More Truth

In the fall of 2023, a Miami-Dade County middle school participated in a Holocaust education program with the organization Names Not Numbers, which brings professional filmmakers to schools to capture student interviews of Holocaust survivors. According to the teacher who shared this account (and who requested that he and his school not be named for fear of retaliation), on filming day the students escorted their guests to the school library in search of that most ubiquitous of interview backdrops: a loaded bookshelf. When they got there, however, they found the shelves empty and the books strewn across the floor; administrative assistants—the school no longer employs librarians for budgetary reasons—were sorting through the piles in an attempt to comply with Florida House Bill 1467, which requires that all school books be reviewed for “pornographic” or “inappropriate” content, under threat of felony charges. The arrival of the students, alongside those elders who would momentarily testify about the fate of societies that ban books, sent the assistants scrambling to restock at least the portion of the shelves that would enter the camera’s frame. But the scene’s significance was not lost on the teacher, who later described feeling unsettled by the collapse between past and present, the uncanny experience of discovering oneself within history.

Library shelves covered in construction paper, blocked off in tape, or sitting completely empty have become a common Floridian spectacle since the passage of HB 1467, part of Governor Ron DeSantis’s broader efforts to suppress instruction on shameful legacies of racism and to force queer life back into the shadows. Last year, nearly 2,700 books were flagged for restriction or removal by Florida schools and public libraries. For many American Jews—the majority of them self-professed liberals—these tableaus of censorship have raised the specter of Nazi Germany. “Why is this a Jewish issue?” Florida-based Reform rabbi Jeffrey Salkin wrote in a Religion News Service column last year. “Because we Jews know how this ends.” The resonance has become particularly stark as Holocaust literature has increasingly been caught in the dragnet: Four Florida counties have pulled a graphic novel adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank from the shelves due to a section, true to the original unabridged diary, in which Frank explores her sexual feelings toward other girls. Other Holocaust books banned in various counties for their supposed moral infractions include Jodi Picoult’s bestselling novel The Storyteller, Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic memoir Maus, and William Styron’s blockbuster Sophie’s Choice. Such draconian policies have mirrored or provided models for similar censorship campaigns in other states, including Texas, Tennessee, and Missouri.

In response to the precipitous rise in book bans since 2021, mainstream Jewish institutions have sounded the alarm. That year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published a short resource on the dangers of book banning, arguing that “children’s books open doors to conversations about identity, diversity, bias, and social justice—conversations that are an integral part of a young person’s education.” A few of the organization’s chapters in the South, as well as some Jewish Federations, have also spoken up against right-wing censorship campaigns in their local contexts. In 2023, the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater New Orleans even adopted a resolution declaring that book bans are “antithetical to Jewish values.”

And yet, judging by the actions of many of these same institutions, it would seem that censorship is simpatico with Jewish values when the subject is Palestine. For example, in December, the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey announced that after “over a year of intense lobbying,” it had successfully convinced Newark Public Schools to remove A Little Piece of Ground, a novel about a Palestinian boy living in Ramallah, from the sixth-grade curriculum. In a rationale that echoes DeSantis’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits the acknowledgment of systems of racial supremacy, Federation CEO Dov Ben-Shimon wrote that “for the 12-year-old child who was assigned this book . . . there was no conclusion they could possibly reach except that Israel is the aggressor, and the Palestinians are the victims.” Ben-Shimon specified that while the organization was loath to be seen as encouraging book banning in the “current climate,” the extraordinary stakes compelled them to intervene. Across the country, such suppression has been not the exception but the rule. Amid the rise of right-wing attacks on critical race theory, ethnic studies, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in recent years, Jewish institutions have fought in courtrooms, local committee meetings, state departments of education, and university presidents’ offices to ensure that Palestinian history is not taught anywhere, from K-12 through higher ed.

These dynamics have profoundly intensified since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, as Jewish groups desperate to preserve US support for Israel have thrown their weight behind attacks on academic institutions. Faced with truths they cannot bear, Jewish communities have cried “Less Truth!”; inevitably, though to their own surprise, that impulse has united them with others intent on suppressing in­convenient histories. By marshaling their resources to whip major US political and cultural institutions into a moral panic over alleged antisemitism, these groups—including those that have long understood themselves to be at odds with the right—have become instrumental to the right’s agenda of corporatizing universities, defunding public education, rolling back tenure, and repressing dissent. In the process, Jewish organizations have handed those violently authoritarian movements an essential alibi in the figure of a perfect victim, whose eternal and indisputable plight becomes a means to recast aggression as defense. Here, the proclaimed vulnerability of the Jew testifies not to the need for liberal democracy—which American Jews have long credited with their flourishing—but to the need to destroy it altogether. Politicians across the political spectrum have already leveraged this figure to justify the mass arrest of nonviolent protesters by heavily-armed police in scenes that highlight the utter insufficiency of our democracy even as they augur its collapse. In this light, the empty libraries of DeSantis’s Florida herald a dire future—an unsubtle warning of the consequences of this devil’s bargain.

