The word “genocide” was deployed to describe Israel’s retaliation as early as Oct. 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas-led killing of 1,200 people inside Israel launched this war.

There was no genocide then. There still is no genocide. Yet.

It nonetheless has, absent evidence and a legal determination, become a catechism on the left: Armies of the faithful chase politicians like ambulant “Jesus is God!” billboards, shouting out doctrine. Belief systems are contagious, and the Church of Genocide is gaining converts on the right.

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for the Maine Senate seat whose campaign imploded last week, was a true believer, clinging to the true faith until the end.

Yet, inappositely, a blip of commentary about the sexual assault allegations that felled Platner (and which he denies) makes clear why the use of “genocide” charge is irresponsible.

“I know I’m old-fashioned this way, but I still think due process is the best way (ie: the only reliable way) to determine guilt and the truth of accusations,” Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer and reporter, said on Twitter. “Online mobs and trial by media are infinitely more unreliable for all sorts of reasons that should be obvious.”

This stood out, because Greenwald obsessively accuses Israel of genocide, absent due process, without qualification.

Greenwald is not alone: True believers have proliferated. Pronouncing a crime without the caveats that would normatively attach to one that has yet to be adjudicated is a function of blind faith, not of due process. Shaming others into doing so is not protest, it is weaponized evangelism, with all its sweep and terror.

A faith system predicated on discarding analytical and legal norms has swept up those who otherwise are the keenest to hold up those norms. And its apotheosis is the delusional investment in the disappearance of Israel, an outcome insinuating into the mainstream of political discourse, even as expressions of the glories Israel’s erasure would reap seem to leap out of the Book of Revelations.

The Gaza War has been prolonged and ugly. Its horrors demand reckonings for leaders on all sides, including Israel’s, just as the Ukraine war invites reckonings, just as the depredations in U.S. occup[ied Iraq deserved reckonings. But it is a standard issue 21st century war.

Determining Israel’s actions are a genocide, absent due process, is the mentality of the mob.

Each believer is not necessarily a bad person: They see real horrors. Tens of thousands of Palestinian lives have been snuffed out. Tens of thousands of children will never become men and women. Millions of people are displaced. Whole cities have become rubble.

Hamas alone is not responsible for the carnage. There are plausible allegations of Israeli war crimes. There are statements and actions by Israeli officials and public officials that echo events and rhetoric that has presaged genocides. This is typical of societies seized with wartime hatreds. Often, they recover before devolving into the ultimate crime; sometimes they do not.

The good men and women who see these horrors and become consumed with a thirst for answers in some cases coalesce into mobs who destroy worlds, like anticommunists in the 1950s, like the Americans now who are rattled by violent crime and who unleash their fury on migrants.

The Church of Genocide is ready to exact similar retributions on Israel and its adjacents: impure Jews, politicians who resist their imprecations, anyone in their way.

1. “Alleged.”

One of the first things a reporter learns is not to describe a killing that has yet to be adjudicated a “murder,” however horrific the circumstance.

Genocide, like murder, is an adjudicated crime. Germanely, it is one Israel has been charged with in the International Court of Justice, which has yet to deliver its verdict.

The standard exists because of the presumption of innocence that is one of the pillars of free societies. The unqualified use of “murder” or “genocide” or any crime by a person in a position of authority – a reporter, a lawyer, an elected official – prejudices the case.

If a suspect has indeed been charged with murder, “alleged” attaches to the charge in every case, until there is a verdict.

Wikipedia uses “genocide” without qualification in this entry on allegations against Israel. Contrast this with the online reference work’s careful (and correct) use of “allegations” of genocide to describe Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7. Norms have become mutable in an era where political agendas rule

Ideally, the same standards of presumption of innocence should prevail in everyday conversation and even in advocacy.

They do not, and the reasons in certain instances are understandable. People who lost loved ones in Gaza will use “genocide” unadorned in the way a victim’s family will stand outside a courthouse bearing a placard that says “Murder is murder” even while the trial is underway.

Reasonable societies accommodate the anomalies of grief, an inherently unreasonable state. The presumption of innocence does not obviate outrage; it contains it. But containing outrage, keeping it from intoxicating the discourse, requires the guardians of social norms – reporters, lawyers and lawmakers among others — to uphold the presumption of innocence.

2. The Standard of Intent

A genocide conviction against Israel would set a precedent. The ICJ has never delivered a verdict of genocide, and no nation has been found guilty of the crime.

There have since the convention went into effect in 1951 been three cases of international tribunals finding groups – not nations – guilty of genocide, in Rwanda, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia.

The reason is the crime’s daunting standard of intent. “In order to infer the existence of dolus specialis [special intent] from a pattern of conduct, it is necessary that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question,” according to the 2015 ruling in which the ICJ rejected Croatia’s charge of genocide against Serbia.

Accusers of genocide against a state must show a pattern of conduct and demonstrate that the sole intent of the pattern of conduct was genocide.

That could prove daunting for Israel’s accusers. In the Gaza war, they must establish an overarching pattern of genocidal intent in which a central theory of the war has been absent and in which multiple Israeli political and security factions have been in constant tension if not opposition with one another – including about humane treatment of the Palestinians. They must establish a pattern of intent by the party that was attacked and caught catastrophically off guard at 6:29 am Oct. 7, 2023.

“Israel did not commit genocide and is not committing genocide in Gaza,” Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who was among the first to identify Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1949, wrote last year on this platform. “There is no government policy, no plan, no intention, no activation of a plan to kill the Palestinian people. Genocide is a top-down affair, a national project, decided by a government or ruling party. Small massacres in wartime are routinely bottom-up affairs, with sergeants, lieutenants, captains ordering killings, as in Mai Lai in Vietnam. But genocides are organized, national projects.”

Another way to establish intent is to quote a war’s managers, which has proven difficult for Israel’s accusers without resorting to manipulations. South Africa, which initiated the genocide case at the ICJ, in its indictment cited Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister, telling troops, at the war’s outset: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week.”

In fact, Gallant said “There will be no Hamas” after “We will eliminate everything,” substantially narrowing his meaning to the terrorist group, and not to the entirety of Gaza. (The ICJ, in accepting South Africa’s case, restored the sentence.)

South Africa also misidentifies the source of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s citation of “Remember what Amalek did to you.” The citation comes from Deuteronomy, and refers to Israel escaping the genocide its deadliest enemy launched against it while Israel fled Egypt. The phrase is understood among Israelis and Jews generally as an appeal to remember God even in the most dire circumstance; its use was commonplace during the Holocaust, which is why it appears on Holocaust memorials including at The Hague.

In the South African document, the phrase is misattributed to the Book of Samuel, which takes place hundreds of years later and refers to God’s command to King Saul to wipe out Amalek. South Africa gets not just the quote but the story wrong: Netanyahu “invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites,” the charge says. King Saul disobeyed God and did not wipe out Amalek – and his disobedience is the point of the passage. The ICJ judges, perhaps better biblically versed than the South African prosecutors, did not cite any citation of Amalek.

Yair Rosenberg long ago did much of the work in picking apart these citations. I don’t know about Yair, but I must confess to a queasiness in getting this deep into biblical citations.

It is like arguing with a lunatic on his own terms. It is deeply disorienting.

But it’s necessary work, I realized when I read that The New York Times’ Ezra Klein said on his podcast: “Now you can debate which biblical passages Netanyahu is referring to. I find that debate a little bit strange.”

First there’s no debate: South Africa is plainly wrong.

But how language is understood, the culture it emerges from, is not even a little bit strange: It is critical to understanding intent. My God, it is critical to writing. Israelis hearing this particular phrase would not have understood it as a call to murder, but as an appeal to believe in divine protection: How is grasping that “strange”?

3. Only One Definition of Genocide Pertains

There are not multiple definitions of genocide. There is one very precise one, the legal definition in the 1951 convention:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The absence of due process notwithstanding, there are a plethora of human rights groups, politicians, scholars of genocide and opiners that say Israel is committing genocide.

Then there are accusers who rattle off the names of these groups and scholars like a recitation of the saints on All Hallows Day, as if volume arrives necessarily at truth. In their recitations, they incant “Jewish” and “Israeli” descriptors as emphatics. (Would these same folks accept the weight of “Jewish” as a descriptor for anyone dismantling the genocide accusation?) Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the Zeteo media outlet, is a high priest of this particular catechism.

There are instances where due process does not obtain in naming a genocide: Defining the Ottoman era massacres of Armenians as a genocide as a political and moral question because there were no laws against genocide in 1915, no court to adjudicate them.

In our era, with a Genocide Convention and a court to adjudicate it in place, the tension between a political and a legal definition is untenable. Israel deserves the protections that we extended to O.J. Simpson. (I can’t believe I typed that sentence, but here we are.)

There are efforts to expand the definition of the crime. Ezra Klein in his New York Times podcast interviews Philippe Sands, a lawyer who has argued genocide cases and who wants to loosen the legal definition of genocide precisely because it is so daunting.

Sands, who has written a book of the genesis of the term and of the crime, argues in the podcast that the high bar established in the convention of “intent” is not true to the person who coined the word, Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who lost family in the Holocaust.

“Lemkin’s conception didn’t have what has emerged as a special intention that has to be proven,” he tells Klein. “Lemkin also had a much broader conception of which groups were covered. You’ll have noticed political groups are excluded.”

He believes Lemkin would have applied the term to Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Members of Lemkin’s family are separately taking legal issue with the Pennsylvania based Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention for arguing that Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocide. The Institute was founded in 2021 and named without consulting his family. Lemkin was a Zionist.)

Sands argues that raising the bar has devastating consequences.

