July 16, 2025

I want to share something that haunts me. Not because I agree with it — and certainly not because I find it morally acceptable. I want to explore it because it happened, because it is real. And because it has, in a very literal sense, changed the way I see the world.

This may be old news to many, but like anything of vital importance, it must be reflected upon again and again.

On Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists stormed across the Gaza border and slaughtered men, women and children in their homes, many of the victims lived in Israeli towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip. These were places populated by people who, for the most part, made up the vanguard of Israel’s far left.

(Left and right in Israel differ from American definitions. The divide there is not about taxes or abortion — but primarily about whether or not to give up land for peace, and the efficacy of allowing for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.)

Up until the pogrom of Oct. 7, these communities — places like Kfar Aza, Be’eri and Nir Oz — were, at one point, and for some, models of hope. They were not anonymous cities. They were small, close-knit towns near the border where relationships had been built over time.

And that’s the part that disturbs me most — because in many of these cases, the Hamas terrorists, and Gazan “civilians” who joined in the atrocities, had been aided by other Gazans who had worked for, eaten with and been embraced by the very people they helped target.

These weren’t spies in disguise. They were dreamers of a lurid dream — gardeners, handymen, day laborers who had shared morning coffee and pastry with Israeli families. There are accounts of them being invited into homes, exchanging stories and photos of their children, even receiving help with medical care. These weren’t strangers — they were neighbors of a kind.

I also believe — and this is the complicated part—that there was a degree of real affection. When Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, this may have been part of what she was alluding to. Either way, human beings are complex. We all are. We are multilayered. However, those of us whose minds have not been corrupted by an evil, radical ideology will not easily succumb to what happened on Oct. 7.

The betrayal.

These same workers, according to testimony from survivors and investigators, had provided detailed intelligence to Hamas. Who lived in which house. Who had weapons. Whether there were dogs. Who might resist. Who was vulnerable. One family’s dog — warned about in advance — was shot on entry. It was not random. It was precise. That’s what keeps me up at night.

How could someone sit across from you at a kitchen table, drink your coffee and then mark you and your children for slaughter?

I don’t have answers. But I’ve tried to look into the dark and awful chasm of it.

And what I see — what I imagine, however murkily —is this: for some Gazans, there had been a great dissonance, one too painful to bear, one that pushed against their sense of themselves, made them feel deeply ashamed. On one side of a fence, they saw beauty: green fields, ordered lives, security, hope. On their side: overcrowding, scarcity, repression, the choking grip of Hamas and the false promise of destroying not just what the Jews had built, but the Jews themselves.

Envy — if not the root of all evil — is surely a major contributor.

Gazans, it is impossible to know in exactly what numbers, saw the Oct. 7 attack as the long-awaited breach. The opening of the gates. The final chapter in a story they had been told since childhood — that the land had been “stolen” from them, that the Jews were interlopers thriving on Islamic soil and that one day they would destroy the illusory state the Jewish devils had built for themselves and return to reclaim what was theirs.

This wasn’t just about land. It was, and remains for many, a religious duty. A mythic dream. A fantasy of reversal.

If they could break through the fence — so the fantasy went — others would join. Missiles would come from Iran, from Syria, from Hezbollah in the north. The Jews would be crushed and burned. And the shame of a century or more of powerlessness would finally be avenged.

But fantasies fed on rage don’t lead to liberation. They lead to destruction. And that’s what happened — not just for the 1,500 Israelis murdered on that horrible day, and the 251 souls kidnapped by Hamas, but for Gaza itself.

What unfolded was not a revolution. It was not a war for justice. It was the bestial rape and murder of civilians, the burning of babies, the parading of mutilated women through the streets. And all of it was rationalized, praised, even celebrated, by American professors, journalists, writers and self-described progressives — most of them living, of course, on land that had actually been stolen.

They called it “resistance.”

Some even called it “joyous.”

Osman Umarji, a lecturer at UC Irvine, said in a public lecture just weeks after the massacre: “The Zionists have been exposed for the criminals and blood-thirsty animals that they are. This is a gift from Allah to the world.” He added that events like Oct. 7, 9/11, and the Second Intifada were divine “reminders … waking the Muslims’ spirit.”

Bikrum Gill, a political science professor at Virginia Tech, went further, praising Hezbollah terrorism as “anti-imperialism” and a necessary “weapons production capacity that can challenge at an international scale.” He concluded: “We must refuse those who demand that we condemn Palestinian violence.”