Before the current escalation, major Jewish groups’ attacks on education had been most successful in a battle over ethnic studies—an academic field rooted in 1960s student movements that seeks to develop critiques of American racism and imperialism through a focus on Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous histories. In 2019, when the California Department of Education released the first draft of a proposed K-12 curriculum, a number of groups—including local Jewish Federations, chapters of the ADL and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the California Legislative Jewish Caucus (CLJC)—objected to the adoption of the nearly 500-page document because of a brief description of the Nakba (the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the war to create the State of Israel); the inclusion of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in a list of potential student research topics; and a sample lesson on “Comparative Border Studies: Palestine and Mexico.” They also griped that the curriculum didn’t include material on antisemitism or Jewish American history, despite the fact that California already mandates Holocaust education in public schools. The coordinated campaign by Jewish institutions—which included the creation of a coalition of Korean Americans, Hindu Americans, and other ethnic groups who also complained that they had been given short shrift—succeeded in forcing the state to make such significant changes to the curriculum that the original authors have disowned the result. By the time California actually adopted the model curriculum in March 2021, it had cut all references to Palestine and added a new lesson on Jewish Americans written by the Mizrahi Zionist group JIMENA, which includes material defining Jews as indigenous to Israel, a talking point frequently used to legitimize Israeli seizure of Palestinian land. After their victory, California’s mainstream Jewish organizations have been eager to export their tactics nationally: During a 2021 “Public Briefing on Ethnic Studies” webinar, the director of San Francisco’s JCRC described “sharing best practices . . . and doing briefings” on their efforts to reshape ethnic studies in “blue states and major cities.” Such a campaign is already underway in Massachusetts, where the JCRC of Greater Boston and the regional AJC chapter have been lobbying to ensure that a proposed statewide ethnic studies program does not resemble the early California draft.

While the Jewish right has fully embraced a DeSantis-esque opposition to all ethnic studies education, the liberal majority has taken pains to separate its efforts from the broader right-wing campaign to undermine anti-racist and queer-affirming education. In September 2023, LA and Bay Area Jewish leaders who had helped advance the charge against the ethnic studies model curriculum in California penned an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post seeking to clarify their position. “We, as a Jewish community, must embrace ethnic studies, not shun it . . . Just as others learn of our history of trauma, displacement, and immigration, we should embrace their stories as well,” they wrote. Replacing ethnic studies’ emphasis on power analyses with an exercise in multiculturalism, they asserted that as long as the Jewish community could successfully advocate to keep out “anti-Israel agendas,” it could continue to endorse a more inclusive educational project. Similarly, Jeremy Burton, executive director of the JCRC of Greater Boston, framed his organization as holding the reasonable center against both a right that “resort[s] to scare tactics, sowing fear amongst parents that any curriculum change would harm their children,” and a left “who seek to delegitimize every aspect of the American project.” The Boston JCRC would take the middle approach, he argued, shaping a version of ethnic studies—and a general approach to teaching history—that was acceptable to the Jewish mainstream while “keep[ing] bad actors out of the process.”

But if there was ever any notion that Jewish institutions could simply tinker around the edges of anti-racist and anti-imperialist curricula without becoming collaborators in a broader autocratic project, events since October 7th have dispelled it. In the name of “Jewish safety,” mainstream Jewish groups across the country have backed a wave of McCarthyist repression targeting Palestine-related speech and activism at educational institutions. At the K-12 level, the ADL has filed civil rights complaints against public school districts in Berkeley and Philadelphia, conflating ceasefire walkouts and lessons on Israeli apartheid with antisemitic harassment in a bid to shut them down. Meanwhile, at colleges and universities, Zionist groups, donors, and trustees have successfully pressured universities to cancel lectures, readings, art exhibitions, and—in the case of the University of Southern California—an entire commencement ceremony, to avoid platforming messages of solidarity with Palestine. At campuses across the country, student activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have been suspended; faculty fired and investigated; job offers rescinded; and terrifying displays of police power mobilized to arrest over 3,000 participants in nonviolent protest encampments.

