Am I A Fandom Blog Or A Jewish Blog? Who Knows!

Claiming that Arab isn't an ethnicity or religion, so even though Arab empires occupied the region that is now Israel/Palestine, it isn't the same as the Assyrians, Romans, Ottomans, British, Israeli, etc. (and yes, she includes Israelis in the list of occupiers)

Claiming that UN is biased in favor of Israel

Claiming that Zionism (whose definition she quotes from Herzl... Herzl) is predicated on taking the "biblical narrative to heart, uncritically"

Calling Jews "sneaky and underhanded" for using biblical texts (by which she means God promising the land in Jewish religious texts) to justify Zionism

he and elizer ben yehuda lived about the same time frame so i don't know how widespread contemporary hebrew was at that point, but that is probably what makes it feel archaic while still seemingly childish and very not uniform.

politicaljew:

You are being lied to by a bunch of populists who think you're stupid.

This is not foolproof, but it's how I killed SJP on my campus.

See, the thing everyone on campus fucking forgets is that "Israeli" is a NATIONAL ORIGIN, and that's a protected category under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which like... is wildly in danger in this day and age but that's not the point. The point is that anything that receives federal funds is vulnerable to a Title VI complaint, and you know who receives federal funds?

COLLEGES. UNIVERSITIES. EVEN PRIVATE ONES. Because you know what counts as federal funding?

STUDENT.

LOANS.

That's right: if your institution offers federal student loans, YOU CAN MAKE A TITLE VI COMPLAINT.

And because a Title VI complaint threatens a school's federal funding? They do NOT fuck around with them. They won't always be able to tell you the exact action they take (in fact, they'll hardly ever be able to tell you), but they WILL have to take action if your local band of antisemites is posting anti-Israel crap.

And how do you MAKE one? Why, through this extremely handy portal! But your school should also have a process for making one, and if you have a diversity office or something akin to that, you can also have fun freaking them out by walking in and saying, "Hi, I'm here to make a Title VI complaint." Usually this will cause people to get managers. Federal discrimination complaints are a big deal.

Judaism is absolutely post-catastrophic, though. Post-cataclysmic, perhaps.

I'm actually using Christian language on purpose here, because I am trying to convey to gentiles, particularly culturally Christian onea, what it means to be continuing on as a people, and as an individual after the world has ended for you and your people, which unforunately leaves me limited to Christian language.

Destruction of the Temple, 71 CE, restructuring of the religion from the ground up to survive without a central facility

Crushing of the Bar Kochba Revolt, 135 CE, Judea renamed after a near-folkloric enemy from Jewish scripture and a large portion of Judeans enslaved and/or exiled

First Crusade/Rhineland Massacres, 1096 CE, large portion of the Jewish community of central Europe killed, 'othering' of Jews within European society skyrockets

Unremembered Genetic Bottleneck (Black Death-related pogroms?), circa 600-800 years ago, we don't remember the details but genetic evidence indicates that while we are closely related to Sepharadim and other Levantine peoples, all Ashkenazim alive today are descended from just 350 people between 25 to 32 generations ago because everybody else died

Reconquista, expulsion of Jews from Spain and later all Spanish colonial possessions, 1492

Holocaust

Faruhd+expulsion of the Jews from the entire MENA region with nothing but the clothes on their back post-1948

that’s what the cause has always been about.

Palestinians do have a right to form a state for “the right to not be stateless” reasons, but there’s never been a time when the “Free Palestine” movement cared more about that than the negation of Israel, or was not defined by its antisemitism. this is not a good cause that went bad because outsiders poisoned it; it is a cause that has always had a venomous aspect, and purposefully keeps Palestinians in a position to be aggrieved for recruitment and fundraising purposes, in order to fuel an eternal intifada.

This is long.

But if you're questioning some part of the meme above, you can scroll down and learn how these things are similar.

SKINHEADS VS KEFFIYEHS

Skinheads and people wearing keffiyehs are not inherently or necessarily biased against Jews. But as a group, we've seen a disproportionate amount of negativity and even violence against Jews from each one.

