(Scroll to the bottom of this post for the clip in its original context) I remember learning about the Holocaust in school. How could you forget? The scale, the brutality, the senselessness. The...
Exemplary
(Scroll to the bottom of this post for the clip in its original context)
I remember learning about the Holocaust in school.
How could you forget?
The scale, the brutality, the senselessness. The pictures stay with you. And as I learned more about Jewish history in university and self-study, it was sickening to learn that this was no outlier, but just one of countless acts of violence perpetrated against the Jewish people over the past several thousand years.
Any vulnerable human being who faces injustice will have my support. Thus, like many others, I have supported the Jewish people when they have faced anti-Semitism--and I will continue to support them when they are victimized for their identity.
But it has been shocking to discover that, for Zionist Jews (and here I will distinguish Zionist Jews from non-Zionist Jews), protecting the oppressed from their oppressors is not the lesson to take from the Holocaust.
Recently, Sarah Hurwitz (former Obama speechwriter), has claimed:
"…Holocaust education is absolutely essential. But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews. And they think, oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-Black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless Black people. So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, 'Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.'"
…Is that not one of the lessons of the Holocaust? That a modern, supposedly principled people can perpetrate acts of horror? And that it is incumbent upon good bystanders to speak up and step in when they see innocent humans being systematically killed by a powerful state apparatus?
Finding a long-term, peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict (aka "Peace in the Middle East") is going to be a long and difficult road, there is no question. But how are we even supposed to start walking towards peace when some of the participants deny the most basic lessons of their own history?
Because by no means am I a scholar of Holocaust history--but it doesn't take a scholar to see that when you are trying to downplay "a wall of dead children" (Hurwitz's own words), you have taken a wrong turn. Hurwitz goes on to talk about how Jews worldwide are a "family" who need to support one another unequivocally, even if they don't see eye to eye on social issues.
Declaring that you need to unconditionally support your kinsmen even when they're committing acts of atrocity sounds like exactly the wrong lesson to have taken from the Holocaust.
I have nothing but admiration for the brave anti-Zionist Jewish people around the world who raise their voices against the genocide in Palestine. And I will support them as best I can against the anti-Semites and Zionists who target them.
You can find the original Hurwitz clip around 11:10 of this video if you wish to see it in its larger context.
I've been seeing this clip make the rounds, or one like it, as she's on a book tour and has repeated this same theme throughout. I cannot believe she's saying the words with no realization of how...
I've been seeing this clip make the rounds, or one like it, as she's on a book tour and has repeated this same theme throughout. I cannot believe she's saying the words with no realization of how she's being interpreted. Usually people at least try to couch their "we must hide the children's bodies from the youth" beliefs as concern for said youths' well being rather than failing to indoctrinate them.
Also fwiw she was a speechwriter for President Obama but I think was promoted to work in a more lead role under Michelle. Idk if "aide" is accurate in a speech writing context? /Gen. It feels like this level of callousness had to come later though? Is this a post-October 10th pivot or something that happened over the years or how she always was...
I contend, or perhaps hope, that it's panic. Israel support was ironclad and bipartisan until very recently. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL (who defended Elon's Roman salute) was an assistant to...
I contend, or perhaps hope, that it's panic. Israel support was ironclad and bipartisan until very recently. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL (who defended Elon's Roman salute) was an assistant to Obama too.
I want to be clear I'm not defending her or the Obamas because she worked for the them, just seeking clarification on the framing a bit. It all feels a bit like post 9/11 when we're playing Toby...
I want to be clear I'm not defending her or the Obamas because she worked for the them, just seeking clarification on the framing a bit.
It all feels a bit like post 9/11 when we're playing Toby Keith on the radio non-stop and the slurs against Arabs came out on force.. I know there are people who have felt this way before, but really, this many people? Idk.
I cannot believe it either, but I came to the conclusion that it's perfectly believable. Ezra Klein is not my favorite thinker, but I do follow his podcasts and a few months ago he had a podcast...
I cannot believe it either, but I came to the conclusion that it's perfectly believable. Ezra Klein is not my favorite thinker, but I do follow his podcasts and a few months ago he had a podcast on the topic. Well, he had several but this was one of them. I'll link to it if I can find it. Somewhere in the episode, he makes a pretty honest observation that how, even in his reform synagogue at a very liberal city (I believe it was NYC), Palestinians have always been considered as less than. He talked about how dehumanizing the language was now that he reconsiders some of his world views.