In beckoning the state to forcefully repress anti-Zionist activity on campuses, Jewish groups have provided an opportunity for conservative legislators who have long pined for the destruction of educational institutions—especially colleges and universities, which they view as incubators of insidious left-wing thought. In 2023, Republicans introduced at least 65 bills targeting DEI efforts at schools, eight of which were signed into law; the ACLU has warned that such bills “represent yet another attempt to re-whitewash America’s history of racial subjugation, and to reverse efforts to pursue racial justice.” Beginning in November, the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce (HCEW) has amplified this project on a national stage through a series of university-focused hearings that have framed campus anti-racism and DEI initiatives as antisemitic. Indeed, at one such hearing in early December, committee chair Rep. Virginia Foxx baldly proclaimed that “universities have stoked the flames of an ideology” that has placed Jews “at the bottom of the totem pole and without protection,” an ideology that “goes by many names—anti-racism, anti-colonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality.” Republicans have intimated that these theatrics are only the beginning of a larger offensive. A recording from a private Zoom call between Republican Rep. Jim Banks and business leaders last December, which was leaked to CNBC, revealed how right-wing lawmakers plan to use the hearings as an excuse to “defund these universities by cracking down on not backing their student loans . . . That’s what we are laying the groundwork for.” A version of this future has already arrived in Florida, where last year, DeSantis overhauled the board of trustees at the historically alternative New College of Florida and instated his own appointees, who promptly recruited an incoming class full of athletes, denied tenure to several professors, and abolished the school’s diversity office and gender studies program.

If the campaign against higher education was once decidedly partisan, with the invocation of antisemitism, liberals have now enthusiastically joined the fight. Academic administrators who have historically shrugged at the right’s agenda are now rushing to fast-track it inside their institutions. After the HCEW subjected a procession of university presidents to eviscerating show trials, leading to the resignation of M. Elizabeth Magill from the University of Pennsylvania and contributing to the ouster of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, Columbia President Nemat Shafik used her appearance before the committee to model compliance, announcing her intentions to meddle in departmental appointments and investigate and punish putatively protected speech. In These Times reported in June that at least a dozen universities have now “overhauled campus conduct rules in ways that will effectively limit speech and make it riskier to protest.” News anchors, commentators, and self-styled public intellectuals have lauded such efforts, proclaiming the necessity of doing whatever it takes to eliminate the “new antisemitism.” A number of Democrats have also taken leading roles in the crackdowns. Up-and-coming pro-Israel Democratic politicians like Sen. John Fetterman and Reps. Josh Gottheimer, Dan Goldman, and Ritchie Torres have backed police intervention against students protesting in solidarity with Palestine and pushed bills classifying certain anti-Zionist speech as antisemitism. (Sounding every bit the MAGA book burner, Torres wrote in The New York Post that “the anti-Israel hate increasingly possessing the American mind is a demon that must be exorcised from our body politic.”) In California, Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, chair of the Assembly Budget Committee and co-chair of the CLJC, has worked with Republicans to withhold $25 million of state funding from the UC system until its president proves his willingness to quell future student protests.

White Jews have often complained of their exclusion from the ranks of “marginalized peoples,” bemoaning being treated not only as white people, but as white people par excellence—avatars of power, privilege, and fragility. Now, it is precisely this doubled position—claiming the moral authority of a dispossessed group while reaping the material benefits of whiteness—that has attracted the right, which sees in the figure of the Jew a Trojan Horse for the interests of white America and the heavy hand of the state. After all, it would be difficult to get mainstream Democrats like New York Governor Kathy Hochul or California Governor Gavin Newsom on board with complaints that school curricula are “anti-white,” but alarm bells ring across the political spectrum at the claim that they are anti-Jewish. That diversity efforts might be fueling “white genocide” sounds preposterous to anyone to the left of Trump, while Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s question to university presidents about whether calls for a genocide of Jews would violate their university policies is a shot heard ’round the world. (Never mind the fact that no students had been documented making such calls on the leaders’ campuses.) Like a video game cheat code, this hack has helped the right jump levels, not only disarming but also recruiting their opposition: Speaking the language of Jewish protection has transformed liberal America from the #Resistance into willing collaborators.

Many American Jews, raised on tales of their own immutable peril, have proven eager to be used in this way or at least susceptible to the narrative. But this affiliation comes with its own dangers. In becoming the state’s favored minority—the purported reason for suppressed graduation speeches and campus events and lesson plans, for mask bans and increased surveillance, for cops on campus and mass arrests—Jews risk being confused for the state itself, the release valve it offers for the frustrations of its many repressions. Still, the greatest threat to Jews is not the one that is particular but the one that is shared. It’s the same as the threat to women, the disabled, queer people, racial and religious minorities, leftists, and so many others: fascism.