SWASTIKAS VS RED TRIANGLES

Swastikas are a symbol of a group that explicitly considers Jews the enemy; accuses them of controlling the international mass media and imperialistic nations with their wealth; starting and profiting from every war; corrupting societies; wanting to occupy the entire world; and having outlined this plan in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion....

And so are inverted red triangles. I literally copied all of that from Hamas's founding documents.

Additionally, inverted red triangles are the symbol Hamas uses to mark targets it's boasting about hitting or hunting down.

NOT WHITE VS TOO WHITE

Nazis and other white supremacists, to this day, vehemently argue that Jews are not white. Jews are one of their favorite targets.

That's a big part of the reason that in the U.S., almost every single year, the second-most hate crimes are against Jews.

(The most: Black people. The third-most: Gay men. If you include the hate crimes against all groups in the LGBTQIA+ community, the total is larger, but still third.)

Worse: there are 7.55 times as many Black people in the U.S. as Jews. But there are about twice as many hate crimes against Black people as Jews. Which means that in terms of hate crimes per person, Jews win first prize?

If you're not Jewish, you're probably going, "But you can't trust the ADL!" And I have to tell you: these statistics are from the FBI, actually.

But this is a good moment to think about where your distrust of the ADL comes from. Was the source solid? Did you fact-check what it was saying?

If a different marginalized group said, "We've tracked the actions that harm us," and people outside that group said, "No they don't, you're just bad people who are trying to chill free speech," what would you think? Would you have the same reaction to that group as to the ADL?

Anyway, here's a fun tweet from Elon Musk:

Please note: that is an actual link preview from the actual link to his tweet. That is not a photoshopped fake tweet. The man literally said this, and I didn't see the Musk-hating progressive community even blink.

He had previously said that white people are gonna get eliminated and replaced, which is standard neo-Nazi garbage. And which DID elicit a lot of outrage.

This is not Elon Musk agreeing that Jews are just regular white people like him.

This is Elon Musk saying that Jews are hyper-privileged. That Jews have enormous power.

This is, simultaneously, Elon Musk weaponizing the Holocaust to be like, "See? That's proof of white genocide!"

Nazi Twitter took great offense.

This Nazi's response neatly bridges the gap for everyone. This is where the two beliefs join hands and become one.

(Tumblr struggles with tweet previews sometimes, so that one IS a screenshot.)

I've seen lots of "Jews are white" people also say that a secret cabal of Jews controls the media, the government, and/or the world. Sometimes they think the Israeli government is that secret cabal of Jews. Sometimes they think AIPAC is. Sometimes they just call it "Zionists."

Other comments included: "You got community noted by the jews that run your community notes"

"Stop playing stupid." followed by this:

And, of course, "The jews are NOT White. They wear 'Whiteness' like a skin suit when it's "convenient. Don't believe me, listen to her..."

Followed by a video in which a Jewish creator explains, "Some Jews are white, like me, but our whiteness is conditional, and that's why it's different…. we are [considered] white when it's convenient [for actual white people]. We are [considered] white when our whiteness boosts the numbers of white people in order to oppress people of color. We are white. until. we're fucking. NOT.

"And when we're not, we're almost hated in a different way because we can 'fool you' with our whiteness. We can assimilate. Which is why the man whose name starts with H put stars on our jackets. so we wouldn't trick anybody."

(He got the idea, presumably, from the centuries of European countries making Jews wear badges or silly hats for the same purpose. And they got the idea from the centuries of caliphates doing the exact same thing across North Africa and the Middle East.

Which begs the question: if Jews are so obviously white, why did Jews from Morocco through Afghanistan need to wear special badges, belts, or even strings of bells, to make sure they weren't accidentally treated as equals there either?)

Back to the bullet points.

The argument I have seen made over and over, across social media platforms, is that Israel was founded by and is mostly made up of Ashkenazi Jews. I.e. Jews who immigrated from Europe. Who are, therefore, white people.

