been an immediate scandal inside the university. And I believe there would have been. At least, I want to hope so. But somehow being excluded as a Jew diminishes the seriousness of the offense.

The post Shunned by the right, targeted by the left, Eva Illouz confronts antisemitism masquerading as academic freedom appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — In the safe confines of a gathering of Jewish fundraising and communal professionals, Sarah Hurwitz’s remarks about antisemitism and Holocaust education earned polite applause. By the time they made it to social media, they’d become kindling in a rhetorical firestorm over the Gaza war — and the uses and abuses of Jewish memory.

Hurwitz — a former speechwriter for both Barack and Michelle Obama who has written two books about her embrace of her Jewish identity as an adult — was one of three panelists Nov. 16 at the opening plenary of the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington. They were asked to address antisemitism and Jewish identity at a “crossroads.”

Speaking from notes, she began her remarks with the fairly uncontroversial observation that “young people” are exposed to a media diet that amplifies the fringe, including antisemitic influencers like Nick Fuentes. She also made the somewhat more contentious point that images of “carnage” in Gaza are making it hard for defenders of Israel like her to debate “facts and arguments” with younger Jews.

But then she veered into talking about Holocaust education, suggesting that the Jewish “bet” on promoting Holocaust education had backfired, at least as a vaccine against antisemitism.

“Holocaust education is absolutely essential,” she said. “But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.’ So when on Tiktok, all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”

Hurwitz’s framing could be seen as descriptive, explaining how the emotional structure of Holocaust education — emphasizing victimhood, power imbalance and trauma — leads some students to align emotionally with Palestinians rather than with Jews. She went on to suggest that moral lessons from the Shoah are often taught in a way that’s too binary — oppressed vs. oppressor, powerless vs. powerful — without helping students understand how antisemitism functions in complex ways, even when Jews have sovereignty and power.

But beyond the GA audience, the backlash was fast and fierce. Instagram and Reddit filled up with posts accusing her of saying, as one post put it, “that it was a mistake to teach Americans that genocide is bad.”

Jenin Younes, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, accused Hurwitz of using Holocaust trauma to silence criticism of Israel’s military operations.

“Holocaust education is not failing,” she said. “It’s succeeding — because it is teaching young people to recognize oppression and call it out, even when it doesn’t serve political agendas.”

Progressive Jews also objected. “She’s not disagreeing with the moral lesson that we should stand against the powerful harming the vulnerable,” wrote Rabbi Sandra Lawson on Substack. “She’s upset that people are applying it universally. The lesson was supposed to stay contained, meant only for certain victims.”

The point of Holocaust education, wrote journalist Spencer Ackerman, is “[n]ot to exceptionalize Jewish suffering, but to activate solidarity. To recognize that there is a continuum of atrocity perpetrated by dominant classes against subjugated ones.”

Hurwitz’s remarks about a central pillar of Jewish advocacy may have been tailor-made for the JFNA crowd, made up of mainstream Jewish professionals uneasy about whether current tools — Holocaust education, Israel trips, anti-antisemitism training by pro-Irael groups  — can stack up against the anti-Israel messages young people encounter. JFNA has joined several initiatives aimed at presenting a more “nuanced” view of the war in Gaza, with the goal of countering misleading or anti-Israel narratives in the mainstream and social media.

But Hurwitz also entered a decades-old — and, since Oct. 7, increasingly fraught — debate over the goals of Holocaust education. Does “never again” mean a universal call to protect human rights and prevent genocide, or is it a narrower call to make sure Jews are never again vulnerable to mass murder? And if the latter, does that somehow inoculate Israel from accusations that it can, in the interest of self-defense, oppress a weaker people?

That debate was at the heart of a dust-up in September, when Los Angeles’ Holocaust museum deleted an Instagram post that proclaimed, “‘Never again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.” The graphic showed six interlocked arms of different colors, one with an Auschwitz tattoo. Another slide declared: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience.”

The museum explained that it deleted the post because it was “easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” Indeed, appreciative supporters of Palestine and angry supporters of Israel read the original post as a statement about the death toll and hunger crisis in Gaza.

Ben Ratskoff, an assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, wrote that the museum’s retraction “reflects a deeper turn away from the universalist approach that has been at the heart of institutional Holocaust memory culture since the 1990s.” Elie Wiesel, he noted, framed the Holocaust as “a Jewish tragedy with universal implications and applications.” In 2000, the Stockholm Declaration, which founded the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also declared that “the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.”

“Teaching about the Holocaust,” the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains on its web site, “can inspire students to think critically about the past and their own roles and responsibilities today.” 

Israeli historian Amos Goldberg noted in July that Holocaust memory in the West deals with a deep tension between two sentiments. In the first, “human rights-oriented” version, “the world pledged itself to human rights, to curbing nationalism, and to strengthening democracy as a lesson from the Holocaust.” The second sentiment, he writes, “was empathy toward the Jews as the primary victims of Nazism, and their perception as Europe’s ultimate ‘Other.’”

With Israel facing accusations of genocide in Gaza — including from Israeli  scholars like Goldberg, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — these divergent lessons of the Holocaust have been fiercely debated, and sometimes weaponized.

