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What does a swastika mean?
Jews may not agree on much these days, but we all know that a swastika is shorthand for celebrating the Nazi regime, white supremacy and the mass murder of Jews. At least when the intent is clear.
Vandals who sprayed swastikas on a Jewish school in Brooklyn last fall made a clear statement, as did two teens who added antisemitic slogans to the swastika drawn outside a home in suburban Detroit in April, as did those who appended “Heil Hitler” to their graffiti on a Jewish community center in Queens earlier this month.
Other cases are murkier. Sometimes swastikas appear without explanation scrawled in public bathrooms or bus stops. Hikers in Seattle have grown frustrated with recurrent swastika graffiti on a popular trail that in one instance was paired with an ominous, if confusing, message: “He’s waching [sic].”
And then there are the swastikas displayed to condemn fascism. A man in my San Francisco neighborhood liked to wear a shirt featuring an enormous red swastika, which startled me every time I saw it, even though it also said “F— Nazis” and featured a boot stomping on the symbol.
Some Hindu groups have also sought to reclaim the swastika, which originally held meaning for various eastern religions, and argue that the Nazi version of the symbol is better called a Hakenkreuz.
But the most contested contemporary uses of the swastika are those that seek to brand Israel and its supporters as Nazis. Israeli flags featuring blue swastikas in place of the Star of David are not unusual at large pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and a similar but rather odd version of this flag — purple and featuring two swastikas alongside a Jewish star atop the New York University logo — flew over a building on campus last week.
“We are shocked and deeply troubled that this hateful symbol expressing antisemitism was raised on a flagpole overlooking Washington Square Park,” Wiley Norvell, a school spokesperson, told the student newspaper.
That equating Israel with Nazi Germany should be considered be antisemitic is an axiomatic truth for many Jews, and a prohibition on such comparisons is enshrined in the controversial, but widely used, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
“It invokes painful collective memories for Jews,” wrote Paul Iganski, a British hate crimes scholar. “Those who play the Nazi-card know exactly what it means.”
***
Beyond the emotional gut punch that displaying a swastika can pack — there have also been incidents of demonstrators taunting Jews with swastikas displayed on their phone screen — many Jewish scholars argue that the comparison is antisemitic because it is meant to diminish the reality of the Holocaust.
Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s antisemitism envoy during the Biden administration, has said that people who compare Israeli policy to the Nazis are engaged in “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust.
“They are making a false comparison which elevates by a factor of a zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done, and lessens by a factor of a zillion what the Germans did,” she told JTA. “That’s not to defend everything Israel does, but you can’t call it a Holocaust unless you want to distort what the Holocaust is.”
A similar strain of argument contends that comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is intended to demonize Israel and is therefore part of the “new antisemitism” that projects longstanding animosity toward Jews onto the Jewish state. “When Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz — this is antisemitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel,” Natan Sharansky wrote as part of his “3D Test.”
There is, of course, a tautology at play in the arguments from both Lipstadt and Sharansky: Comparing Israel to the Nazis is antisemitic because it is an outrageous exaggeration. But many of those who make these comparisons argue that there are legitimate parallels to draw between the two governments.
Jean Améry, a Jewish writer from Austria who survived the Holocaust, wrote about his great dismay with the European left’s turn against Israel and Zionism — including Nazi comparisons — but acknowledged disturbing similarities between rumors of Israeli soldiers torturing Palestinian prisoners and his own experience at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust, which he said tested his allegiance to the state. “In my value system, for all that I have experienced the full horror of its concretization, the abstract category ‘human being’ outranks the concept ‘Jew,’” Améry wrote in 1977. “When barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.”
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the brilliant Israeli scientist and public intellectual who escaped Europe for Mandate Palestine shortly before the Holocaust, called Israeli judges who allowed Arab prisoners to be tortured “Judeo-Nazis” and warned that the entrenched occupation of the West Bank and Gaza coupled with rising ethno-nationalism among Israeli Jews was sending the country down the same road as Germany.
Then there’s the genocide claim, which is distinct from direct Nazi analogies — the Holocaust was not history’s only case of genocide, though it remains by far the most famous — and has been accepted by many Jewish scholars and political leaders, including Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of dovish but nonetheless Zionist advocacy group J Street.
Norman J.W. Goda, a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida, has spoken out forcefully against the genocide claim, which he argues “encourages what historians call ‘Holocaust inversion’ — the mischaracterization of Israel’s self-defense efforts as genocide.”
The argument that Israel’s opponents are using the Holocaust in offensive ways to score cheap political points is weakened, somewhat, by the kneejerk insistence by many of the country’s supporters that Iran and Hamas are equivalent to the Nazis and that its Oct. 7 attack was an act of genocide. It seems that both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain stuck in a framework where the Holocaust seems like the most potent point of reference.
Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm has lamented that the Israeli government is “using the memory of the Holocaust to fight human rights” while, at the same time, the global left is dismissing Holocaust remembrance.
“It’s become almost impossible to talk and think about it,” Boehm said.
And this only captures aspects of the Jewish debate. Many Palestinians feel, at a minimum, as though they have been forced to pay the price for the crimes of Nazi Germany through displacement and occupation.