The right’s loud philosemitism might seem at odds with its eagerness to ban Holocaust texts like Maus and Anne Frank’s diary, and in fact these much-maligned acts of censorship—usually prompted by the books’ sexual content rather than their relationship to Jews—are something of a red herring. Because even as Florida has scrubbed the stories of its many Others from the curriculum, DeSantis and the state’s department of education boast of having “adopt[ed] the nation’s most comprehensive Holocaust education standards,” designating the second week of November “Holocaust Education Week” in commemoration of the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht, and mandating expanded instruction on antisemitism. In 2021, DeSantis made sizable allocations in the state budget for the St. Petersburg Holocaust museum, the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, and a Holocaust Task Force, a body dedicated to the promotion of Holocaust education, ensuring that “appropriate memorialization” is provided “on a regular basis throughout the state.”

That the only history of persecution the American far right can stand to teach is that of European Jewry should raise some questions. How exactly is the history of the Holocaust being taught if its lessons do not unsettle present-day fascists? In what way is this past being made palatable to those frightened by other explorations of oppressive systems? In their book The Holocaust and the Nakba, political scientist Bashir Bashir and historian Amos Goldberg detail how the Shoah has been lifted out of longer colonial histories and put forward as a “catastrophic aberration” that is, paradoxically, proof of Europe’s enlightenment—the exception that, in being overcome by the forces of liberalism, ultimately proves the rule. In truth, the Holocaust was manifestly continuous with the colonial processes of extraction and extermination that Europe and the US had perpetrated elsewhere. In his 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire identifies Nazi fascism as colonialism turned inward, noting that the Holocaust was aberrant only insofar as it “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for” the nonwhite inhabitants of other lands. As the journalist Naomi Klein recounts in her recent book Doppelganger, Hitler himself cited English colonists as the “inventors” of concentration camps, and the Nazis understood their march to the east—their extermination of Jews and conquering of Slavs—as akin to America’s westward expansion and genocide of Indigenous peoples. Few of us learn Holocaust history this way. As Klein observes, the de­contextualized rendering of the Shoah disseminated in classrooms across the country allows the denizens of the West to revel in their victory over Hitler—and by extension, their innocence—rather than confront their continuities with his project.

This sanitized way of understanding the Shoah does not just absolve white America of its colonial history; it accomplishes something similar for the State of Israel. As the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi notes in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the first Zionist settlers and their British imperial patrons were not shy about the nature of their plans for Palestine: From the 1890s until the 1920s, the most important organization facilitating Jewish migration was called the Jewish Colonisation Association. It was only “once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization” that “the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten,” Khalidi writes. In this light, the contemporary Zionist rejection of the term “colonialism” issues less from a consideration of its definition than a reaction to its emotional valence. The result is a collective tantrum—a cry of rage and disbelief that the victims of one of history’s most significant wrongs are not unconditionally exempt from its judgments. Indeed, as Klein recounts, many early Zionists were propelled by the belief that “Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus,” entitling them to practice “colonialism . . . as reparations for genocide.”

This sense of exceptionalism continues to inform how Jews see, or do not see, what is happening in Israel/Palestine today. For decades, the majority of world Jewry has refused to acknowledge what should be plain in the militarized checkpoints; the thousands of people held indefinitely without charge; the routinized land theft; the separate roads and services and systems of law; and now the genocide in Gaza: that struggling toward the end of the occupation of Palestine must be the next chapter in the great decolonial project. As the Palestinian American literary scholar Saree Makdisi writes in Tolerance Is a Wasteland, this willed ignorance necessitates a distinct form of suppression: “not merely the denial of Palestinian history, Palestinian dispossession, and Palestinian rights; but the denial that they have been denied in the first place.”

The only remedy to this deadly denial—and the broader fascist tendencies it feeds—is the re-interpolation of Jewish history into this larger story. Only by recognizing the fuller context of both Jewish victimhood and domination can Jews understand their own place in history, and stop aiding those intent on extending these brutal pasts. This would mean recognizing that the plight of European Jewry had some of its roots in colonial conquest, and that many of those practices have been reproduced in the settler colonial machinations of the State of Israel. It would mean reintegrating the fact of the Holocaust with that of the Nakba, telling in sequence the story of how one catastrophe was distorted to justify another. The legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah defines the Nakba as the foundational, and continuous, ethnic cleansing and fragmentation of the Palestinian people, of which we are now witnessing a “genocidal variant”—and argues that accepting and internalizing the truth of this process would be the first step to rectifying the harms inflicted on Palestinians. Eghbariah notes that such reckoning is “not a one-off act” but one that “requires constant attention”; to remake systems, we must surely rewrite basic understandings as well, a transformation that must take root, among other places, in the classroom.