“The International Court of Justice said [in Croatia v. Serbia in 2015]: No, it’s not [genocide],” Sands tells Klein. “It left the consequence that, yes, it’s crimes against humanity and war crimes. And the consequence has been devastating within Croatia and within the region. Why did the Bosnians get a genocide for Srebrenica, and we only got a crime against humanity for Vukovar?”

His argument is gaining international traction: Ireland has called on the ICJ to expand the definition of genocide.

Liberals campaigning to blunt a law – to make it less precise – is unusual. Maximizing penalties is an argument one usually associates with the right. Imagine, for instance, a broad murder statute that would not allow for mitigating circumstances. What would happen to, say, the battered woman syndrome defense?

4. The misapplication of “genocide” is reckless.

The correct use of the word for the worst of all crimes would always be critical; it is especially critical in our era, when malign political actors say facts are fake.

Sands and others advocating for expansion of the law may succeed. Until they do – and if Israel’s actions meet the expanded definition – absenting “alleged” from accusations of genocide is at least as reckless as, say, Donald Trump’s unqualified assertions that elections he does not favor are “rigged.”

It is reckless to attach oneself, however unintentionally, to a movement that seeks to divest Jews from history, to deny the consequences of the Holocaust by suggesting that everyone, including Jews, commits Holocausts. It is reckless in a year in which J.D. Vance removed Jews from the Holocaust.

It is reckless precisely because there are circumstances in Israel that obtain before a genocide, which does not necessarily require the magnitude of the Holocaust to earn the definition: Leaders announcing food blockades and hindering aid distribution. Documented allegations of torture. Polls showing substantial majorities of Israelis favoring the removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

One of the flaws of the South African indictment is that it quotes officials who are like Stalin’s pope: Big talkers who command zero divisions. One of these is Amichai Eliahu whose imprecations are so reckless – and, indeed, genocidal – that Netanyahu suspended him from the government for a time.

It would be easy to dismiss Eliahu, who is heritage minister, because he commands no divisions; but he is in charge of educating the public. And he still has that job, employed by a government that otherwise has done little to discourage the rhetoric

These depredations are the roiling consequences of war – and they are evident as much among Palestinians as they are Israelis.

Dehumanizing rhetoric, killing without meaningful consequence, depraved indifference – these factors preceded genocides, as in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But anyone who has spent time in a country deep in the throes of war will tell you they are commonplace and more often then not, do not culminate in genocide – because good people intervene not to further dehumanize one side, but to gently nudge the sides to recognize the horrors that could portend.

I have seen these conditions in every war zone I covered – not just in Israel and among Palestinians, but in Afghanistan, in Bosnia after the war, in Congo, in Northern Ireland. No genocides ensued.

Dampening hatred, nurturing coexistence is hard, grueling work – which is why pronouncing “genocide” before one has taken place is a flamboyant sleight of hand, a means of pretending to witness while looking away.

Shouting “genocide” is giving in to belief and giving up on reality, it is chanting curses into the wind, and at the worst possible time: when we need to be present, to end this war, to end this carnage, to guide Israelis and Palestinians toward conciliation.

The first time Abe Foxman hugged me, I was not ready for it, although I should have been.

It was at his farewell event in 2015, when he retired from decades leading the Anti-Defamation League. All evening long I heard about his famous hugs, an aspect of his behavior I had not previously been aware of.

And I knew he liked me, and I knew once we met after the formalities, he was bound to hug me, and I dreaded it, because for whatever reason I am not a hugger.

And he did, and it was okay.

Abe died Sunday, and JTA, where I worked until 2024 as Washington bureau chief for 21 years, wanted an obituary, so of course I had to write one. Unsolicited calls from Jewish organizational leaders are not a thing Jewish media reporters love to see flashing on their cell phone screens, but I lit up when I saw Abe’s name, because however it was going to start, I knew how it was going to end: with agreement, on the topic, or to disagree.

Because Abe was very, very good about disagreeing. He did not mind if you disagreed with him, I think he relished it. He liked a good, civil argument.

As I wrote in 2015:

If you ask him if he thinks that maybe, this time, he’s crossed a line, he admits he’s wrong, or he admits you might have a point, or he says he disagrees, but you know what, that’s OK.

He insisted once that I come listen to the lecture he routinely gave about his Holocaust experience, in this instance to a group of students visiting D.C. Not to report, but to understand. He talked about his nanny, who protected him from bad men who wanted to kill him, and whose fierce love for him led her to do the unthinkable: try to keep him from his parents.

He loved her anyway, because he understood that the same obsessions that drive heroism could also become toxic. I think he wanted me to understand that. Or maybe he knew that I did.

He called me “tattele,” a Yiddish term of affection that means “little father,” but also “good boy.” I don’t know whether he was teasing me for my earnestness, which frankly can be a pain to others, or because I loved talking about my boys.

He routinely sent me and the Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh joint texts with screenshots of a tweet he had sent and that he wanted us to notice. (“Why screenshots?” I asked him once. “I can’t figure out the other thing,” he said, meaning cutting and pasting a link.) Sometimes all he wanted to say was “Shabbat Shalom.” (Also, why just me and Jacob? There are other journalists. Maybe because we three were kindred, a trio of neurotics constantly in search of “the other hand”.)

Shortly after I retired, he summoned me to dinner with another source, and they contemplated my future. I know, what future? I was retired. I needed time not to think about the world.

That wasn’t a good reason to retire, they made clear.

Sure enough, I kept writing.

So when he was in DC, he wanted to see me. We met for an early dinner on April 14, at his new favorite place, the Salamander hotel overlooking the Southwest waterfront.

He had been in the hospital, he told me, for a leaky valve. I told him he looked good, which was no lie. He said he wasn’t optimistic. I wish I had listened closer when he said that.

I heard Hebrew and turned around. A young couple was sitting near us, and they started chatting with us in Hebrew. They were big fans of Benjamin Netanyahu. Abe looked at me. He did not want to start a discussion. I was diplomatic and guided us out of the encounter unscathed.

Netanyahu had broken Abe’s heart, steering Israel into a dark corner dank with hatred and self-regard. A lot of people had broken Abe’s heart. The world was breaking Abe’s heart. The epidemic of antisemitism, the anti-Israel and, yes, anti-Jewish antagonism spreading through a Democratic Party he had embraced in 2020, finally free of nonpartisan shackles, the anti-democratic depredations of Donald Trump and his minions.

And the Jews were breaking Abe’s heart, the Jews who lacked the courage to see themselves through their anger with Netanyahu and understand that Israel was still their best hope, and the Jews who lacked the guts to stand up to Trump and to the antisemitic left.

And yes, guess what, I was breaking Abe’s heart, because I was not writing enough. People needed to hear my voice, he told me.

Of course I protested, I have a lot on my plate, and besides, who listens? I have begun to despair of a political environment in which no one listens to anything but their worst impulses.

I wrote after leaving JTA because sometimes there was a thing that was known by maybe only a few folks who could write about it, let’s say about the uses and abuses of the Holocaust.

But honestly, who gives a fuck about my voice? I wrote a lot of stories, I had a good run, but honestly, writing seemed more and more a sinkhole.

Abe wasn’t having it. Write, he said.

I promised him I would. And then I went in for the hug, because this time, I wanted it. I wanted the Foxman hug. Maybe my stupid obtuse brain finally figured out something.

That was the last time I saw Abe. And here I am, writing.

(Jusmine/Wikimedia Commons)

Who are indigenous to a land and who are not? The latter question — the one that effectively excludes people from a claim — has since before Israel’s inception dogged the conflict.

People who have lived in or identified with a place for a long time legitimately stake claims to it. What's unsettling is when more recent arrivals are called interlopers, especially when the charge lasts into the second generation.

That’s when a romantic claim that has in recent decades been embraced by the left veers into uncomfortably racist territory. Saddling generations of Jews in the Middle East with the label of invaders doesn’t sound much different than the racist attacks Latino folks suffer this side of the Atlantic. And the same goes for Israeli hypernationalists who seek to brand Palestinians as interlopers.

There have been attempts to explain the difference, to uphold exclusionary policies deemed protective of the “indigenous” as worthy and not comparable to, well, racism. They are often convoluted and not persuasive, and inevitably slide into the dark waters of separating the “authentic” from the “inauthentic.”

A tweet by the influential journalist Mehdi Hasan, mocking new arrivals in Israel from the India Burma border as not indigenous, led me to write to an op-ed this week in Haaretz,

Here’s a sample:

Once you bring up DNA, you slide down a twisted helix toward race theory, doing no one any favors, especially during a Trump administration that is, in ways subtle and blatant, promoting white supremacy and identity – a trend that spells trouble for Jews and Palestinians alike. One can easily imagine a future MAGA president wondering aloud: If both Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to this strip of land, maybe they should both go live there and duke out who controls it.

Here’s the article (and likely a paywall).

“Country club antisemitism” often refers to an exclusionary brand of prejudice that is distasteful, can be ugly — but is low on the harm register.

In an age of lethal and near lethal attacks on synagogues, preschools and Jewish institutions, getting worked up about not being able to use the best swimming pool in the gated community seems almost an indulgence.

This week, Tucker Carlson, the far right influencer, misrepresented a story the pundit Catherine Rampell once told him.

Here’s the top of the story I wrote yesterday for JTA:

Catherine Rampell, the economist and pundit, likes telling the story about how her father once launched a public campaign against a Palm Beach country club when it banned his 4-year-old son from attending a birthday party because he is Jewish.

Now, Tucker Carlson has turned the anecdote into a sinister and “repulsive” tale of a crusade against folks who just want to hang out together.

Carlson’s misrepresentation is telling: the story of the hurt a 4 year old felt morphs in Carlson’s telling into an ugly display of resentment and vengeance. Intentionally or not, Carlson made clear how exclusionary country clubs mask a bigotry that runs far deeper than mere insularity.

