Our Genocides: Confronting a New Period in Jewish History
Part One of a twelve-part series on Israel, Gaza, and American Jewry.
Our Genocides1
By Todd Hasak-Lowy2
1.
We used to have only one genocide.
Now we have two.
The first was committed against us.
The second is being committed by us.
But each is ours, so now we have two.
2.
The first was bigger, was more extreme than the necessarily extreme second one. Our first genocide was so unprecedented in its extremity that the Jewish collective effort to comprehend and commemorate it, to learn and teach its lessons, has become one of our central undertakings, as Jews, in the years since. To be a Jew since the middle of the twentieth century is to know oneself, to fix one’s identity, as the potential target of genocidal acts. But this self-understanding did not prevent us from perpetrating genocide.
3.
The difference between our two genocides is so great that many people, many of our own people, are outraged by anyone who dares to place them together under the category: “our genocides.” To be sure, every genocide is unique, the particular outcome of a singular blend of dehumanization, opportunity, and the tools of human destruction. And some genocides are more destructive than others. The Holocaust was more destructive, and thus worse, than what Israel is doing in Gaza.
Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that humanity created a term for a certain kind of collective brutality and mass killing. Not only this, humanity gave this term institutionalized legal force, in an effort to deter people from committing this crime again.
And both the Holocaust and Israel’s actions in Gaza belong under its heading. We have two genocides, however different they may be.
4.
The fact that we now have two genocides marks a terrible historical irony. Our vast and varied response to the first genocide—a response motivated in large part by our determination to prevent such a thing from ever happening to us again—must now be understood as one of the causes of the second.
In a word, we overcompensated.
Outrage over my claim that we have two genocides, denial regarding the basic truth of this claim—these are additional signs of our ongoing overcompensation.
The Jews now have two genocides, despite all our efforts to teach and warn the world about the danger of genocide.
A terrible historical irony.
5.
A Jew, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term “genocide,” so as to give this crime a name.3 Lemkin, a Polish Jew, began his crusade before the Nazis rose to power. As a young law student, he learned of what the Turks had done to the Armenians and wondered why the law was unable to prevent such an atrocity.
His project then was not one of Holocaust exceptionalism. It couldn’t have been, as the Holocaust hadn’t yet happened when he began his work. Rather, he sought to give the world a tool for identifying something humans had done to one another over and over and over again, so that the international legal and political systems might be able to prevent it.
In the early and mid 1930s, Lemkin paid close attention to the way Hitler spoke and the kind of moves his party and, later, government were making. They intended to exploit this vulnerability in the international order. Just before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler asked his military chiefs, “Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?”4
In the early years of the war, Lemkin, half refugee, half messenger, travels extensively in an effort to sound the alarm: Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, and eventually the United States. He believes the US is the best candidate to do anything about what the Nazis are already doing. He spends much of 1941 and all of 1942 and 1943 trying to get US leaders to do something.
But Lemkin fails. Not only does he fail, but what the Germans do dwarfs what the Turks had done. Worst of all, at least for Lemkin, forty-nine out of his fifty-three family members are killed. This cataclysm claims almost every one of Lemkin’s relatives and the entire world in which he was born and raised.
Somehow, Lemkin continues his crusade. He knows that this bug, this feature of the international system will allow such a thing to happen again, a thing that has already occurred twice in his lifetime.
He decides to name it. Not the Holocaust or the Shoah. Despite all that happened to him, he decides that we, humanity in its entirety, need a name for this bug, this feature. For the mass destruction of a people. And not just for intentional mass murder, but—and this is crucial—for all the other related, seemingly lesser acts that lead to and make possible this killing: forced migration, mass starvation, the targeting of leaders, et cetera. Lemkin knows that if the world is going to stop such things from happening again, our language needs to be expanded to include a new word that names this crime.
