menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

This Yom HaShoah is different from all others — and we’ve never needed it more

18 0
13.04.2026

The formulaic question we should be adapting from the Passover seder and asking ourselves as we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust this year is, how is this Yom HaShoah different from previous Yom Hashoahs?

There are several answers. On the one hand, we are experiencing the most intense, most far-flung antisemitism since the end of World War II, much of it under the veneer of purported anti-Israel sentiment. Jews across the globe are subjected to vitriolic and physical attacks of a type we thought had been made obsolete by knowledge of the atrocities and outrages perpetrated by the Third Reich and its multinational accomplices.

In the past year, we have witnessed Jews murdered in terrorist attacks at Bondi Beach, Australia; in Washington, D.C.; in Boulder, Colorado; in Manchester, England; and in Israel. On Wednesday, a Pakistani national pleaded guilty in federal court in New York for attempting to carry out a mass shooting with automatic weapons at a Jewish center in Brooklyn.

At the same time, while we raise the alarm at genocidal threats directed at the State of Israel by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the like, we cannot ignore or trivialize the spike in violence from extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Holocaust memory is under siege by far-right American commentators and activists as never before. Podcaster Candace Owens dismisses the notorious SS doctor Joseph Mengele’s inhumane medical experiments at Auschwitz as “bizarre propaganda,” while the white supremacist Nick Fuentes denigrates the Holocaust as a “Jewish bedside story.”

Last week, President Donald........

© The Jewish Week