Also, Carlson, in his podcast interview with his brother, Buckley, does not use the word “Jew,” but instead gets creative with euphemisms, which Rampell later ably dismantled.

I was pleased to find out, however much they might not want me in their pool, that there is such a thing as a “Bath and Tennis” club (although, guys, the sequence is backwards.)

I was also pleased at the terrific hat in the archive photo JTA found to illustrate the story.

Read more:

https://www.jta.org/2026/04/23/united-states/tucker-carlson-calls-campaign-to-shame-a-country-club-for-barring-a-jewish-toddler-repulsive

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You march them into preschool and you notice how tiny they are, how serious they look, their faces alive with anticipation — School! This is school! — and you know there are two diapers – diapers! – tucked into their Blue’s Clues backpacks.

And you tell yourself well yes, the Temple preschool is the best there is, we asked so many other parents, the teachers were caught napping at that one up the street from their grandmother’s and that other one, they locked the little girl in the bathroom, who does that? This preschool is great, Temple or not. Or maybe Jewish parents don’t let folks get away with that shit, hahaha.

And then again that cop car at the top of the parking lot and there’s that burly guy with the crewcut his eyes on constant scan, so what, you say, even though that preschool at the Methodist church founded in the Civil War era, you didn’t see any security there. So what.

And it’s all bullshit and you knew it then but you don’t have to lie to yourself about it anymore the day your older boy calls from university to check in and he casually lets drop he took a course on Jews in Film, and say what would you recommend? And then again, a year or so later, he tells you he took a class on the conflict and on the first day held his own with an anti-Israel student, and then again a few years later, he calls you again on a Friday evening and asks for the blessing before he goes out drinking with his workmates, and then again, he texts you a photo of his girlfriend lighting the Hanukkah candles in their window.

Then again and then again and then again.

And then again your younger boy says, “When are we doing Shabbat?” and when you bless him he leans in for his kiss on the head, however awful your week has been, he wants that kiss on the head and he wants the blessing that goes with it. And then again, you’re pedal boating with him on a lake and he asks you about Torat Haim, and what do you think it means?

Then again and then again and then again.

And then they kill in Seattle and then again in Pittsburgh and then again in Poway in places our children make sacred with their yearnings, to learn, to make friends, to figure out what exactly it is that makes them think their parents are their heroes, and then again they try, they try to kill again in West Bloomfield.

Every time, you write the story, you call security officials, you quote the politicians, and you look at their photos on your desk, on the bulletin board, and you think for a fleeting second, was this worth it?

Okay, not just for a fleeting second. I’m lying to myself again. It’s a constant hum. What have I done? Why did I give them this legacy?

I know why, I know why, because it is beautiful and rich and thick with ancient longing and love and no one who has that should ever let it die.

I know why, but here I am, the hum never abates and I am so fucking exhausted, we are so fucking exhausted. “The killer’s motive” will launch a million second grafs, but who gives a fuck about the killer’s motive, what do we need to know about the killer’s motive except that it thrives in countless bloodstreams.

Just stop, just stop, just stop.

Gentlemen, you’re no Lloyd Bentsen.

This past week there they went again, rhyming if not exactly agreeing, this time about the lessons of the Holocaust. Both men peddled familiar tropes about the universal meaning of an event that Jews understand as unique in history.

Still, there was a critical difference: Walz wore his Holocaust dilution haplessly, like a cloak he grabbed on his way out into the bleak cold. Vance’s denialism was part of a broader strategy of stripping our collective memory of atrocities committed against the vulnerable.

Just like in the 2024 debate, Walz stumbled and Vance came prepared – but in the context of Holocaust trivialization, this time around, being prepared makes Vance look a lot worse. Echoing pablum about the Holocaust, as Walz did, is a sign of an unoriginal mind; deliberately seeking to erase the Holocaust, as Vance did, is a sign of a malicious mind.

Walz, the Minnesota governor, spoke at a press conference with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey after federal agents shot dead Alex Pretti, who was documenting their abductions of undocumented migrants (and at times U.S. citizens.)

“We have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” Walz said. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” (If only people were still growing up reading Anne Frank’s diary. The iconic book seems to be less frequently assigned as mandatory reading for middle schoolers than it was in the past).

A few days later, Vance marked the 27th of January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, with this statement:

“Today we remember the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust, the millions of stories of individual bravery and heroism, and one of the enduring lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history: that while humans create beautiful things and are full of compassion, we’re also capable of unspeakable brutality. And we promise never again to go down the darkest path.”

Missing is any mention of Jews or of Nazis. It’s hard to believe, given Vance’s embrace of blood and soil nationalism, that this was inadvertent.

Let’s sharpen the contrast: Walz tossed off his gratuitous reference in decrying government troops rounding up and deporting innocents, which at least has a cognate in Nazi behavior in the years before the Holocaust. Vance erased any meaningful mention of victims in a week in which he embraced the government brutality that left Walz grasping for cognates.

I had – like millions of Americans – spent the weekend staring at my phone playing and replaying Pretti’s execution, and although I’m in retirement mode and trying to break my news fix jag, when I saw Walz and Frey planned to speak, I parked myself in front of the TV.

As soon as Walz made the remark, I knew of the likely repercussions: The debate over how to best apply the meaning of Anne Frank’s diary has been a thing since less than a decade after she died at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Lillian Hellman, a universalist who happened to be Jewish, bested Meyer Levin, a Jewish author, in a struggle over what message to bring to the stage.

Toward the end of her diary, shortly before she was deported, Anne wrote in perhaps the most cited quote from her diary, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” That should be hard to read: It is a falsehood written by a good person who truly believed it.

(Much less quoted is a sentence from the same passage: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too.”)

If there is any meaning to be extracted from the Holocaust, one is that people are not, at heart, good, and that it is a grueling day to day hour to hour endeavor to resist our worst impulses. We like to say that the Bible reminds us 36 times to be kind to the strangers among us, more than any other commandment, but this is not validation, it is evidence that the prophets had to bang decent behavior into our heads over and over again.

Hellman dragged the quote kicking and screaming from the context of Anne’s murder and sought to elevate its fragile desperation into a meaning so banal it defies understanding: See, even this victim of mass murder believes we all should be besties!

Levin has since been vindicated, in part because of Cynthia Ozick’s excoriating review of the play when it was revived on Broadway in 1997. (I saw that production: I was grateful that it restored some of the diary’s Jewish meaning, not least in its casting an actual Jew, Natalie Portman, as Anne.)

Frank was hiding because she faced certain murder if she was found. Walz’s imagined diarist faces certain scarring: possible deportation and family separation. But she does not face being removed from history.

I spoke to the late preeminent Holocaust scholar, Yehuda Bauer, in 2017, about why the Holocaust was unique. “All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians.”

For the Nazis, Jewish genocide was not a contained endeavor, a convenience, a means to acquire wealth, a scapegoating: It was an overarching mission. Hitler invaded countries to kill Jews.

Walz’s conflation is hardly original: The phrase “the Anne Frank of” is cluttering our collective memory, referring in some cases to diarists who survive into adulthood.

Claiming that a murdered Jew is everyperson is one thing; erasing Jews from memory, as Vance did, is quite another.

This was not the first time the Trump administration removed Jews from the Holocaust. In 2017, in one of his first statements as president, Donald Trump marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by omitting any mention of Jews from his statement. (The ensuing controversy led to my call with Bauer).

At the time, the omission of Jews seemed to be the mark of a presidency that no one expected to happen and that was scrambling to adhere to the playbook. The White House eventually apologized.

“It may have all started as a mistake by a new administration that is loath to admit it’s wrong,” Deborah Lipstadt wrote at the time. “Conversely, it may be a conscious attempt by people with antisemitic sympathies to rewrite history. Either way it is deeply disturbing.”

Lipstadt’s second guess turns out to be the right one. Vance knowingly peddles lies about whole classes of people. He smears the dead civilians in Minnesota and advises the federal gunslingers that they have the administration’s back. He treats the most ancient and essentialist expression of antisemitism – that Judaism definitionally persecutes Christians – as an outlook worthy of engagement. He upholds a German party that seeks to erase the country’s Nazi shame.

He belongs to an administration systematically erasing the American record of slavery and racism.

I took a course with Bauer in 1986 on Holocaust history. A classmate asked him to distinguish between the Jewish significance of the Holocaust and its universal significance.

What I recall him saying was, “The Holocaust only happened to Jews. The Holocaust may happen to anyone.”

We can’t wrap the Holocaust in amber. To strip the Holocaust of Jewish meaning is to erase Jewish suffering, but to freeze its meaning in the mid-20th century is to forsake vigilance. It guts the commandment to safeguard the strangers in our midst.

The most striking thing I’ve seen since Saturday is Anderson Cooper’s CNN interview with the “lady in the pink jacket”, Stella Carlson, who caught on video Pretti’s execution. What I find harrowing is how she explains her loneliness, her terror in the face of violence emanating from the entity that is built to protect us, the government.

Only one thing is the Holocaust. But its signposts remain ever present. Heeding them, noting them without diminishing the Jewish meaning of the Holocaust, is a tightrope walk that requires sensitivity and smarts.

Walz at least for a moment may have lost those qualities, but the man who recognizes an atrocity in the making deserves more grace than the man who hopes we don’t notice.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency just posted my scoops about the ADL:

It pleaded with other Jewish groups not to make a scene after Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s FBI chief, likened the group to “terrorists” for tracking right wing extremists.

And then it removed a section called “Protect Civil Rights” from its “What We Do” web page.

Read on:

ADL removes ‘Protect Civil Rights’ from website as it narrows its mission amid right-wing attacks

I wear your hatred like a cloud

Wet and scented with your sweat.