Lemkin coins the term “genocide.” That was him. Genos, people, race; caedo, killing. First half Greek, second half Latin. Hard to mispronounce and easy to remember. The world adopts it. Webster puts it in the dictionary. Newspapers start using it. And, most important, the international legal and political communities try to figure out what to do about this thing we had been overlooking, in part because we did not have a word for it. Because we didn’t know there was something to name at all.
In 1948, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide approved this multipart definition:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
6.
I am not an expert on genocide, but I have read the words of many who are. I finally, and reluctantly, reached the conclusion that we, the Jews, now have a second genocide based on the writings of Omer Bartov, Aryeh Neier, Amos Goldberg, and Daniel Blatman.
All four men are Jews, three are Israeli, and they all refused to call the war in Gaza a genocide until it was many months old.
7.
Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He was born in Israel in 1954, served in the Israeli army, and was an officer in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He is the author of such books as Mirrors of Genocide: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.
Bartov has been writing regularly about the conflict in Gaza since October 7, 2023. In the immediate months following October Seventh, Bartov stopped short of calling Israel’s war a genocide; he merely said it was in danger of becoming one. His slow and deliberate change of opinion has been publicly documented and backed up by sober observation and precise reasoning.
In an April, 24, 2025, essay in The New York Review of Books, Bartov writes:
If we take into account the killed, the wounded, the thousands buried under the rubble, the thousands of “indirect” deaths due to the destruction of most medical facilities, the thousands of children who will never fully recover from the long-term effects of starvation and trauma, we can undoubtedly conclude that Israel has deliberately subjected the Palestinian people in Gaza, most of whom are refugees from the partition of Palestine in 1948 or their descendants, to ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,’ as stated in Article II(c) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.5
8.
Aryeh Neier was born in Berlin in 1937. His family fled Germany in 1939. He has spent most of his life in the United States.
Neier is one of the founders of Human Rights Watch and is the author of numerous books, among them War Crimes: Brutality, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice.
In a June 6, 2024, essay, Neier notes that he did not originally support South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel, which the former brought against the latter at the International Court of Justice in December 2023. Neier adds that he supports Israel’s right to retaliate against Hamas following October Seventh. He also mentions that, because of the way Hamas is embedded within the civilian population, Israeli retaliation would necessarily involve considerable civilian harm.
Nevertheless, in a June, 6, 2024 essay in The New York Review of Books Neier writes, “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory.”
9.
Amos Goldberg is a professor of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the Holocaust, and his English-language books include Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust. Daniel Blatman is a colleague of Goldberg’s at the Hebrew University and a historian specializing in the Holocaust. He is the author of The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide.
Goldberg reached his conclusion that this is a genocide before the other three experts. In an essay published in Hebrew on April 17, 2024, “Yes, This Is Genocide,” Goldberg writes, “It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.”6
Goldberg’s case is straightforward:
What is happening in Gaza is genocide because the level and pace of indiscriminate killing, destruction, mass expulsions, displacement, famine, executions, the wiping out of cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanisation of the Palestinians—create an overall picture of genocide, of a deliberate conscious crushing of Palestinian existence in Gaza.
In late January, 2025, Goldberg and Blatman together published a long column in Haaretz, “There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It’s Still Genocide.” In it they write, “[A] meticulous comparative examination of events over the past year leads to the painful conclusion that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza.” Later in their article, after listing at length various features of Israel’s actions in Gaza—everything from the number killed and injured to the “destruction of infrastructure for local food production and water distribution”—the two historians write, “all these paint a clear picture of genocide. Gaza, as a human, national collective entity, no longer exists. This is precisely what genocide looks like.”
10.
These four Jewish experts all reached their conclusions gradually and reluctantly. These are not men who use “genocide” sloppily, as a crude epithet with which to condemn Israel and even Zionism as a whole. There are many other experts who have reached this conclusion as well.