Literally: they came from Europe, therefore they're white.

Because nothing says, "I am a well-informed person engaging in perfectly reasonable discourse" like the descendants of people who forced Jews into Europe, repeatedly exiled them from region after region, and/or repeatedly tried to kill them off, insisting that being in Europe makes you white.

This short gives a good overview of what's wrong with that theory. But basically, moving to an area with less sunlight will in fact make your descendants lighter-skinned. So will intermarriage and - though this video doesn't address it - rape.

When people are challenged on this idea, the fallback is Khazar theory and racist blood quantum.

Blood quantum emerged as a way to measure 'Indian-ness' through a construct of race. So that over time, Indians would literally breed themselves out and rid the federal government of their legal duties to uphold treaty obligations.

This is the inverse of the equally racist "one drop rule."

The one drop rule measured the amount of 'black blood' that black people had in society. And that ensured that every person who had at least one drop would be considered black and would be covered under these discriminatory laws and, even in the earlier days, enslaved.

Basically, if you have a way to exploit a group, you define them using "one drop." If you don't, then you just want to eliminate them. So you use "blood quantum"/DNA to argue them out of existence.

People will claim that research shows Ashkenazi Jews only have European DNA (false) and that's why DNA tests are illegal in Israel (false): because (((they))) don't want you to know they don't belong there!

There are 4,000+ years of continuous archeological and historical records showing that the Jewish people originated in Israel and are the only group that has continuously been there.

But we don't learn about the history of West Asia (the Middle East) in Western schools. So we default to our racist assumptions about the people there, and ignore and speak over all of them.

HOLOCAUST DENIAL VS HOLOCAUST INVERSION

Holocaust Inversion is a much easier one to explain.

Inversion is when you take a traumatizing experience of oppression that a group has experienced, and claim that actually, that group is the one committing that oppression on another.

White replacement/white genocide theories are a good example of that.

Like when white conservative groups, who are only here because their forebears violently replaced the existing populations (in some cases via actual genocide), claim that they're being deliberately "replaced" by indigenous people immigrating from farther south. And that the intention is somehow to commit genocide against them.

Inversion conveniently waters down what actually happened.

It relieves people of the perceived guilt from what their ancestors did, while awarding themselves the moral weight of it.

It's so, so juicy, you guys. It's such a good move. Who wouldn't want to turn, for example, the deliberate attempt to demonize all Jews, in order to gain the power to take over the world, while wiping them off the earth, and the mass enslavement of Jews along the way, into a war that has killed about as many Gazans as have been born during that time?

It simultaneously removes "you literally tried to kill all of us less than a century ago, don't talk to us about genocide" as an argument, and (ironically) gives you that healthy moral glow you feel from passionately arguing against the Holocaust.

Plus, it makes arguments against it sound like they're the ones minimizing it. It's very difficult to argue against exaggerations of the death toll, for instance, without sounding callous and uncaring of those who have been killed.

Ultimately, Holocaust inversion does the same thing as Holocaust denial.

Many Holocaust deniers don't argue that the Holocaust never happened. Instead, they seek to minimize it by saying that far fewer than 6 million Jews died. 271,000 is a popular denial number that I've seen thrown around in a lot of Instagram comments.

Or to increase the number of non-Jews who were killed. To argue that it was not specifically an attempt to kill every Jew on earth. To argue that Jews weren't targeted at all.

By contrast, people commonly say, "what Israel is doing in Gaza is exactly like the Holocaust."

This is the equivalent of saying that the Nazi Party spent almost two years bombing a 140 square mile area where 15% of the Jews on earth lived. And attacking it through ground invasions. And that they let humanitarian aid in.

And that the UN could not distribute that aid effectively, partly because 88% of its trucks regularly got looted, partly because there was a war going on around it.

It's actually a brilliant way to erase both the Holocaust and October 7.

Because the assumption, and implication, is that Israel attacked Gaza in order to wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth. Or at least to drive them out of Gaza and grab the land.

