Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Everyone likes to think they would have resisted Hitler.
The global response to the October 7th pogrom and its aftermath makes me not so sure.
Visit any university campus, newspaper office, arts festival, or “progressive” political gathering and you will encounter masses of people who have convinced themselves that had they been born 90 years earlier, they would have spent their evenings forging identity papers, hiding Jewish families beneath the floorboards and passing intelligence to the resistance.
Nobody imagines themselves cheering at a Nuremberg rally or informing on their Jewish neighbor. Few would even entertain the possibility that they might simply have kept their heads down, avoided troublesome acquaintances, and persuaded themselves that politics was terribly complicated. Certainly nobody pictures themselves explaining over dinner that while antisemitism is distasteful, one must understand ordinary Germans’ legitimate grievances.
“Everyone” is Sophie Scholl or Oskar Schindler, and everyone would have known. This is unfettered nonsense. It is a morality test with the answer sheet attached.
The Nazis are perfect villains because history has removed every ambiguity. Nazism has become the visual shorthand for evil: its uniforms, rallies, racial theories, and shattered synagogue windows safely preserved behind the glass of historical certainty.
We know where the trains were going, what the euphemisms concealed, which politicians were monsters, and which frightened dissidents deserved statues. People living through the 1930s did not have these advantages.
Retrospective moral courage costs nothing. You can condemn a dead dictator without losing a friend, a job, a university appointment, a publishing contract, or an invitation to a boring dinner party. There is no social penalty for opposing Hitler in 2026. Quite the reverse: Opposition to historical fascism is a credential of respectability. Politicians invoke it. Universities teach it. Corporations commemorate it. Museums curate it. Celebrities post about it.
We have converted one of history’s greatest moral catastrophes into history’s easiest moral examinations.
Question one: Was Hitler bad? Please show your work to get full marks.
The interesting question is whether our moral confidence survives without hindsight’s benefit.
Real moral tests do not arrive with an answer sheet and footnotes. They occur amid incomplete information, competing claims, and social pressure. The threatened group may be unpopular, its government objectionable, and some of its members unpleasant. Its enemies may possess genuine grievances alongside murderous hatreds. Defending the victims may require acknowledging facts that complicate your preferred ideology, while the people threatening them describe themselves as liberators, not fascists.
Hatred rarely arrives wearing the uniform by which future generations will recognize it. This is the Auschwitz test for modern politics. It does not ask whether you would have opposed antisemitism in 1938, but whether you can recognize antisemitism before somebody builds a museum about it.
Modern Western society congratulates itself endlessly for having learned the Holocaust’s lessons while demonstrating that it has learned only the aesthetics at best. We know what evil looked like then thanks to photographs, newsreels, preserved camps, speeches, uniforms, and an entire iconography of wickedness that enables even the historically illiterate to recognize the villain.
The difficulty is that today’s antisemites have a new wardrobe. Ideas adapt, hatreds acquire new vocabularies, and ancient prejudices discover fashionable moral causes and climb inside them. The Jew who was once accused of contaminating the nation can now be accused of contaminating indigenous land. The supposedly rootless cosmopolitan has somehow metamorphosed into the settler colonialist. Sinister Jewish international power has been modernized into the Zionist lobby manipulating Western governments.
The old conspiracy has not necessarily disappeared; it has just acquired a postgraduate vocabulary.
Israel can be criticized and its government can be condemned. Its politicians can be fools, zealots, opportunists, and worse. Its soldiers can commit wrongdoing and its policies can be mistaken. Israel is a country, not a sacrament. Indeed, the interesting moral test begins precisely there, because moral courage becomes meaningful only when the people being defended are not required to be politically immaculate to earn our protection.
The West finds dead Jews much easier because they arrive politically sanitized. Anne Frank cannot vote for a Right-wing coalition. A murdered child cannot support settlements. A skeleton at Auschwitz cannot say anything objectionable about Gaza. The Holocaust Jew has been stripped of agency’s vulgar complications. He is simply a victim. Perfect.
Living Jews are more troublesome. They have opinions, elect governments, carry rifles, argue among themselves, and occasionally make decisions that appall foreigners. They stubbornly refuse to remain symbols. This exposes retrospective morality’s great fraud. We imagine historical victims as though they arrived pre-certified by posterity, complete with moral halos and museum plaques. They did not.
Victims have always been complicated. People can be irritating, frightened, tribal, angry, prejudiced, politically foolish, and morally inconsistent while remaining entitled not to be murdered. Victimhood has never conferred sainthood.
Yet contemporary politics increasingly demands immaculate victims. Sympathy is granted after ideological inspection. Political beliefs are examined, privilege assessed, ancestral conduct audited, and historical grievances weighed. By the time the process is complete, the corpse has undergone a political background check. If an Israeli is murdered, the body can barely cool before somebody arrives carrying “context.”
Context is useful. History matters. Yet there is something grotesque about context that functions only in one direction. When Jews are attacked, history becomes infinitely complicated. When Jews defend themselves, history acquires a children’s book’s crystalline simplicity.
The choreography was visible after the October 7th pogrom in 2023. Israel had not even got all the Hamas terrorists out of the country when allegedly “educated” people in Western capitals were explaining how the murdered had provoked their murderers. The sequence was remarkable: Massacre was rapidly followed by contextualization, contextualization by equivocation, and equivocation by suspicion of the victims themselves.