Which is not to say there is consensus on this matter. There has been debate and even crisis within genocide studies, at least as of late 2024, due in large part to the uniquely central place the Holocaust plays in the field and the larger suspicion that no one, not even otherwise dispassionate scholars, can successfully separate their politics from this question.7 Perhaps for this reason, many scholars have elected not to weigh in on the matter publicly at all. But this is steadily changing. On May 15, 2025, the Dutch newspaper NRC spoke to seven prominent genocide scholars, including the Israeli historian Raz Segal. All of them agreed that Israel’s actions in Gaza now constitute genocide. Moreover, they could not name a single researcher whose work they respect who still contends otherwise.8
11.
One scholar who continues to object to the charge of genocide is Holocaust historian Norman Goda, who incidentally used to be a colleague of mine in Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. In February, 2025, Goda published a long essay entitled “The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel with Genocide.”
Almost this entire piece is an account of the long history of Israel being accused of genocide. Without a doubt, Goda shows that this charge is nothing new, and has often been inseparable from larger, occasionally anti-Semitic efforts to discredit Israel and Zionism in their entirety.
The problem with Goda’s piece, however, is that he appears to assume that since numerous past accusations do not stand up to scrutiny and were made in bad faith, so the current instance must be more of the same. Goda ignores virtually all details of what Israel has done and continues to do in Gaza since October 2023. He assumes, in other words, that recent accusations against Israel are no different than previous ones, despite ample evidence that the world is now condemning Israel for actions that are absolutely unprecedented in the history of this conflict.
12.
More important than my opinion on this question, more important even than the voices of numerous experts, is my confidence that much of the world will eventually conclude that Israel has committed genocide.
Why do I believe this?
Because so many countries already have called it genocide; because the situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate; because, eventually, this offensive will end, allowing journalists and experts of all sorts to visit Gaza and document what precisely has happened there in the last nineteen months,9 a near-global consensus that Israel committed genocide in Gaza may well emerge.10
This global consensus will matter more than our collective refusal, as Jews, to accept it.
13.
Once the world concludes that we, the Jews, have two genocides, we will have entered a new period in Jewish history.
We had already entered a new period, the post-October Seventh period, by October 8, 2023. It was immediately clear that October Seventh was a watershed in the history of Israel, the conflict, and perhaps even Jewish history as a whole.
But while for many Israelis, and many diaspora Jews as well, every day is October 8, the world has continued to divide time in additional ways.
The immediate period after October Seventh will be viewed, I believe, as a brief, liminal stage, in which Israel began to respond to Hamas’ genocidal attack with what proved to be a genocidal response of its own.
We have now transitioned into a post-post-October Seventh period, one defined by the fact that Israel has committed genocide. This period will demand of Jews, wherever they may be, a new way of being.
14.
Yes, the attacks of October Seventh were genocidal in nature. Israeli Jews were murdered for being Israeli Jews. The men who committed these murders would have killed many, many more had they been able.
But genocide requires both genocidal intent and the ability to act on this intent. In light of the latter, it is indisputable that Israel is capable of genocidal destruction to an extent that Hamas can literally only dream about. Lacking an air force, tanks, and cutting-edge technology—not to mention unwavering support and material assistance from the world’s strongest military power—the best (or worst) Hamas can do is around five thousand armed men, accompanied by rocket fire, paragliders, and boats, rampaging through twenty-one communities and a music festival for less than twenty-four hours.
To describe in any detail what Israel has done in response would require much more than a single sentence.
15.
The fundamental question that will confront Jews, including American Jews, is: What are we to do about the fact that we now have two genocides?
This question can be broken down into a few smaller, related questions:
Will we do anything to bring this genocide (which, as of this writing, is ongoing) to an end?
Will we accept the truth of this genocide?
Will we acknowledge not just our failure to prevent this genocide, but our passive acquiescence and often active contributions—in the form of money, political cover, et cetera—to its execution?
16.
With regard to the first question, the terrible answer appears to be no, not for the most part. Many people are trying to stop this genocide, and some of these people are Jews, but this effort appears to be failing. This genocide is happening with the world’s knowledge of it, but a host of geopolitical forces—first and second among them the Netanyahu government and two American administrations—are preventing the world from stopping it.