Land where Israel had already destroyed all its settlements in 2005, when it pulled out of Gaza and turned it fully over to Palestinian rule. Land where all synagogues have been destroyed. I don't know why Israel would wait 20 years and then try to take the entire thing back. So far, nobody I've asked has been able to give me a reason for thinking that.

It erases the fact that Hamas invaded Israel and mutilated, tortured, and burned its way across an area larger than the Gaza Strip itself, in just one day.

It erases how incredibly, graphically violent that attack was.

It erases the fact that Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, kicking the Palestinian government out entirely, and has run it as a brutal dictatorship ever since.

It erases the fact that Hamas's stated mission is to violently destroy Israel (because Jews are terrible and have no right to be there, see above).

And that it asked for, and got, $500,000,000 from Iran to plan October 7.

And that it has publicly stated, at least twice, that it will keep attacking until Israel has been "annihilated." (Hamas even has explicit plans for what it will do when it conquers that land.)

Ok I don't know why I thought "easy to explain" would mean I could explain it BRIEFLY

NAZI GERMANY VS THE USSR

Honestly, these are just two wildly Jew-hating places. That's it, that's the tweet.

Okay, fine:

The Russian Empire, while trying to control more and more land, instigated pogroms that scapegoated and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, while driving out about as many. It continued to be a nightmarishly Jew-hating and Jew-scapegoating place, yea, verily even unto today.

Doesn't matter what it's called, it's been doing the same shit the whole time. Including empire-building invasions.

And part of the way it scapegoated and mass-murdered Jews was by creating some of the worst, most powerful antisemitic propaganda the world has ever seen, and actively spreading it around the world.

The Nazi Party had the same playbook. Land, propaganda, murder, profit.

And it drew HEAVILY from the Russian playbook. It even integrated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into its massive propaganda machine.

It was especially heartened by the fact that nobody lifted a finger against Russia for killing and cleansing a total of probably 500,000 Jews.

The main difference is: because the Nazi Party was willing to do the killing itself, and to industrialize it, it was able to kill 2 out of every 3 Jews in all of Europe. 90%+ of the Jews in the countries it occupied. Along with all the Jews who were just killed by civilians who believed in the cause.

It's especially awful that people claim Israel was founded by "white European colonizer Jews," when "white European colonizers" spent so much time and effort trying to wipe the Jews out during that time.

It's also just plain annoying that people misinterpret early Zionist writings as meaning, "we're powerful colonizers!" when, for the first 40 years of the Zionist movement, that was literally the Ottoman Empire.

I asked someone recently how she could claim those Jews were colonizing a literal empire. The response was that they were obviously colonizers, because they came from Europe.

Please send help.

RIGHT WING VS LEFT WING

This is purely a matter of what other issues you support, and - sometimes - how you frame your arguments.

I literally can't tell the difference on Twitter anymore.

Like, ok:

She's responding to French president Emmanuel Macron saying France stands with Lebanon. "Exterminating the population" is Holocaust inversion. I'm going to guess that this is a leftist, based on the "all of humanity" wording, but I literally don't know. Let's find out!

Her header says, "The whole world is my temple, love is my sanctuary, the universe is my homeland." She's white and blonde as heck, which maybe explains why she feels like the entire universe is her homeland.

Her retweets are for USAID, against everyone in the Epstein files, against attacking Iran. She has one saying, "they lied to you about what a terrorist looks like," with a photo of some white dude I'm guessing is Pete Hesgeth or somebody. And another claiming that they lied to you about who bombed all the countries in West Asia - that it was not Iran, it was all "false flag operations" by the US and Israel.

(hilariously, one of the tweets claims that this was "revealed" by someone named "Krystal Ball." propagandists have realized they don't have to try anymore)

And then: a retweet from white supremacist Jackson Hinkle, whose "MAGA Communism" has been called out by antifascist groups for "cryptofascist" socialism. In other words, he infiltrates the left wing and creates a pipeline to the right wing.