Curse my name and call me loud

I will not drown in your regret.

My lips were stained when Rachel kissed

Me, named me son and gave me breath.

The blood I suckled binds her wrist

And flecks the snow that soft her death.

Call me Jew and call me Satan,

I’ll turn and face you either way.

I’ll shed my coat and put your hate on

And wear it til the light of day.

So I wrote the sonnet, below, about the night my father died.

My wife is an early bird, I’m a night owl.

When our boys were little, she would almost always go to bed before me.

When I joined her, sometimes she was awake, sometimes she was falling asleep, sometimes she was fast asleep. In whatever state she was in, even in deepest slumber, she would ask me, “Did you check the boys?”

Of course I checked the boys. They lay in their beds in a room just feet away.

My parents split up when I was 2. Maybe 3, technically, but that’s another story.

When I was 14, my mother insisted I move in with my father. I was reluctant. If I wanted to stay at the same high school, which I did, I would have to commute much of the north-south length of Montreal: a walk in the city’s windwhipped below zero winters, and then three buses. The longest stretch, along Décarie, was the 17 route, where they still ran heat-challenged buses from the 1940s.

My objections slipped away within weeks: My father was a salesman who often traveled and he would leave me alone for days, sometimes a week at a time. He taught me how to cook, how to clean up, he left me to wake myself up and get to school on time. (That was a challenge.) I appreciated the independence and the responsibilities it entailed.

I spent Saturday and Sunday nights with my mother, but one Sunday night I didn’t – I don’t think she and I fought, I just didn’t want to. I was 16, and not wanting to do something was reason enough not to do it.

I came into the apartment and I told my father I was home. He shouted out that I was not supposed to be. I guessed he was in his bedroom with a woman. He clubbed with his couple friends on Sundays and when he wasn’t seeing someone, they encouraged him to pick up women.

I closed the door to my own room and I thought now is a good time to go through my clothes and throw out what I don’t like.

There was a pile of clothes on my floor when she screamed that his heart stopped. She ran out asking me for help. She was barely dressed. I thought she was at least 30, but I was 16, so maybe she was 25 or so.

So I went into his room and I saw his corpse, eyes open, mouth open, on the bed.

We lived on the 16th floor of a new apartment building on an otherwise empty street in St. Laurent, a suburb known for its neat streets, its warehouses and its strip malls.

The building had a pool. It had underground parking and a lobby with mirrors and a chandelier. People who made decent salaries and who wanted the trappings of luxury put up with the isolation of living in St. Laurent. When I didn’t take the three buses to school, I biked.

I looked up the address just now. It’s got a walk score of 86 out of 100. Plenty of shops and restaurants nearby.

Not in 1977. When I biked along isolated patches of Côte Vertu, headed for the terrors of Décarie (and a small portion of its expressway), truckers would veer toward me and grin when I scrambled into the woods.

So on June 12 of that year I did not know CPR. I called 911 while the woman shrunk into a corner of the apartment and sobbed. I ran down the brightly lit corridor on the 16th floor, and banged on doors, and no one answered until someone did and I begged people to help. I asked them if they were nurses, because doctors would not live on the 16th floor of an isolated highrise.

Some of our neighbors, wrapped in bathrobes, came to see. They saw my father dead, half naked in his bed.

He was a dark man, solidly built, covered with hair, shorter than me. His favored cologne was Aramis, which I thought was too sweet. Once, someone called him a “schvartze Yid,” and he liked it, it’s what he called himself.

The ambulance came. The first responders said he was dead beyond recovery. They said he likely had a stroke.

I called my oldest sister. She came with her husband. We followed the ambulance to a hospital. The young woman, who for some reason had come with us, sat huddled in a corridor. My sister crouched in front of her and comforted her in French and told her she could go home. We never saw or heard from her again.

My mother was still in love with my father. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what happened. She was fragile, I told myself, but the real reason was that since early childhood I had navigated my mother’s interrogations about my father’s lovers. I couldn’t bear the prospect of explaining this woman to my mother.

So I lied, I said I watched him die. There was a consequence I did not anticipate, but maybe I should have, but I was 16. My mother wanted me to describe what happened. My sisters would plead with her to leave me alone, but she was relentless.

Which meant I had to place myself in the room with my father, itself not insane – he had the color TV and we watched it together, Carson, “Ellery Queen,” “60 Minutes,” sometimes I would fall asleep next to him, surrounded by the ridiculous wallpaper shaded bronze with nudes in coy poses.

But to silence my mother, I had to, in persuasive and vivid detail, describe my father seizing up and dying. What were we doing, what were we watching, what did I hear or notice that made me look at him? I had to imagine my father having a stroke. Which of course meant that while I was lying to my mother I also pictured him dying with a woman on top of him during sex, again and again and again.

So yes, I checked the boys.

Sometimes we put ourselves inside stories we love without intending to. When my younger son was 2, I went to a parents’ meeting at preschool. His teacher told me all was good, but he had a quirk: When one of the assistants would offer him a cupcake at snacktime, instead of taking the cupcake, he would lean in and take a bite.

My sons spent a good part of their day at my mother-in-law’s house surrounded by older Balkan women, so reaching in for a bite while someone holds up a cupcake is a given (I don’t even have to explain this part when I tell Greeks the story). I called my wife at work immediately afterward to tell her the story and to describe the teacher’s bafflement, and we both laughed really hard. Within a year or so, my wife was remembering herself at the meeting.

That makes sense. I experienced a moment of intense love for our child, for my in-laws, and of course my wife wanted to remember it as if she were there.

Putting yourself in a room intentionally, though, watching someone you love seize up and die, is a little crazy.

A lot else happened in the days leading up to my father’s funeral, and the days after. Some of it was pretty funny. Some of it was awful.

For some reason I thought it was a good idea in the day or so before his funeral to read Camus’ “The Stranger.” It gave me headaches. It made me sleep a lot.

Once, lying on my sister’s couch, my eyes closed, the paperback heavy in my hand, I heard my sister tell my mother, “Let him sleep, it’s how he copes.”

I’ve had recurring dreams since then; at first that my father was murdered. I was a feckless student at Hebrew University two or three years later but I do remember surprising a professor who I think thought I was not a serious person (because I wasn’t, then), when he asked the class why “Hamlet” begins with the prince certain of his father’s murder absent the evidence that eventuates later in the play, and none of the students said anything, so I said because when someone you love dies senselessly, you want to rationalize it. And murder is a reason.

The professor, a kind South African, raised his eyebrows and said yes.

The murder dreams were followed by recurring dreams (and these persist) that he isn’t dead, that he fled from us and that I learn where he is, in another city, in another country, and he still doesn’t want to see us.

One dream sticks out, just weeks after he died: We’re in his Chrysler. His Chrysler New Yorker. His company car. He’s driving me along Saint Jacques to the prestigious drama school in St. Henri where I had been accepted (I flamed out after a semester). He’s dead. I tell him, why are you driving me, you’re dead. He says, because I have to get you to school.

I made friends that summer with a poet, Carole Leckner. I told her about the dream. She said that it wasn’t a dream, it was a visitation.

I hope so. It’s better than murder. It’s better than flight and concealment.

This year, my synagogue informed me in an automated email, my father’s yahrzeit was on June 12. The Hebrew and Gregorian anniversaries aligned.

I told this story for years. Then in 2006, I wrote this sonnet. I showed it to my wife and to a few others who knew what happened the night my father died, and suggested I write about it. A couple of them said they expected a story or a novel, not a sonnet. I stopped showing it to people.

I didn’t write this sonnet to remember. I wrote it because I was conceiving of a series of sonnets that would end with “You’ll do fine,” because it may be the most utterly meaningless phrase in the language and I wanted to see if in 14 lines I could infuse it with meaning.

I wrote six sonnets ending with “You’ll do fine.” Maybe four of them are good. Some are raw. This one is pretty.

I wrote it because my wife said “Did you check the boys,” and I loved the iambs.

“Did you check the boys?” she says, asleep.

She’ll never know. My ear against unparted

Lips, my brittle heart and then a deep

And balmy noise. The boys? Don’t get me started.

“Your father!” said the pretty girl. “His heart

Has stopped. It stopped!” He died inside her, lips

Wide open, lined with spittle. (Hers?) The art

Of lying to my mother would eclipse

My other skills. “My name is Legion,” Scratch

Told Christ, “for we are many.” Mark says Jesus

Drowned those spirits. I believe you catch

Them slipping into little mouths like breezes.

You pluck them out and throw them to the swine.

Tell your sleeping babies: “You’ll do fine.”

2006

Photo: January 2025, IDF spokesman’s office.

“The tactics used to suppress a civilian population create dissonance,” Itamar Luria, a psychologist, said.

I spoke with Luria in 1990. I was writing a story for The Jerusalem Post about Parents Against Erosion, a then recently established support group for parents of combat soldiers.

I attended an evening session and heard mothers and fathers unsettled by their sons – then it was mostly sons – returning home from service sullen and mute.

Occupation does not happen in a silo. It ripples outward from patrols and raids and envelops families.

On Aug. 8, before dawn, Israel’s Cabinet authorized the occupation of Gaza City as a means of ending the 22 month Israel-Hamas war. Should it succeed, the plan would place the entirety of the strip under Israeli control.

Call-ups are due to begin this Tuesday, unless the military brass talks down the Security Cabinet.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted he does not want an extended occupation, but it’s hard to see how it will not end up being exactly what he says he does not want.

Netanyahu says an undefined Arab entity will administer the strip, but it won’t be the Palestinian Authority. No Arab nation is interested. The multiple actions Netanyahu has promised will bring an end to the war have not panned out.

“This is exactly the result Hamas wanted,” said Yair Lapid, the opposition leader. “An occupation without a goal and without a plan for the day after.”