This all may get worse before it gets better, but even if this genocide ends tomorrow, it will have already happened, and, by and large, Jews will be remembered as having numbered among those who directly carried it out (Israeli Jews), provided such Jews cover and support (American Jews), or did nothing at all to stop it (again, American Jews).
I belong to that last group, I should admit.
17.
With regard to the second question—Will we accept the truth of this genocide?—the answer may also be no. In fact, the main obstacle to the solidification of a global consensus around the truth of Israel’s genocide is, I fear, ourselves. With many of our loudest, strongest voices so determined to minimize and justify and explain away and distract from what is happening in Gaza, so determined to blame Hamas for its own people’s suffering, so insistent on claiming that the true danger is anti-Semitism, it is unlikely that much of our community will accept this truth once the literal dust has settled. We will continue trying to get the world not to see what is there in plain sight to see.
And this necessarily provides an answer to the third question as well since, if we don’t accept the truth of this genocide, we certainly can’t accept our role in it, either.
18.
The answers to these previous questions explain as well why I’m comfortable saying that “the Jews” now have two genocides. After all, I am well aware that “the Jews” are diverse. That in addition to the minority of us speaking out and trying to stop this genocide, there are many Jews disturbed by it, ambivalent about it, confused about it, or ignoring it altogether. And there are many Jews whose Jewishness, such as it is, actively revolves around other things, for whom Israel is a marginal part of their Jewish identity.
But none of that changes what I view to be indisputable. The loudest, clearest, and most powerful forces in our community are in support of this. Are in conflict with those trying to stop it and in such a way as to silence any but the most determined among us. Consequently—and this is a terrible but inescapable bottom line—Israel’s genocide now belongs to all of us.
19.
I feel I should make one more effort to convince those readers still reluctant to accept the reality of Israeli genocide that this indeed is what is happening.
Here is my case:
As of late July 2025, Israel has killed over 60,000 Palestinians. The majority were civilians. The number of children killed is over 17,000. When compared to other genocides—including, of course, the Holocaust—this figure, however awful, may seem so small as to be a rounding error.11
Keep in mind, however, that this figure does not include the bodies buried under rubble. Only one week into Israel’s bombing campaign, back in October 2023, it was estimated that 1,000 people were already trapped under bombed out buildings. By the middle of November, 2023, Israel had already dropped approximately six hundred two-thousand-pound bombs on Gaza, bombs that have a blast radius of a quarter mile. According to the UNRWA, over 90 percent of homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Entire cities no longer exist.12
Professor Michael Spagat, an economist at the University of London, is an expert on mortality in violent conflicts. In a recent study, he concluded that, by January, 2025, over 75,000 people had died violent deaths in Gaza. At that time, the Health Ministry in Gaza had the number at only 45,000. If Spagat’s figures are accurate, then the current total of dead is around 100,000.13
Keep in mind as well that virtually all Gaza’s medical and health infrastructure had already been destroyed many months before. Food is so scarce—along with potable water—that the entire strip is threatened with famine. Children are now dying daily of malnutrition.
Most of the population in Gaza is thus essentially homeless—and has been forced to move, or simply flee, more than once. They are incapable of finding medical treatment and are eating a fraction of the calories that would make up a normal diet.
Think for a moment about all the people in your life—diabetics, the elderly, the very young, those in need of dialysis—who continue living thanks only to the reliability of the basic necessities in their lives: food, shelter, medicine, et cetera. Without trying too hard, I can think of a couple of dozen people I know personally who would likely die within six months were they to be forced to live under the conditions that Palestinians are living under in Gaza.
So what is the actual number of dead already? How many indirect deaths have been caused by this war, if “war” is even the right word at this point? And what will the final number be when this comes to an end?
20.
But to focus merely on the number dead is to choose the wrong metric. Even expanding our frame to include the injured misses the point, however much it is worth noting that Gaza now contains the most child amputees of anywhere on earth.
Most schools, universities, and cultural centers in Gaza have been destroyed. This society, such as it was, no longer exists.