(Followed by a tweet claiming that "If we don't stop Israel in time, it will do to the entire world what it has already done to the Palestinians." Again, buying right into the standard-issue propaganda that comes from both Russia and the Nazis.)

Let's do just one more! I thought right-wing at first, based on "vibes" I guess. But then I noticed the use of "anti zionists," which implies leftist. And "zios" was popularized by KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, which should mean right-wing - but it's been embraced by the left now.

Plus, it's in response to a politically conservative rabbi rejoicing that literal Nazis Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Joe Kent are no longer working in government.

Aaaaand.... I'm wrong.

His Twitter page implies that he's a Christian Nationalist. His most recent retweet is from a contest to win three guns. And he follows that by retweeting something claiming that your enemy if you're a Republican or Democrat is not the other party, it's Satanists. This one really clinches it:

oof.

Okay, last item!

OPEN BIGOTRY/RACE POLLUTERS VS ELIMINATIONISM/ZIONIST INQUISITION

This is very "potayto, potahto."

But only if both potatoes are green and poisonous.

I assume we all understand that openly being a bigot is bad. And that believing a group is "polluting" your race is also bad. So let's look at "eliminationism."

The most obvious example is the frequent claim that Israel is "Occupied Palestine"/"a failed state" that should be eliminated.

Some people who say this seem to think it's possible to just order a country's government to disband and hand the reins over to the neighboring government.

This would be especially complicated in the current situation, when Israelis are explicitly not allowed in almost any West Bank cities and it's a capital offense to sell land in Palestine to Israelis.

But also, that's just... literally not a thing. The way you get that would be by Palestine invading and conquering Israel. That's what you're talking about. And honestly, the government of Palestine doesn't seem to want that land or its people. That's a lot to dump on it all of a sudden.

Others who say this are clear that they mean someone should indeed invade and kill all the Zionists, by which they mean everyone in Israel. (Including about half the Jews on earth.)

Personally, I think that there should be a once-a-millennium limit on killing half the Jews on earth. (/s)

oh crap they're just gonna say they're taking this one early fuck shit fuck (/gen)

Literally, though, you cannot just sit there and call for the destruction of a country. You know that's calling for genocide.

But what else does "eliminationism" mean?

Pervasive right-wing extremist themes on radio, television, and some online news sources (often as a modern-day replacement for hard-copy newspapers and newsletters).... support an increasingly passionate and virulent message in public discourse. This message encourages persons who feel uneasy or displaced in society to expiate their grievances not through the political process, but through murder.

That paper points out that Americans tend to think our country is immune to such things - and that our history of lynching, among other things, disproves that.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were thousands of lynchings. This was a direct reaction to the end of slavery. That's why (and when) the KKK and other white supremacist groups started.

Being a Jew in a predominantly Christian town could be fatal. However, courts recognized that if the defendant was a black man the likelihood of race-based hostility grew significantly. ....When a more or less silent majority discounts eliminationist rhetoric as "merely" symbolic, the message can manifest as action. Cultural symbols gain power by articulating aspects of a group narrative.

People generally talk about this as a right-wing, even fascist phenomenon.

But like.

This is a false binary. But it's a very fucking popular false binary.

Because let's be real: we're all very fucking angry about how shitty capitalism is. And especially American capitalism. And especially its impact on the American healthcare system. And it's fun to fantasize angrily that this one dude killing one healthcare CEO is going to get us universal coverage. Instead of having zero impact on the system.

Fantasizing that you can achieve major social change by just going out and killing people, and that doing that wouldn't fuck you up, makes people feel powerful. Which makes us happy.

It's fun to imagine taking your rage out on the people in power.

But it's kind of scary to see people cheering on the murder of someone they abstractly hate, when you've seen time and again that they also abstractly hate you.

(In fact, people were spreading disinformation claiming that the New York Times ran a headline saying "The Glorification of Luigi Mangione Is Inherently Anti-Israel."

People are at the point where they make literally everything about "Israel" somehow. Everything is a "zionist psyop."

It feels like watching the Protocols of the Elders of Zion get popular. It feels like the 1930s.)