I don't know where this vile person had their upbringing but it's immensely hard for a person to break out of those chains, whether it be zionism, racism, homophobia and all the other hate infused ideologies in their vicinity. When you're so committed and programmed into thinking that your worldview, or religion, or politics or all of it, is just and moral and that makes you superior to the rest of us, you become deaf to the words that come out of your mouth. And I say that's good. It's not good that people like these, millions of them, exist, but since they do, I say let them speak. There's no better way to let the world know who they actually are than they themselves and their words.
I understand all of that, and I even recall picking up anti-Palestinian messaging as a Catholic school kid, but there is a level where you're on national TV more worried that people are seeing...
I understand all of that, and I even recall picking up anti-Palestinian messaging as a Catholic school kid, but there is a level where you're on national TV more worried that people are seeing bodies than you are that there are bodies.
I'm not as fond of the "let them speak" model towards bigotry as personally I think our society has become more bigoted as it's spoken freely out loud. Without the shame of "oh these views are not acceptable" more people pick them up, especially younger people, because that indoctrination essentially continues. I don't have stats to back that up, just how things feel atm.
For what it's worth, I'm not a young person, so I'm not scrolling videos on TikTok or any other social media. I also don't think I received an especially robust education on the Holocaust (we...
For what it's worth, I'm not a young person, so I'm not scrolling videos on TikTok or any other social media. I also don't think I received an especially robust education on the Holocaust (we learned the broad strokes of WW2, the six million death toll, and read Ian Seraillier's The Silver Sword, and that might have been it... I never liked history class, so even if there was more to it, I would have probably tuned out). However, despite having no personal or first-hand frame of reference, I was still sympathetic to Jewish people, and I was baffled for decades as to why people cared about Jewish people specifically to the extent that discrimination against them was any sort of cultural reference point to begin with.
With that said, years of passive exposure to mainstream news stories about conflict in the West Bank, and subsequently reading/viewing their own domestic media on Israeli foreign policy, military indoctrination of children, not to mention abhorrent rhetoric espoused by common Israelis in man-on-the-street interviews, have done WAY more to provoke anti-Israeli sentiment within me than anything else. It's only with determined effort to cut through the immense web of noise surrounding Israel-Palestine that it eventually refined into a dislike of ethnic-supremacist Zionism; a less-discerning person could easily have flattened it into anti-semitism.
Declarations like this one made by Hurwitz do little to make me reconsider. The cognitive dissonance and convenient omissions in her broader statement are depressing.
I'm 40 but we did a lot of holocaust stuff in school and even had survivors come in and talk to us. I'm honestly confused what point she's even trying to make. She seems to be openly admitting...
I'm 40 but we did a lot of holocaust stuff in school and even had survivors come in and talk to us.
I'm honestly confused what point she's even trying to make. She seems to be openly admitting that things in Palestine are getting pretty similar to the holocaust.
I'm not sure what possible lesson she expects people to learn besides "genocide is bad" and maybe "genocide is shockingly more possible than you'd expect. "
For me the biggest take away is how, whenever we talked about it, everyone would say "how could it get to that point? How did regular people go along with something so terrible?"
We'd all insist that if we were alive back then, we'd never be so easily manipulated. The teacher would usually say it wasn't really that simple.
And here we are with people cheering on ICE and the IDF, or posing in front of Aligator Alcatraz because they saw a particularly convincing meme
The discussion I’ve seen in some Jewish spaces is whether the Holocaust was a universal tragedy or a specifically Jewish one. I can understand both perspectives (The depths to which “civilization”...
The discussion I’ve seen in some Jewish spaces is whether the Holocaust was a universal tragedy or a specifically Jewish one. I can understand both perspectives (The depths to which “civilization” can sink to for the former, and the unique industrialization of genocide through Operation Reinhard for the latter).
I think it's pretty callous to the other ethnic groups who were victims of Nazi Germany's systemic genocide to claim that it is as a tragedy belongs exclusively to Jewish people, unless you define...
I think it's pretty callous to the other ethnic groups who were victims of Nazi Germany's systemic genocide to claim that it is as a tragedy belongs exclusively to Jewish people, unless you define Holocaust in such a way that it refers to only the actions against Jewish people but deliberately decide to call the exact same actions against, for instance, the Roma and Sinti, something else for some reason. And even that's pretty weird imo.
I don't think necessarily treating it as a universal tragedy is sensible -- I live in Germany, after all, and there's a pretty stark difference between how Jewish people are affected by it even today vs how it affects white German goyim.
But we shouldn't erase other groups that were very much victims here, especially when they are still treated like shit here and are the victims of a lot of racism to this day. The man in charge of my case at the immigration office a few years back casually dropped a slur against Romani people while using them as an example of people who didn't have the right to freedom of movement in the EU because they don't work. And this was from a man who was in all other respects very nice, helpful, and polite (albeit with the quintessential personality of a German civil servant).
