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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.”
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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.
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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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John Galliano bows out of Met exhibition as backlash over antisemitism mounts
(JTA) — John Galliano withdrew from a planned exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to a rapidly escalating controversy over the museum’s decision to honor the fashion designer despite his history of antisemitic and racist remarks.
Galliano said Monday that, after discussions with the Met and others involved in the exhibition, he had decided that it was best for the show not to take place “at this time.” He said he remained accountable for the pain caused by his past words, particularly to Jews and Asians, and recognized that an exhibition honoring his work could be painful for some. The Met said it agreed with his decision.
The reversal came less than a month after the Met announced that Galliano would be the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, a rare honor that would have made him only the third living designer to receive a solo show there. The exhibition was to open in conjunction with the Met Gala, one of New York’s biggest annual cultural and celebrity events.
Opposition to the exhibition appeared to mount steadily in recent weeks. Early public pushback came from Dana Thomas, Galliano’s biographer, who wrote in an Aug. 6 New York Times guest essay that the Met had made a serious error in choosing to honor him. The criticism then broadened, with Jewish leaders, museum donors and New York politicians publicly urging the museum to reconsider.
Those criticizing the exhibition were New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who called the decision deeply painful for Jewish New Yorkers. Prominent Met donor Alice Tisch described the planned exhibition as a “whitewash,” according to the Times.
The reversal is also a setback for Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and the driving force behind the Met Gala. She had championed Galliano for decades and was among the Met figures most closely associated with bringing the exhibition to the museum.
The controversy was complicated by the fact that some prominent rabbis had actually met with Galliano before the exhibition was announced and had come away believing that his repentance was sincere, as JTA reported earlier this month.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Galliano had shown the contrition necessary to earn his return to the fashion world. Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in New York, likewise said he was convinced by Galliano’s statements of remorse and his efforts to educate himself about Judaism and the Holocaust. Neither rabbi endorsed the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, however. Rather, both told the museum that if it proceeded, it had a responsibility to make Galliano’s antisemitic conduct and the lessons of his repentance an explicit part of the exhibition.
That distinction was reflected in the Met’s original plans. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, said in announcing the exhibition that it would address Galliano’s antisemitic and anti-Asian conduct, as well as his firing from Dior, a hate speech conviction in France and his subsequent treatment for addiction and public acknowledgment of his actions.
Galliano, among the most celebrated designers in the world, was fired by Christian Dior in 2011 after a video surfaced showing him praising Hitler and making antisemitic remarks in a tirade in a Paris cafe, and directing an anti-Asian slur at the partner of a Jewish woman. A French court convicted him of making public insults based on race, religion and ethnicity.
After entering treatment for substance abuse, he embarked on a process of rehabilitation and eventually returned to the fashion industry. Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met privately with Galliano repeatedly; in 2013 the ADL said that Galliano had demonstrated “true contrition.”
After the initial announcement of the exhibition, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL, noted that the organization had “long since accepted his apology,” but added that he understood “why some Jews may question the decision to include Galliano’s work in an exhibit given the massive spike in antisemitism in recent years.”
In a statement Monday, Greenblatt appeared to take a harder line in welcoming Galliano’s withdrawal.
“With antisemitism at crisis levels, the Met honoring John Galliano at this moment was misguided, and even Galliano ultimately recognized what the Met should have done from the start,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “This was the wrong move at the wrong moment. Timing matters.”
Galliano’s withdrawal leaves the Met without a planned spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition. The museum said information about a replacement exhibition and the 2027 Met Gala will be announced later.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Julie Moos Named as the Forward’s New Editor-in-Chief & Chief Content Officer
The Forward today announced the appointment of Julie Moos as Editor-in-Chief & Chief Content Officer. This newly created executive position merges newsroom leadership with audience strategy, positioning the nation’s premier independent Jewish news outlet to accelerate digital growth and serve audiences across platforms.
The appointment was announced by Forward Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen.
Moos, who joined the Forward in 2024 as Managing Editor for Audience, previously served as Interim Editor-in-Chief and Vice President for Audience & Strategy. In these roles, she advanced the publication’s digital content strategy and helped secure major grant funding, including a prestigious Luce Foundation award to support the “Holy Ground” series chronicling Jewish life and reinvention across rural and small-town America.
Under Moos’ leadership, the Forward has hit unprecedented growth milestones:
- Record Audience Scale: Surpassed 100 million total audience views in 2025 across web, video, audio and social channels, as measured by Brandwatch.
- Social Acceleration: Grew social media reach by 280%, expanding video reporting to meet the audience where they are.
- Critical Acclaim: Led the Jewish journalism field in reporting awards, including record recognition from the New York and Los Angeles press associations.
- Product Innovation: Successfully relaunched specialized newsletter offerings, including Antisemitism Decoded.
“Julie’s new role marks a pivotal shift toward a fully integrated structure that meets the demands of the rapidly changing news environment,” said Feddersen. “By bringing editorial stewardship and audience strategy under unified leadership, we can ensure our high-impact reporting meets readers where they consume media today, expanding our reach and amplifying the Forward’s mission to elevate issues vital to the American Jewish community.”
Joel F. Brown, Chairman of the Forward Board of Directors, added: “Julie has made important contributions to the Forward from her first days with us and our franchise will accelerate its growth significantly under her editorial leadership. She has a deep and authentic devotion to Jewish communal life which she braids brilliantly with her excellence in journalism and her advanced command of media distribution strategy. I am confident that her leadership will ensure the Forward remains the premier, trusted media source for American Jews.”