This is what passed for moral clarity in certain corners of academia. It still does.

It was not joyous. Not for Israel, clearly. And as it turned out, not for Palestinians.

It was evil.

And still — I need to understand it, if only because the darkness of that day remains a constant shadow. I need to process it. But to understand is not to agree. It is to resist the temptation to flatten human beings into caricatures. It is to ask: How could this happen? What story had to be told — again and again — for someone to believe that betraying a friend, pointing out a child’s bedroom, or shooting a family dog could mark the beginning of freedom?

One possibility is this: like gullible children, they were lied to. Their false hopes, carefully fed. Not only by Hamas, but by an entire ethos of negation — one that seeks not to build, but only to destroy. One that elevates victimhood into virtue and turns murder into sacrament.

That story must be rejected — morally, strategically and spiritually.

The Palestinians will never be free by killing Jews.

They will only be free when they free themselves from their eliminationist mindset. When they fully and finally reject militant, radical Islam. When they are able to choose life over death.

And when the world — especially those who claim the mantle of justice — stops applauding massacres as if they were moral victories.

Understanding motivation does not mean abandoning moral judgment.

It means sharpening it.

It means defending oneself by knowing the motivations of one’s enemies.

It means being able to hold in one’s mind a vision for true peace — not just a cessation of war.

---

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. 

Education is what’s left after you have forgotten the details. You may not remember the years of Napoleon’s reign, but did you learn to love the study of history? Exactly how Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” ends may be a distant memory, but did you learn to love reading? Did you go on to read his equally great “Huckleberry Finn” and explore other authors? If you are a doctor, lawyer or other professional, you do need to remember facts and details, but was that the limit of your schooling or the beginning? Were you educated, or merely trained?

Education should shape the whole person and develop character. It is a thirst for knowledge, a mind open to exploration and wonder, a desire to understand.

Isidor Rabi was a boy with immigrant parents who went on the win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1944. When he was asked how he managed to accomplish that most impressive feat, he gave credit to his mother. When his friends came home from school, he said, the mothers all asked their children what they learned. When he came home from school, his mother asked: Izzy, did you ask a good question? Education is the art of asking good questions—intellectual curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge in any area. It never stops, has no time limit or boundaries. It is a lifelong quest. Talk to any person in extreme old age who is thriving, and you find someone who is endlessly curious.

The purpose of formal education is to inspire and to begin a process and a way of thinking that we develop on our own over time. It goes beyond the bounds of any one discipline and invites the study of new and unexplored areas. There are people who never studied music and can’t read a note but who love music nonetheless, read biographies of composers and attend concerts simply because it gives them great pleasure and moves them. Professional musicians may technically know more, but they don’t feel the experience any more than others who have engaged in their own musical education do.

Education has no intellectual borders: It is a professor of biology who enjoys the theatre, an optometrist who reads history, an engineer who loves art. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the most renowned school of engineering in the world, courses in the humanities are required.

There are two pillars of education. One is that education is a lifelong pursuit and the other is that it is comprehensive, not narrowly focused.

Education does not have a pension plan. It never retires. It lasts as long as people want to understand themselves and their world, as long as they take pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge. Degrees and diplomas are presented at a ceremony called “commencement.” Commencement means beginning. It does not mean the end of anything but rather the beginning of the voyage, the unquenchable thirst.

Education’s other pillar is comprehensiveness. Kenneth Clark’s magnum opus, “Civilisation,” originally a BBC television series and later a book, conveys an important message. It demonstrates that civilization does not exist in silos but is comprehensive. It grows organically. History, art, music, literature, architecture and even current events are the product of a culture. And culture contributes to our understanding of our society and ourselves. That study is open to all, young and old, people in every work and profession. Clark’s book  demonstrates that an understanding of history and our times makes knowledgeable citizens. It also made him optimistic: He concludes with the observation that “Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths” that should give us confidence in ourselves. He asserts that it is a lack of confidence that kills a civilization: “We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.”

“We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.”

Jews have been pioneers in the field of education. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called attention to the fact that “Jews set about creating the first system of publicly funded, universal education in history. By the end of the 1st century, it was complete. Jews became the people who predicated their survival on the house of study … From that day to this, they made education their highest communal priority. It allowed them to do what no other nation has done—preserve their identity intact across almost twenty centuries of exile, dispersion and powerlessness.” Jews have won and lost many battles over the millennia but survived amid loss because they understood one fundamental life lesson. In the words of Rabbi Sacks: “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend a civilisation, you need schools.”