With this in mind, we should ask: How many people, among those who survive, will be irreparably damaged thanks to the lengthy physical and psychological trauma they have been forced to endure? Such things are impossible to measure, but surely more than a million people belong in the category of the irreparably damaged.
You may claim that all this is being done to destroy Hamas and/or free the hostages. But only 8 hostages have been rescued by the military (out of 148 hostages who have been returned alive), whereas at least 20 have actually been killed as a result of IDF operations in Gaza. Meanwhile, numerous Israeli military leaders and security figures have stated that destroying Hamas through force is simply not possible.
Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that the wholesale destruction of Gaza is not a byproduct of Israel’s war, but rather the aim of it. As Omer Bartov recently said, “[T]his is not a war, that is a false representation.” Rather the aim is “to destroy completely Palestinian existence in Gaza and render the Strip uninhabitable.”
21.
So here it is again: the multipart definition of genocide, as approved by the UN in 1948:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Only (e) clearly doesn’t apply here; (b) and (c) are indisputable, (a) is likely as well, and since it is quite hard to keep newborns alive under the current conditions in Gaza—or even carry a viable fetus to term—(d) would seem to fit as well.
And only one of these needs to be met for the label to apply.
This is a genocide.
22.
Section (c) above raises the matter of intent, which, in the realm of international law, is quite difficult to prove. In other words, there is a chance that, when the South African case against Israel, first brought in late 2023, reaches the International Court of Justice, that the ICJ will rule that Gaza is not a genocide.
But even when focusing on the demanding threshold of intent, the case against Israel remains unusually compelling.
In an April, 2025 interview, William Schabas, a Canadian-born expert on International Human Rights Law and author of such books as Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, says, “Of all the cases that have come before the International Court of Justice dealing with the Genocide Convention, there are now nineteen of them, South Africa’s case is the strongest.”14
On a similar note, Goldberg and Blatman write that the United States has officially recognized ten cases of genocide. The eighth of these were the actions taken by Myanmar against the country’s Rohingya Muslims starting in 2016. But
The statements by Myanmar officials about Myanmar intent to exterminate the Rohingya are weak and incidental compared to the flood of genocidal statements heard from all corridors of politics, society, media, and the military in Israel, expressing extreme dehumanization of Palestinians, and a desire for their widespread extermination.15
23.
The contrast between the United States’ readiness to categorize Myanmar’s atrocities as genocide and our country’s absolute refusal to do so in the case of Israel—despite the Gaza genocide being more deadly (high estimates of Rohingya deaths are below 50,00016)—is viewed by some as proof of a genuine crisis or even collapse in the postwar global order. And obviously, the United States is doing something much worse than refusing to recognize the genocide in Gaza for what it is; our country is arming Israel and providing it with endless diplomatic cover.
A full explanation of America’s stance here would take up quite a bit of space, as it would have to include everything from American geopolitical interests in the region to the political strength of non-Jewish, evangelical Zionists (who, it is important to note, vastly outnumber Jewish American Zionists). That being said, the American Jewish community has certainly played a role in the emergence of this remarkable and indefensible double standard.
24.
With the abundance of evidence regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza growing by the day, it is becoming more and more common for Israel’s defenders to reach for context in order to explain it away. This is what happens during war; Hamas started this; Hamas could end this now if it released the hostages; Palestinians voted for Hamas so they’re responsible; et cetera.
Putting aside for a moment the fact that most of these excuses don’t stand up to scrutiny,17 it’s important to remember that genocide is a war crime. In other words, committing genocide during a war doesn’t excuse it. There are some things a country is simply never allowed to do under any circumstances, and genocide is one of them.
This truth also addresses another common justification being offered to support Israel’s actions: that its operations in Gaza are self-defense. It is certainly possible to view Israel’s war in Gaza, at least for a time, as a form of self-defense, but this does not make it mutually exclusive with genocide. Genocide and perceived self-defense often go hand in hand.