A long term occupation will at first seem to be a relief from war’s devastation — but its effects over time are also insidious on occupied and occupier.

You will read a lot as Israel prepares and carries out this latest plan about the costs of occupation to Palestinian lives and wellbeing and aspirations, about the diplomatic isolation it will bring about. Talk of an arms embargo is intensifying among Israel’s closest allies, in Europe and in Washington.

You will read about the stretch long-term occupation will impose on the Israeli economy as the government covers reservists’ salaries and businesses suffer absences of key personnel.

You will read about the brain drain it will spur of educated Israelis who rushed to take up arms after Hamas’ genocidal raids on Oct 7 and who are exhausted by a war that after 22 months seems not to show any signs of ending.

You will read about the tensions it will aggravate between the secular and modern Orthodox Israelis who dedicate weeks every year to policing Gaza and the Haredi Orthodox Jews who continue to avoid the draft.

But there are effects that won’t immediately be apparent. It will be some time before you read about the occupation insinuating itself into intimacies.

A lot has changed since 1990. Reservists don’t need to wait for leave to find a public phone to say they’re coming home. They can check in with families every day and several times a day.

The Gaza war is much more far reaching in its destruction for Palestinians than any before it, and soldiers already are relating stories of their role in the leveling of vast areas encompassing homes, farms and factories and the deadly chaos at poorly managed aid distribution sites.

These horrors will recede in a long term occupation.

What will remain are the hauntings, the silences sour with experiences that never make headlines, the corrosion borne of power earned by your gun.

Here’s a haunting from 1990, just weeks after I spoke with Luria.

Climbing the dark stairwell of a dwelling in a Gaza refugee camp, leaping stairs to keep up with your captain, who believes a rooftop lookout is directing stone throwers.

There is a man on the rooftop. Actually, a kid. His desk is covered with sketches — delicate, detailed birds eye views of the clusters of buildings and streets below.

The captain is convinced the kid is a lookout. He presses his gun barrel against the kid’s cheek. “I see movement up here, I’m coming for you. I don’t care if it’s you or not.”

The kid shakes. “Yes sir, yes sir.”

What will remain are the tremors the encounter instilled in every man on the roof. Tremors that shudder after your uniform is carefully folded away and you’re a civilian again. Tremors that explode days later into your threat of violence to a thug who ripped apart a placard held up by a friend at a peace rally.

“If you touch her, I will break your head,” I said.

The thug retreated. But the tremors remained.

“The tactics used to suppress a civilian population create dissonance,” Itamar Luria told me when, after attending that long ago meeting of parents, I called the requisite experts to add context to my story.

I felt the vindication a reporter feels when an expert tells him what he already knows through lived experience.

At the parents meeting’ 35 years ago I watched a young man stand up and chastise his elders. “Surely the first victims of the Intifada are the Palestinians who are being beaten and humiliated,” he said.

Tamar Liebes, who founded the group, told the young man that the suffering of Palestinians was “first and foremost among our concerns.”

“But we are parents and we see what our children bring home with them,” she said.

What they bring home is at times impossible to bear. More than 40 soldiers have taken their lives since Oct. 7.

Occupation does not happen in a silo. It ripples out from patrols and raids and envelops minds and sometimes crushes them.

She was, I think, touting a paper she had co-written with her supervisor, David Makovsky, who was an old friend. That wasn’t what struck me. What did was my late mother’s name.

My mother, Rachel, spelled her name Strumza. The name stood out not just because it is uncommon, but because of family lore: My mother had told me that anyone I met named Strumza was a distant relative.

The Strumzas were descended from two brothers, a shochet, or ritual slaughterer, and a rabbi, who lived in Thessaloniki at the end of the 1700s.

The Ottomans decreed that everyone should have proper family names. The brothers were also vintners, and their vineyards were in Strumica, a region named for a river in what is now Northern Macedonia. All Strumzas are their descendants, my mother said, and her brothers affirmed.

That was cool, or at least I thought so as a child in Montreal, where “Turkish Jew” sounded weird and was the opposite of a conversation starter.

The coolness I attached to the knowledge stuck well into adulthood, and so, many decades later, I answered my mother’s namesake not out of interest in her pitch but because she was my mother’s namesake. She immediately replied, and we had coffee.

I had an agenda, too: to test my mother’s story about the two brothers. It turns out, Rachel Stroumsa, the researcher of Middle East policy, had heard the same story

So I was validated. I know, sample of one – this was not scientific. There may be Jews named Strumza or or Strumsa or Estrumsa or Stroumsa (some of the variations I’ve encountered) who are not relatives; there may be people named for the region who are not Jewish.

But I like to think that when I come across the name, I come across an echo of an extended family I might have had.

I drove through Strumica a decade ago, and I found no Jews, but I found vineyards and people who were tall like me and had long faces and dark eyes like mine, but I wasn’t inspired. I couldn’t write about it. The local museum was closed for repairs. It was a pleasant corner of the Balkans that told me little about myself.

Thessaloniki once had a Jewish majority, and then after devastating fires in 1917, a chunk of the community left (spurred in part by the surging Greek hypernationalism) and there was a plurality.

Then the Nazis came, and wiped out more of the community than almost anywhere else. More than 90 percent. And then there was a tiny remnant.

I first came to Thessaloniki in 1996, and I found almost nothing Jewish in it until I heard a man sing a line from a lullaby. I came in 2005 with my young family in part because my wife’s family had lived in the city for a number of years.

We traveled with one of her aunts, a deeply devout Orthodox Christian. Without asking me, Vanghelista took me to the city’s Jewish corners. She insisted I know them. That this woman recognized in me a longing I did not recognize in myself established a bond between us that survives her passing a couple of years ago.

One of our stops was at the Jewish museum. Then it was small and charming, telling the story of an ancient Jewish community and sorrowfully noting its passing.

I visited again today. The exhibits have become more expansive and far-reaching. A considerable part of it is devoted to the Nazi occupation and the murder of the city’s Jews. A panel explains that the Greek Jewish community in the last 20 years has become more robust about staking its claim to compensation and to being memorialized. I wrote a few years ago about the late (non-Jewish) mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, who spearheaded the revival.

Now, there is a room walled with the names of deported Jews. It is not a complete accounting, because accountings of a system dedicated to our disappearance from history never can be complete.

So I kneeled at a wall with names beginning with “S” and I found Strumsas, a lot of Strumsas, five Rachel Strumsas. Close to 40 Strumsas.

It was hard to count because I kept shaking with anger. A young docent told me I could take a picture if I wanted.

I told my son, Nathaniel, that these were his ancestors. These were his people. I wanted to tell him that these were the reasons why when we go to Greece we enjoy his mother’s extended family but mine are gone, or absent, or eradicated. But it seemed obvious and it was hard to contain my anger. So we left.

I would like to say their memories should be a blessing, but the Nazis murdered not just their bodies, but their souls, their memories. I wanted their memories.

(Photo by Creative Commons)

I was crossing the Bay Bridge last week when I caught a waxing moon propped up in the night sky, colored blood red.

I wanted to record it – but I was driving. And in photos, moons get lost in artificial light.

So I wrote about it.

Bay Bridge

The moon shucked off its yellow meat

And let its frame rust red.

The sky is broke and wrapped in lead.

The bay unfolds in heat.

The rental’s dashboard flashes white,

The windshield swells with sweat.

Above the lapping, lilting wet

I steer into the night.

The revelation this weekend of an American Jewish nonprofit’s involvement in promoting an Israeli politician in the throes of an election campaign comes after years of attacks by Netanyahu on liberal leaning foreign nonprofits promoting civil society in Israel.

The Marker, an Israeli financial daily, first posted the revelation on Friday. This reporter has been working on the story for a number of weeks.

The book was a bestseller in Israel as was the English language version published by Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint, Threshold Editions.

Tikva’s CEO, Eric Cohen, in an email to this reporter last month, said Tikvah spent $110,000 “to help translate, edit, produce, publish, and distribute” the Hebrew version of the autobiography. (Promoting the book in 2022, the Israeli publisher said that Netanyahu wrote both versions of the book, in Hebrew and in English, in longhand.)

Cohen said his group helped publish the book “to advance understanding about Israeli history, to advance understanding about the practice of statesmanship, and to expand awareness and sales for the entire Shibboleth library of books.”

Tikvah’s investment in the book, among more than 40 books that Tikvah helped Shibboleth, a conservative imprint, publish, was not connected to Netanyahu’s campaign, Cohen told The Marker. He said Tikvah did not contribute any further funds to the book’s promotion.

Tikvah’s chairman, Elliott Abrams, last year said Shibboleth was among the entities “launched and developed” in Israel by Tikvah. Abrams, a senior foreign policy official in a number of Republican administrations, made the claim In an announcement that Tikvah was spinning off some of its Israeli operations to a new think tank, Herut.

Cohen said Tikvah invested the money in the book in “late 2022.” Elections were called that year on June 30.

Netanyahu claims no knowledge of Tikvah’s involvement, although the nonprofit’s relationship with Shibboleth was common knowledge in conservative circles in Israel.

Netanyahu and his allies have long decried liberal NGOs for allegedly interfering in Israeli politics. His animus fueled his infamous claim on the day of the 2015 election that "Arab voters are coming in droves to the ballot boxes. Left-wing NGOs bring them in buses."

More recently, Netanyahu’s government has sought to pass bills that would place severe restrictions on nongovernmental organizations that receive the majority of their money from foreign governments. The bills’ defenders say they want to limit foreign influence in Israel’s political system.

The autobiography, originally scheduled to be published on Nov. 22, 2022, was rushed out on Oct. 18, 2022, exactly two weeks before the Nov. 1 election, which Netanyahu won narrowly. It places Netanyahu and his family at the heroic center of much of Israel’s history and settles scores with rivals and critics.