After the massacre of Oct. 7, supporters of Israel invoked the Holocaust to express their feelings of vulnerability. “The murderers of Hamas are guided by the exact same goal” as the Nazis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration in 2024. Many pointed out that Oct. 7 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, implying a parallel of effect if not scope.

Palestinians and their supporters also invoked the Holocaust, a comparison that intensified as the war ground on and accusations of “genocide” made the comparison at least implicit.

Jewish groups not only denied the accusation of genocide, but rejected the comparison, whether made by Hamas or the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine.

“These comparisons are not simply misguided or exaggerated; they have a double-edged effect,” wrote Simone Roadan-Benzaquen, managing director of the American Jewish Committee’s Europe office, in January. “On one hand, they trivialize the Nazi atrocities by equating them with a contemporary conflict, tragic as it may be, that differs fundamentally in purpose and scope. On the other, they invert historical roles, casting Jews — victims of an unparalleled genocide — as today’s oppressors….

“The result is an assault on memory itself.”

Hurwitz served as chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential campaign, later as senior speechwriter to Barack Obama, and, from 2010 to 2017, as head speechwriter for Michelle Obama. After leaving government, Hurwitz wrote about her personal journey from “lapsed” or “cultural” Jew to one more deeply engaged with its core texts, rituals and history. Her two books on that journey have made her a popular draw on the Jewish lecture and podcast circuit.

It’s by no means clear if Hurwitz intended to say, as critics charge, that Holocaust education was a mistake because it fostered sympathy for the Palestinians. She did not respond to a request for an interview.

But in her latest book, “As a Jew,” published in September, she does argue that Holocaust education fails if it doesn’t explore the full historical scope of antisemitism, or, taking inspiration from the writer Dara Horn, if it doesn’t show how Jews lived in addition to how they died.

“If the main thing you know about antisemitism is the Holocaust, it’s easy to get the impression that antisemitism originated sometime in the twentieth century, and the Holocaust was a one-off — that out of nowhere, after just a few decades of hating Jews, the civilized world lost its mind and started killing them,” she writes.

Her book also includes a spirited defense of Israel, which puts her in the crosshairs of anti-Zionists and other harsh critics of Israel. At the GA, Hurwitz may have been describing the limitations of Holocaust education in teaching about antisemitism, but she waded directly into a fight about applying the lessons of the past to the crises of today.

The post Sarah Hurwitz, former Obama speechwriter, creates firestorm with remarks about Holocaust education appeared first on The Forward.

A restored early 20th-century railcar that was believed to be the type used to transport Jews to extermination camps across Nazi-occupied Europe during Word War II was installed on Tuesday morning in the Holocaust Museum Boston, which is still being built.

The railcar was lifted by a 173-foot-tall tower crane and installed on the fourth floor of the museum currently under construction across from the Massachusetts State House. The railcar is over 30 feet long, 12 feet high, 8.75 feet wide, and weighs more than 12 tons. A group of supporters, city leaders, government officials, Jewish communal leaders, and other community representatives gathered on Tuesday morning to see the railcar’s installation.

“The hardest truth this railcar forces us to confront is this: the Holocaust was not carried out by the Nazis alone. It was carried out by people, ordinary people, who kept the trains running, who stamped the papers, who followed schedules, who chose silence over courage. The machinery of genocide ran because countless individuals did their everyday jobs and looked away,” said Jody Kipnis, co-founder and CEO of Holocaust Museum Boston, before the installation. “This railcar will stand at the heart of the Holocaust Museum Boston to confront that truth.”

The railcar was donated by Sonia Breslow of Scottsdale, Arizona, whose father was among less than 100 people who survived the Treblinka concentration camp, where 900,000 others were murdered. Breslow’s father was transported to the extermination camp in a railcar like the one installed at the Holocaust Museum Boston. He immigrated to Boston after surviving the Holocaust.

“Seeing this railcar lifted into its new home took my breath away,” said Breslow. “My father survived a transport to Treblinka in a car just like this. Most who were taken there did not survive. For this railcar to be in Massachusetts, a place where he rebuilt his life, is deeply personal. It ensures that his story, and the stories of millions, will never be forgotten.”

The railcar was discovered in a junkyard in Macedonia in 2012, shipped to the United States, and stored in Arizona before being transported to Massachusetts for conservation. Over the past six months, it was restored by renowned conservator Josh Craine of Deadalus, which is a company that has focused on the conservation of historic artifacts, sculptures, and architectural ornaments since 1989.

The railcar will provide an immersive experience for visitors once the Holocaust Museum Boston opens in late 2026. Visitors will be able to walk through the railcar and it will be displayed by a protruding bay window, making it visible from the street. Outside, people walking by will see museum guests enter the railcar but not leave, “an intentional design symbolizing the millions who never returned and the freedoms that were stripped away,” the museum explained.

“This railcar is not just an artifact, it’s a witness,” added Kipnis. “We want visitors to feel its weight, to understand that millions of people stood where they will stand. Our mission is to transform that understanding into moral courage. At a time of rising hate, the urgency of this museum has never been greater.”

Operated by the Holocaust Legacy Foundation, the Holocaust Museum Boston will be New England’s only museum dedicated exclusively to Holocaust education and the first new museum to be built in Boston in over 20 years.