As Goldberg and Blatman write, “Most instances of genocide in modern times have occurred after prolonged violent conflict between the group of perpetrators and the group of victims.” After listing examples of this—the Armenians and the Ottoman Turks, the Herero people in Africa and their German colonizers, the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda—the two historians continue:
In this context, it is essential to note that most acts of genocide are perceived by their perpetrators as acts of self-defense against their victims. The Israeli Palestinian conflict undoubtedly falls into this category; genocide in Gaza is seen by most Israelis as a defensive war following the horrific attack by Hamas.18
25.
The Holocaust, in this regard, is an outlier.
It is my impression, moreover, that our community’s expertise—not to mention preoccupation—with the Holocaust has actually made us somewhat ignorant about the category of genocide in general. Our steady, decades-long engagement with the Holocaust—its utterly hyperbolic qualities, the fact that the Nazis targeted Jews for elimination despite the latter posing no security threat whatsoever—has caused many of us to miss just how common genocide is. For instance, the well-known geographer Jared Diamond, in a book published in 1992, lists seventeen genocides since 1950.19
I have spoken to numerous Jewish friends and family members since starting this project, and many are surprised to learn how expansive the category of “genocide” is. Why, they ask, doesn’t the term name only deliberate campaigns of direct mass murder (according to which only genocides like the Holocaust and the one in Rwanda would count)? As I will explain at greater length later on, a more expansive definition captures the early stages of a slippery slope, where other war crimes, including ethnic cleansing, often drift into something much worse.
Keep in mind, for instance, that the Nazis’ original plans for the Jews focused on ghettoization and relocation. Actual extermination was only settled on much later, in mid-1941.
Against this backdrop, the question for our community, then, is what exactly “never again” means. Certainly this slogan addresses an atrocity like the Holocaust, but it seems to me to be a horribly missed opportunity if that’s all those words really mean. The somewhat recent field of genocide studies has helped us identify just how common the crime of genocide is. Certainly we can take a great deal of credit for this increased awareness. But we can also act in such a way as to undo it by insisting on a more narrow definition this time around, by thus denying the truth of a “lesser” case when the perpetrators are members of our own religion.
26.
In the eyes of the contemporary Jew, the Holocaust denier is a unique villain. This figure is so purely abhorrent, so inexpressibly mendacious, that he’s become a caricature. The absurdity of his position renders him nearly comical these days. But we can now mock and dismiss such people only because without question Jews have won the struggle over memory when it comes to the Shoah.
Prior to this victory, Holocaust deniers posed an unimaginable threat. The past—the years 1933 through 1945—were unspeakable enough. To prevent this past from becoming accurately known, to tell a different, false story, was to negate the one good that might be salvaged from all that horror; to incapacitate the very force of “never again”; and, consequently, to increase and extend the harm.
Based on its current words and actions, it seems quite possible that much of the American Jewish establishment will never recognize and accept the central truth of what Israel has done in Gaza. We will continue placing the blame on Hamas. We will continue telling ourselves and others that all they had to do was release the hostages. We will convince ourselves that Israel had no choice and no alternatives. All this was simply self-defense. We will assert that the Palestinians (and the Arabs, and the Muslim world) have never accepted and never will accept the existence of Israel. We will, in these ways and more, change the subject once more by insisting that all claims to the contrary are yet another expression of anti-Semitism.
We will, in this way, become deniers of what this thing already and irreversibly is. The figure of the Jewish genocide denier will thus become a common and widespread Jewish type.
27.
The likelihood of Jewish genocide denial on a massive scale suggests a likely schism in Judaism as a whole, because how will—how can—Jews who recognize this second genocide possibly continue to worship and identify themselves with those Jews who refuse to do the same? How will “big tent” Judaism remain viable under such conditions?
Each and every Jew will have to choose a side.
28.
How many Holocaust museums, memorials, monuments, and educational centers are there in the United States alone?
According to a list on Wikipedia, the number is approximately one hundred. In other words, on average, there are two such locations for each and every state. Over thirty states house one or more, including Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
There are at least twenty actual museums devoted to the commemoration of the Holocaust in this country.