Some people just could not say that slaughtering civilians was evil without reaching for a subordinate clause. Yes, October 7th was terrible, but. That “but” deserves its own Holocaust museum. It contains within three letters one of humanity’s oldest moral evasions. Yes, what happened to the Jews was regrettable, but there is a wider context. There is always a wider context when the victims are Jews.
Context explains conduct; it does not automatically absolve it. Poverty does not confer a license to rape. Humiliation does not sanctify kidnapping children. Dispossession does not turn the murder of civilians into an emancipatory act. Political grievance does not become moral detergent just because the assailants claim to have a grievance. Adults retain agency even when they have suffered.
This should not be controversial. Apply it to Palestinians, however, and otherwise sophisticated Westerners develop the expression of a Victorian aunt who has just discovered pornography beneath the vicar’s mattress.
“When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, ‘Jews go home to Palestine.’ Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, ‘Jews get out of Palestine.’”
― Amos Oz, renowned Israeli writer and novelist
Here lies another part of the Auschwitz test: whether people we classify as “oppressed” are permitted moral agency. Western politics increasingly operates with a peculiar division of human responsibility: Power confers agency while powerlessness confers explanation. The powerful possess strategies, ambitions, and culpability; the powerless are supplied with trauma, grievances, and historical forces acting upon them.
This is advertised as “compassion” when it is really condescension. People do not cease to have agency because their cause elicits sympathy. To deny them agency is to deny something fundamental to their humanity.
The same intellectual discipline must apply to Jews. Jewish suffering does not make Israeli policy automatically correct. Israeli power does not make Jewish vulnerability fictitious. Both propositions can coexist, although this is unfortunate in a political culture increasingly organized around slogans designed to fit on cardboard rectangles.
The Holocaust should have taught us considerably more than “Nazis are bad.” It should have taught us to recognize the social permission structure surrounding hatred. Mass persecution does not begin at the crematorium. Long before violence reaches that stage, a society has usually performed an elaborate moral renovation. A particular group becomes uniquely suspect. Collective guilt becomes permissible. Ordinary standards are suspended. Institutions develop sophisticated explanations for why intolerable discrimination constitutes justice here. Intellectuals supply the vocabulary. Activists supply the fervor. Respectable people discover that silence is considerably easier than dissent.
Eventually hostility feels righteous. That is the dangerous moment we are at now.
The people vandalizing a Jewish business are unlikely to imagine themselves reenacting Kristallnacht. They see themselves as “fighting oppression.” Students excluding Zionists need not experience themselves as enforcing an ethnic loyalty test; they can call it creating a “safe space.” The activist who requires Jews to denounce Israel before being admitted into polite “progressive” company can persuade himself that no discrimination has occurred.
This is how moral blindness works. People rarely experience themselves as villains. They see themselves as good people responding appropriately to exceptional circumstances.
History’s antisemites possessed explanations too. They had grievances, theories, intellectuals, newspapers, political movements, and impressive volumes purporting to demonstrate why Jews represented a unique danger — so measures that would have appeared indecent in other circumstances could be presented as regrettably necessary.
Our age’s great conceit is imagining that education has made us immune to this process. Clearly, it has not. It has just created more sophisticated rationalizations. This is why Holocaust education fails to stop antisemitism. A person can memorize the Nuremberg Laws and learn nothing about his own capacity for conformity. He can tour Auschwitz, stare solemnly at the piles of shoes, and return home to demonize living Jews.
He has learned history as information rather than warning. The lesson of Auschwitz is not how to identify Nazis after Nazism has become synonymous with evil. It is to recognize the psychological and social machinery that makes persecution feel reasonable before its consequences become impossible to ignore.
That machinery does not depend upon swastikas or Prussian marching boots. Certainty will suffice. So will collective guilt, dehumanization, moral exceptionalism, conformity, fear, and an educated class willing to explain why the ordinary rules of decency do not apply to this particular group under these particular circumstances.
Most important are the decent people who prefer social comfort to confrontation. This brings us back to those heroic fantasies about hiding Jews beneath the floorboards.
So, no, they probably would not have hidden Jews.
A more useful examination comprises smaller questions posed in the present tense: whether they defend a Jewish colleague when everyone else remains silent, or whether they challenge antisemitism when doing so makes dinner awkward, or whether they object when a Zionist is excluded from an organization, or whether they can condemn the murder of Israelis without first demanding their political credentials, or whether their principles survive the discovery that their own political tribe has temporarily decided Jews are inconvenient.
History’s great moral catastrophes are built partly from millions of such mundane calculations. Very few people will ever be asked to hide a family beneath their floorboards. Many will be asked whether they prefer silence, though. That is why our obsession with what we would have done in the 1930s is so self-indulgent. The examination is not in 1938; it is now.
There will be no answer sheet. The victims will be imperfect, the facts incomplete, and the propaganda abundant. Friends may disagree. One’s preferred political movement may cause embarrassment. Doing the right thing may carry a social cost. One may even find themselves defending somebody they dislike. That is precisely what makes it a moral test.
Everyone knows what they would have done at Auschwitz after Auschwitz. The question that matters is whether they would have recognized the road leading there while everyone around them was congratulating themselves on the destination.
To paraphrase Dara Horn, if there’s one thing people love more than dead Jews, it is defenseless ones.
Good closing sentence. Well written, well done.