That genuinely isn't seen as a slur by plenty of Europeans. It's casual because there's no feeling behind it. Doesn't help that they've been referred to as such for decades if not longer, so the...
The man in charge of my case at the immigration office a few years back casually dropped a slur against Romani
That genuinely isn't seen as a slur by plenty of Europeans. It's casual because there's no feeling behind it. Doesn't help that they've been referred to as such for decades if not longer, so the general European attitude is either outright discriminatory or like your example, casually dismissive without knowing they are.
You also have certain groups of 'travelers' refer to themselves as gitanos or gypsy's making the entire endeavour trying to inform people rather futile.
There's a long road ahead for Roma acceptance. Plenty of Europeans can be actively advocating against racism only to flip a switch the moment you mention Roma. It's weird.
And many of the groups that Westerners identify as "Roma" have zero historical connections. Spanish Gitanos are totally unrelated to Irish travellers afaik, and they have a unique language that...
You also have certain groups of 'travelers' refer to themselves as gitanos or gypsy's making the entire endeavour trying to inform people rather futile.
And many of the groups that Westerners identify as "Roma" have zero historical connections. Spanish Gitanos are totally unrelated to Irish travellers afaik, and they have a unique language that has created a lot of Spanish slang.
It's not really a slur either. One of my favourite bands is called The Gypsy Kings!
I think there's a difference between a group of Romani/gitanos using the term and others. And differences from the 1970s when the band was founded by those people to today. But Spanish gitanos are...
I think there's a difference between a group of Romani/gitanos using the term and others. And differences from the 1970s when the band was founded by those people to today. But Spanish gitanos are Iberian Romani aren't they? And "gitano" from egiptano (-> egitano -> gitano) is basically the same as the English term in question.
How are they not being correctly referred to as Roma/ni? Travellers aren't Romani but that didn't seem to be your point? Or am I misunderstanding?
Yes and no. In most cases they're local to Spain after centuries of mixing with other people in the Iberian peninsula. This is particularly true in Southern Spain. For example, flamenco has its...
But Spanish gitanos are Iberian Romani aren't they?
Yes and no. In most cases they're local to Spain after centuries of mixing with other people in the Iberian peninsula. This is particularly true in Southern Spain. For example, flamenco has its roots in Andalusian Gitano culture. Even their historical language, Caló, is a mix of Romani and the local Catalan and Castilian.
The Wikipedia article on Gitanos has more information (though the English page is written in an unusual style): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitanos
How are they not being correctly referred to as Roma/ni?
Spanish Gitanos don't identify as Roma.
The label is used by some Romani people internationally, but I have never ever heard it used by a Gitano. Calling them Roma is forcing a label they have never identified with, and I'd argue it's culturally dismissive to lump them in with other Romani groups.
I'm a strong believer in calling people what they want to be called, and Spanish Gitanos identify as Gitanos. The most literal English translation is Gypsy, but I understand why English speakers want to avoid that word. If Gypsy can't be used, then the exonym Gitano is more respectful.
"Spain doesn't have a million Gypsies; there are one million Spaniards who are Gypsy. It's an important nuance," warns Joaquín Bustamante, director of a publication called Cuadernos Gitanos and host of a radio show, Gitanos, arte y cultura romaní, which airs on state radio's multilingual international platform.
I agree with calling them what they want to be called. So if that's the issue that makes sense. But the article you linked to starts with So you may understand where my confusion came from as I...
I agree with calling them what they want to be called. So if that's the issue that makes sense.
But the article you linked to starts with
The Romani in Spain, generally known by the endonym Calé,[6] or the exonym gitanos (Spanish pronunciation: [xiˈtanos]), belong to the Iberian Romani subgroup known as Calé, with smaller populations in Portugal (known as ciganos) and in Southern France (known as gitans).
So you may understand where my confusion came from as I did my own research.
I appreciate the focus on the fact that gitanos are Spanish not "other" and it's something missing from how other countries view their various traveler/Romani/etc. populations.
I understand. They can fit with the broader Romani umbrella, but they're clearly distinct. Spanish people with Iberian Romani genetic or cultural heritage self-identify as Gypsies or Gitanos. Out...
So you may understand where my confusion came from as I did my own research.
I understand. They can fit with the broader Romani umbrella, but they're clearly distinct. Spanish people with Iberian Romani genetic or cultural heritage self-identify as Gypsies or Gitanos. Out of respect, I use the terminology they prefer.
