I once thought that the greatest test of our generation was empathy. On Yom HaShoah in 2017, I wrote: “When we remember the 6 million victims and say, ‘never again’ this year, let’s be empathetic and compassionate against all forms of hatred, prejudice and discrimination.” Of course, I still believe that it’s important to be an empathetic person. But it seems like many of today’s social justice advocates are missing the nuance and bigger picture. I now realize that empathy must have boundaries.
So much has changed in the last few years, and the world is a different place for Jews, post-10/7. As Jews, we can’t advocate for tikkun olam at all costs, including at the expense of our own safety and survival. Israel did not start this war, and Hamas continues it by refusing to release 59 hostages. There is a saying that “all is fair in love and war.” The fight is not over, and Israel is allowed to defend itself until the enemy is defeated. As an American Jew, I fully support Israel’s decision about how to defend itself.
I think it’s been a failure of Holocaust education in this country to extrapolate the lessons of genocide to all forms of hate, prejudice and discrimination. We need to distinguish that what happened during the Holocaust was a genocide against the Jewish people. The Holocaust was a specific effort to exterminate the Jews.
Unfortunately, we have learned these failures in Holocaust education the hard way. Since Oct. 7, it’s more important than ever to find effective ways to combat antisemitism, which is closely linked to anti-Zionism. We live in a world with real evil in it, and we need to be able to clearly distinguish between good and evil to eradicate it.
Oct. 7 was a mini-Holocaust. Israeli children were kidnapped and killed for one reason: because they were Jewish. Kfir and Ariel Bibas can be compared to Anne Frank, the most famous childhood face of the Holocaust. There are parallels to be made between Yarden Bibas, who survived 484 days as a hostage in Gaza only to be released and learn that his wife and two sons were brutally murdered by Hamas, and Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz only to learn that his wife and two daughters were murdered by the Nazis. Dara Horn, the author of “People Love Dead Jews,” said on a recent Tablet magazine podcast, that we only have a window into Anne Frank when she was in hiding. When Anne wrote in her diary, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” that was before she was captured by the Nazis. We don’t have a window into her thoughts once she was sent to a concentration camp and confronted true evil and was murdered.
Anne Frank’s diary is currently on exhibition in New York at the Center for Jewish History. Holocaust education needs to take it one step further and make the connection to what is happening in Israel right now. Edan Alexander, an American who grew up in my own backyard in Tenafly, is still being held hostage by Hamas in the tunnels of Gaza for over 530 days. Every American should be outraged by this; he should be a household name. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I naively thought that because of their generation’s sacrifice, and our commitment to Holocaust education and the principles of zachor, it would mean “never again.” Oct. 7 taught us that the Holocaust is no longer a history lesson, and that “never again” is now.
On Passover, we will recount how we were once slaves in Egypt, and that in every generation we are obligated to see ourselves as if we personally were redeemed from Egypt. We live in a world where evil does exist. The only way to combat evil, and eradicate it, is to have moral clarity and clear definitions that call out right versus wrong, good versus evil. I now believe that the greatest test of our generation is being able to stand up for the truth among the lies, and to find light in the darkness of this world.