Once the new publication date was announced and it was clear the book’s sales would coincide with the campaign – and not post-date it – Netanyahu’s Likud Party told Netanyahu it could no longer promote the book, The Marker reported. Doing so would violate laws against a candidate profiting personally from a campaign.

It’s not clear if Tikvah pulled back from its involvement after the new publication date was announced. “We remain grateful that this book, written by one of the most significant leaders of the Jewish people, is now available in the Jewish people’s language,” Cohen told The Marker.

Why Netanyahu would need a nonprofit to sink money into the preparation and publication of his autobiography is a puzzle. Autobiographies by major public figures are virtually guaranteed to be best-sellers.

Netanyahu’s office told The Marker that his contract with Sella Meir Press, an affiliate of Shibboleth, did not mention Tikvah and that he had no idea the fund was involved. Tikvah’s relationship with Shibboleth has long been a matter of public record. Ha’aretz reported on the relationship in 2019.

Direct contributions to Israeli political campaigns by incorporated bodies, foreign or domestic, are forbidden, but indirect assistance is permitted.

An expert on Israeli nonprofits, Arnie Draiman, said Tikvah’s contributions likely were legal but raised ethical questions for an American non-profit with an Israeli affiliate.

“Campaigns are short-term and partisan; nonprofits should aim for lasting, systemic change across political shifts,” Draiman said. Additionally, “Involvement in politics may pressure staff or clients to conform, especially when essential services are involved,” he said.

In August 2022 – after elections were called – Simon & Schuster’s Jonathan Karp bought the world rights to the book from Gary Ginsberg, a lawyer with extensive ties with Democrats and the pro-Israel community. Multiple officials at Simon & Schuster involved in the book’s publication did not return or declined requests to comment on how many books were sold and who got the money.

Cohen declined The Marker’s request to explain an $9 million spike recorded in its 2023 tax filing in spending for “education programs, content creation and publishing aimed at fostering and enhancing Jewish culture, religion, history, economics, law and social policy.” That item soared from about $6 million a year from 2019-2022 to nearly $15 million in 2023.

Tikvah offered a summer course on the book in 2023. The pitch for the $75 course did not mention Tikvah’s involvement in the book’s publication. Tikvah also promoted the book on its podcasts.

The Netanyahu book is not the first time Tikvah, which bills itself as “advancing Jewish excellence and Western civilization through education and ideas,” has been involved in Israeli politics. Alumni of Tikvah’s educational programs in 2023 urged the fund to cut off ties with Kohelet, the think tank that shaped the Netanyahu government’s proposals to radically restructure the judiciary, a push that sparked months of mass protests.

A number of reviewers panned “My Story,” a New York Times bestseller, for being unselfaware and reductive. The Washington Post called the book “a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing narrative.”

Conservatives loved the book, likening Netanyahu – in more than one review – both to Winston Churchill and a character worthy of a movie star treatment.

One such assessment said the book was akin to “a Tom Clancy novel written for a Tom Cruise movie adaptation.”

That appeared in Mosaic, a publication funded by Tikvah.

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to show that a bill in the Knesset would restrict NGOs that rely on most of their funding from foreign governments.

On July 14, the Pentagon announced that it had contracted with Grok for $200 million to equip the Department of Defense with AI.

On July 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning federal departments from using AI models that are not “truth seeking” – the same term his best frenemy Musk said Grok would embody before it unleashed its tide of Jew-hatred.

Not mentioned in Trump’s executive order was Grok, which said Hitler “would have crushed it.”

Not mentioning is worse than cowardice, it is worse than complicity. It is an absence of speech that is an action. It is erasure.

It is a plague and Trump, the autocrat unhinging our country from decency, is its vector, its patient zero. While he begs his base to not mention Jeffrey Epstein, his government is erasing the women and Blacks and Latinos and LGBTQ people who shaped this country, it is erasing the Holocaust.

Plagues do not recognize boundaries. Among the infected are Zohran Mamdani, who is running to be New York’s mayor, and who would on Oct. 8, 2023 not mention an antisemitic atrocity – effectively erasing it.

Also infected are legacy Jewish organizations who will not mention the responsibility Israel’s government has for the carnage and starvation Palestinians are enduring in Gaza.

The absence of a mention of Grok and its antisemitic gyrations in Trump’s executive order is notable because the order is otherwise intensely focused on race. Trump seemed especially exercised by the Black George Washington generated last year by Google’s Gemini.

“One major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy,” the order said.

Trump will mention antisemitism when it serves his purpose: weaponizing it to demoralize the universities he hopes to transform or destroy, and to set a precedent for arresting dissidents. Jewish organizations praising this crusade are enabling it, even as it does little to protect Jewish students facing campus hostilities.

Trump and his acolytes will not mention antisemitism when it claws out of their own fetid soil. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has led the prosecution in Congress of elite campuses for antisemitism, has not commented on Grok and its antisemitism and the $200 million taxpayers are paying for it. Her office did not return a request for comment.

Last year, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee demanded answers from Gemini, about its “woke” content and whether it was spurred by Biden administration directives. Not a peep now that the Pentagon is spending hundreds of millions on “MechaHitler.”

Jordan’s office did not return a request for comment.

It’s true that both Musk and Google founder Sergey Brin eventually copped to screwing up. But however disorienting it may seem to some to see George Washington as a Black man, calling for the mass murder of Jews would seem to merit equivalent oversight – especially from a company whose founder has mimicked Nazis and amplified antisemitic conspiracies as the “actual truth.”

Not mentioning is not simply a reflex, a duck and weave: It is a policy. It is an ideology.

It is a principle.

The day after Grok went full metal Nazi, the Missouri attorney general, Andrew Bailey, a Republican, wrote an array of tech companies demanding answers as to why Trump ranks so poorly on antisemitism on their chatbots.

Here are some: Trump’s veiled threats at Jewish voters, his equivocating about a neo-Nazi march, dining with a Holocaust denier, ensconcing in his administration actual antisemites.

Bailey does not want chatbots to mention these examples. Not on Bailey’s list of demand letters: Grok.

Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, has in recent weeks grappled with a phrase he has defended, “Globalize the Intifada.” His latest twist is that he will not condemn the phrase but he will “discourage” its use.

The controversy is weirdly attenuated: Mamdani has never deployed or endorsed the phrase – he declined to condemn it in a pre-primary podcast, setting off the controversy. A far more troubling case of Mamdani not mentioning, of erasure of an atrocity, has been lost in the noise.

“I mourn the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours,” he said on Oct. 8, 2023, a day after Hamas marauders committed the worst act of antisemitic violence since the Holocaust. “Netanyahu’s declaration of war, the Israeli government’s decision to cut electricity to Gaza, and Knesset members calling for another Nakba will undoubtedly lead to more violence and suffering in the days and weeks to come. The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”

In 69 words, Mamdani inveighs against Israeli politicians using genocidal language but does not mention the genocidal action that just occurred. Hundreds of people were “killed,” passively. There is no mention of Hamas, and its ideological compunction to murder Jews. There is no mention of Jews. Perpetrators and victims are erased.

Then he was a state senator. Now that he’s running for mayor he periodically invokes “the horrific war crime of Oct. 7,” which misnomers an act of genocide.

Just as Missouri’s Bailey is building an ideological framework for not mentioning the antisemitism in Trumpian precincts, so too does Mamdani get his Paulian chorus of defenders who construct a virtue of not mentioning.

M. Gessen in The New York Times wrote an essay which starts out as a defense of Mamdani and then takes an unsettling detour into recasting the deadly attacks in Washington D.C. and Boulder, Colorado as “terrorism,” just not the antisemitic kind.

“Neither attacker made any obviously antisemitic statements,” Gessen wrote.

The standard of obviousness to determine intent and effect is ancient and insidious. The white supremacists who deployed literacy tests designed to keep Blacks from voting did not name Blacks. Derek Chauvin did not utter a racial epithet while his knee squeezed the life out of George Floyd.

Gessen argues that Israel was the preeminent factor in the attacks. “If we are looking to draw larger lessons from this brutality, it’s worth considering that violence that looks antisemitic may — even when it very effectively serves to scare a great many Jews — be something else,” Gessen said.

A lot of racist atrocities are also “something else.” Chauvin had a professional brief to arrest people who pass counterfeit Jacksons.

But Israel is not just “something else,” it is salient to Jewish expression, for many reasons, but principally because Israel is home to half the world’s Jews. The ancient imperative of pidyon shvu’im, the redemption of the captives is what brought Jews out into the streets of Boulder. The fact that the captives were seized from Israeli land does not separate them from their people.

The same imperative of Jewish interdependence is at the heart of Rabbi Jill Jacobs’ indictment last week in the Forward of the Jewish establishment for not mentioning the starvation lapping through Gaza’s Palestinians, for not mentioning the genocidal fantasies of some members of the Netanyahu government. (The Reform movement on Sunday came out with a statement saying that “denying basic humanitarian aid crosses a moral line” and that the continued presence of extremists in the government “morally compromised Israel’s actions.”)

“What good would Jewish protest do?” is the question that haunts Jewish groups: It becomes fodder for antisemites and for haters of Israel. (“Even the Jews…”) It angers people who believe Israel deserves nothing but fealty in a war launched by Jew-hating genocidaires. It cuts off the access the organizations have to the Israeli government, and that they cherish deeply.

But to not mention is to abdicate leadership. Israel’s government may not give a whit about what the alphabet soup of American Jewish organizations have to say about the war, but if these groups pretend to lead this country’s Jews, they should answer to this country’s Jews, and not with reflexive defensiveness about biased media or the responsibility of Hamas.

