Do you feel like it is harder to breathe as a Jew with each passing day?

 

The question may sound dramatic, but for many of us, it’s starting to feel true. In recent months, anti-Semitism hasn’t just risen — it feels like it is becoming malignant. Fostering this increased animosity against Jews is the dominant Palestinian narrative that takes deeper root in the West with each passing week. Jewish students are told they are not welcome in campus spaces unless they disavow the very idea of Jewish peoplehood. Synagogues and Jewish centers on college campuses are vandalized. Protesters shout that Jews are “genocidal,” comparing Gaza to Auschwitz, equating Zionism with Nazism, and using “Zionist” as a slur that no longer disguises the real target: Jews.

 

This isn’t only about Israel. The accusations have taken on a life of their own. We’re hearing, once again, the age-old lies that Jews control media and politics, that we manipulate economies, that our loyalties lie elsewhere. And while these tropes have existed for centuries, they’re being newly resurrected under the pretext of “social justice,” just repackaged and rebranded.

 

In the Arab world, these ideas are not fringe, as pointed out in Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel 2025. As he noted, walk through any bookstore in Cairo or Beirut and you’ll see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and The International Jew displayed on shelves alongside bestsellers and religious texts. These books, long debunked and universally condemned in the West, are treated as legitimate political commentary. They're taught, referenced, and deeply ingrained in the cultural and ideological frameworks of entire generations. Their impact doesn’t stay within those borders, they are influencing communities in the West through social media posts, and as we now know too well, university classrooms in Europe and the U.S.

 

This increasingly dangerous climate is fueled further by the dominance of the Palestinian narrative in the West. That narrative, oversimplified and without truthful context, paints Jews as white colonial settlers, who stole the land from the “people of color Paletinians”, erasing more than 3,000 years of Jewish connection to the land of Israel. It denies the existence of ancient Israel, the centrality of Jerusalem in Jewish history, and the forced exile of Jews from Arab lands. In its place, it casts Israel as a foreign occupier and Jews as racists.

 

And much of the world seemingly listens.

 

What’s most alarming is how quickly this rewritten story has taken hold — not just among fringe radicals but across mainstream institutions: universities, media, NGOs, and even some corners of government. Terms like “settler colonialism” and “apartheid” are thrown around with moral certainty by people who seemingly have never read a page of Jewish history. This past Tuesday’s Global “Shut it Down for Palestine,” was endorsed, in part, by organizations like, American Civic Institute, Artists Against Apartheid, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, Cleveland Peace Action, Coalition for Civil Freedoms, Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice, Indigenous Nations network. Just the names of these few organizations give insight to how misguided and uninformed they are; applying the concept of intersectionality and assuming any injustice against minorities in our country is somehow the same. Dare I say this is willful ignorance? 

 

And now, we Jews, true victims of genocide, are being accused of committing it.

 

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Fewer survivors are alive to tell their stories. Fewer schools teach the Holocaust in any depth and a 2020 survey by the Claims Conference revealed that 56% of U.S. Millennials and Gen Z could not identify Auschwitz-Birkenau. Additionally, 63% did not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Into that void, a toxic narrative has emerged, one that accuses Jews of doing to others what was done to them.

 

Let’s be clear, there is no comparison. There is no equivalence. The Holocaust was the industrialized, ideologically driven extermination of an entire people. To call Israel’s actions a genocide is not only a lie, it is vile. It’s a distortion that minimizes the gravity of the Holocaust and denies us the ability to speak about our own trauma. This is no less than another attempt of silencing us and erasing our story.

 

And yet, this is where we are. As it was in Germany in the years before the Holocaust, lies have been repeated so often that they are believed. Jews were blamed then for Germany’s economic problems, its cultural anxieties, its identity crisis. Today, Jews are blamed for the world's moral failings from colonialism to capitalism to global conflict.

 

History doesn’t repeat itself exactly. But it does Rhyme.

 

Yom HaShoah is a time to remember. But it is also a time to act. Silence never protects us. Appeasement never earns us safety. Denial never turns hatred into acceptance. It is our responsibility as parents, educators, and Jews to tell the truth to anyone who will listen; to fight ignorance with history and our story and to defend memory as a sacred act.

Because when memory is lost and our true story forgotten, lies are ready to fill the void.

 

And when those lies get loud enough, people start to believe them as we are witnessing today.