Judean Ethnicity

June 2026:I grew up in communist Prague in a family where both parents were Holocaust survivors. Both circumstances left marks on me. Living with parents who went through the Holocaust was difficult at times and my experience with communism added additional stress.

May 2026:Holocaust education remains one of the most important historical and moral responsibilities within schools, museums, and civic institutions. Historical accuracy, survivor testimony, archival preservation, and genocide education continue to play an essential role in helping students understand one of history’s greatest human catastrophes.

May 2026:Art allows people to feel before they judge.

May 2026:Education about the Holocaust deals with the worldwide systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. 

May 2026:There is no rhyme and no reason why somebody lived and somebody died—I survived.

May 2026:The work of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (HMTC) exists at the intersection of memory, moral responsibility, and democratic preservation. In an era increasingly defined by ideological extremism, algorithmic propaganda, and the normalization of hatred disguised as activism, the mission of Holocaust education has become not merely relevant, but indispensable.

May 2026:Every Tuesday night in Manhattan, a circle of chairs was arranged to hold a universe of intersecting worlds.

May 2026:What is an heirloom that your family treasures? Perhaps a seder plate, letters from war, a baseball glove, or even a tattered handwritten recipe. My family’s possession of my father’s detailed experience during World War II sat for over four decades before changing the course of my own story. That is my heirloom.

May 2026:The Holocaust has come full circle. Given its common meaning—the mass murder of six million Jews—that’s not something to celebrate. It’s always best to put as much distance as possible between an atrocity and more normalized surroundings. New generations should view the Holocaust as ancient history, and not as a current event.

May 2026:I used to say that I was obsessed with the Holocaust. Kind of a curious thing to say, I know—but as the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors who never spoke about their experiences, I was desperate to know what they had gone through, to try to make sense of the incomprehensible.

May 2026:Over the years, many moments have stayed with us, but one in particular stands out.

May 2026:I have spent the past few weeks speaking to students about my grandfather’s story of surviving the Holocaust. The truth is that I do not really know his full story. It is something I have struggled with my whole life. That struggle guided me in a way I could not have imagined.

May 2026:Arnie Newfield was born on February 27, 1942, in Westerbork Holland, a transit camp at the time.

May 2026:Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust gave me sensitivities and a way of seeing the world different from that of most American Jews. As the child of Holocaust survivors, I inherited contradictory impulses: fear and defiance, insecurity and pride, grief and resilience. I grew up with pain that engendered anger, though over time that anger slowly eased as the 1970s became the 1980s became the 1990s, and America grew kinder and more hospitable not only to Jews, but to many groups that had once faced prejudice and discrimination.

May 2026:John Woolf was born Julius Wolf on October 31, 1928, in Carei, Romania.

May 2026:Renée Silver was born in 1931 in the region of Alsace-Lorraine known as the Saarland.

May 2026:My name is Kristine Keren (née Krystyna Chiger), and I’m a Survivor. I was born on October 28, 1935, in Lwów, Poland.

May 2026:Born in Łódź, Poland, my grandmother Eva Moskovitz grew up in a large and loving family.

May 2026:My family, my father, my mother, and my sister Rachel who was 10 years older than I, we were a very lucky family. We survived the war.

May 2026:I was born in 1933 in Rexingen Germany. I had an older sister named Inga who was born in 1930.

May 2026:My name is Mireille Taub. I was born in Paris in 1938. I didn’t know my name was Mireille until I became a citizen at 13—my parents always called me Mimi. They loved opera, so everything they named was named after an opera. “Mireille” is a very bad opera by Gounod. Mimì, of course, is the character in “La bohème.” My sister is Raymonde Elaine—Elena, “la Belle Hélène.” My father’s company in America was called Manon, after “Manon Lescaut.”

May 2026:My name is Lusia Milch, and I am a survivor of the Holocaust. 