Symbols are manipulated to create an atmosphere that accepts political violence.

The next ones are replies to someone selling cryptocurrency called Snowball:

An NYC group tried to incite a second Crown Heights riot in 2025, spreading the same old lies that started the first one. but this time, targeting the "jewish supremacist zios" who "martyred" the kid who died to a car accident.

This was the lie that started the Crown Heights Riots in 1991, in which 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered and 38 civilians were injured.

This begins by dehumanizing the targeted social group. The repeated use of culturally specific imagery supports brutalizing such targets individually.

"The research found that student groups have explicitly called for violence against Jews, with some justifying the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in December, which killed 15 people and injured 40. Nearly half, 49 per cent, of students had heard slogans or chants glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah or other proscribed groups on campus, while 47 per cent have witnessed justification of the October 7 attacks."

As moderate voices remain silent or ineffective in the face of such events, extremist messages move from the fringe toward the center of public discourse.

By imbuing the message with religiosity, extremist positions and actions convert into "[h]oly wars and just causes [that] invite warriors to view battle as sacred drama."

Extremist violence against the dehumanized becomes accepted.

Episodic events of assault turn into acts of arson and rampages, then, if unchecked, into pogroms and genocide.

(de-paywalled links: the bondi beach one, the jews are no longer surprised one)

TL;DR:

^^^^Why is this so hard for people to grasp.

Great read. I had NO idea how the Crown Heights incident went down - for years I’m sorry to say that I had also thought the Hatzalah ambulance abandoned that child.

Also wanted to add, regarding Jews and privilege -

It’s a lot more complex, but in a nutshell - a lot of Jewish success comes from multiple factors. While a small percentage of Jews who are light-skinned and not-visibly-Jewish like myself do have some privilege and advantages in the west when visibly out in the open, we do NOT benefit from white privilege.

We’re a tiny group with overlapping culture of emphasis of education despite diaspora. We were not allowed to have property in many countries in many time periods. PLUS we were often exiled out of places and lost whatever property we had. So education was all we had. Knowledge could not be taken.

We were not allowed “real” jobs. Medicine (especially in Europe) back in the day was basically considered what crystal healing is today, so it was a job that a lot of Jews were allowed to do and they did what they could to survive.

Dealing with money and jewelry was also considered materialistic and lowly, so we were allowed to do that too. And again, we thrived. Hence the Jewish banker stereotype.

We were not allowed medicine sometimes - New York City hospitals had often banned both Jewish doctors AND patients - so we founded our own, Mount Sinai Hospital.

We were not allowed to make our own stories. So we founded Hollywood, we helped found Broadway. Again we thrived because we learned that our work and education was our bread and butter. But… that became “Jews control media, Jews control Hollywood” etc.

It doesn’t mean we’re better than anyone, nor do we think we’re better than anyone.

Very rarely throughout history was there ever a case of Jews owning slaves, Jews never invaded any country and stole their resources (contrary to the “Nakbah” narrative - we never kicked out Arabs from our own land, they left on their own. The descendants of those Arabs who stayed are largely still residing in Israel as equal citizens.)

So our success was NOT from stealing or pillaging or taking advantage. It was fully made and earned.

The usual case is white privileged people taking advantage over POC, enslaving them, hoarding generational wealth, etc.

Jews don’t fit neatly into either stereotype, so this leads to wild and widespread discriminatory assumptions about Jews.

We didn’t steal but we also didn’t need saving.

Very rarely will anyone come to save us. That’s why Nazi Germany was able to kill so many of us (1/3rd of our entire global population). Hitler was only stopped because he was stepping on other countries’ toes, not because anyone cared that much about Jews. There’s literally more uproar from the west currently about Palestinian casualties than there ever were for Jewish casualties in WWII.

That’s why we believe in protecting ourselves. That’s why the IDF exists (that and 80 years of terrorism). That’s why modern Israel is a thriving country today despite starting off with poverty and poor resources, and many traumatized survivors from Europe or forcibly removed immigrants from Arab countries.

