Judenrein. Rebranded as Antizionism. |
Yom HaShoah: The Lesson the World Has Still Not Learned
The pattern has not changed. Only the language has.
Every year on Yom HaShoah, we light candles for the six million Jews died in the Holocaust. We recite names. We say “Never Again.” And every year, the world moves on with a comfortable belief that what happened in Nazi Germany was a singular aberration, a historical accident, something that could never repeat itself.
It wasn’t an accident. It was a process. And that process is happening again.
A Warning Written 3,000 Years Ago
The Torah did not leave us without warning for this moment. In the Book of Shemot, Exodus, one of the most chilling verses in all of Jewish scripture describes how genocide begins. Not with violence. Not with camps. But with forgetting.
“And a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” — Shemot 1:8
One verse. One generation. And everything the Jews had built, contributed, and earned was erased — replaced by fear, libel, and eventually enslavement and mass murder. The Egyptians did not suddenly become evil. They forgot. They chose a new narrative. They accepted a new libel about the Jews living among them that they were a fifth column, a demographic threat, a people whose loyalty could not be trusted. And a society that had benefited from Jewish contribution for generations said nothing, accepted the libel, and watched what followed.
This is not only the story of Egypt. It is the story of every society that has turned on its Jews, and it is the story unfolding in the Western world today. Canada did not suddenly become hostile. Europe did not suddenly turn. A new generation arose that did not know what Jews had contributed, survived, or built. A new libel was handed to them, and they accepted it without question.
The Torah warned us that this is how it begins. We were not listening then. We must listen now.
How Genocide Begins: Not With Gas Chambers, But With Words
The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. It began with carefully crafted libels, socially accepted lies, that transformed Jews into something the public could hate without guilt. Racial polluters. Enemies of the volk. Outsiders within. Stab-in-the-back traitors. Capitalist manipulators. Bolshevik agitators. The Nazis did not invent these slanders overnight; they normalized them in baby steps, until society accepted Jewish dehumanization as simply the natural order of things.
And society did not resist. It gobbled the libels eagerly. The majority stayed silent. And silence, in the face of hatred, is not neutrality — it is permission.
The Nazis also used token Jews. There were Jews who supported Hitler, who believed that loyalty and assimilation would protect them. Who said: “We are Germans. We are not like those other Jews.” By the time they understood what was happening, they were already marching toward the camps.
This is not ancient history. This is a blueprint for Jew-hatred, and it is being followed again.
The Language Changed. The Target Did Not.
In the antizionist era, “the Jew” has been re-coded as “the Zionist.” The ancient libels have returned, laundered in the moral language of our time: genocide, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing. The demonization is identical. Only the vocabulary has been updated.
Antizionism presents itself as political criticism. But political criticism applies standards consistently. What we see today is something categorically different: an obsessive, disproportionate fixation on one small country, the world’s only Jewish state, that does not apply to any other nation on earth. No other country faces this volume of condemnation, this level of institutional hostility, this degree of organized delegitimization.
That is not politics. That is Jew-hatred wearing politics as a costume.
And once again, today’s token Jews play their role. They declare: “We are Jews, we are just not Zionists.” But Zionism is not a political party one can resign from. It is woven into Jewish prayer, into Jewish holidays, into the Hebrew Bible, into the mitzvot themselves. The longing for Zion is not a modern political invention, it is three thousand years old. A Jew stripped of Zionism is not a liberated Jew. A Jew stripped of Zionism is a Jew who has been told to amputate their identity in order to be accepted.
We have seen this bargain before. It did not end well.
Recognizing the Structure of Antizionist Institutions
The machinery of antizionism is not random. It follows a recognizable pattern. Institutions captured by this ideology share a common fingerprint. They devote disproportionate energy and resources to attacking one small Middle Eastern country while ignoring far graver human rights abuses elsewhere. They systematically silence and exclude Jews who challenge their narrative. They abandon their own legal, ethical, and evidentiary standards the moment Jewish or Israeli interests are involved. They demand immunity from accountability whenever Jew-hatred is raised. And they use the prestige of their platforms to legitimize discrimination by dressing up racism in the language of social justice.
This is not critique. This is a hate movement with institutional backing.
The Spiral We Are Already In — And the Politicians Who Look Away
Libels do not stay as words. They never have. Words become attitudes. Attitudes become policies. Policies become violence. This is not theory, it is the documented history of every era of Jew-hatred. And we are already deep inside that spiral today.
Jewish day schools are being shot at. Jewish children are being bullied — not just by other students, but by teachers who should be protecting them. On university campuses, Jewish students are excluded, harassed, and intimidated while administrations deliberate and equivocate. Jewish-owned businesses are being vandalized and targeted. In cities across the Western world — Toronto, London, Paris, New York, Sydney — Jewish communities are living with a level of fear and threat that would be considered a national emergency if directed at any other minority group. Antizionism is beyond a Stage-4 cancer now. It is trending to Stage-5.
And what do the politicians do? They issue statements. They attend candlelight vigils. They say the right words at the right ceremonies. And then they do nothing.
This is cowardice. There is no more polite word for it. Jewish communities are among the most civically engaged, economically productive, and philanthropically generous populations in every country that has been fortunate enough to have them. They are, by any measure, high contributors to the societies that are now failing to protect them. And the politicians who benefit from their taxes, their votes, and their community-building cannot find the moral clarity to call antizionism what it is: racism. Discrimination. A hate movement.
