Dear World: We are not the Holocaust. We are Israel

Peloni:  Brilliant essay!  Must read

Diane Bederman | Jan 27, 2026

The time has come to stop putting an emphasis on Jewish death and instead celebrate LIFE.

It has been 81 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When people imagine Auschwitz, they often picture a single camp. But Auschwitz was not one place, it was a vast complex. Auschwitz-Birkenau covered more than 40 square kilometers, about 15 square miles. It included more than 40 sub-camps, forced labor sites, rail lines, barracks, gas chambers, and crematoria. Birkenau alone was designed to hold more than 100,000 prisoners at a time. This wasn’t chaos. It was an industrialized system of murder. Understanding the scale matters, because genocide doesn’t happen in a moment. It is built, expanded, and normalized. The Nazis were not alone. They were aided and abetted by most of the world, including Britain and America, Canada and Pope Pius XII.

Today, though, it seems many are unaware of the Holocaust; or prefer to change the context. The number of British schools commemorating the Holocaust has plummeted by nearly 60 percent following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel.  Think about that. Jews murdered in their homes by barbaric Muslims invading during a ceasefire and the response to that is reducing information about the Holocaust!

In the past we often dealt with Holocaust denial. Not anymore. Now, thanks to DEI, CRT and Woke progressivism, we do not deny or demean the Holocaust, oh no. It is imperative, now, that we teach an “all-inclusive” mass extinction.  The National Education Association(the largest teachers’ union and professional employee organization in the United States) handbook contains a description of the Holocaust as having claimed the lives of “more than 12 million victims of different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” (Ahhh, yes, the Nazis were looking for people calling themselves transgender and non-binary).

The “12 million” figure was calculated by combining the fatality numbers among various people who suffered in the war, but who were not targeted by the Nazis for mass annihilation. And, incredibly, the NEA did not even mention the actual victims of the genocide, the Jews. Of course not. Today, Jews are oppressors, not the oppressed or victims of genocide.

Sadly, the Holocaust was not the last attempt to murder Jews for the crime of being Jewish. Nor was it the first. In every generation people have tried to annihilate us. From the days of Babylon to Islam’s first baby steps in Media when Mohamed murdered a tribe of Jews, to the exile of all the Jews from Israel by the Romans to the Crusaders, beginning in 1095 CE, crushing Jews in wine presses. Decapitating them and burning them. Sound familiar? Accusations of desecrating the “Holy” wafers led to mass murder, and the Inquisitions and expulsions of Jews from Spain. Estimates of the number of Jews tortured to death during the Inquisition in Spain range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. In Ukraine in 1648: Jews were” skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs. Then there were the Russian pogroms of 1905 /06. “The killings were barbarous…Nails were driven into the heads of the people Ukraine 1917-1921: Between 150,000 and 200,000 Jews were slaughtered. “Much of what the Jews experienced in Ukraine was echoed in descriptions of October 7.”

Ahhh October 7, when Muslim barbarians invaded Israel during a ceasefire and murdered 1200 Jews-for being Jewish, but unlike their cousins, the Nazis, who killed the Jews before setting them on fire, the Muslim barbarians put babies in ovens and tied families together before setting them alight. And then screamed “genocide.” It’s never the fault of the non-Jews for killing Jews.

Here’s a suggestion. Don’t bother teaching the Holocaust any more. We, Jews, must stop identifying with the Holocaust. We are not the holocaust. We are “thrivers,” like millions before us who had been attacked for the crime of being Jewish and carried on. We don’t talk about those attempted exterminations anymore. Over the millennia, we survived the persecutions, prosecutions, pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions and crusades. We thrive, and that eats at the soul of so many, today. Tough.

From time immemorial the Jews have been attacked for the crime of bringing God into the world. Bringing ethics and morals and rights and responsibilities into the world. With each passing century a previous evil attack on the Jews was forgotten as a new one came about.

I was born just a few years after the world turned its back on the Jews of Europe. The refrain “Never Forget: Never Again” has been shared for almost 80 years. Well, dear people. Try as you might to blame the Jews for all the shit going on in the world today, we will not go gently into that good night – ever again. The Holocaust is now part of the long, brutal history of the failure of the people throughout time trying to kill us. They all failed. We are not going away.

We will be remembered over the millennia as fighters/survivors of the worst human crimes known to man. From generation to generation you tried to kill us. You make us out to be the villains, the evil people. How can we be the villain and the evil people in a world of 8 billion when there are only 15 million of us? Why is that? We came first – before Christians and Muslims and Hindi and Sikhs and Buddhists. You have tried to kill us because we are the carriers of morality – that prevents you from murdering your neighbour or stealing from the local grocer or having sex with your neighbour’s wife or child. We brought respect for others into the world, justice and mercy, charity and loving kindness. It is too much for you. So you try to kill us. In every generation.

Well the Holocaust was a doozy. But you failed. You don’t’ want to teach it? Don’t. It won’t change who I am. My mother’s name was Sarah and my father’s name was Avraham. It won’t change the identity of all the Jews in the world. It won’t weaken the Israelis who fight for freedom in the Middle of the Middle East run by Muslims who will not tolerate freedom and whose god calls for the death of all others.

You will not have sex with a 6 year old. Unless of course you are a Muslim. The devolution of God.

You will not sacrifice your children in the name of God – unless you are a Muslim – shahid.

In every generation there are those who want to eradicate us. It isn’t “us.” It’s the ethic God gave to us – His Chosen People, to share. An ethic that requires constraint.

I’m done now with the Holocaust. No more talk about Jews rounded up and put into ghettos – in Rome too, right in front of the Pope who did not care. Today’s Pope doesn’t care about Jews either. Nothing has changed over the millennia. We are God’s Chosen people: chosen to give the world the extraordinary ethic of freedom and then be attacked for it for all eternity. So, enough responding to them. The haters. Let them speak. Let them go back in history and see what happens to countries which attack their Jews. Expel their Jews – hey Spain and Britain. I don’t want my great grandchildren talking about the Holocaust. I want my grandchildren and great grandchildren talking about the extraordinary state of Israel reborn in 1948 on its legal, historical and biblical land: a country with the same language, laws, religion, culture and borders for 3500 years and counting. I want my great grandchildren to talk about the extraordinary inventions from Israel in medicine and military(Remember Kaboom????) and science. I want them talking about the extraordinary successes in agriculture. I want them talking about a tiny country, one country, one Jewish country, in a world of 194 countries. I want them talking about the fact that the world talks about Israel and the Jews – and it kills them that we are here alive and well and thriving. That we will always be here because we are God’s Chosen people Who taught us never to quit, never give in, never bend the knee to false gods. And if that makes the rest of the world – 8 billion people – give or take – upset. Tough.

With every generation we get stronger and mightier. We frighten the non-Jews more and more. Why? Because we are God’s Chosen people and there is nothing they can do about it. Nothing. They try and try and try and fail, from generation to generation.

We must all embrace the words of Daniel Pearl, the American Journalist, who was decapitated by Al-Qaeda in Pakistan. He was kidnapped January 23, 2002. His final words?

“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish. My family follows Judaism.”

Amen.

Israel – from the river to the sea.

Israel Is Real

From the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it.”

Diane Weber Bederman