Hamas is responsible. Media bias exists. But Israel is with the United States running a chaotic food distribution program that has resulted in hundreds of deaths. Responsible government ministers have endorsed starvation as a tactic. Israel has imposed restrictions to keep Hamas from seizing the food, but has not used the same powers at its disposal to flood the strip with relief.

Mentioning these things does not undermine the Jewish covenant, it deepens it.

The ubiquity of the biblical commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, crocheted on countless throw pillows, appearing in script above countless school room blackboards, has rendered it almost meaningless.

But it is suffused with meaning. The word in the Hebrew original is not “neighbor,” but “re’ah,” companion, with a meaning more intense than companion: “Re’ah” is feminine and also means wife. Love your spouse as you would yourself is good marriage counseling; expanding that intensity of love across society is a recipe for political health.

In the winter of 1943, Marlou Droop, a German writer and a member of the Nazi Party, was outraged that her friend Rudi Holzer was being held at Rosenstrasse 2-4, a Jewish community building in Berlin made into a holding center for deportees.

Holzer, like Droop, was a baptized Roman Catholic. He was also an ethnic Jew.

She approached a connected friend, an army officer. He told her to drop it. “You shouldn’t even mention things to do with Jews,” he said, according to “Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany,” by Nathan Stoltzfus. “Or if you do, you can’t be caught doing it.”

Don’t get caught mentioning the Jews.

Holzer lived, but not because of Droop’s protestations. He lived because his non-Jewish wife, Elsa, joined the wives of some 1,800 Jewish men slated for deportation – men who until then the Nazis had spared because of their status as husbands to Aryan women.

They mentioned their husbands. “We’d like to have our husbands back,” another wife, Hilda Elkuss, recalled the woman calling out.

It was the only protest against the deportation of Jews in Nazi Germany. And it was a success. The men (and it was almost only men – Aryan husbands were likelier than women to succumb to pressure to cut off their Jewish spouses) – lived.

The Nazis understood the power of mentioning. Josef Goebbels sought to black out media coverage of the protests.

A cluster of sculptures across from Rosenstrasse 2-4 stands now as a rebuke to ordinary Germans: Had you believed Jewish life was as precious as your own, had you gathered the courage these women mustered to mention their loved ones, had you imagined the erasure of your Jewish neighbors as the erasure of your love…

Had you mentioned the Jews, they might have lived.

The question of inherent worth versus earned worth is an ancient one – at least as old as David v. Ishbosheth.

This week it played out in an especially ugly way.

Donald Trump valorized white South Africans for being white while preparing Afghan refugees for deportation who risked their lives for America because, well, they’re not white.

Axios, in its pithy Axiosese, aptly called it a “split screen”. Here in real time was a vivid argument on what citizenship means: Racial belonging, or commitment to an idea?

The jarring elevation of rank racism over patriotic duty recalled for me one of Washington DC’s hidden gems, a paean to the triumph of patriotism over race identity: the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, tucked into a small building on R Street off of Dupont Circle.

I first encountered the museum, run by the Jewish War Veterans of America, in 2008, when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz organized a tour of the museum for Jewish Congress members and for the Jewish media.

I remember being moved by the museum’s intimacies: dog tags and uniforms handed down over generations, Jewish prayer books, thick and pocket sized and faded and still redolent with the hopes soldiers had for their safe return home.

Dog tags conventionally signified the soldier’s faith so the chaplaincy could apply the correct rites. During World War II, the military suspended the practice to protect any Jewish soldiers captured by the Nazis. Some Jewish soldiers defiantly scratched “J” onto their tags anyway.

I also recall an animated discussion between a trio of veterans who acted as docents: Jews were overrepresented in the military, if anything, they all agreed.

I learned over time, this insistent conversation was a feature of Jewish war veteran gatherings. The “if anything” was key: Jewish veterans lead a sisyphean battle against the impression that Jews shirk military duty.

“Time and time again, we have to remind our fellow Americans, ‘Yes, we were there,'” Col. Rich Goldenberg of the New York National Guard said a decade later at a Jewish War Veterans Shabbaton.

Goldenberg noted then that around the same time the Jewish War Veterans of America was established, so were similar societies elsewhere, in Britain and in Germany.

The timing was not coincidental: race-based nationalism was gaining traction.

“We’ve always been the outsiders looking in in the lands we’ve lived in,” said Goldenberg.

The best efforts of Jewish veteran groups notwithstanding, the trope persists, at times, God help me, perpetuated by Jews.

In Nazi Germany, World War I veteran status protected some Jews – until it didn’t. Race identification eventually trumped patriotism, and the valorous became victims. One of the lies perpetuated by Theresienstadt, the concentration camp presented to the world as a resort, was that it pampered German Jewish veterans,

The tension between fighting for an idea and preserving racial privilege was evident to the Black soldiers who fought fascism in World War II, according to surveys of troops uncovered only in recent years.

“It is impossible to understand how the brains of the Southern white man works and just what can be the cause of so much … hate that is imposed upon the Negro soldier,” The Washington Post quoted a Black soldier as saying in a 2021 story on the find. “With all the patriotic speeches … he takes time out to heap insults and abuse upon the Negro soldier who is doing all that he can to further the war effort.”

(I was considering a follow-up story about antisemitism revealed in the same surveys – it was pervasive although Jewish service in World War II outpaced the general population.)

The grimmest manifestation of the tension between Black service and white supremacist hatred were the Black soldiers in uniform who were lynched precisely because their uniform – their hard-earned status – was considered an affront. There was a lynching of a black soldier on a U.S. army base - but the FBI failed to determine who killed 19-year-old Pvt. Felix Hall. .

The lynchings, thank God, abated, but the racism and the obtuseness to it persisted, I learned in 2002 when I wrote for The Associated Press about the paucity of Black troops in Special Forces.

That year, almost four decades after the civil rights upheaval, white officers and analysts suggested that most Blacks were not up to the job – and that with a few exceptions the handful who did get into the elite units were getting a pass.

It was a familiar refrain for Black troops. "That's code for `You're not quite as smart, you're here because you're getting a break somewhere,'" said Brig. Gen. Remo Butler, a Black soldier who headed Special Operations Command-South.

How I got to Remo was telling: two of my white interviewees, the ones who were insisting to me that Special Forces were all about merit, said I should speak to him, he would set me straight about how there was no racism in the military.

Both called me back stunned after my story appeared. Apparently, they had never actually asked Remo about what it was like to be Black in the Special Forces.

Military service, with its prospect of the ultimate sacrifice, is the starkest stage on which a society determines whether it valorizes birthright or merit.

Perhaps its best known fictional representation is “Gunga Din,” by Rudyard Kipling. The Indian field aide sacrifices his own life to save the life of the narrator. “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” the soldier finally reckons. In the world of Kipling, who valorized the British idea (he wrote an ode to the Magna Carta), the realization that one earns rather than is born into valor comes too late – but is no less acute.

Kipling was hardly woke. His work was infected by racial condescension. Sentimental valorizing of dead troops of color begs the question – why shouldn’t every non-majority citizen enjoy full rights, whether or not they serve?

It’s a question embedded in the Israeli and pro-Israel valorization of Druze and Bedouin troops. The encomiums to non-Jewish Israelis who serve can be as cringe inducing as a dramatic recitation of Gunga Din, but at least they carry within them the kernel of a democratic idea: A country is worth loving, worth dying for, not because its people share the same genetic makeup, but because of the equality, the coexistence, the redemption for which it strives.

It’s not a stretch that those who serve but who do not yet enjoy the full benefits of citizenship do so according to an unwritten compact: One day, this country will be worthy of your sacrifice.

“During my combat service in Afghanistan, local Afghans protected my unit and helped us return home,” Rep. Jason Crow, the Colorado Democrat and veteran, said this week. “We promised to protect them. The Trump administration is breaking that promise.”

Yes. And why it’s breaking the promise is stunning. Asked about the different treatment of the Afghans and the South Africans, Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, said one of the criteria for refugees is that “they could be assimilated easily into our country.” The Afghans won’t be easily assimilated when they return to a country run by a vicious sect that sees them as traitors.

Trump denies race is a factor in his consideration. Yet he mimics the specious white supremacist claim that a “genocide” is underway in South Africa. (Trump is meantime seeking to deport people for accusing Israel of genocide.)

More to the point, he has gutted refugee protections for other vulnerable populations whose sin apparently is that they could not be “easily assimilated” – he has counted out entirely any intake of Palestinians.

One of the South Africans named in interviews is Charl Kleinhaus, who purports to have been threatened with property confiscation. The most recent repostings on what appears to be his Twitter account are effusive praise for Trump, which is understandable enough.

Not so understandable is what the account tweeted in 2023: “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group they are not Gods chosen like to believe they are.”

Assimilate that.

UPDATE: Kleinhaus just deleted his tweet. Here’s a screenshot.

I wrote earlier this week about an emerging division in the organized Jewish community over whether to accommodate or oppose President Donald Trump’s means of combating antisemitism, through arrests and deportation of foreign students, often without due process.

I said I had not seen polling of Jewish voters since Trump launched his crackdown. On Thursday, the Jewish Electorate Institute published a poll.

It validated my assessment, based on pre-inauguration polling, that a majority of Jews would be opposed to Trump’s anti-antisemitism measures. Two questions related to the issue specifically.

Asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Trump is handling antisemitism in America?” 56% of respondents disapproved and 31% approved.

Asked “Do you support or oppose the President’s executive orders allowing the federal government to deport individuals without a court hearing?” 71% opposed and 23% supported.

It’s of interest, nonetheless, that Trump had some of his greatest traction on antisemitism, with 31% approval being among his best scores in the survey. Asked, for instance, about his overall performance, 72% disapproved (67% strongly disapproved, a dominance of the “strongly/somewhat” split I have not often seen in polling.) Those approving of his performance amounted to 24%.

