We Need to Talk About Holocaust Education

Predictably, the remarks Sarah Hurwitz made about Holocaust education at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America were quickly repackaged, recontextualized, and weaponized by progressive Jewish spaces already inclined toward anti-Zionist framings, as well as by the non-Jewish anti-Zionist crowd who treat any intra-Jewish critique as ammunition.

Within the wider Jewish community, it’s too early to say what the consensus is or will be. But the speed and intensity of the pushback in those particular corners says something about how fragile this conversation has become.

Hurwitz doesn’t deserve that backlash. Because the truth is: we have to talk about what went wrong—if anything—with Holocaust education. Or more precisely, what we expected it to do, and whether those expectations were realistic. If the goal was to document, catalogue, and describe the horrors and the path that led to them, Holocaust education has succeeded. If the hope was to inoculate societies against antisemitism, it succeeded too—for a time.

But the world changed. And the pressure on Holocaust education to remain the single moral firewall against antisemitism stayed the same.

This is only the beginning of a long conversation. That’s why people should lay off Hurwitz, especially those who clipped and repackaged her remarks to serve their own narratives. There are conversations we need to have within Holocaust education and within the wider Jewish world—conversations that require honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to admit that we were behind the curve.

One of those conversations must be about the gap between funded, institutionalized Jewish advocacy and the unsupported, unsponsored content creators who are doing the hard, daily psychological labor online. They have a great deal to teach us, because they’re learning in real time. And it is in real time that the conversation about Israel, Zionism, and the Jews is actually happening.

I know what I’m talking about. I built an account to over half a million followers with nine million likes—not because Gidon (my life partner and a child survivor of Theresienstadt) was “cute,” but because I taught myself how to translate memory and history into the visual, emotional language these platforms speak: emotional hooks, clear points made early, a distinctive look and style, and the kind of shareability that matters in the modern attention economy.

I researched trends and best practices and emulated them with my own touch. It was endless trial and error. It was a full-time job for which I was never paid, nor was I approached by any Jewish institution beyond being asked to use my platform to plug their events or newest initiatives. Outside of Hebrew University, no academic institution reached out to ask how I did it or what I had learned.

One of the ways I learned was by spending more time studying antisemitic content creators than I did creating my own. I needed to understand them: what memes they used, what coded language they spoke, how they generated rage, and how they learned to take themselves seriously to seem credible.

There is a content creator with over 100K followers who quite seriously “demonstrates” that when she asks ChatGPT whether the Jews killed Charlie Kirk, it replies in the affirmative—then goes on to detail why this is the truth.

I also spent a lot of time paying attention to Jewish and Jewish-adjacent content creators of every kind—music, politics, cooking, fashion, and yes, Jewish advocacy. I discovered hundreds upon hundreds of these creators—talented, tenacious, creative—working with no institutional support whatsoever. What motivates them? Not money. Not prestige. Not speaking gigs. Just creativity, Jewish pride, and a stubborn refusal to cede the digital space to antisemitism.

Gidon became a viral sensation. People loved him. And then October 7th happened.

Almost overnight, he was no longer acceptable. The same people who once celebrated him began calling him a “baby killer”  – because he is Israeli. The shift was so sudden, so total, that it left me stunned. What happened to the solidarity we’d built? Where did the empathy go? Had it been only performative? What had we failed to teach?

This is the question that has kept me awake for two years: Had we mistaken engagement for understanding? The answer is yes. But I also think we creators did not yet have a name for this new form of antisemitism, which Adam Louis Klein rightly calls antizionism.

Before October 7th, I always tried to respond to every email and DM sent to Gidon. I treated those conversations as sacred. The messages were often tender—gratitude, curiosity, genuine affection for Gidon. The most common question, by far, was: Could this happen again?

I rarely used Holocaust imagery in our content. That was deliberate. The surprise of seeing a joyful, elderly survivor in color—dancing, laughing, telling stories—paired with historical context in text form, created its own kind of emotional effect.

But the question persisted: Could it happen again?

Social media users were imagining cattle cars, crematoria, barbed wire, striped pajamas. The visuals from films and museums. They were imagining the machinery. I tried to both reassure and teach alertness: Not like that. Not the industrialized version. But the hatred that made it possible, I explained? Yes. Absolutely. That can happen again. It does happen again, in different forms and different places.

The ideology, I explained – the dehumanization, the disgust, the conspiracies of antisemitism never disappeared. It just waited in the wings while preparing for a costume change for the next act.  The new antisemitism didn’t come marching in wearing swastikas. It came wrapped in the language of liberation. “Free Palestine.” “Decolonize.” “Globalize the intifada.” Antizionism as a moral virtue.

We’re not antisemitic, they say. We don’t hate Jews.

They just hate that Israel exists. From the river to the sea, they say, Palestine will be free. Where the seven million Jews living there would go doesn’t seem important.

Holocaust education taught millions that explicit Jew-hatred is immoral. That lesson stuck. But antizionism presents itself not as hatred but as conscience. As purity. As justice. And it spreads memetically—through aesthetics, slogans, and disinformation—faster than any textbook, museum tour, or lecture can counter.

Einat Wilf frames it bluntly: utopian fantasies require the removal of the collective Jew.

This is where we are.

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman wrote that Holocaust education wasn’t meant to exceptionalize Jewish suffering but to “activate solidarity.” A lovely thought. But solidarity that collapses the moment Jews exercise agency is not solidarity. It’s conditional approval.

I don’t believe Holocaust education “failed.” I think we relied on it far too heavily, expecting it to remain the single bulwark against antisemitism long after the hatred had changed shape.

We now need to bring together the institutions, the creators, the educators, the analysts, the musicians, the rabbis, the journalists—the entire ecosystem—into one coherent response. Groups like the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) are doing essential work, but they cannot carry the burden alone, just as Holocaust education couldn’t carry it alone.

There is a constellation of Jewish and Jewish-adjacent creators doing brilliant, innovative, unrecognized work every single day. They deserve to be seen. They deserve support. This moment demands coordination, honesty, and humility.

Hurwitz didn’t have the answer. She wasn’t pretending to. She simply started the conversation we should have begun ten years ago.