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The anger here comes from the fact that Felker-Martin is demonstrating a marked lack of knowledge about the very thing she's claiming authority in. Jews were treated in the exact way she describes and positions as a hypothetical. Conditions for Jews were so dire in the USSR that the moment emigration became possible, the population of Israel temporarily doubled. Many of the Russian Jews who went there didn't even want to live in Israel--they were using it as a jumping-off point because they were terrified Gorbachev's decision would be reversed and they'd be trapped again. We don't know how many Soviet Jews were killed by the regime. We do know they were given the choice to practice and believe only a Soviet-approved form of Judaism that hollowed out most of its teachings, convert, or die. The other side didn't save them. It just subjected them to a different kind of genocide.

So yes, what happened to queer men at the end of the Holocaust was horrible. About ten thousand queer men were in the work camps (queer men were not sent to the death camps unless they were Jewish), and many were indeed imprisoned after liberation.

But it most certainly wasn't unique to queer men. The lack of support after the Holocaust is a huge part of Jewish history, and in fact it's where the phrase "never again" comes from--never again will we trust that our neighbors would hold out a hand instead of shutting the door. Never again will we rely on others to protect us, because we can't.

what i can tell you is that we have a holiday once a year where we hold the scrolls and hug them and dance around them. what i can tell you is that they are written with love by hand by trained scribes who take exquisite care to make sure each word, each letter, is perfect. when we read from them we do not touch the parchment directly so that it won’t be harmed by the oils from our fingers.

we make beautiful clothing for our torah scrolls, embroidered cloth coverings and shining worked metal crowns to sit atop them or carved wooden cases plated with gold and silver. the torah is to us the words of the living God, the tree of life, the record of who are and where we’re going, and the torah scroll is our most holy ritual object.

the torah scroll never touches the floor. if it is dropped accidentally, everyone in the room must fast for forty days in mourning. the desecration of a torah scroll is the utmost level of desecration that can be done to a jewish community, short of killing its members. nazis burnt and destroyed torah scrolls as part of their campaign of terror against the jewish people even before widescale mass deportations began. in ancient times, the romans wrapped the rabbis who led our community in torah scrolls when they burnt them at the stake.

this past shabbat, in the middle of the night, a synagogue in jackson, mississippi was intentionally set on fire. the library was burnt to ashes and five torah scrolls were damaged, with two of them completely destroyed.

I have people in the comment of news articles speculating about "oh I bet it was [whichever side of Zionism you want to bitch about the most]" or being blatantly racist or Islamophobic. as if this wasn't done by a white 19 year old NAZI.

can you people shut the fuck up about things you don't understand? can I stop being asked "why the security guard wasn't there" (IT WAS 3AM) (our security guard would genuinely fucking die for us and got an award for his 33 years of service on the same night as the fire) or why we dont "fireproof where we keep our Torahs" (the building is made of fucking brick with steel doors and bulletproof windows. because of shit like this.)

I've been told we "deserve it" for whatever blood libel strawman people want to prop up this time, told they feel no sympathy because I'm not making it about anyone else that is going through hardship.

I'm not going to offer up a burnt sacrifice of my personal grief as some sort of ritual to appease every bad-faith actor in the world. I am not going to make this about anyone else. I am not going to allow ourselves to be put down for not being perfect victims.

Me: “Don’t say it.”

My Brain:

And the uncomfortableness is due to the fact that I am un-universalizing the massacre. That i am not allowing them to be victim to jewish trauma.

Ofc its a complicated situation as non jews present on the beach for other reasons will also be affected, however random non jews in NZ were not impacted directly by the shooting.

And its the exact same pattern as the holocaust. There is this universilation that the bondi beach hannukah massacre could've happened to anyone. It couldn't. Mass shootings yes can happen to anyone, I mean look at the states. But specifically the bondi beach hannukah massacre only could've happened because of antisemitism.

Why? Because otherwise it would no longer be the bondi beach hannukah massacre. Jews were targeted, it happened during a Jewish holiday. If it happened during a Muslim holiday and Muslims were killed then it would be the bondi beach insert Muslim holiday massacre, not the bondi beach hannukah massacre.

You cannot divorce antisemitism from the event.

And it mirrors holocaust universliation, as the holocaust only could've happened because of antisemitism. The nazis didnt rise to power and then convince Germans to hate jews, Germans hating jews is what voted the nazis into power. Genocide can happen to anyone, the holocaust only happened because people hated jews.

And the reason for the universilation of jewish trauma is because recognizing antisemitism means you have to recognize that it is a problem that people have largely ignored. It makes them feel weird and icky and guilty.

first, the facts: on december 14, 2025, a father-and-son duo attacked a menorah lighting celebration to mark the start of hanukkah in bondi beach. they explicitly targeted a jewish celebration and murdered 15 people and wounded many more. people tried to intervene by fighting off the shooters, and several were shot or lost their lives in the attempt.

you’ve probably heard of ahmed al ahmed, the shopkeeper who seized a gunman’s weapon and forced his retreat, sustaining gunshot wounds in the process. you should also hear about alex kleytman, a holocaust survivor who died saving his wife; reuven morrison, who warned of dangerously rising antisemitism in australia a year before and hurled bricks at the attackers before being shot dead; sofia and boris gurman, a couple who died trying to fend off the attackers; and chaya dadon, a 14-year-old girl who was shot multiple times while shielding younger children with her body. she is in the hospital.

then, the spin:

when the details of the attack became clear, i saw condemnations of the violence. some of them highlighted the explicitly antisemitic nature of the attack. others decided this was really an issue of gun control, or a false flag, or actually a really great thing that they wanted to see more of because the victims belonged to a group that they despised.

i saw a few themes emerge. one was apologetics, a desperate desire to downplay the significance of the attack.

and this weird forced positivity approach of “look at this person who helped other people, even though he is — gasp — muslim and they are jews.” as though muslims and jews are fundamentally at odds, that it’s surprising that human beings would come to the aid of human beings outside their group.

take none of this as a criticism of ahmed, who is objectively a hero and righteous man. he did not ask to be made the symbol of a feel-good story, to be the only thing that many people mention about the attack at all.

and i understand that it is an effort to preempt islamophobic responses to the attack, i do. it’s just that the message, over and over again, makes jews an afterthought in our own story.

it’s not his fault that his gofundme has received more donations than all of the other victims and survivors’ combined. he did risk his life to save others at considerable cost to himself.

but i’m reminded of righteous gentiles, the ones who saved jews in the holocaust. certainly they are worthy of admiration. but there were relatively few righteous gentiles all told, which you might not know considering the many, many movies about them. jews are so rarely seen as the heroes in our own stories.

i think dara horn was wrong: people don’t love dead jews. they’d really prefer not to think about them at all.

is this the story?

i feel like there’s a joke I don’t quite get but sure thing

because that feels like the same line of reasoning many of us have been subjected to, where gentiles attempt to hold us individually responsible for the most extreme people we share a community with.