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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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In Congress, a measure to tighten U.S.-Israel military ties sparks backlash on both sides of the aisle
Next year’s National Defense Authorization Act has made its way to the House floor, and has some Democrats and conservatives alike rallying against a provision that critics in Congress say would embroil the U.S. in unprecedented levels of military integration with Israel.
The measure, Section 224 of the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, was advanced by Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., as part of the committee’s annual defense bill. If enacted, it would establish a framework for expanded U.S.-Israel defense cooperation. An official designated by the Pentagon would be responsible for coordinating collaboration with Israel on technologies ranging from missile defense and drones to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and biotechnology. The provision also encourages joint research projects, shared manufacturing arrangements, military training exercises, and closer cooperation between American and Israeli defense companies.
While the proposal has generated controversy in its own right, it is also fueling a broader conversation about what the U.S.-Israel defense relationship should look like after 2028, when the current 10-year memorandum of understanding governing American military assistance to Israel expires.
The United States has provided military assistance to Israel since 1960, but since 1998, the bulk of that aid has been directed by a series of such memoranda negotiated between the two countries. Congress must still approve the funds annually, but lawmakers have historically funded the agreements as negotiated.
But in recent months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that he does not wish to renew the 2016 MOU to its full extent, stating that he hopes to “taper off” U.S. aid over the next decade and wishes to focus instead on a more collaborative defense relationship.
His comments come as public support for Israel has declined in the United States and military aid has come under increasing political scrutiny, with many Democrats and some Republicans calling to reduce or cut off assistance. An April Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53% a year earlier. Negative views have risen among both Democrats and Republicans, particularly among younger generations. Today, 57% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable view according to the Pew survey.
Rachel Brandenburg, managing director and senior policy analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said Israeli leaders are likely aware that future aid packages could face greater scrutiny from both Democrats and an increasingly isolationist wing of the Republican Party, a factor that helps explain the Israeli interest in reducing its reliance on U.S. aid. At the same time, she said, Israel’s increasingly sophisticated defense industry and strong economy have made it less reliant on American financing than in the past.
Against that backdrop, supporters of Section 224 argue that deeper cooperation could help lay the groundwork for a future relationship based on mutual benefits.
“The United States has more to gain by harnessing Israel’s defense tech ecosystem, their innovative capabilities,” Brandenburg said. “Their economy is strong, so there’s quite a bit that they could be buying with their own dollars.”
Michael O’Hanlon, the Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, told the Forward he believes the concerns that Section 224 would integrate the U.S.-Israel defense relationship to unprecedented levels are overblown. “My overall sense is that this would move the US-Israel relationship in the direction of AUKUS,” he said, referring to an existing trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“In theory, it shouldn’t really be needed because collaboration is already close,” he explained. “In practice, this kind of provision might help cut through bureaucratic red tape and speed up collaborations. But on balance, I don’t expect huge change because the partnership is already very tight.”
Critics, however, see the proposal very differently.
Its opponents worry that if the U.S. and Israel move away from a military-aid relationship and toward a more collaborative partnership, large parts of the U.S.-Israel defense relationship will be harder to scrutinize or limit. Instead of debating aid packages, lawmakers could find themselves dealing with defense projects that are already built into Pentagon programs and contracts.
“It’s taking one program that’s become unpopular and turning it into another program that those who would disapprove of an intensified U.S.-Israeli defense relationship won’t really know about,” said Steven Simon, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.
If combined with Israel’s stated desire to reduce its reliance on aid and other efforts to deepen defense cooperation, Simon says Section 224 could produce a relationship that is “much more integrated, immutable, and immune to political pressures than has ever existed.”
Similar concerns have been raised by lawmakers on the left.
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Monday that he intends to “strongly oppose” the provision, arguing that “Netanyahu is lobbying for Section 224 in the national defense bill, a provision that quietly expands U.S.-Israel military cooperation and weapons development with almost zero oversight.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, also opposes the provision and introduced an amendment to strike Section 224 during committee markup, stating, “The American people are tired of the arrogance and insolence of Prime Minister Netanyahu telling America what we should do.”
On the right, political figures and commentators have framed the measure as a threat to American sovereignty.