What is the purpose of these places?
Obviously, their purpose is first and foremost to document, commemorate, and educate about the Shoah.
But what is the purpose of all that? Why bother to undertake such efforts? Why have American Jews devoted so many resources to building so many Holocaust centers throughout this country?
The self-evident answer is to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.
As a result, our second genocide, the one committed by Jews—Israeli Jews, but Jews all the same—presents us with a disturbing question:
How could this massive project of commemoration and education, which began over sixty years ago,20 have failed to prevent our own people from perpetrating genocide themselves? One answer is that these centers, whatever their official names, whatever is written in their mission statements, are not interested in genocide in general, but only in the Holocaust. A different answer is that these sites of memory are interested in both the Holocaust and genocide in general, but not in instances of the latter if they are committed by Jews.
29.
One of these answers must be true, unless denial and self-deception on a massive, collective scale are to blame. A collective blindness so complete that it has prevented any honest consideration of current Israeli actions at all.
Whatever the explanation, it is hard to foresee how this vast commemorative infrastructure will operate in the future, how it will manage to integrate the truth of our second genocide into the commemoration of the first.
My guess is that the American institution of Holocaust commemoration will refuse to take on this project. And this refusal will negate its very raison d’être. This institution, which has become one of the central pillars of American Jewish identity, will reveal itself to be, in the final account, riddled with so much hypocrisy it will likely need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
Such a daunting project—which is nothing more and nothing less than the necessary reconstruction of collective Jewish memory as a whole—is one measure of just how new, just how different, and just how demanding this next period in Jewish history will be.
30.
Another central pillar of American Jewish identity for more than fifty years, of course, has been Israel itself.
Here, too, a new approach will be required of American Jews. And here, too, the challenge is immense, more immense even than the project of reconstructing Jewish memory. The Holocaust is an object of memory, one whose precise meaning we can fashion as we see fit. Israel, by contrast, is an active, living agent with interests of its own.
To put it mildly, those who accept the reality of our second genocide will find themselves in conflict with the State of Israel, at least until that time when the country concedes to what it has done, a time that may never come.
31.
These, then, are the contours of our predicament as American Jews. The double helix of our identity—the Holocaust and Israel, the promise of the latter ensuring that the former will never be repeated—has not turned out as we hoped. Instead, we are, at the least, implicated in a version of what we most despise.
Our task now is to attempt to understand how this could have happened, how a people so utterly devoted to remembering our first genocide, so determined to teach the world its lessons, could fail to stop our people from committing another.
What did we misunderstand about ourselves? What did we refuse to see about Israel and our relationship to it that allowed things to get to this point? What did we tell ourselves was necessarily true that turned out instead to be false?
How should we act, as a collective, in this new era in Jewish history? What can we do in order to transition successfully from the previous period to this one? What can be salvaged, and what must be discarded? What new institutions should we build? How can we mobilize our community’s abundant resources in order to make such changes possible?
And what to do about those seven million Jews still living in Israel? What is our responsibility toward them? They have failed themselves, yes, but we have failed them too. What should we do now? How can we help them? How can we ensure their safety? Is there anything we can do to make it more likely that they will take on the formidable and humbling task of confronting all they have done?
And, of course, how can we get them to stop what they are doing and ensure that they never do it again?
32.
In the posts that follow, I will discuss a number of basic features of Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and American Jewry. I will attempt to show what we have gotten and continue to get wrong. I will suggest other ways to think about the various difficult problems at the center of the conflict. I will, above all, encourage you to realize that our collective approach to Israel and its conflict has proven to be disastrous, so we must attempt something very different in the future, a future that starts now.
To read Part Two, “On the Question of the Victim,” click here.
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This piece was last updated on August 13, 2025.