It must be pointed out that part of Jewish education is that it continues throughout adulthood in study partners (chavrusa), synagogue courses, institutional study with organizations such as Tikvah and Torah in Motion, along with many other means of continuing one’s knowledge. There is a great flourishing of Jewish study during and after formal studies have been completed.

The two pillars of education—lifelong learning and inclusivity, covering a wide range of topics—are essential for an informed and engaged citizenry. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) expressed the ideal in his noble ambition: “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”

---

Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo.

I used to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show. We debated, argued, and, at times, agreed. While I never found him particularly subtle, he once struck me as intellectually curious and engaged. That person is gone. The Carlson I see now is unrecognizable—a man who cloaks ignorance in faux patriotism and traffics in rhetoric that is unmistakably antisemitic.

His latest outrage? Declaring that American citizens who serve in the Israel Defense Forces—like my own children—should be stripped of their U.S. citizenship. Carlson has apparently convinced himself that American Jews who feel a sense of duty to Israel are traitors, or at least less American than their neighbors. The ugliness of this accusation is matched only by its historical illiteracy.

Does Carlson understand, for example, that some of America’s most revered World War II heroes voluntarily joined foreign militaries—well before the United States entered the war? That far from being condemned, they were celebrated?

Let’s start with the Eagle Squadrons—units of volunteer American pilots who joined Britain’s Royal Air Force to fight Nazi Germany in 1940 and 1941, while America remained officially neutral. These brave men, often in their twenties, believed the threat of fascism was too dire to wait for official policy to catch up with moral clarity. They put their lives on the line, not for personal gain, but to defend democracy and decency abroad.

Carlson may also want to familiarize himself with Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., older brother of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy trained as a naval aviator and volunteered for a high-risk mission in 1944, during which he was tragically killed. He was part of a generation that understood moral duty does not end at a nation’s border.

Were these Americans traitors, Tucker? Should they have been stripped of their citizenship?

Of course not. And the notion that they should have been was never even entertained. Because Americans—at our best—understand that fighting tyranny and standing for one’s values transcends passports.

So why does Carlson reserve this particular fury for Jews who serve in the IDF?

Because this isn’t really about foreign military service. It’s about delegitimizing Jews as full participants in American life. Carlson didn’t launch into a broadside against Americans who join the French Foreign Legion. He’s not railing against those who volunteer with Kurdish fighters, or Americans currently embedded in the Ukrainian military effort against Russia.

No. He singled out Israel. He singled out Jews. And that’s not just a double standard—it’s antisemitism.

Carlson is reviving the toxic accusation of dual loyalty, a charge that has haunted Jews for centuries. From the Dreyfus affair in France to Soviet purges to McCarthy-era smears in the U.S., this idea—that Jews cannot be trusted, that they are somehow foreign, suspect, or beholden to another country—has fueled some of the darkest chapters in modern history. Now, incredibly, Carlson is breathing new life into it.

And the implications are chilling. In a time of rising antisemitism globally, in a moment when Jews are still mourning the October 7th massacre and facing a wave of hostility in its aftermath, to accuse American Jews of divided loyalties isn’t just inflammatory—it’s dangerous.

To be clear, my children who serve in the IDF are American citizens. They are not dual nationals. They are not secret agents of a foreign power. They are idealistic young men and women who have chosen to stand up against terrorism and defend innocent lives in a democratic ally of the United States. Their choice is morally consistent with the best traditions of American heroism.

There is a long legal precedent to back this up. The U.S. State Department has affirmed repeatedly that Americans can serve in foreign militaries without jeopardizing their citizenship—so long as those militaries are not hostile to the United States. Israel is not only a close American ally; it is the single most reliable partner in the Middle East on issues ranging from counterterrorism to technology. American citizens serving in the IDF are not breaking any laws. They are not betraying their country. Carlson knows this—or should.

So why is he doing this? Why this sudden, almost obsessive hostility toward Israel? Why the relentless effort to paint American Jews as foreign interlopers rather than full participants in the American experiment?

