“There have been huge shifts in America about how people think about Jews and Israel, and I think that’s especially true for young people,” Horowitz said during the panel discussion, noting the rise of social media as a major source of news and information.
“Today, we have social media, and its algorithms are shaped by billions of people around the world who really don’t like Jews,” she added.
Horowitz continued:
It is also increasingly post-literate media. Less and less texts, more and more videos, so you have TikTok smashing the brains of our young people all day long with a video of the massacre in Gaza. This is why many of us cannot have a rational conversation with young Jews, because anything we try to say to them, they hear through this wall of carnage. So I want to present data and information and facts and arguments, and in their mind they see a massacre, and I look obscene.
“I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet we made on teaching the Holocaust to be teaching anti-Semitism, in this new media environment, I think that’s starting to fall apart a little bit, because Holocaust education is so essential,” Horowitz asserted.
“But I think it might confuse some of our young people about anti-Semitism, because they’re learning about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, skinny Jews. So when they see on TikTok all day long strong Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is that when you fight Israel, you fight the big, strong people who hurt the weak,'” she added.
Reactions to Horowitz’s statements ranged from skepticism to anger.
“I’m almost speechless,” said Janine Younes, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He said On
As Argentine economist Maya Mindel X discussed, writing And that “it is very unfortunate that a large number of powerful people believe that the lesson of the Holocaust is not that the mass killing of civilians on the basis of their ancestry so that your nation can take their land is wrong, but rather, ‘Fuck you, I got my land.'”
Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart books On X, the “level of condescension” in Horowitz’s comment is “quite striking.”
Writer Bryce Green He lamented: “We have reached the point where Israel’s supporters now claim that the Holocaust was not so bad because the strong were attacking the weak.”
“No, that would be the wrong lesson from the Holocaust,” he added. “According to them, it was only bad because the Jews were the victims. Really sick bullshit.”
Independent journalist Ahmed El-Din He said On
Religion books Wednesday on his sub-site that “Hurwitz did not make a mistake, she said the quiet part out loud and revealed the Zionist project for exactly what it is.”
He noted that she “even admitted that, in the midst of the carnage, she looked obscene.” “This admission, uttered almost by accident, is the closest thing to honesty that her worldview allows: the problem is not the violence of Zionism itself, but its visibility. Zionism, as she inadvertently reveals, depends not on morality but on obfuscation. The ideology does not demand less brutality, it simply requires fewer witnesses.”
Turning to Holocaust education, Eldin wrote:
According to Hurwitz, Holocaust curricula “backfired” because they taught young people that “you’re fighting big, powerful people who hurt the weak.” In her account, this universal moral principle – this basic moral intuition – is the problem.
The implication is astonishing: the “correct” lesson of the Holocaust seems to be “never question Israel.” What angers her is not the suffering of Palestinians, but the possibility that young people realize that it is suffering.
“A world that sees Palestinians as human beings is a world in which Zionism cannot operate,” Al-Din concluded. “A world that sees violence cannot romanticize the ideology that produces it. Once people witness the truth, myths cannot be revived and propaganda cannot be rehabilitated.”
He added: “Israel may be able to level Gaza’s buildings to the ground, but it cannot rebuild the ignorance it relied on in the past.” “The truth has already come out, the narrative has collapsed apace, and the mask has disappeared irrevocably.”
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