Former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene tied the provision to the recent reports of Israeli espionage against the U.S., stating on X, “The Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on the U.S. to the highest level and AIPAC is openly cheering Republicans for section 224 in the NDAA that merges our military with Israel’s military.” Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie — who this week held a hearing premised on the conspiracy theory that Israel intentionally killed U.S. soldiers on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War — pledged to offer a floor amendment to strike the section.
The debate has also been picked up by far-right commentators, including podcaster Alex Jones, who stated: “This is beyond treason. This is absolutely a foreign government merging with us. Israel is now the main threat to the existence of this country.”
Brandenburg pushed back on concerns that the proposal would weaken oversight. Rather than moving cooperation further from public view, the legislation calls for additional reporting to Congress and public disclosure of some forms of existing coordination between the two countries, Brandenburg noted.
“That’s new,” she said, “in the sense of adding the accountability and transparency to these elements of the relationship in ways that didn’t exist previously.”
She also asserts many critics have overstated the significance of Section 224, noting that many of the forms of cooperation described in the legislation — including collaboration on missile defense, cyber security and counter-drone technology — are already taking place.
“Those who want to counter the idea that Israel and the United States should be working together have exaggerated what this legislation is actually saying,” she said. “They are accusing it of things like integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, or subjugating the U.S. military to the Israeli military. None of that is actually called for in here.”
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Israel names a street after renowned Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever
The Israeli city of Netanya has renamed one of its streets Rechov Avrom Sutzkever (Abraham Sutzkever Street), after the renowned Yiddish poet and Vilna partisan.
The event on June 10 marked an important cultural moment, recognizing the legacy of a poet who devoted his life to Yiddish language and Jewish culture. During his lifetime, Sutzkever was celebrated not only for his poetry, but also for editing the storied Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) for 46 years. His work remains a fixture in the field of Yiddish literature today.
Sutzkever was born in 1913 in the shtetl of Smorgon, in what is now Belarus. During World War I, his family moved to Siberia, where his father, Hertz Sutzkever, died. In 1921, his mother Rayne moved the family to Vilnius, where Sutzkever attended cheder.
Sutzkever survived the Vilna Ghetto. He was a leader of the “Paper Brigade” that rescued Jewish cultural treasures from the Nazis and later became the only Jewish witness called by the Soviets to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
His poetry chronicled his childhood in Siberia, his life in the Vilna ghetto and his escape to join the Jewish partisans. In 1947 he settled in Palestine, later Israel.
In Israel, he continued to create, publish and preserve Yiddish culture for decades. Yet, despite his immense influence around the world, he remained less known in Israel because he chose to write and fight for the Yiddish language rather than switch to Hebrew.
This is the first time a street in Israel has been named after him. Even Tel Aviv never did so, despite the fact that Sutzkever lived there for many years and the city was once a hotbed of Yiddish cultural activity, due to the influx of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who settled there after the Holocaust.
The street-naming ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Netanya, Avi Slama; representatives of the Lithuanian Embassy; public figures, artists, and members of the family, including Sutzkever’s granddaughter, Hadas Kalderon.
In the past decade, Kalderon has been instrumental in keeping Abraham Sutzkever’s memory alive, most notably through two documentary films: Ver Vet Blaybn? (Who Will Remain?) in 2021, and Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever in 2018.
Kalderon told me that she was very moved by Netanya’s decision to name the street after her grandfather, in a garden overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. “It was not only a tribute to Sutzkever himself, but also a powerful moment of recognition for Yiddish language and culture within the State of Israel,” she said.
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At the dawn of the World Cup, the story of the Jews who helped bring soccer to America
When the North American FIFA World Cup starts in Mexico City on June 11, the story will largely be told through the familiar lenses of Lionel Messi, the geography of the 48 participants and three hosts, and — because 75% of the games will be played there — the continuing rise of soccer in the United States. But there is another, less familiar story woven through the tournament: the long, strange and often overlooked history of Jews in North American soccer.
Mostly that’s been in the United States where players and owners have included a larger proportion of Jews than in Canada and Mexico. By my count, no Jewish players have represented Mexico, and only two Jewish men have represented Canada at senior international level and one of them, Tomer Chencinski, only did so once, in a friendly game where Canada lost 2-0 to Belarus in Doha. (Daniel Haber played 5 international games in his career).
