The Bondi terrorist attack and calls for “death to the IDF” and “globalize the Intifada” have had an effect on me, more than I let on, making me wonder what has happened to the world. We are living in a time when facts seem optional and empathy is increasingly selective. We have watched respected voices deny or minimize atrocities committed against Jews, including the refusal by parts of the #MeToo movement to acknowledge the rape and sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women. Silence, deflection, and moral hesitation have become familiar responses whenever Jewish suffering does not fit a preferred narrative. This deafness is not new. It has a long and uncomfortable history.
From People to “Race”
In the weeks leading up to the pogrom, the local newspaper Bessarabets (Бессарабец) published repeated antisemitic articles accusing Jews of ritual murder and portraying them as an inherent threat. Crucially, Jews were described not simply as a religious group, but as a “race.” One of the paper’s most notorious phrases called for a “crusade against the hated race.” With that shift, Jews were no longer people who practiced a faith or belonged to a historical community. They became a biological problem.
Words, Categories, and Violence
This distinction matters. A religion is a system of belief and practice. A people is a historical and cultural community shaped by shared memory, language, and experience. A race, as defined by late nineteenth-century racial thinking, was imagined as biological, fixed, and immutable. Once Jews were redefined as a race, there was nothing they could do to change their status. Conversion, loyalty, and citizenship became irrelevant. Violence could be reframed as necessity.
Although I am not a religious person, the words of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ring true: first Jews were hated because of their religion, then they were hated because of their race, and now they are hated because of their nation-state. The categories change, but the underlying logic does not. It is always about finding a new language to say that Jews, in whatever form, do not belong as free and equal human beings.
Actually Jonathan Sacks used “pogrom” as one of a series of uniquely Jewish words that entered the moral vocabulary of the modern world because of antisemitic violence.
From Kishinev to Nuremberg
This framework did not begin with the Nazis, but it was perfected by them. In 1935, the Nazi regime enacted the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” one of the central Nuremberg Laws. Although presented as a general racial safeguard, its primary target was Jews: the law criminalized marriages and sexual relations between Jews and so-called “German or related blood” and formalized the idea that Jews were a biological contaminant to German society.
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| Reich Medical Association circular promoting ‘racial hygiene |
This racial obsession was not fringe ideology. It was institutionalized. German medical and scientific bodies embraced “racial hygiene” as a central mission, recasting medicine as a tool for deciding whose lives were worth protecting and whose were disposable. Healing gave way to sorting. The postcard illustrated here, showing the memorial to the victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, reminds us that this trajectory did not begin with gas chambers or camps. It began with words in newspapers, definitions repeated often enough to feel normal, and the steady erosion of empathy.
The Present
What makes this history so unsettling is how familiar it feels. Then, Jews were dismissed as a race. Today, Jews are often dismissed as an abstraction: a political symbol, a collective accusation, or an inconvenience to a moral narrative. When Jewish victims are ignored, doubted, or explained away, it follows the same logic. Once Jews are no longer seen as individuals, their suffering becomes negotiable.