***
I should end on a point of caution. The swastika is at once inflammatory and inscrutable — it can be used to promote fascism and white supremacy, and to condemn it — and is rarely received well, even when it is used by opponents of Nazism.
A few years ago, Kurosh ValaNejad pasted “kinetic art” on the fence of a Los Angeles museum that was meant to look like the Iranian flag from one angle and the Nazi swastika from another. ValaNejad was trying to compare the Iranian government to the Nazis, but most passersby only saw a huge Nazi banner and police announced plans to charge ValaNejad with a hate crime.
And in my reporting on George Washington University, I repeatedly heard a story about a swastika being drawn on a Jewish student’s dorm room. It was true. The vandal had drawn the swastika, along with a Hitler mustache, on photos of Donald Trump and Mike Pence that were taped to the door. But the headline version made it sound like unadulterated antisemitism.
The most famous spate of swastika vandalism also turned out to be far stranger than it initially appeared: The so-called swastika epidemic that began with vandalism at a synagogue in Cologne, West Germany, in 1959 and rapidly spread across the globe — stretching from Rhodesia to the United States and even Israel — was revealed in the past few years to be part of a Soviet propaganda campaign that sought to paint capitalist countries as antisemitic.
Who knows what the perpetrators of the swastika stunt at NYU were trying to communicate. The flag was hoisted over the Steinhardt School, named for Jewish philanthropist and Birthright booster Michael Steinhardt. Was he the target? Was it a Nazi message suggesting that NYU itself was controlled by Jews? Was it an anti-Nazi message equating Israel with the Third Reich? Was it something even more convoluted or strange than either of those options?
The lesson here — in case it needs to be spelled out — is that, while I don’t believe in limiting the parallels or lessons that we can draw from history, anyone who wants their political message to be read in good faith should avoid relying on swastikas to make their point.
The post What does a swastika mean? appeared first on The Forward.
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The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel
Towards the end of Birthright, a new play that just made its New York City debut at the MCC Theatre, two characters are arguing over Israel and Zionism in the wake of Oct. 7. The talking points will be familiar to anyone who’s been ensconced in the discourse of the past few years: Izzy says that Zionism is and has always been a colonialist project, and Chaya blames the conflict on Palestinian leaders who rejected early two-state solutions.
As they argue, each is frantically Googling; their phone screens are projected onto the walls of the set. We can see the chasm between their echo chambers: Izzy goes to the Jewish Voice for Peace website, Chaya to The Jerusalem Post. Each time they focus on their own screen, the sound of the argument becomes muffled and indistinct until they resurface to throw a new piece of evidence into the conversation.
It’s a clever piece of production magic that effectively drives home the schism over Israel in the Jewish world, and our inability to hear each other.
Birthright, commissioned by Miami New Drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector and here directed by Teddy Bergman, is nominally about the eponymous free trip to Israel. But really it’s about a group of six friends that formed on the trip, and their personal journeys — through Judaism, and through life — as the somewhat motley crew diverges and reconnects over the years.
The show is a long one, three and a half hours once you include its two intermissions. Each act depicts a single night, spaced over the course of nearly two decades — first, right after they’ve returned from their trip to Israel in 2006, then in their early 30s as their careers are taking off in 2016, and finally a year after Oct. 7. While the runtime is admittedly long, it allows for well-developed characters, which are essential to approaching such a touchy topic with any nuance, and the fast-paced dialogue keeps things moving briskly. (A reasonable helping of humor, including a Kanye reference in every act, doesn’t hurt.)
And the show does manage an astonishing amount of subtlety for a topic that has become so factionalized. The characters represent a reasonably diverse range of Jewish thought and experience, though certainly leaves some out. (There are no Jews of color or converts, for example, and no true right-wing hawks.)
There’s Chaya (Zoe Winters, best known as Logan Roy’s secretary and mistress on Succession), who grew up Conservadox, but spent college rushing a sorority and dyeing her hair blonde; she ends up working for the Democratic establishment. Noah (Eli Gelb, Tony-nominated for Stereophonic) is a political wonk with a Facebook-addled dad prone to right-wing conspiracy theories. Izzy (Molly Bernard), a queer Jew who eschewed law school, has worked on the Jewish left long before it became buzzy. Lev (Hale Appleman), a lost soul wanderer with a penchant for Jewish philosophy — he name-drops Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor — has family who survived the Holocaust. Alona (Molly Ranson), a sociology PhD who fell for an IDF soldier on the trip, eventually marries an Israeli and moves to Tel Aviv. And Emerson (Nate Mann), a musician, is barely aware that he’s Jewish when he lands on their trip half by accident.
This long summary represents only a smidgen of the events in the group’s lives. The play makes sharp use of production gimmicks, opening the second and third acts by projecting a montage of messages, summarizing the events of the group’s intervening years — and also cleverly reminding us of the quirks of bygone eras. Before the second act, we see wedding invitations and job announcements sent out by email, and then newborn photos posted on Facebook. Before the third, there are group chats on iMessage and then Whatsapp, where we see more birth announcements. Later, they exchange articles about the Israel-Hamas war.