Moos said, “I’m honored to lead this incredible team at a moment of dramatic change in the Jewish world and in the media. For over a century, the Forward has been a trusted guide and voice of Jewish life in America. Today, that requires deep, principled reporting, groundbreaking storytelling and ongoing innovation — from dynamic newsletters to video and live events — to ensure our work invites conversation and connection everywhere people watch, listen, read, talk and meet.”
Moos is a nationally recognized editor and media leader who has served in senior roles at McClatchy Media, the National Press Club Journalism Institute and The Poynter Institute. She edited the New York Times bestseller President Obama Election 2008: A Collection of Newspaper Front Pages Selected by the Poynter Institute.
She lives in Alexandria, VA. She is a graduate of Barnard College and earned a nonprofit management certificate from Georgetown University, where she taught digital journalism at the graduate level. She serves as an ambassador for Central Synagogue’s online community, The Neighborhood, and co-hosts the DC-area chapter. Julie has served for decades as a synagogue board member, staff member and active congregant in North Carolina, Florida and Chicago.
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Republican Mike Rogers is the Senate candidate Democrats need to save their party
Many progressive Michiganders – especially in the Jewish community – will hold their nose and vote for Democratic Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed despite his association, friendship and political partnership with antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker.
Many will hold their nose because El-Sayed has called Israel a “rogue” state, refusing to recognize the Jewish State of Israel as legitimate.
They will hold their nose and vote for El-Sayed because they are more scared of the Republicans’ hold on the Senate than a tainted Democrat.
However, as a social progressive who almost always votes Democrat, I want to push back against this logic and urge my fellow Michigan Democrats and progressives to vote for Republican candidate Mike Rogers for the sake of progressive, democratic values.
For me, the disdain that El-Sayed has shown for the Jewish community, especially in his continuing refusal to disavow his relationship with Piker, puts him in the same category as candidates who are openly racist and homophobic. Even the most loyal progressive would reject a racist, even if that meant risking a Republican Senate.
To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win. Such a candidate winning would be a disaster for the most fundamental requirements we have for any candidate of any party.
Instead, those who really want to focus on turning the Senate Democratic should slip across Michigan’s border to Ohio to knock on doors for Sherrod Brown or donate to help James Talarico in Texas. Those efforts would be a real show of Democratic and progressive solidarity – much more than a vote for El-Sayed.
Donald Trump and the Republican party would like nothing more than to see Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate – an easy target to paint all progressives, liberals and loyal Democrats with the brush of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The anti-Israel and antisemitic words of El-Sayed and other extremists in the party are a poison that has the potential to severely damage the party long term and make it unviable both for Jews and all those with traditional liberal values. Only a decisive win for Rogers will send a clear message to the Democrats that a return to a stance that is both pro-Israel and pro Palestinian, respecting the Jewish community, is the only way for a strong party to stand up to the Republicans in national elections to defend our progressive values.
This election is not just about the safety and future of Jews in the Democratic party. It is also about returning America to a place where we do not tolerate the harassment of people with whom we politically disagree. The harassment and intimidation of any candidate considered pro-Israel at the Michigan Democratic convention in April traumatized many Jewish participants. Michigan’s Jewish Attorney General Dana Nessel skipped the convention on Saturday out of fear for her safety.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed has said nothing to apologize for his supporters who carried out this gross infraction of the democratic process. Imagine what the National Democratic Convention will look like in less than two years if this model of behavior is not denounced now. Jews with traditional pro-Israel values will see they have no place in the Democratic party.The only way to stop this behavior is to show that it leads to Democrats losing elections.
In recent days, El-Sayed reportedly apologized for remarks he made in March after a truck loaded with explosives rammed into Temple Israel in suburban Detroit with a driver intent on shooting whomever he didn’t blow up. There were more than 100 children inside.
Jews were shocked when El-Sayed seemed to justify the near murder with the words “hurt people hurt people.” His recent non-apology apology if anyone was hurt by his words made it worse.
He doubled down on recognizing the “context” for the attempted massacre: Israel’s actions in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah – the terror group in which the Michigan terrorist’s brother was a member when he died.
In other words, according to El-Sayed, if children are blown up in Michigan, you can blame Israel.
Moreover, he continues to blame Israel for Michigan not having enough funds for its public schools and other needs, a classic antisemitic deflection. His antisemitic blood libel continued after his primary victory when he accused Israel – not just its government – of being “bloodthirsty” – in its defensive war against Hamas.
El-Sayed’s friend and campaign partner Hasan Piker has shared the same sentiment ,warning pro-Israel American Jews that if they continue to defend Israel, they will be targeted because of that stance.
I urge my fellow progressives to examine Piker’s comments insulting Poles and Poland, blaming the West for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his disdain for Black chatterers on his show – with the vilest of expressions. How can they vote for a candidate who befriends such a man and repeatedly invites him to campaign events?
Yes, Mike Rogers is an old-fashioned conservative who has had to cede some ground to Donald Trump’s conspiratorial views of the 2020 election. But I would argue that worse for our democracy is to normalize the cesspool of disgusting swearing and demonization that Piker champions.
Progressive Democrats must never give up the fight for our causes. However, in the long run, we must right the sinking ship of the Democratic party, a party which is our only hope for winning the war for our progressive values. The path to making this necessary correction is turning our energies to making sure that Mike Rogers defeats Abdul El-Sayed. That is why Rogers, a Republican, has my vote and my voice.
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