Since time immemorial, enemies of the Jewish people depended on treacherous voices within the Jewish community to validate their hatred towards Judaism, and in recent generations, the rights of Jewish people not only to practice their religion, but also to live as equals among citizens and build their own country.
In the years leading up to the Holocaust, there were Jews who blamed anti-Semitism on their people; during the Holocaust, there were Jews who failed to rescue, let alone advocate for, their doomed brethren. And afterwards, there are Jews who distort the experience of the Holocaust as in their campaign to discredit Zionism.
“I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” is the title of an opinion column written by Prof. Omer Bartov, who teaches Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. It was published in The New York Times on Monday.
“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov wrote. He then validated his view from his position as a Jew and an educator.
“Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”
Many of us have seen how the memory of the Holocaust can be easily distorted on social media with simplistic memes that compare a Jewish boy raising his hands in the Warsaw Ghetto to a Palestinian boy standing in the ruins of Gaza City. This visual power imbalance was addressed by my colleague Moshe Hill, in a column titled “Is Holocaust Education Enough To Curb Anti-Semitism?” (May 14, 2025)
“Now, good and evil are taught based on power dynamics – or the oppressor-oppressed matrix. If one side of a conflict is stronger, they are the evil ones. The weaker side is considered the good one,” Hill wrote back in May. “This matrix does not apply to the current state of the Jewish people, who are not seen as weak and oppressed but, rather, as strong and therefore the oppressor.”
This distortion is amplified by academics such as Bartov, who ought to know better, having documented the Nazis’ description of Jews as wealthy and powerful, and a threat to the German nation. Instead, he quotes Israeli politicians who compared Hamas to Amalek as proof that they are engaging in a genocidal war. Although the literal reading of the Torah speaks of exterminating Amalek, and Shaul HaMelech loses his crown for refusing to kill Agag, our Oral Law offers this archenemy an exit ramp away from a destiny of perpetual war.
The Gemara in Gittin (57b) notes that some of Haman’s descendants studied Torah in Bnei Brak, and some of Sisera’s descendants taught children Torah in Jerusalem, and some of Sancheiriv’s descendants taught Torah in public. Among their students were Sh’maya and Avtalyon, the teachers of Hillel the Elder.
Sanhedrin 96b also mentions descendants of Haman learning in Bnei Brak, as well as descendants of N’vuchadnetzar, the Babylonian ruler who destroyed the First Beis HaMikdash. If today’s political commentators are offended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comparison of Hamas to Amalek, then they should focus on Hamas’ actions, which resemble the biblical adversary, particularly the October 7 attack on unarmed Israelis at a music festival and kibbutz residents who dedicated their lives towards peace with Palestinians.
Bartov offers no context for the references to Amalek, and we should not expect this secular scholar to have an understanding of Shas. He then quotes Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, tweeting that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Again, there is no context provided to explain that Hamas uses homes, schools, and hospitals for storing weapons, connected by tunnels, with civilians as human shields. Israeli soldiers paid the ultimate price entering booby-trapped apartment buildings out of respect for the rules of war, and the lesson learned is that with every building as a ticking time bomb, a danger not only to soldiers but their own residents, Gaza must be razed before it is rebuilt.
Bartov then argues that Israel is forcing the population out through “deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation, and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.”
For every aid truck that enters the enclave, there was no accountability provided on how much of it is received by the population, as armed groups brazenly commandeer humanitarian aid. Only with the arrival of the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, have the food and water been transferred directly into the hands of the Gazan population. Rather than speak out against the murder of aid workers and civilians trying to access this aid, international voices seek to undermine GHF and restore the monopoly of UN-backed UNRWA, which did nothing to stop Hamas from exercising power over the lives of Gazans concerning the distribution of food.
These voices include Amnesty International, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and the International Court of Justice, cited by Bartov as arbiters on human rights and genocide. Looking at fellow Israelis, he merely dismisses them as ignorant of the “genocide” on account of “self-censorship” by Israeli media.
Bartov notes that his characterization of Israeli actions is not an exception in his field, noting that genocide scholars Shmuel Lederman, William Schabas, and CCNY Professor of International Relations Dirk Moses “have reached the same conclusion.”
Bartov concludes with an imagined future for his compatriots. “Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name.”
Although I am not a published scholar on the Holocaust, I’ve taught classes on this subject at Touro College, and I am a grandson of survivors, named for one victim among the six million. Unlike Bartov, I live a fully Jewish life, culturally and spiritually. Like Bartov, I live in the safety of the United States, while our relatives face an existential threat to their lives. My vision for the future of Israel and diaspora Jews is starkly different.
At the end of this tunnel, Jews will recognize the same experience as my grandparents, when an indifferent world felt that Jews shared in the blame for anti-Semitism that led to the gas chambers and killing fields, and the nations that failed to save Jewish lives. When Jews stockpiled weapons in the ghettos and forests, and in the safe houses used by the Haganah and Irgun, then we had the ability to survive and safeguard our future. As for the nations of the world, only those who recognized our plight – and spoke up for Israel – will have a good reputation in the annals of history.