It's a stretch, but I think it's vaguely similar to how some Black Americans prefer the terms African American or even Colored (NAACP). Identity labels are complicated, and I don't want to force people into a box they didn't choose.
Oh yeah the degree to which otherwise reasonable people will suddenly say horrifying shit when Romani (and other travelling peoples) come up in Europe genuinely shocked me earlier on. It's still...
Oh yeah the degree to which otherwise reasonable people will suddenly say horrifying shit when Romani (and other travelling peoples) come up in Europe genuinely shocked me earlier on. It's still so normalized here.
Separate and apart from the semantics of who is included in the term holocaust, it's really important to remember that a crime against humanity (or really, any crime/tragedy/injustice, period)...
I don't think necessarily treating it as a universal tragedy is sensible -- I live in Germany, after all, and there's a pretty stark difference between how Jewish people are affected by it even today vs how it affects white German goyim.
Separate and apart from the semantics of who is included in the term holocaust, it's really important to remember that a crime against humanity (or really, any crime/tragedy/injustice, period) affects us all. Yes, specifics of circumstance will influence how different individuals or groups are affected, and some symptoms are more/less visible than others, but that doesn't make it any less universal. We may take for granted that we harden ourselves to survive modern civilization with some sense of sanity intact, but we can't forget that we often lose something quite precious and priceless in the exchange. Isn't that what art tries to remind us?
The main reason South Africa was able to move on post-Apartheid without any systematic racial retribution was their process of truth and reconciliation, which allowed Afrikaners to admit their complicity without fear of punishment. It encouraged a level of honest self-examination that's absolutely necessary before any healing could begin. It laid bare that both sides needed to heal.
James Baldwin addressed similar issues during the US Civil Rights Movement, in The Fire Next Time:
There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
I get that I might be preaching to the choir in a sense here, given Germany's post-WW2 sense of shame, but I do know it's gradually being seen as more, I dunno, obsolete or outmoded or whatever nowadays.
I have asked in a few forums why more countries don't do more to save more Palestinian refugees and I got: Generic anti-immigrant sentiment. People making assumptions that I wanted Arab countries...
I have asked in a few forums why more countries don't do more to save more Palestinian refugees and I got:
Generic anti-immigrant sentiment.
People making assumptions that I wanted Arab countries specifically to take in Palestinians, even though I didn't say anything like that.
People saying that Palestinians were uniquely dangerous because of things that happened decades ago, in Jordan and other places. Which I know only a little about, but I doubt would apply to, say, France or Germany taking in women and children?
Nothing I've read so far has been convinced me that it's not mostly anti-immigrant sentiment.
It's hard to say where sentiments come from since humans are famously bad at rationalising their own behaviour, but I can provide one of the big reasons that isn't just immigrant hatred. Many...
Nothing I've read so far has been convinced me that it's not mostly anti-immigrant sentiment.
It's hard to say where sentiments come from since humans are famously bad at rationalising their own behaviour, but I can provide one of the big reasons that isn't just immigrant hatred.
Many Muslims view the acceptance of Palestinian refugees as supporting ethnic cleansing. By giving Israel a place to send the Palestinians, countries make displacement easier.
I'm not sure it's a good argument against accepting Palestinian refugees, but it's a significant reason why Muslim citizens oppose Palestinian migration.
That seems plausible. I don't know who the Internet strangers I was discussing this with are, but they didn't give any sign that they're Muslims. It doesn't seem like it's only the Muslims who are...
That seems plausible. I don't know who the Internet strangers I was discussing this with are, but they didn't give any sign that they're Muslims. It doesn't seem like it's only the Muslims who are against it? There is, at least, a general lack of enthusiasm.
I don’t think it is a matter of belonging to a particular group, but whether the lessons and implications are universally applicable or more specific to anti-semitism. I may not have been clear in...
I don’t think it is a matter of belonging to a particular group, but whether the lessons and implications are universally applicable or more specific to anti-semitism. I may not have been clear in my phrasing.
(Side note: The Holocaust page on Wikipedia does refer only to the murder of Jews. Other victims of the Nazis are covered in separate pages.)
Oh right you are. Huh, I'd not have defined it that way myself, but they've more authority than me on this. Wikipedia does indeed focus explicitly on the Jewish victims. From the end of the...
Oh right you are. Huh, I'd not have defined it that way myself, but they've more authority than me on this. Wikipedia does indeed focus explicitly on the Jewish victims. From the end of the bottom-most paragraph of the Wikipedia header:
Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups
The Holocaust refers specifically to the genocide against the Jews. There are other victims of the Nazis, and they are sometimes bundled in when referring to the Holocaust because it was usually...