How long do they intend to wait? Do they need a massacre on their soil before they act? Do they need Jewish bodies in the streets before they find the political will to do the right thing?
The world has a troubling pattern when it comes to Jews: it loves dead Jews. It memorializes them beautifully. It builds museums, funds commissions, erects monuments, and produces films. It weeps at Yad Vashem. It takes school groups to Auschwitz. And then it goes home and allows the very conditions that produced those atrocities to reconstruct themselves, piece by piece, libel by libel, shooting by shooting.
We do not want your repentance after the fact. We do not want your guilt. We do not want another Yom HaShoah ceremony dedicated to the victims of a violence that could have been stopped, if only someone had chosen to act earlier.
Antizionism is not a political disagreement that has gotten slightly out of hand. It is a stage-five cancer, and it is metastasizing. We know, from history, what happens when this cancer is left untreated. We know the names of the massacres: the Farhud in Baghdad, October 7th in southern Israel, the Bondi Beach attack in Sydney. These did not emerge from nowhere. They were the predictable endpoint of normalized hatred — libels that were tolerated, rhetoric that was platformed, violence that was rationalized, and politicians who chose the comfort of silence over the difficulty of courage.
We cannot wait for the next massacre to act as though we care.
From a Personal Soviet Oppression to Canadian Hostility
My family survived Soviet oppression. In the USSR, Jews were stripped of their religion, their nationality, their ethnicity, their culture — everything that made them Jewish. My uncle, like many others, ended up in a Gulag. Simply for being Jewish.
We left. We survived. And I never, not for a single moment, imagined that Canada, one of the finest countries in the world, would become what it is becoming now.
Canada was a place of safety. A place of decency. A country that understood, at least in principle, what hatred costs. But over the past decade, something has corroded. The normalization of antizionist rhetoric has made Jewish communities targets. Streets, campuses, institutions — places that were once safe have become hostile. I find myself thinking thoughts I never imagined I would think: Am I safe here? Does this country still want me?
This is not the Canada I knew. And the fact that Jewish communities across the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and the United States are experiencing the same thing should terrify everyone because this is not a local political trend. This is a civilizational pattern repeating itself.
We Are at the Same Point in History
Ninety years ago, the world was also at a turning point. The signs were there. The libels were there. The token Jews were there, providing cover. The silent majorities were there, looking away. And the Jews waited too long, hoping it would pass, believing the civilized world would correct itself.
It did not correct itself. By the time the truth was undeniable, the trains were already running.
We are at the stage that preceded the Holocaust — the stage of normalization, of libels becoming mainstream, of violence against Jews being rationalized, of Jewish existence being treated as a legitimate subject of debate.
We are in the early chapters of a story we have read before. And we know how it ends.
The Time to Act Is Now. Not After the Next Massacre.
I do not ask the world to love Jews. I do not ask the world to love Israel. I ask only for the minimum that any civilized society owes any of its members: do not demonize us. Do not exclude us. Do not deny our history and our right to exist as a people with a homeland.
Doing the right thing should not require the murder of Jews first.
The Torah does not leave us without instruction for this moment either. In the Book of Vayikra, Leviticus, the obligation is stated not as a suggestion, not as a moral ideal, but as a commandment:
“Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” — Vayikra 19:16
Lo taamod al dam re’echa. Do not stand by while your neighbor bleeds. This is Jewish law is three thousand years old and more urgent today than it has been in living memory. The Torah does not ask us to feel bad about injustice. It does not ask us to attend a vigil, issue a statement, or post a condemnation on social media. It commands action. And it places that obligation not only on Jews, but on every person who witnesses hatred escalating and chooses silence over courage.
This verse is the Biblical indictment of every politician who performs concern while doing nothing. Of every institution that abandons its standards the moment Jews are involved. Of every member of the silent majority who watches the spiral tighten and tells themselves it is not their problem.
Jew-hatred is a civilizational problem. The Torah says so. History confirms it.
“Never Again” was never supposed to be a slogan. It was a covenant that a promise extracted from the ashes of six million people that the world would recognize hatred early enough to stop it.
To honor that covenant today means three things:
First, recognize the pattern. Antizionism follows the same structure as every prior form of Jew-hatred: libels, dehumanization, normalization, escalation, violence, denials. Naming this is not silencing criticism — it is calling hatred by its correct name.
Second, demand that antizionism be classified and treated as the form of antisemitism. Not a political opinion. Not a legitimate critique. Racism. Discrimination. Hatred.
Third, enact policy and legal protections that reflect this reality providing protections that treat anti-Jewish hatred with the same seriousness as any other form of racism.
Let us be precise about history: Jews did not come from Europe or Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jews survived Europe and MENA — expelled, massacred, and exiled across two millennia, yet never severed from the one land that was always their own.
Jewish people deserve what every other people on earth claims as a birthright: peoplehood, nationhood, security, and dignity. Discriminating against a people on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, culture, or nation is racism — in every form, in every era, under every name.
Yom HaShoah is not only a day to remember how Jews died. It is a day to recognize how Jew-hatred adapts, and to confront it before it escalates again.
From “the Jew” to “the Zionist”: the ideology changed. The target did not.
We must remember. We must speak. We must refuse to forget.