Todd Hasak-Lowy holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied Hebrew and Arabic Literature. He is the author of numerous books, including Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Modern Hebrew Fiction. He co-wrote the Holocaust memoir Somewhere There is Still a Sun, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. His translation of Asaf Schurr’s Motti won the Risa Domb/Porjes Hebrew-English Translation Prize. He was an Assistant and later Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of Florida from 2002-2010. He was a Visiting Israel Studies Scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2011. He is currently Professor, Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of Liberal Arts and the Writing Program.
This account of Lemkin is based in large part on Samantha Powers’ “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Perennial: 2003), 17-78.
Ibid, 23. Powers’ “massacre” is a translation of “Vernichtung,” which can also be rendered as “extermination” or “annihilation.” The latter is the choice used in a display of this quote at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Bartov repeated many of these claims in a July 15, 2025 editorial in the New York Times, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
For one account of this crisis, see Mari Cohen’s December 19, 2024 article in Jewish Currents, “Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?”
On August 8, 2025, Melanie O’Brien, Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Western Australia and President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, posted an essay on OpinioJuris, “the world’s first blog dedicated to the informed discussion of international law by and among academics, practitioners and legal experts.” O’Brien’s piece is called, “Is Genocide Happening in Gaza?” This essay, which contains dozens and dozens of hyperlinks, walks the reader through the various aspects of genocide, as defined in international law. Here’s the final sentence of O’Brien’s post: “Whatever the exact moment was of ‘crystallisation’ of these crimes as genocide, it is without a doubt that we are witnessing a genocide now in Gaza, and state parties to the Genocide Convention are failing in their obligation to prevent and punish genocide.”
Serious journalism based on first-hand investigation of the conditions in Gaza is all but impossible right now, as the Israeli government restricts foreign journalists access to the territory. The French historian and Gaza expert Jean-Pierre Filiu (whose work I will cite extensively in a later post), was permitted to spend a month in Gaza in December 2024. In an interview with Haaretz, he had this to say about his experience: “Even though I have been in a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, via Syria, Iraq and Somalia, I have never, but never, experienced anything like this . . . Now I understand why Israel is denying the international press access to such an appalling scene.” In addition, Israel has killed approximately 200 journalists, almost all of them Palestinian, since October 7, 2023.
There are many people and groups already attempting to document what is happening in Gaza as it unfolds, including Israelis. See, for instance, the massive, regularly updated document created and maintained by the Israeli historian Lee Mordechai.
It is worth keeping in mind—if one insists on comparing this to the Holocaust—that there were approximately nine and half million Jews in Europe in 1933, compared to approximately two million Palestinians in Gaza in 2020, a ratio of 4.5:1.
And some of these cities are, or were, quite large. Consider Rafah, which had a population of 275,000, comparable to that of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. According to satellite photographs taken in early June, 2025, “the proportion of structures that have been eradicated in Rafah . . . is higher than what was destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Schabas makes this claim around the interview’s 26-minute mark. When asked, around the 43-minute mark, if he thinks what is happening in Gaza constitutes a genocide, Schabas responds, “Absolutely,” and then adds, “This is clearly such a case, of genocide. There is nothing comparable in recent history. This idea of the borders are closed, the people have nowhere to go, and they’re destroying, they’re making life, have made life, essentially, impossible in Gaza.”
Goldberg and Blatman, ibid.
I’ll address just one of these here: the charge that Palestinians as a whole are responsible because they elected Hamas. To begin with, such reasoning obviously implies that all Israeli civilians are responsible for whatever the Israeli military is doing because they elected Netanyahu. (Not to mention, they’ve done so multiple times, and as recently as 2022, whereas Hamas was elected only once). But here’s Haaretz’s Dahlia Scheindlin on the matter on Palestinian culpability for electing Hamas: “Palestinian elections were held in 2006—the youngest voter would have been born in 1988. That means Gazans under 35 in 2023 never chose Hamas, or anyone. In 2022, half of all Gazans were under 18. While the full data isn't readily available, in 2021, approximately 64 percent of Gazans were under 25.”
Goldberg and Blatman, ibid.
Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzeee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 286.
Holocaust Museum LA, formerly known as formerly known as Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, was founded in 1961.