The Holocaust refers specifically to the genocide against the Jews. There are other victims of the Nazis, and they are sometimes bundled in when referring to the Holocaust because it was usually done through the same processes, but the Holocaust itself was most specifically meant to be about the Jews because it was motivated by very specific anti-Semitic prejudices stoked by the Nazis. That they also had other prejudices they acted on in parallel is separate from the particular dynamics of anti-semitism in German culture.
I definitely don't deny the specific antisemitism of the Nazis and their focus on eliminating Jewish people for sure. I think that rightfully is the focus of education on the topic, since it was...
I definitely don't deny the specific antisemitism of the Nazis and their focus on eliminating Jewish people for sure. I think that rightfully is the focus of education on the topic, since it was the core of what happened and had such massive effects on Jewish people worldwide and on the European populations they were forcibly removed from. But I don't know if it really makes sense to define the exact same actions done to other ethnic groups and persecuted minorities out of the meaning of the word, unless there was some more concrete distinction in terms of what the groups were subjected to or the timing thereof that I'm not aware of. I don't think framing the ethnonationalist ideology of Nazi Germany as being "other prejudices they acted on in parallel" is a very accurate picture. Antisemitism had an prominent and outsized place in Nazi ideology, but pretending that Nazi genocides of other "undesirables" was somehow a completely independent thing that happened in parallel just doesn't stand up to scrutiny imo. Ultimately I'm not sure it's really productive to insist that other victims are denied the use of the term "Holocaust." And I certainly don't think a definition that refers exclusively to Jewish victims reflects the mainstream way the term is used by most people, tbqh.
She was talking to a Jewish conference. The "lesson" many Jewish people had from the holocaust was that it's a dog eat dog world, and if they don't have a strong nation of the jewish people,...
She was talking to a Jewish conference. The "lesson" many Jewish people had from the holocaust was that it's a dog eat dog world, and if they don't have a strong nation of the jewish people, another holocaust is always in the cards. I can't entirely say they're wrong.
Obviously, this isn't particularly relevant for non-jewish people, but they weren't her audience anyway.
I've seen this clip already and I have to say I'm still just flabbergasted and depressed. I know sane folks live in Israel too, but I desperately need to believe they're just being silenced (or...
I've seen this clip already and I have to say I'm still just flabbergasted and depressed.
I know sane folks live in Israel too, but I desperately need to believe they're just being silenced (or maybe not platformed) rather than becoming such a minority that this absolute evil is taking genocide mainstream.
Think about how many folks in the United Stats don't agree with Donald Trump and then probably assume that our media is not showing us the entire picture. Our news is never covered International...
Think about how many folks in the United Stats don't agree with Donald Trump and then probably assume that our media is not showing us the entire picture. Our news is never covered International geopolitical situations with a lot of nuance.
(Scroll to the bottom of this post for the clip in its original context)
I remember learning about the Holocaust in school.
How could you forget?
The scale, the brutality, the senselessness. The pictures stay with you. And as I learned more about Jewish history in university and self-study, it was sickening to learn that this was no outlier, but just one of countless acts of violence perpetrated against the Jewish people over the past several thousand years.
Any vulnerable human being who faces injustice will have my support. Thus, like many others, I have supported the Jewish people when they have faced anti-Semitism--and I will continue to support them when they are victimized for their identity.
But it has been shocking to discover that, for Zionist Jews (and here I will distinguish Zionist Jews from non-Zionist Jews), protecting the oppressed from their oppressors is not the lesson to take from the Holocaust.
Recently, Sarah Hurwitz (former Obama speechwriter), has claimed:
…Is that not one of the lessons of the Holocaust? That a modern, supposedly principled people can perpetrate acts of horror? And that it is incumbent upon good bystanders to speak up and step in when they see innocent humans being systematically killed by a powerful state apparatus?
Finding a long-term, peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict (aka "Peace in the Middle East") is going to be a long and difficult road, there is no question. But how are we even supposed to start walking towards peace when some of the participants deny the most basic lessons of their own history?
Because by no means am I a scholar of Holocaust history--but it doesn't take a scholar to see that when you are trying to downplay "a wall of dead children" (Hurwitz's own words), you have taken a wrong turn. Hurwitz goes on to talk about how Jews worldwide are a "family" who need to support one another unequivocally, even if they don't see eye to eye on social issues.
Declaring that you need to unconditionally support your kinsmen even when they're committing acts of atrocity sounds like exactly the wrong lesson to have taken from the Holocaust.
I have nothing but admiration for the brave anti-Zionist Jewish people around the world who raise their voices against the genocide in Palestine. And I will support them as best I can against the anti-Semites and Zionists who target them.