For whatever reason, whether more closely linked to Europe, denied entry to other sports, or just arbiters of excellent taste, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of soccer in the United States for over a century. The first American to play for a major European team was Eddy Hamel for Ajax Amsterdam in 1922. Hamel was a New York-born winger who became a star for Ajax in Amsterdam during the 1920s. An injury forced his retirement in the 1930s and, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. His story remains one of the most tragic intersections of Jewish history and world football.
Jews also comprised the largest soccer crowd in America when 46,000 New Yorkers watched Hakoach Vienna play New York All Stars in 1926. That record stood for over 50 years but it also encouraged a number of members of the Hakoach team to emigrate to the US and start a New York team that was a crucial part of the American Soccer League of the era.
Later, in the 1970s, the National American Soccer League — the glitzy NASL — became a success thanks to the glamorous New York Cosmos. As head of Warner Communications, their CEO Steve Ross, born Rechnitz, was the person who brought Pele over and made the league the star-studded affair it became. After Herman Sarkowsky co-founded the Seattle Sounders, the continent was almost ready for football.
When the NASL faded and folded, soccer dwindled as a major sport in the United States. Alan Rothenberg saw an opportunity to revive the sport by hosting the 1994 World Cup and founding the MLS as a reset. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and the chief executive of the World Cup USA 1994 organizing committee, he made both of those happen and laid the foundations for the current shape of U.S. soccer.
The success of the MLS was not a foregone conclusion, though; indeed, it barely survived to the millennium. It was founded in 1993 but only started playing in 1996 — losing an estimated $350 million between its founding and 2004. The league initially turned to Don Garber, a former NFL executive, in August 1999 but even he couldn’t turn it around. By late 2001, it looked like the league would fold like its predecessors but it was able to secure new financing from owners Lamar Hunt, Philip Anschutz, and the Kraft family to take on more teams. Over the past 20 years, it has become robust, enjoying the general boom of all things soccer, riding the coattails of the English Premier League.
Without Robert Kraft and Anschutz, Major League Soccer might not exist today. During the league’s precarious early years, the two billionaire owners absorbed enormous losses to keep the fledgling competition alive. Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was also a central figure in bringing the 2026 World Cup to North America. As chairman of the United Bid Committee, he played a crucial role in securing the tournament for the United States, Canada and Mexico.
If Kraft represents one side of the Jewish soccer story, Chuck Blazer represents another.
The larger-than-life American soccer executive helped expose corruption inside FIFA, serving as a key witness in the investigations that ultimately toppled some of the most powerful figures in world football. Yet Blazer was a product of the very system he later helped unravel. His spectacular rise and fall remains one of the strangest chapters in soccer history, a tale of luxury apartments, exotic pets and global corruption.
Unlike baseball, basketball or boxing, soccer never became known as a major arena of Jewish achievement in the United States. Perhaps that has been due to the historic lack of status for soccer in the country. Despite the excellence of Yael Averbuch West for the USWNT and a number of Jewish players for the USMNT including Jonathan Bornstein, Benny Feilhaber, Dan Calichman, DeAndre Yedlin, Kyle Beckerman and the maverick Yari Alnutt there have been no soccer equivalents of Sandy Koufax or Hank Greenberg.
The stalwart defender Jeff “Goose” Agoos came closest with 134 international appearances and six more for the U.S. soccer Olympic team. But playing with a mediocre USMNT, he enjoyed few legendary moments. In fact, arguably no professional moments outshone the bizarre story of his 1989 NCAA championship ring in his junior year, the season that he played in the Maccabiah. On Dec. 3 of that year, his Virginia Cavalier team (playing for future USMNT coach Bruce Arena) met the top ranked, undefeated Santa Clara team in a freezing cold stadium in Piscataway, N.J. The teams were still tied 1-1 after FOUR overtimes and, with no penalties on the books, they shared the spoils. It was the third time that two teams shared the championship and has never happened again.
This year’s USMNT squad does include the only Jewish player at this summer’s tournament — reserve goalkeeper Matt Turner. If, as coach Mauricio Pochettino plans, Turner exclusively warms the bench, he will take his place alongside many of America’s notable Jewish soccer figures who have furthered the game, even if not on the field.
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