This glut of information is how the show achieves its depth. On paper, one could slot some of these characters into obvious archetypes: The Zionist who makes aliyah, the queer anti-Zionist activist who has made politics her whole identity, the centrist liberal who staunchly supports Israel. But every character has real depth and pathos, and none of the action plays out to its stereotypical end.
When someone asks Izzy, the JVP-type activist, why she hates Israel so much, she doesn’t list out its sins; instead, she’s affronted. “I don’t hate Israel. I love it,” she says. “What it could be at its best.” She doesn’t believe she’s fighting against the nation, but for it.
Meanwhile, Alona, who made aliyah, does not launch into a speech about how Hamas has to be eradicated before the war can end; Bibi, the rest of the Israeli government and settlers, she says, are just as much of a “cancer” as any terrorist group.
Though the political discussions are impressively nuanced, Birthright finds its true success in spending as much time on the rest of the characters’ lives as it does on their political stances. There are the complications of falling for a non-Jewish partner. The ways having children changes life in inalterable ways. Divorces. Substance abuse. The way a dream career can still disappoint. For a topic that is so often turned into a polemic, the play takes a broader view.
In presenting stories of real, believable Jewish lives that are not solely defined by their Judaism, the play demonstrates that Jewishness doesn’t mean just one thing to anyone. Instead, it explores the ways Jewish identity layers on, mingles with and sometimes challenges the rest of one’s choices, values and beliefs.
There are views left out of Birthright, to be sure. No one is right wing (the characters call their group “BirthLeft”), and in the first act they all make fun of their trip as a way to get Jewish kids laid. No one is truly hawkish about the war; in the first act, the characters make fun of George W. Bush and fantasize about working on Democratic campaigns. No one is making an argument, as plenty of people have in the past few years, that Palestinians should be exiled from Gaza or deserve to die.
But the overall point can apply equally: Judaism, and Israel, is not one clear thing. There’s no perfect answer. We aren’t all supposed to agree — but that doesn’t have to tear us apart. It’s a simple message, but one that is hard to believe these days; Birthright makes it feel tangible.
As Lev says when considering their Birthright trip, and his confused feelings about it. “History, Jewish history, it’s never been a straight line, and it’s never meant only one fixed thing. It’s more a thing you interpret, that you find meaning in.”
The new play Birthright is playing at the MCC Theater in Manhattan through Jul 26, 2026.
The post The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life
(JTA) — The New York Times has hired Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg to launch a national beat covering Jewish American life, bringing a widely known journalist on antisemitism and Jewish affairs to a newspaper whose coverage of Israel and the Jewish community has been under unusually intense scrutiny since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate.
It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.
“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”
The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.
For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs.
Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.
He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.
Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.
“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.
The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.
The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.
For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict.
A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note.
Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice.
At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.
Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.
According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders
(JTA) — After weeks of backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this weekend opened its exhibit on the Nakba, the narrative of Palestinian defeat and displacement upon Israel’s founding.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, exhibit is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” and features photography, poetry and everyday objects that document the experience of Palestinian-Canadians impacted by the Nakba. Palestinians use the term, meaning “catastrophe,” to describe their mass displacement upon Israel’s establishment.
The exhibit has drawn fierce condemnation from some Jewish groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Materials that are one-sided and driven by a political agenda can contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the group wrote in a post on X last week. “The federal government must hold the CMHR’s leadership accountable for this egregious mishandling.”
The museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, was upset enough by the exhibit to resign.
“Because the museum chooses to proceed with this exhibit in its present form despite repeated concerns raised by myself and members of the mainstream Jewish community and others seeking a more balanced and historically complete presentation, I can no longer, in good conscience continue to serve as a Trustee,” Berlin wrote in a resignation letter dated June 22.
In the letter, Berlin argues that the exhibit omits the context that “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands” were also displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“A story detached from the surrounding factual details is not the truth, it is just a story,” Berlin continued. “The museum has a statutory and moral obligation to tell the full truth, not to sacrifice it at the altar of politics.”
The museum has vigorously defended the exhibit. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Isha Khan, the CEO of the museum, said that “focusing in this one exhibit on the human violations faced by of Palestinian Canadians does not negate the human rights violations faced by Jewish people.”
“Sharing the stories of one community in no way minimizes the experiences of another,” Khan continued.
Khan added that the exhibit had drawn “both criticism and support from Jewish Canadians.”
Several progressive Jewish groups in Canada, including Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order, defended the exhibit in a joint statement Thursday, writing that it was the “result of dedication, persistence, care and advocacy, especially from the Palestinian Canadian community.”
“We are proud to celebrate a Canadian institution that has remained steadfast in the face of unfounded criticism and pressure and chose to move forward with integrity,” the statement continued. “We hope this historic opening, and the ongoing inclusion of the exhibition in the Museum, encourages learning, reflection and action.”
The dispute over the exhibit comes as Jews in Canada have faced a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent months, including in March, when shots were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues. In 2025, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, marking a 9% rise from 2024, according to B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.
The post Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders appeared first on The Forward.