The question must be asked: Does Tucker Carlson have financial ties to Qatar? It’s an uncomfortable topic, but Carlson’s views have recently become almost indistinguishable from those promoted by Qatar’s state-funded outlets—outlets that openly defend Hamas and vilify Israel. If he is being compensated, directly or indirectly, to adopt these views, the American public deserves transparency.

More importantly, American Jews deserve safety. We deserve the dignity of knowing that when our children risk their lives fighting Hamas—a genocidal organization whose founding charter calls for the murder of Jews—they won’t be smeared as traitors by influential voices back home.

I have always believed that Carlson was at his best when standing against groupthink and political orthodoxy. But now, ironically, he parrots the same antisemitic tropes long hurled by the far-left: that Jews are too powerful, too foreign, too disloyal. That to support Israel is to betray America. It is a tragic fall from grace, and one that cannot go unchallenged.

To be an American is to believe in freedom, justice, and moral responsibility. Sometimes that means serving at home. Sometimes that means serving abroad. And sometimes it means standing up to powerful voices who forget our history and peddle dangerous lies.

My children who serve in the IDF embody that American spirit. Tucker Carlson no longer does. 

---

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is an American author, broadcaster, and public speaker. He is the founder of The World Values Network and the author of over 30 books on ethics, Judaism, and politics, including Kosher Sex and Judaism for Everyone. He has been called “America’s Rabbi” by The Washington Post.

I am the author of a new report published by the Jewish People Policy Institute, “Israel Studies at American Universities: Is There a Path Forward?,” a call to action to save the discipline before it’s too late.

I trained as a historian in the field of Israel Studies and have had a bird’s eye view to the trials and tribulations of the field in my career teaching at Brandeis, Oxford, Northwestern and now the University of Haifa over the past 15 years. The report was written out of professional and personal commitment to a field in crisis in the troubled campus space today, especially after Oct. 7. With pro-Palestine encampments proliferating across quadrangles, students unwilling to be socially shunned for taking a class with “Israel” or “Zionism” in the title — if not vulnerable to outright antisemitic attack — faculty subjected to ideological litmus tests, and even protesters storming into Israel Studies classrooms, the situation has become untenable.  

But once upon a time, from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, Israel Studies was a new, promising and thriving academic initiative dedicated to the research, teaching, and study of modern Israel, Zionism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict through an interdisciplinary lens. The core tenets of the field were to embrace the complexity of Israel and emphasize the dual narratives of Israelis and Palestinians as a means of educating toward conflict resolution. That open-tent philosophy led to an identity crisis — today, it doesn’t know what defines it, who belongs within in, how to teach it, what its relationship with other departments and disciplines should be (especially in a hostile campus climate and with a new field of Palestine Studies growing up alongside it) and what its priorities must be for the future. Moreover, an increasingly prominent anti-Zionist wing of the field has come into conflict not only with other scholars, but with donors and communities that has alienated many former champions.

While Israel Studies confronts a kind of schizophrenia from within, it is also beset by broader challenges in university culture. Today, Israel Studies is a canary in the coal mine of academic dysfunction, from ideological capture of much of the humanities and social sciences heavily funded by despots from the Middle East, to campus antisemitism and cancel culture. The widespread embrace of BDS and both the intellectual and bureaucratic institutionalizing of ideas about Israel as a settler-colonialist/apartheid/genocidal regime and Jewish Zionists as “white supremacist oppressors” makes it difficult for any complexity about Israel to be introduced into the curriculum, and perhaps even more importantly — to hire, publish, or promote anyone who deviate from these narratives. Whether Israel Studies can survive in a climate where Israel and Zionism are the third rail of campus politics is a test case for health of institutions of higher education as a whole.

Yet, “what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus”: Israel Studies demonstrates the dangers of the pipeline from dorm room to boardroom, as an entire generation of students were miseducated (or undereducated or uneducated) about Israel, Zionism and the Arab-Israeli conflict but are now inhabiting institutions of power and knowledge, from the media, to politics, and foreign policy. The dividends of the Israel Studies dilemma may yet be seen down the road.

Can Israel Studies survive given this set of both internal and external circumstances?

My recommendations are for the field to reform itself and be in a stronger position to confront the situation on campus environment beyond it — but without the “buy in” from faculty, university administrators and donors (who don’t necessarily play nicely together), it may spell the disappearance of Israel Studies, at least at the most antagonistic elite universities where it once thrived.