You can find the original Hurwitz clip around 11:10 of this video if you wish to see it in its larger context.
I've been seeing this clip make the rounds, or one like it, as she's on a book tour and has repeated this same theme throughout. I cannot believe she's saying the words with no realization of how she's being interpreted. Usually people at least try to couch their "we must hide the children's bodies from the youth" beliefs as concern for said youths' well being rather than failing to indoctrinate them.
Also fwiw she was a speechwriter for President Obama but I think was promoted to work in a more lead role under Michelle. Idk if "aide" is accurate in a speech writing context? /Gen. It feels like this level of callousness had to come later though? Is this a post-October 10th pivot or something that happened over the years or how she always was...
I contend, or perhaps hope, that it's panic. Israel support was ironclad and bipartisan until very recently. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL (who defended Elon's Roman salute) was an assistant to Obama too.
A more sinister side to this is that while pro-Israel forces have coalesced around the Republican party (more or less), it's having some less than ideal side effects, because factions of the far-right are unabashedly antisemitic and are capitalizing on the youth's hate for Israel too: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/06/politics/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson-heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts
I want to be clear I'm not defending her or the Obamas because she worked for the them, just seeking clarification on the framing a bit.
It all feels a bit like post 9/11 when we're playing Toby Keith on the radio non-stop and the slurs against Arabs came out on force.. I know there are people who have felt this way before, but really, this many people? Idk.
I cannot believe it either, but I came to the conclusion that it's perfectly believable. Ezra Klein is not my favorite thinker, but I do follow his podcasts and a few months ago he had a podcast on the topic. Well, he had several but this was one of them. I'll link to it if I can find it. Somewhere in the episode, he makes a pretty honest observation that how, even in his reform synagogue at a very liberal city (I believe it was NYC), Palestinians have always been considered as less than. He talked about how dehumanizing the language was now that he reconsiders some of his world views.
I don't know where this vile person had their upbringing but it's immensely hard for a person to break out of those chains, whether it be zionism, racism, homophobia and all the other hate infused ideologies in their vicinity. When you're so committed and programmed into thinking that your worldview, or religion, or politics or all of it, is just and moral and that makes you superior to the rest of us, you become deaf to the words that come out of your mouth. And I say that's good. It's not good that people like these, millions of them, exist, but since they do, I say let them speak. There's no better way to let the world know who they actually are than they themselves and their words.
I understand all of that, and I even recall picking up anti-Palestinian messaging as a Catholic school kid, but there is a level where you're on national TV more worried that people are seeing bodies than you are that there are bodies.
I'm not as fond of the "let them speak" model towards bigotry as personally I think our society has become more bigoted as it's spoken freely out loud. Without the shame of "oh these views are not acceptable" more people pick them up, especially younger people, because that indoctrination essentially continues. I don't have stats to back that up, just how things feel atm.
For what it's worth, I'm not a young person, so I'm not scrolling videos on TikTok or any other social media. I also don't think I received an especially robust education on the Holocaust (we learned the broad strokes of WW2, the six million death toll, and read Ian Seraillier's The Silver Sword, and that might have been it... I never liked history class, so even if there was more to it, I would have probably tuned out). However, despite having no personal or first-hand frame of reference, I was still sympathetic to Jewish people, and I was baffled for decades as to why people cared about Jewish people specifically to the extent that discrimination against them was any sort of cultural reference point to begin with.
With that said, years of passive exposure to mainstream news stories about conflict in the West Bank, and subsequently reading/viewing their own domestic media on Israeli foreign policy, military indoctrination of children, not to mention abhorrent rhetoric espoused by common Israelis in man-on-the-street interviews, have done WAY more to provoke anti-Israeli sentiment within me than anything else. It's only with determined effort to cut through the immense web of noise surrounding Israel-Palestine that it eventually refined into a dislike of ethnic-supremacist Zionism; a less-discerning person could easily have flattened it into anti-semitism.
Declarations like this one made by Hurwitz do little to make me reconsider. The cognitive dissonance and convenient omissions in her broader statement are depressing.
I'm 40 but we did a lot of holocaust stuff in school and even had survivors come in and talk to us.
I'm honestly confused what point she's even trying to make. She seems to be openly admitting that things in Palestine are getting pretty similar to the holocaust.
I'm not sure what possible lesson she expects people to learn besides "genocide is bad" and maybe "genocide is shockingly more possible than you'd expect. "
For me the biggest take away is how, whenever we talked about it, everyone would say "how could it get to that point? How did regular people go along with something so terrible?"
