The world no longer feels sorry for Jews. Now what?

For decades, Holocaust memory anchored Jewish legitimacy. In a post-sympathy world, Jewish education must rethink its foundations.

The Jewish star with a former Nazi concentration camp in the background (photo: Benny Rotlevy/Unsplash)

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Jewish education in the Diaspora developed in a world shaped by the civilizational earthquake of the Holocaust.

For nearly half a century after 1945, the images of liberated camps, skeletal survivors, and the ruins of European Jewry created a reservoir of global sympathy that was unprecedented. The Jewish People were not simply another minority with grievances; they were the survivors of history’s most systematic attempt at annihilation. In that atmosphere, Zionism did not require elaborate justification. The argument for Jewish sovereignty felt self-evident.

In classrooms, summer camps, youth movements, and synagogue programs, the narrative arc was linear and powerful: exile, persecution, catastrophe, rebirth. The Holocaust was not taught as an isolated tragedy but as the final proof that Jewish powerlessness was untenable. The modern State of Israel’s founding in 1948 appeared as both redemption and necessity — a moral and strategic response to Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

The world, having witnessed the consequences of statelessness, largely accepted this logic. Jewish education absorbed that moral alignment and, over time, came to rely on it. If students understood what had happened to the Jews of Europe, it was assumed, they would intuitively understand why a Jewish state must exist.

For two generations, this education unfolded not only through textbooks but through living memory. Survivors themselves stood in front of classrooms and community groups, speaking not as distant historical figures but as grandparents, neighbors, and congregants. Their presence collapsed the distance between past and present. Jewish vulnerability was not an abstract concept; it had faces, voices, and numbers tattooed into flesh. In that environment, the case for Jewish sovereignty required little theoretical scaffolding. It was experiential, personal, immediate.

But the world in which that model operated has changed. The “post-Holocaust sympathy world” that once shaped global and Jewish consciousness was always historically contingent. Sympathy is not a permanent geopolitical asset; it is generational. It fades with time and distance.

As the last remaining survivors pass away and memory becomes inherited rather than lived, the emotional infrastructure that undergirded Jewish education erodes. Today’s university students are three or four generations removed from Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau.

For many, the Holocaust occupies the same psychological category as other historical atrocities: morally significant, extensively documented, but temporally distant. When memory becomes institutional rather than personal, it loses some of its authority. Students encounter the Holocaust through museums, curricula, and documentaries rather than through human beings whose lives were shaped by it. The story remains powerful, but its immediacy has softened.

At the same time, the broader moral landscape of the West has shifted. In the late 20th century, the Holocaust occupied a singular place in global consciousness. It stood at the apex of a moral hierarchy, the ultimate symbol of industrialized evil.

In contemporary discourse, however, historical suffering is increasingly viewed through a framework of comparative and competitive victimhood. The 20th century’s atrocities now sit within a crowded gallery of injustices: colonialism, slavery, genocide, displacement. Within this framework, moral attention is distributed across multiple narratives rather than concentrated on one.

Jews, once understood primarily through the lens of persecution, are often recategorized in contemporary identity politics as relatively successful or even privileged. Israel’s military and technological strength reinforces that perception. In such a landscape, Holocaust memory alone does not automatically translate into contemporary moral capital or political support.

This shift creates a profound tension for Jewish education. Much of it still relies, implicitly or explicitly, on the emotional architecture of the post-1945 era. It emphasizes vulnerability, rescue, survival. It assumes that if students understand Jewish suffering, they will understand Israel’s legitimacy.

Yet understanding does not necessarily produce alignment. Students can feel genuine sorrow for the victims of the Holocaust while simultaneously absorbing narratives that frame Zionism as “colonialism” or Israel as an “oppressor.” The moral logic that once connected Jewish victimhood to Jewish sovereignty has weakened in the minds of many young people raised in a different intellectual environment.

The transformation is not only ideological but technological. In the decades after Israel’s founding, Jewish institutions and educational frameworks exercised significant narrative control over how Israel was presented to Diaspora Jews.

Today, that control has largely evaporated. Young Jews encounter Israel first and most frequently through social media, where conflict imagery circulates without context and where algorithmic amplification rewards emotional intensity over historical depth. TikTok videos, viral images, and influencer commentary often shape perception long before any classroom discussion begins. Jewish education no longer operates as the primary storyteller about Israel; it competes within a crowded and frequently hostile information ecosystem. An education built on the assumption of a broadly sympathetic audience must now prepare students for a world in which sympathy cannot be presumed.