In sum, it may be time to move Israel Studies to a hospitable home off-campus — including thinktanks and Jewish institutions like JPPI — to offer a new generation a rigorous and nuanced curriculum that may be lacking at college today.

Rather than an obituary, I hope it will be a rebirth of the field for the post-Oct. 7 reality. 

 

---

Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn is a celebrated scholar, author, educator, media personality and public intellectual who currently serves as Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a Historian of Diaspora-Israel relations at the University of Haifa.

As a practicing psychiatrist, I have spent my life appreciating and teaching the value of empathy — one of humanity’s most precious tools for healing, connection, and moral growth. But over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve witnessed something deeply disturbing: empathy itself being used as a weapon instead of a bridge. I call this phenomenon “empathicide.”

What Is Empathicide?

Empathicide is the social and psychological process where the genuine, healing intent behind empathy is distorted into an instrument that excludes, dehumanizes, or silences.

Forms of Empathicide

Most forms of empathicide are unconscious and unintentional and come from a desire to conform or be perceived as compassionate. But two are purposely designed to sway public sentiment: I call them “Strategy-Driven Empathicide” and “Authority-Driven Empathicide.”

“Strategy-Driven Empathicide” involves the intentional exploitation of empathy to silence and demoralize others. This practice is commonly exercised by ideological movements that use emotions to fuel hate. The primary tool of strategy-driven empathicide is disinformation and the manipulation of data to oversimplify and vilify others.

“Authority-Driven Empathicide” happens when those in power — such as university or government leaders — are complicit with agents of strategic empathicide. They do so by appeasing them, even if it means silencing or marginalizing individuals who genuinely need protection.

These forms of empathicide are not abstract theories — they are unfolding before us, particularly in spaces where empathy is claimed as a virtue but wielded as a weapon.

Antisemitism and the Experience of Jews on Campus

Nowhere is empathicide illustrated more clearly than in the growing acceptance of anti-Zionism as a socially sanctioned form of antisemitism.

Antisemitism surged across North American college campuses post-Oct. 7. At UCLA, masked protesters ran around campus with daggers, tearing down hostage posters. Demonstrators shouted slogans promoting violence against Jews. Others beat a piñata of the Israeli prime minister while yelling, “Kill that f—ing Jew.” And Jewish faculty were falsely accused of supporting genocide. The trauma and vulnerability were palpable. The anti-Zionist movement showed itself to be more fixated on threatening Jews on campus than helping Palestinians.

For months, Jewish faculty and staff at UCLA relentlessly documented these and other incidents of antisemitism. We finally met directly with UCLA leadership in early March 2024, but they failed to respond meaningfully, the chancellor at the time stating that they were “hoping the situation would blow over.”

But things did not blow over.

By April, an encampment was established on the UCLA campus that excluded Jewish students and faculty from public spaces and enabled harassment and violence against Jews on campus, under the watchful eyes of campus security.

Three particularly egregious examples of empathicide stand out:

On March 22, 2024, UCLA protesters masked in keffiyehs built a giant mannequin of a pig holding a bag of money with a collection can marked with a Star of David — a grotesque revival of centuries-old antisemitic tropes. This was a deliberate act of dehumanization and another clear example of Strategy-Driven Empathicide.

On March 27, 2024, a mandatory medical school class on the unhoused was taught by a keffiyeh-wrapped lecturer who led UCLA medical students in chants of “Free Palestine” and prayers to “Mother Earth.” This channeling of compassion for the unhoused into unquestioning solidarity against another group is also an example of empathicide.

Most disturbing to me was when antisemitism invaded my own Department of Psychiatry at UCLA in April 2024 with a public lecture titled “Depathologizing Resistance” in collaboration with its DEI, Community and Global Psychiatry and Ethics offices. This psychiatry presentation actually normalized suicide for a cause. It justified the Hamas massacres and abductions on Oct. 7, 2023, and promoted anti-Zionist indoctrination, mischaracterizing Israel as a colonizing, genocidal regime. The lecturers also referred to Israel as “occupied Palestine for 75 years” — normalizing the erasure of the entire Jewish state of Israel, in any form, in any part of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.

By framing suicide and antisemitic violence as “resistance,” the lecture didn’t just distort empathy — it gave moral cover to terror. This is how empathicide can elevate ideology over human life — and even undermine the Hippocratic Oath. The lecture reflected many features of Strategy-Driven Empathicide — in ideological talking points, glorifying violence and minimizing Jewish history and trauma — yet it was presented as medical education. Whether the speakers realized it or not, the event aligned with disinformation found in the propaganda campaigns of organizations like Hamas.

