A Debate About Holocaust Education Goes Viral

“Holocaust education is absolutely essential,” [Hurwitz] said. “But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism 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.’”  - Sarah Hurwitz

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 antiZionist framings, as well as by the non-Jewish antizionist networks who treat any intra-Jewish critique as ammunition.

Within the broader 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.

What Holocaust Education Was Designed to Do — and What It Was Not

The truth is that we have to talk about what went wrong 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 some degree, to inoculate societies against explicit antisemitism, it succeeded too. For a time.

But the world changed, with digital media, social platforms, and new ideological movements. Yet the reliance on Holocaust education to remain the single moral firewall against antisemitism stayed the same.

This is only the beginning of a long conversation, one that requires honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to admit that we were behind the curve.

The Gap Between Institutions and Real-Time Jewish Creators

One of those conversations must be about the gap between established institutional Jewish advocacy and the vast ecosystem of unsponsored Jewish content creators. This mini-universe of largely unnoticed Jewish advocacy has a great deal to teach us; 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 became part of that real-time conversation when I built a TikTok account with just under half a million followers and 9 million likes. This didn't happen 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.

Learning the Architecture of Digital Antisemitism

I spent more time studying antisemitic content creators than I did creating my own content. 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.

Along the way, I researched trends and best practices and emulated them with my own touch. It was an endless project of trial and error.

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 little to much more often, 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. He was arguably the most visible Holocaust survivor in the world.

Despite that, outside of Hebrew University, for whom I provided data, I was never approached by any major Jewish institution unless it was to be asked to use my platform to plug their events or newest initiatives. My account ended up doing the work institutions should have been doing.

October 7th: The Collapse of an Assumed Solidarity

And then October 7th happened. Almost overnight, Gidon was no longer acceptable in the online world. 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 more than 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.

What People Asked Gidon Before October 7th

Before October 7th, I always tried to respond to every email and DM sent to Gidon. I treated those conversations as a priority; hundreds of thousands of social media users had developed a parasocial relationship with Gidon, and they deserved to be seen.

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 emotional effect.

But the question persisted: Could it happen again?

Antisemitism Didn’t Disappear — It Evolved

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 form of genocide. 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—the dehumanization, the disgust, the conspiracies of antisemitism—never disappeared. It waited in the wings, preparing for a costume change. The new antisemitism didn’t arrive with swastikas; it came wrapped in the language of liberation. “Free Palestine.” “Decolonize.” “Globalize the intifada.”

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, where the seven million Jews living there would go doesn’t seem important. That is not critique; it is a vision in which Jewish presence is erased.

Why Traditional Holocaust Education Couldn’t Counter This

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.

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 too heavily, expecting it to remain the single bulwark against antisemitism long after the hatred had changed shape.

Einat Wilf frames antisemitism bluntly: Utopian fantasies require the removal of the collective Jew.

Emergent organizations like the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) have the potential to do essential work, but they cannot carry the burden alone, just as Holocaust education couldn't carry it alone.

Jewish Creators Are an Early Warning System

Luckily, there is an early warning system: constellations of Jewish and Jewish-adjacent creators doing brilliant, innovative, social media content creation every single day. They must be seen. They deserve support.

In this moment of Jewish, and societal, crisis, we must get out of our self-imposed siloes and bring together the institutions, the creators, the educators, the analysts, the musicians, the rabbis, the journalists—the entire ecosystem—into a diverse yet coherent response.

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

The Questions We Must Now Ask

These are only a few of the questions we need to be asking as educators as we move into the post-October 7th information landscape:

• How do we safeguard Jewish particularism within the framework of the Shoah and its larger lessons?

• How do we teach particularity without freezing antisemitism in 1945 imagery?

• How will we protect and preserve Holocaust history in the age of AI?

• How do we teach about genocide if the word is stripped of its meaning?

• How do we teach both the specificity of the Holocaust and the larger arc of anti-Jewish hate?

• How do we teach young people to recognize anti-Jewish bigotry in its nascent, pre-viral stages?

• How can we cultivate a more effective, coherent advocacy that integrates ALL Jewish and Holocaust education advocates, not just the big institutions?

• How can we foster the nimbleness critical in this moment?