We'd all insist that if we were alive back then, we'd never be so easily manipulated. The teacher would usually say it wasn't really that simple.
And here we are with people cheering on ICE and the IDF, or posing in front of Aligator Alcatraz because they saw a particularly convincing meme
The discussion I’ve seen in some Jewish spaces is whether the Holocaust was a universal tragedy or a specifically Jewish one. I can understand both perspectives (The depths to which “civilization” can sink to for the former, and the unique industrialization of genocide through Operation Reinhard for the latter).
I think it's pretty callous to the other ethnic groups who were victims of Nazi Germany's systemic genocide to claim that it is as a tragedy belongs exclusively to Jewish people, unless you define Holocaust in such a way that it refers to only the actions against Jewish people but deliberately decide to call the exact same actions against, for instance, the Roma and Sinti, something else for some reason. And even that's pretty weird imo.
I don't think necessarily treating it as a universal tragedy is sensible -- I live in Germany, after all, and there's a pretty stark difference between how Jewish people are affected by it even today vs how it affects white German goyim.
But we shouldn't erase other groups that were very much victims here, especially when they are still treated like shit here and are the victims of a lot of racism to this day. The man in charge of my case at the immigration office a few years back casually dropped a slur against Romani people while using them as an example of people who didn't have the right to freedom of movement in the EU because they don't work. And this was from a man who was in all other respects very nice, helpful, and polite (albeit with the quintessential personality of a German civil servant).
That genuinely isn't seen as a slur by plenty of Europeans. It's casual because there's no feeling behind it. Doesn't help that they've been referred to as such for decades if not longer, so the general European attitude is either outright discriminatory or like your example, casually dismissive without knowing they are.
You also have certain groups of 'travelers' refer to themselves as gitanos or gypsy's making the entire endeavour trying to inform people rather futile.
There's a long road ahead for Roma acceptance. Plenty of Europeans can be actively advocating against racism only to flip a switch the moment you mention Roma. It's weird.
And many of the groups that Westerners identify as "Roma" have zero historical connections. Spanish Gitanos are totally unrelated to Irish travellers afaik, and they have a unique language that has created a lot of Spanish slang.
It's not really a slur either. One of my favourite bands is called The Gypsy Kings!
I think there's a difference between a group of Romani/gitanos using the term and others. And differences from the 1970s when the band was founded by those people to today. But Spanish gitanos are Iberian Romani aren't they? And "gitano" from egiptano (-> egitano -> gitano) is basically the same as the English term in question.
How are they not being correctly referred to as Roma/ni? Travellers aren't Romani but that didn't seem to be your point? Or am I misunderstanding?
A view from an academic and Romani on the topic of the name.
Yes and no. In most cases they're local to Spain after centuries of mixing with other people in the Iberian peninsula. This is particularly true in Southern Spain. For example, flamenco has its roots in Andalusian Gitano culture. Even their historical language, Caló, is a mix of Romani and the local Catalan and Castilian.
The Wikipedia article on Gitanos has more information (though the English page is written in an unusual style): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitanos
Spanish Gitanos don't identify as Roma.
The label is used by some Romani people internationally, but I have never ever heard it used by a Gitano. Calling them Roma is forcing a label they have never identified with, and I'd argue it's culturally dismissive to lump them in with other Romani groups.
As a particularly silly example, here's a 2013 English article from the largest Spanish newspaper which repeatedly uses the label "Roma" despite the experts and Gitanos repeatedly self-identifying as "Gypsies" during interviews: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/09/inenglish/1378734350_880996.html
I'm a strong believer in calling people what they want to be called, and Spanish Gitanos identify as Gitanos. The most literal English translation is Gypsy, but I understand why English speakers want to avoid that word. If Gypsy can't be used, then the exonym Gitano is more respectful.
To quote a Gitano from the previous article:
I agree with calling them what they want to be called. So if that's the issue that makes sense.
But the article you linked to starts with
So you may understand where my confusion came from as I did my own research.
I appreciate the focus on the fact that gitanos are Spanish not "other" and it's something missing from how other countries view their various traveler/Romani/etc. populations.
I understand. They can fit with the broader Romani umbrella, but they're clearly distinct. Spanish people with Iberian Romani genetic or cultural heritage self-identify as Gypsies or Gitanos. Out of respect, I use the terminology they prefer.
It's a stretch, but I think it's vaguely similar to how some Black Americans prefer the terms African American or even Colored (NAACP). Identity labels are complicated, and I don't want to force people into a box they didn't choose.
Oh yeah the degree to which otherwise reasonable people will suddenly say horrifying shit when Romani (and other travelling peoples) come up in Europe genuinely shocked me earlier on. It's still so normalized here.
