A Deafening Silence

On June 1, 2024, Karen Diamond joined a peaceful Run for Their Lives rally in Boulder, Colorado. The march was in support of the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. Karen was 82. She was a beloved member of her community. 

During the rally, a man named Mohamed Sabry Soliman approached the crowd with Molotov cocktails and shouted antisemitic slurs as he launched fire into the group of demonstrators. Fifteen people were injured. Karen was critically burned. After three weeks in the hospital, she died from her injuries.

A Jewish woman burned to death on American soil. The violence wasn’t random. It was ideological, premeditated, and still, almost no one says her name. There is no national mourning, no sweeping op-eds in major publications. Karen Diamond’s death came and went in near silence—exactly the kind of silence that makes the next attack easier.

This lack of outrage echoes the deafening silence that followed the greatest crime in human history.

In December 1945, as the world began to comprehend the full scope of the Holocaust, something remarkable happened in Munich. Holocaust survivors gathered to establish the Central Historical Commission, to bear witness to what they had endured. Over the next few years, commissions were set up in Poland, Hungary and France. More than 5,000 testimonies were collected, fifty years before the Shoah Foundation was founded—voices crying out from the ashes, demanding the world remember.

But they were silenced.

The British Government among other post-war powers was seeking stability. Fearful of complications, it actively quashed discussion of the Holocaust. It halted the production of Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 documentary, Concentration Camps Factual Survey, which was not released until 2017.

Survivors were told to move on, to integrate quietly, to stop dwelling on the past. This was not survivors choosing silence. This was the world choosing to silence them.

The pattern is the same today. When Jews die because of hatred, the response is the same calculated hush-hush. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was set on fire during Passover. Paul Kessler was killed at a pro-Israel rally. Jewish protesters were assaulted at Coachella and Boulder. Each incident met the same fate: an awkward pause, followed by collective forgetting.

We know that public mourning—and outrage—is possible. When George Floyd was murdered, the world responded. Streets were renamed. Murals were painted. Protesters filled cities across continents. There was moral clarity—black men should not die in our streets because they are black. It was raw, emotional, and urgent.

But when Jews are burned, beaten, or killed—moral clarity is replaced by cold calculation. When Jews die it must somehow be their fault. George Floyd’s death justifiably raised the question, “Do Black lives really matter?” Karen Diamond’s death now begs the question, “Do Jewish lives matter too?”

This year, antisemitism has been legitimized from major cultural platforms. At Coachella, stage screens declared “F*** Israel. Free Palestine.” At Glastonbury, Bob Vylan shouted “Death to the IDF” to tens of thousands. Macklemore released a music video equating the Holocaust with Israeli military actions.

This performative protest creates the atmosphere where real violence becomes acceptable—and where such violence is met with silence.

Meanwhile, actual genocides are ignored. In Sudan, civilians are slaughtered and buried in mass graves. In Iran, women are sentenced to death for removing hijabs. Gay men are publicly hanged. Where are the festival stages for them?

The danger of selective outrage is that it creates a hierarchy of empathy. Some deaths matter. Others don’t.

Karen Diamond did not die in the stench of the death camps. She was murdered on a Sunday afternoon in a park in Colorado. She was using her voice on behalf of Jewish victims held as hostages in Gaza peacefully.

The Holocaust survivors who gathered in 1945 understood something we’ve forgotten: silence after atrocity accomplishes the goals of the perpetrators—to silence the crime. When they were systematically silenced after WWII it wasn’t just their stories that were lost—it was their moral compass too.

Karen Diamond’s life began while the inferno of Jewish death was burning during the Holocaust. It ended in the flames of anti-Jewish hate that consume the world today. This time, in her name, we will not be silenced.

Stephen D. Smith is CEO of Memory Workers and Executive Director Emeritus of USC Shoah Foundation.