Another note of interest is Trump’s relative traction with younger Jewish voters, where 34% of people aged 18-39 approved of his performance, while 64% disapproved. The narrower divide was also reflected in the antisemitism question, where 37% of those in the age group approved and 50% disapproved.

The survey also upheld the truism that Jewish voters lean further left than the population as a whole, where the approval runs about 45% against disapproval at 52%.

It would be great for pollsters to dive deeper into why Trump backs better on antisemitism than on other issues (among them tariffs, cuts to the federal workforce, and his treatment of safety net programs like Social Security and Medicaid.) I have guesses; I’d rather not speculate out loud.

The JEI is ostensibly non-partisan, but led wholly by Democrats. The polling was conducted by the Mellman Group, a Democratic pollster.

I should note here that while I think it’s necessary to mention the partisan alignment of pollsters, I will report polls that are done according to conventions of the profession, whoever publishes them. In my career I have cited polling I see as reliable coming from partisans on both sides, and bypassed nonpartisan polling that is poorly done. This poll is solid, and Mellman’s polling is reputable.

The online poll of 800 registered voters who identified as Jews took place April 15-18. The margin of error is 3.5 percentage points.

Esther Hecht was the editor and she taught me a lot: to ask questions without fear but also with kindness and consideration.

Esther believed in encouraging reporters to pursue their interests: the copy that would result was likely to be more invested and engaging than if the reporter was less than taken with the subject.

Once, she assigned me a story on what it meant to be an anglophone Israeli poet.

I don’t know what the connection was exactly to Jerusalem – it was probably tangential.

There is a subculture of poets in Israel who write in English: its dean is the redoubtable Karen Alkalay-Gut. There is also an Israeli poet born in the United States, Harold Schimmel, who writes only in Hebrew. Esther equivocated about including him, but ultimately said I should call him too.

There are, or were, non-native born Israelis who believe themselves to be the incarnation of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and will only speak in Hebrew. Not Schimmel: He was happy to speak English, and that’s what we spoke in the interview.

I asked him why he would only write in Hebrew: I may have been pretentious enough to mention Samuel Beckett, who toggled between his native English and adopted French.

Schimmel said his poetic thinking could take place only in one language. (He said it better than that, but I can’t find the clip.) He had started publishing poetry in English, but switched to Hebrew, and stayed there (although he will simultaneously translate his poems at readings.)

The idea stuck with me: Is a poetic sensibility monolingual?

The more I thought about it the more I thought it may be: Poetry, I think, derives from the language we speak to ourselves. Its rhythms and allusions, its sensuality, is too deeply bound to our inner selves, the language we reserve for savage thoughts and for anguish, for dreams.

I dream in English: It is my skinless language.

Except when I don’t. Since Oct. 7, I have dreamed in Hebrew. The double-level dream where you’re dreaming and also commenting on the dream – in my case, wondering why I’m dreaming in Hebrew.

I was in New York last week for a seder with extended family and it was lovely. On Tuesday, before coming home to DC, I walked and biked to the Eldridge Street Synagogue museum on the Lower East Side.

I took a picture of the sanctuary, and the massive eye-like eastern window designed by Kiki Smith in 2010 to replace the more traditional window that had disappeared with disrepair. (Some 85% of the original windows survived.)

I took the photo when I was in the Ezrat Nashim, the women’s gallery, and the place was suffused with longing: for the Jerusalem the eastern light evoked through the window, for the status that the Jews of the Lower East Side aspired to when they built the building in 1887 – the Moorish architecture recalls the heyday of Jewish life in pre-Inquisition Spain.

For the longing the women in the gallery felt for the men down below when they pushed aside the drapery to better gaze at them as they shuckled and chanted.

The longing too in the very renovation and its nostalgia for a time when the Lower East Side was palpably Jewish in the way it is now Chinese, scents and language floating above the scarred and sacred streets, and in the way no place outside of Israel is any longer, not even in New York.

On the train home, I began composing a poem in Hebrew, my second in my life, my second that week.

Translating it just now was a jarring experience: I felt adrift in English, my native language. The evolutions of feeling and sense I was able to mark in Hebrew disappear in English.

Is Hebrew now my savage language, or one of them? It is dislocating to think so. But it was the only language I needed on the train home from New York.

Here’s the poem.

נומי נומי

עצמי עיניים

שכבי לידי

פתחי שפתיים

קומי קומי

פתחי עיניים

פרח בינינו

עץ חיים


קומי קומי

אחזי בידיי

רקדי איתי

עד תום השמיים

נומי נומי

עצמי עיניים

נפשי פורח

בין שפתייך

Go to sleep

Close your eyes

Lay down beside me

Open your lips

Wake up

Open your eyes

A tree of life

Has grown between us

Wake up

Take my hands

Dance with me

Until the end of the skies

Go to sleep

Close your eyes

My soul has grown

Between your lips.

Israelis have since before the country’s inception grappled with the meaning of the worst calamity in Jewish history, and if meaning should even be ascribed to it.

There is a divide, often unspoken, between survivors and their descendants, and other Jews. I am among the “other Jews” and have every Yom HaShoah, every event remembrance, wondered what I was supposed to feel.

It’s an anxiety that will play out in the space between the sirens on Thursday morning, when those of us whose families were untouched by the Nazis’ murderous hands stand silent in respect, and wonder how to put faces to our mourning.

The same unease was also evident the three years I lived in Australia, the Jewish community with the largest percentage of survivors and their descendants. I would see it in friends descended from Jews whose forebears made it to the Lucky Country before World War II, who very much loved their survivor compatriots but tiptoed around how best to remember it.

In the Jewish student group I was part of, there was a catchphrase that sounds awful on its own, but always elicited laughter. A couple of years before I joined, a woman who survived in Vienna was widowed and seeking things to do, to keep her engaged.

The students pulled her into their activities and she was revivified. The group was setting up an event – for Purim, I think – and at one point, she exclaimed, “I haven’t had this much fun since the Anschluss!”

That became the catchphrase, and it encapsulated every weird feeling felt by Jews not directly affected by the Shoah: It was at once awful and hilarious and beautiful. It made survival and its joys tangible.

In 2021, my ambiguities, my hesitant mourning tumbled out in a rapidly written series of tweets. The thread surprised me with how it resonated.

I’m reprinting it here, with some light edits.

My parents were Turkish Jews. My mother made me aware of the Holocaust when I was 5. I think what prompted it was my question about Hitler, whom an older boy had mentioned.

Its horror had seized her and shaped her. But: She made it clear. It didn't happen to us.

My parents were in Turkey. Turkey was with the allies. My father and uncle were in the Turkish army. My father recalled learning as a soldier of Winston Churchill's secret visit to Turkey.

It didn't happen to us. I grew up with the sense that it would be appropriative and inappropriate for Jews in parts of the world unoccupied by the Nazis to claim the Holocaust.

As an adult, I learned that there were indeed echoes in my family. A Nazi chart I saw when I was 18 and visiting Yad Vashem that counted Jews in each European country, and included the Jews of Turkey.

Then, slow revelations that family that had remained on the Greek side of the post World War I Greek-Turkish split had been consumed by the Shoah: A great aunt on one side in Thessaloniki; a great aunt on the other side in Rhodes. People my family had not been in touch with really since the 1920s, but whose disappearances were learned of in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, even the 1990s, when my Uncle David found an aunt’s name on a memorial in Rhodes.

My mother mourned the death of Ladino, the language of the 500-year old Spanish exile my parents spoke and that has all but faded to annual conferences and songstresses gamely seeking to preserve its beauties in amber.

She wept when I was 14, when I got a Yehoram Gaon album for her birthday. (Try processing making your mother cry on her birthday.) But her sadness was as much a function of Turkey's hypernationalism shunting aside markers of minority identity as it was the disappearance of Greek Jewry. The Holocaust was not us.

Then in 1996, I visited Greece for the first time with my fiancee and Thessaloniki, touring it, meant little to me. There were no markers I could identify, that anyone had in my childhood told me to find.

Doina and I spent one breezy, sunny afternoon at a villa on the Halkidiki peninsula with Greek friends, and we watched Mt. Athos and gossiped about the monks there and the custom of banning females of any species from its soil.

There was a lot of retsina and a lot of toasts ("Yassous, Ronous!") and I had too much and lay down on a bed to sleep it off in a room with its window open and allowing in the Aegean air and the slowly fading blue light.

Half asleep, I heard Costa ask Doina, "Where is Ronous?" and she said, "He had too much retsina" and Costa laughed and sang "Durme, durme."

I opened my eyes, the lullaby, the one of maybe two songs in Ladino I was vaguely familiar with, that my mother did not deny me in her frantic bid to raise Canadians unwounded by a dying culture.

I got out of bed and went downstairs and asked Costa, "How did you know that song?"

He was nonplussed, it was a song! Why should he not know it? It was a lullaby.

I tried to explain its significance, but it was too much to explain on a breezy, sweet evening in a villa by the sea.

It was a lullaby, and it was somehow allowed to stay and inhabit Greek souls after Jewish souls had disappeared. It was all Thessaloniki could offer me.

My mother was right, the Holocaust didn't happen to us, it would be grotesque for my family to claim the depredations suffered by others as our own.

But there it was in a lullaby in the shadow of the sea.

Bob writes on faith, philosophy, foreign policy and myriad other issues. I never walk away from reading him or chatting with him without feeling challenged, in the best way.

We agreed on some things, disagreed on others, including the extent of the pro-Israel lobby’s influence, and how one assesses when Israel criticism crosses into antisemitism.

But it’s also two old white guys being civil and friendly, which I know is the kind of encounter soooo many people long for.

Anyway, enjoy!

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