Separate and apart from the semantics of who is included in the term holocaust, it's really important to remember that a crime against humanity (or really, any crime/tragedy/injustice, period) affects us all. Yes, specifics of circumstance will influence how different individuals or groups are affected, and some symptoms are more/less visible than others, but that doesn't make it any less universal. We may take for granted that we harden ourselves to survive modern civilization with some sense of sanity intact, but we can't forget that we often lose something quite precious and priceless in the exchange. Isn't that what art tries to remind us?
The main reason South Africa was able to move on post-Apartheid without any systematic racial retribution was their process of truth and reconciliation, which allowed Afrikaners to admit their complicity without fear of punishment. It encouraged a level of honest self-examination that's absolutely necessary before any healing could begin. It laid bare that both sides needed to heal.
James Baldwin addressed similar issues during the US Civil Rights Movement, in The Fire Next Time:
I get that I might be preaching to the choir in a sense here, given Germany's post-WW2 sense of shame, but I do know it's gradually being seen as more, I dunno, obsolete or outmoded or whatever nowadays.
I have asked in a few forums why more countries don't do more to save more Palestinian refugees and I got:
Nothing I've read so far has been convinced me that it's not mostly anti-immigrant sentiment.
It's hard to say where sentiments come from since humans are famously bad at rationalising their own behaviour, but I can provide one of the big reasons that isn't just immigrant hatred.
Many Muslims view the acceptance of Palestinian refugees as supporting ethnic cleansing. By giving Israel a place to send the Palestinians, countries make displacement easier.
I'm not sure it's a good argument against accepting Palestinian refugees, but it's a significant reason why Muslim citizens oppose Palestinian migration.
That seems plausible. I don't know who the Internet strangers I was discussing this with are, but they didn't give any sign that they're Muslims. It doesn't seem like it's only the Muslims who are against it? There is, at least, a general lack of enthusiasm.
I don’t think it is a matter of belonging to a particular group, but whether the lessons and implications are universally applicable or more specific to anti-semitism. I may not have been clear in my phrasing.
(Side note: The Holocaust page on Wikipedia does refer only to the murder of Jews. Other victims of the Nazis are covered in separate pages.)
Oh right you are. Huh, I'd not have defined it that way myself, but they've more authority than me on this. Wikipedia does indeed focus explicitly on the Jewish victims. From the end of the bottom-most paragraph of the Wikipedia header:
The Holocaust refers specifically to the genocide against the Jews. There are other victims of the Nazis, and they are sometimes bundled in when referring to the Holocaust because it was usually done through the same processes, but the Holocaust itself was most specifically meant to be about the Jews because it was motivated by very specific anti-Semitic prejudices stoked by the Nazis. That they also had other prejudices they acted on in parallel is separate from the particular dynamics of anti-semitism in German culture.
I definitely don't deny the specific antisemitism of the Nazis and their focus on eliminating Jewish people for sure. I think that rightfully is the focus of education on the topic, since it was the core of what happened and had such massive effects on Jewish people worldwide and on the European populations they were forcibly removed from. But I don't know if it really makes sense to define the exact same actions done to other ethnic groups and persecuted minorities out of the meaning of the word, unless there was some more concrete distinction in terms of what the groups were subjected to or the timing thereof that I'm not aware of. I don't think framing the ethnonationalist ideology of Nazi Germany as being "other prejudices they acted on in parallel" is a very accurate picture. Antisemitism had an prominent and outsized place in Nazi ideology, but pretending that Nazi genocides of other "undesirables" was somehow a completely independent thing that happened in parallel just doesn't stand up to scrutiny imo. Ultimately I'm not sure it's really productive to insist that other victims are denied the use of the term "Holocaust." And I certainly don't think a definition that refers exclusively to Jewish victims reflects the mainstream way the term is used by most people, tbqh.
She was talking to a Jewish conference. The "lesson" many Jewish people had from the holocaust was that it's a dog eat dog world, and if they don't have a strong nation of the jewish people, another holocaust is always in the cards. I can't entirely say they're wrong.
Obviously, this isn't particularly relevant for non-jewish people, but they weren't her audience anyway.
I've seen this clip already and I have to say I'm still just flabbergasted and depressed.
I know sane folks live in Israel too, but I desperately need to believe they're just being silenced (or maybe not platformed) rather than becoming such a minority that this absolute evil is taking genocide mainstream.
Think about how many folks in the United Stats don't agree with Donald Trump and then probably assume that our media is not showing us the entire picture. Our news is never covered International geopolitical situations with a lot of nuance.