May 2026:Every Sunday of my childhood, my Papa came to our house bearing bagels, lox, and the Holocaust. His name was Nuchuum Lewin, born in 1922 in Łódź, Poland.

May 2026:My great-grandfather wrote it twice in the same letter. Once was not enough. He needed her to understand.

May 2026:Speech delivered next to the “Hate Ends Now” cattle car exhibit at the University of North Texas library mall, April 20, 2026.

April 2026:Before the war, Ignacy was a businessman in Lwów, disciplined and deliberate, proud of the life he had built in a city once bursting with a vibrant Jewish life. Jewish Lwów pulsed with Torah learning, argument, enterprise, and culture. It was a European Jewish world with deep roots and a rich history. 

April 2026:On Yom Ha-Shoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—we pause not only to mourn the six million Jews who were murdered, but to confront the enduring responsibility their memory demands of us. We are called not only to remember how they died, but how they lived—and to carry their stories forward with clarity, courage, and purpose.

January 2024:Jews should de-colonize and re-indigenize both their rhetoric and minds. They should understand that identity matters; and that how they identify themselves matters.

January 2024:It is often ignored that Jerusalem is also the national ethnic center of the Jewish people. Whereas Christianity and Islam’s attachments to Jerusalem are only religious, there is a dual Jewish religious and national-ethnic attachment to the city. Jerusalem has been the national capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years and continues to serve as the capital of the modern State of Israel.

January 2024:Genetics has proven that modern Jewish populations carry their Israelite ancestors’ ancient Middle Eastern DNA.

January 2024:A poem by Darren Glick

January 2024:Jews, put bluntly, are not in need of the nations’ failed ideas. This is to say that Judaism, while open-minded and welcoming, is an entity unto itself, and does not require fundamental transformation.

January 2024:What do they have in common? Though they live in far-flung countries all over the world, they share common ancestry with the ancient Israelites. Though they may speak different languages, they all share the Hebrew language.

January 2024:to be a Jew goes beyond just your DNA. While no Jew can ever stop being a Jew according to our tradition and Jewish law, there are some basic minimums each Jew must uphold to be considered a Jew who is still part of the community.

January 2024:My mother told me that the Jewish people are like a hand because I asked her why she was crying. “You see my hand,” she said. “If I cut one of my fingers, where do you feel the pain?” I must have said, “the entire hand,” because this is when she told me that the Jewish people are like one hand; that if the Jewish people are hurting in Israel, we hurt everywhere.

January 2024:This is a story about Judea, a girl who faces bullying in school by a group of kids who purposefully call her not by her given name. The more that Judea tries to show to the students that her name is Judea, the more proof she brings, the bullying increases.

January 2024:In honor of my grandfather Stephan Igra and his brothers and sisters. Each of them deserve recognition and respect for their actions during the war in Warsaw. Where they “lived” outside of the Ghetto. I say “lived” because it’s nothing we can ever imagine. Some were in hiding being shuffled to different safe houses, others were fighting for the underground. I say Thank you and halleluyah… for I am because of you!

July 2022:Honest journalists, professors, and politicians need to begin pointing out: there never was a country called “Palestine.” Israel is not a “settler, colonial” state occupied by “white Europeans.” Jews hail from Judea and are indigenous to the land of Israel. Despite centuries of persecution, we have remained a people, a nation, an ethnicity—which is not “white,” European, or “privileged.”

May 2021:For well over a year, a debate has raged over the treatment of Jews in drafts for a California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). The California legislature has required the drafting and ensuing instruction of this curriculum across the largest high school system in America. The first two drafts were rightly sent back to the […]

July 2021:“Palestinianism” — the complete erasure of Judean identity—has now centered itself in the woke regime. Examples run from teachers’ unions boycotting the one Jewish state to the firing of a black Jewish diversity officer because she dared to condemn anti-Semitism. Want to watch the U.S. and Israeli flags burn simultaneously? Skip a trip to Tehran […]