Do the lessons of the Holocaust apply to Israel and “skinny Palestinians”?

Michael F. Brown Rights and Accountability 26 November 2025

Sarah Hurwitz, speaking here in 2017, has come under intense criticism for her comments in a November 2025 speech to the Jewish Federations of North America.

Thor Brødreskift Nordiske Mediedager

Sarah Hurwitz, author and former speechwriter for the Obamas, has suggested that Holocaust education is failing.

For Hurwitz, the problem lies with universal lessons being applied to Israel, an unacceptable outcome in her view.

Journalist Spencer Ackerman responded at Forever Wars, “I feel like I’m going to lose my mind if I don’t address her astonishing remark that Holocaust education in the United States has improperly taught a universal lesson against genocide.”

Speaking to the 2025 general assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, Hurwitz claimed last week that “since October 7 [2023], but really before then, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel, and I think that is especially true of young people. So we are now wrestling with a new – I think – generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media.”

Social media, notwithstanding all its viciousness, does provide some vital information. Hurwitz dislikes it, however, because social and alternative media also highlight Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.

News sources other than mainstream corporate media are making an enormous difference in getting a fuller picture of the Gaza reality to the American public.

Having watched hundreds of hours of CNN during the Gaza genocide, I can attest to how frequently the network downplays Palestinian deaths and ignores Palestinian accounts of Israeli war crimes and torture. Younger people are getting a much more unfiltered view of the genocide than older viewers relying on a CNN out of touch with reality and profoundly biased toward Israeli apartheid (which goes almost entirely unmentioned by the network).

Letting out her inner xenophobe against “global media,” Hurwitz said the American media “generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media which is a global medium … shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews.”

Here she wrongly conflates concern about Israeli policies with anti-Jewish hatred.

“I sound obscene”

TikTok, she maintained, is “just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews – because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.”

Her sounding obscene is one thing she got right.

For Hurwitz, previously a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the lessons of the Holocaust are not never again for anyone, but that carnage and genocide are acceptable if it’s Israel carrying out such crimes against Palestinians. That’s obscene to much of the younger generation – targeted by Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania at the general assembly as well – and people in general.

As Spencer Ackerman put it, “Hurwitz cannot cope with a younger generation of Jews recognizing the obscenity in what her Zionism has convinced her is justifiable.”

She’s gone so far as to say she wants to keep young Jews off smart phones until their senior year of high school. It’s mandatory ignorance in order to promote Zionist propaganda.

Social media commentators and young people found her approach simultaneously laughable and horrifying.

Despite Hurwitz’s wishes to the contrary, the horror of Gaza cannot be obscured even with CNN failing to tell the full story, long-time anti-Palestinian journalist Bari Weiss now entrenched as editor-in-chief at CBS News, President Donald Trump intimidating college students and administrators, and pro-Israel Larry Ellison’s Oracle joining other investors to buy TikTok.

Hurwitz contended that the very smart “bet” that “we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education in this new media environment … is beginning to break down a little bit … Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and they think, ‘Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-Black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless Black people.’”

She added, “So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”

Well, yes, people committing genocide should be challenged. But not for Hurwitz if it’s Israel carrying out the crimes.

Hurwitz, in a different interview, has gone so far as to compare the far right’s absurd notion of there being a “white genocide” in the United States implemented by Jews to the left’s accurate concerns of Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

According to Hurwitz, “The right is saying that Jews are doing a white genocide, and the left is saying they’re doing a genocide in Gaza, it’s like the same, it’s like very similar tropes.”

In fact, the “white genocide” claim is false and the Gaza genocide assertion is fact as confirmed by numerous genocide experts. Muddying the waters as Hurwitz does is dangerous and intended to prevent action against Israel’s devastating criminal bombardment of Gaza.

While dangerous and detrimental to efforts to end Israeli war crimes, Hurwitz’s repeated speaking engagements and wild claims are in a way a gift that keeps on giving. She is inadvertently exposing how pro-Israel activists and the genocide wing of the Democratic Party – in a desperate effort to shore up support for Israel – are not just harming Palestinian rights but undermining universal lessons against racism.

Often, the question is asked: What would you have done to stop the horror of the Holocaust?

It’s a question intended to lead to reflection and thoughts on how to prevent future genocide.

But during the Gaza genocide the Trump administration has moved to disrupt and impede organizations documenting Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza. When Palestinian human rights organizations such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Al Mezan and Al-Haq took legal issue with Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration sanctioned them in September for their work at the International Criminal Court against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

Trump and his administration get the point Hurwitz is making: Don’t challenge Israeli wrongdoing. Enable it. And penalize those who seek to document the crimes.

Mamdani mockery at JFNA

The Jewish Federations of North America, according to participant and long-time politician Rahm Emanuel, appeared to misspell the name of Zohran Mamdani, the elected mayor of New York City who is a proponent of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian freedom and equal rights and recognizes the Gaza genocide for what it is.

The JFNA did not respond to questions Friday and Monday from The Electronic Intifada about the misspelling. That misspelling elicited laughter from the audience.

The lack of response from JFNA leaves open the possibility the misspelling was racist and intentional, possibly along the lines of a tweet from Elon Musk referring to Mamdani as “Mamdumi or whatever his name is.”

That the JFNA is aligning with denial of the Gaza genocide and smears of Mamdani is no surprise. The rhetoric from Hurwitz on display at the general assembly, however, points to an awareness that Israel has lost an immense amount of support over the past two years.

Genocide will do that.

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Michael F. Brown

Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.