Israel itself has also changed, and this transformation further complicates inherited educational frameworks. The Israel that Diaspora institutions once presented as a fragile refuge for survivors is now a global military power with a dynamic economy and formidable technological capacity. In the post-Holocaust sympathy world, Israel was widely perceived as David: small, embattled, precarious.

In much contemporary discourse, it is perceived as Goliath: strong, armed, dominant. The imagery has inverted. This inversion alters how younger generations interpret the relationship between Jewish history and Jewish power. A narrative built primarily on vulnerability struggles to account for visible strength.

Within Israel, a parallel shift has already occurred. Young Israelis did not grow up in a world where Jewish survival depended on global sympathy. They inhabit a sovereign state that, despite its challenges, feels normal and self-sustaining. For them, Jewish power is not a fragile exception but an everyday reality. This creates a widening psychological gap between Israelis raised within a sovereignty mindset and Diaspora Jews educated within a vulnerability-centered framework. While Israeli civic culture increasingly assumes permanence and responsibility, many Diaspora educational models still operate as if legitimacy depends on reminding the world — and themselves — of Jewish suffering.

An overreliance on Holocaust-centered narratives can unintentionally produce what might be called museum Judaism: a Jewish identity organized primarily around remembrance of destruction rather than experience of vitality. A culture defined chiefly by what was lost risks appearing static, even mournful, to younger generations seeking meaning in living traditions.

If Israel is taught primarily as a response to catastrophe, it can come to feel like a historical artifact rather than a living civilizational project. A Judaism organized around death will struggle to compete with cultures organized around life. This does not diminish the centrality of Holocaust memory; it underscores the need to embed that memory within a broader narrative of continuity and renewal.

The Jewish claim to sovereignty does not begin in 1933 and does not depend exclusively on 1945. It stretches back through millennia of continuous identity, attachment to land, liturgy, language, and collective memory.

Zionism was not invented as a reaction to Hitler; it was accelerated by him. To ground Jewish attachment to Israel primarily in 20th-century catastrophe is to truncate a much longer story of peoplehood and purpose. If Israel is understood only as a shelter from persecution, its moral standing appears contingent on Jewish weakness. Yet Zionism at its core is not a plea for safety; it is an assertion of normalcy, of the right of the Jewish People to exercise self-determination in our ancestral homeland. That right does not expire when Jews are strong.

A generation raised to see itself primarily as history’s victim may struggle to see itself as history’s author. When educational frameworks emphasize fragility without agency, they can produce defensive identities oriented toward seeking approval rather than exercising responsibility. The post-Holocaust sympathy world allowed many Jews to assume that understanding Jewish suffering would naturally produce support for Jewish sovereignty.

That assumption no longer holds.

In much of today’s pop culture, perceived power (not history) often determines perceived legitimacy. An Israel that is strong, armed, and assertive will not automatically inherit the moral credit of Jewish victimhood. If Jewish education does not adjust to this reality, it risks preparing students for a world that no longer exists.

This adjustment does not require abandoning Holocaust education; it requires repositioning it within a larger civilizational narrative. The task is to integrate it with meaning. Israel must be taught not only as refuge but as arena: the place where Jewish civilization unfolds in modern form — Hebrew revived as a living language, ancient holidays reborn in public space, ethical traditions translated into the dilemmas of governance, technological and cultural creativity flourishing in a Jewish context. These are not footnotes to catastrophe but expressions of continuity; they represent the positive content of sovereignty.

In a post-sympathy world, Jewish education must mature from a pedagogy of trauma to a pedagogy of covenant and responsibility.

Jewish students must be prepared to engage in self-defense — verbal, social, even physical — rather than shielded from it. They must understand the historical and ethical foundations of Jewish sovereignty without relying solely on the emotional authority of past suffering. They must see themselves not as passive inheritors of tragedy, but as active participants in an ongoing civilizational story. Jewish students must be taught that Jewish particularism is a source of pride, not an apology to make or a permission slip to request from others.

This requires cultivating and renewing civilizational literacy, cultural fluency, and a sense of shared stake in the future of Jewish life.

The post-Holocaust sympathy world represented a rare alignment between global conscience and Jewish necessity. That alignment cannot be assumed in the present or relied upon in the future. As memory recedes and geopolitical perceptions shift, the foundation of Jewish attachment to Israel must rest less on the tears of others and more on the internal coherence of Jewish history and purpose. Sympathy fades. Sovereignty endures.

The challenge for Jewish education now is to ensure that a new generation understands Israel not because the world once pitied the Jews, but because they recognize themselves as heirs to an unbroken national story whose next chapters they are responsible for writing.

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