The "Jews are white" crowd loves to pretend that Israel is a white country. It's not. A lot of its citizens are descendants of refugees kicked out of North Africa and the Middle East. They're dark skinned. Physically, these are people whose foundation shade is solidly in the middle, not people who would use "Alabaster" or "Fair". There are also all the Jews who aren't from Europe—Beta Israel (Ethiopian), Ugandan, Kaifeng (Chinese), Cochin (Indian), et cetera. A lot of us settled in Europe, but not all of us. Skin tones in Israel are extremely varied and you'll see that a lot.

It wasn't a ridiculous idea, but it seems to have been proven wrong. A generation later, antisemitism is once again the next big thing, and it is hard to go to these museums today without feeling that something profound has shifted.

[...]

No, what I'm wondering about is the purpose of my knowing all of these obscene facts, in such granular detail.

I already know the official answer of course: Everyone must learn the depths to which humanity can sink. Those who do not study history are bound to repeat it. I attended public middle school; I have been taught these things. But as I read the endless wall texts describing the specific quantities of poison used to murder 90 percent of Europe's Jewish children, something else occurred to me. Perhaps presenting all these facts has the opposite effect from what we think. Perhaps we are giving people ideas.

I don't mean giving people ideas about how to murder Jews. there is no shortage of ideas like that, going back to Pharaoh's decree in the Book of Exodus about drowning Hebrew baby boys in the Nile. I mean, rather, that perhaps we are giving people ideas about our standards. Yes, everyone must learn about the Holocaust so as to not repeat it. But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.

Shooting people in a synagogue in San Diego or Pittsburgh isn't "systemic"; it's an act of a "lone wolf." And it's not the Holocaust. The same is true for arson attacks against two different Boston-area synagogues, followed by similar simultaneous attacks on Jewish institutions in Chicago a few days later, along with physical assaults on religious Jews on the streets of New York—all of which happened within a week of my visit to the Auschwitz show.

Lobbing missiles at sleeping children in Israel's Kiryat Gat, where my husband's cousins spent the week of my museum visit dragging their kids to bomb shelters, isn't an attempt to bring "Death to the Jews," no matter how frequently the people lobbing the missiles broadcast those very words; the wily Jews there figured out how to prevent their children from dying in large piles, so it is clearly no big deal.

Doxxing Jewish journalists is definitely not the Holocaust. Harassing Jewish college students is also not the Holocaust. Trolling Jews on social media is not the Holocaust either, even when it involves photoshopping them into gas chambers. (Give the trolls credit: They have definitely heard of Auschwitz.) Even hounding ancient Jewish communities out of entire countries and seizing all their assets—which happened in a dozen Muslim nations whose Jewish communities predated the Islamic conquest, countries that are now all almost entirely Judenrein—is emphatically not the Holocaust. It is quite amazing how many things are not the Holocaust.

The day of my visit to the museum, the rabbi of my synagogue attended a meeting arranged by police for local clergy, including him and seven Christian ministers and priests. The topic of the meeting was security. Even before the Pittsburgh massacre, membership dues at my synagogue included security fees. But apparently these local churches do not charge their congregants security fees, or avail themselves of government funds for this purpose. The rabbi later told me how he sat in stunned silence as church officials discussed whether to put a lock on a church door. "A lock on the door," the rabbi said to me afterward, stupefied.

[...]

I feel the need to apologize here, to acknowledge that yes, this rabbi and I both know that many non-Jewish houses of worship in other places also require rent-a-cops, to announce that yes, we both know that other groups have been persecuted too—and this degrading need to recite these middle-school-obvious facts is itself an illustration of the problem, which is that dead Jews are only worth discussing if they are part of something bigger, something more. Some other people might go to Holocaust museums to feel sad, and then to feel proud of themselves for feeling sad. They will have learned something officially important, discovered a fancy metaphor for the limits of Western civilization. The problem is that for us, dead Jews aren't a metaphor, but rather actual people that we do not want our children to become.