When this lecture was exposed, the backlash swept across the psychiatry department — not against the antisemitic indoctrination, but against Jewish faculty who dared to speak up. A petition demanded our removal. The hostility was so profound that some of us were unable to continue in our teaching and clinical roles. Meanwhile, consistent with Authority-Driven Empathicide, UCLA rewarded the presenters and faculty sponsors with praise, promotions and institutional protection. To this day, UCLA’s psychiatry department has never publicly corrected or condemned the lecture’s content, which trafficked in antisemitic propaganda and violated core psychiatric principles.

And so we arrive at one of the most troubling consequences of empathicide: standing against hate is treated as hate, while spreading it is protected and elevated.

Zionism is a Core Part of Jewish identity

Zionism is not a political slogan — it is the Jewish people’s historic movement for self-determination in their homeland of origin, the land of Israel. Despite their expulsion by the Romans, Jews have always maintained a physical presence and spiritual bond to the land. Since then, Jews have endured millennia of persecution in the Diaspora for 2,000 years.

Zionism is a core part of Jewish identity through history, faith, language and a yearning for safety and self-determination. Importantly, Zionism is not about denying anyone else’s place in the land. It’s about guaranteeing that the Jewish people are never again denied theirs and their safety. Zionism is about refusing to be erased while still leaving space for others to belong, too.

What Anti-Zionism Really Is

While Israel, like any democracy, is subject to critique, anti-Zionism often goes far beyond that. It targets Israel’s very existence, denies Jewish history, and questions the very right of Jews to live there.

Anti-Zionism and Empathicide

Slogans like “Zionism is racism” and “Israel commits genocide” may sound like empathy and support for the Palestinian cause — but since they are grounded in disinformation and demonization, they block critical thought and serve as tools of empathicide.

Anti-Zionism often portrays the state of Israel as “settler colonialist.” This falsehood denies the very origins of the Jewish people and their rightful return to their ancestral homeland, the only place where they are not considered refugees. In reality, Israel is the most successful example of decolonization.

“Israel is an apartheid state” overlooks the full reality of how Arab Israeli citizens, just like Jewish ones, serve in Israel’s parliament, in its courts as judges and in its hospitals as physicians, pharmacists and nurses.

“Israel is committing genocide” distorts the definition of genocide, which requires the intent to destroy a people. While both Hamas’ charter and the Islamic Republic of Iran have expressed this intent both in words and in action, Israel issues warnings before airstrikes and enables humanitarian aid. The charge that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed Israel to be genocidal is also fiction. In actuality, the Court determined that, given the war, it is prudent to ensure that genocide is not occurring — a far cry from the libelous claim being circulated.

Misusing the term “genocide” fuels empathicide.

The “Zionism is racism” charge is slander rooted in antisemitic regimes like the USSR. Even the U.N. eventually recognized how harmful and false that claim is when it revoked that accusation in 1991. Zionism is about the survival of a multiracial, multiethnic Jewish people, not the supremacy of any race. It is about Jewish people scattered across the world who have faced centuries of persecution and exile, holding on to a shared dream of safety, dignity, and belonging in their biblical place of origin.

Is anti-Zionism Antisemitic?

In nearly every form we see today, anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Anti-Zionism that singles out Jews, denies their right to self-determination, and treats their existence as a moral offense is a modern expression of antisemitism. There is one rare exception: anti-Zionism rooted in a radical, consistent universalism that rejects all nation-states and religious homelands equally. But this is exceedingly rare. When empathy is selective and not inclusive, it’s exclusion dressed as compassion.

Empathicide goes beyond isolated incidents; it shapes institutional culture. American college campuses have enabled a climate where students feel comfortable weaponizing the term “Zionist” as a slur against Jews to invalidate the core of Jewish identity itself and its connection with the biblical land of Israel. Reducing “Zionist” to a pejorative term used to marginalize Jews is not activism. It is antisemitism.

Like every democracy, Israel has its share of individual leaders who are extreme, even racist — voices that don’t reflect the values or hopes of most Israelis or Jews. The democratic process addresses these extreme voices, albeit imperfectly, in a manner similar to how it functions here in the United States. But here’s the deeper problem: those calling for the end of Israel often take these extreme voices and act as if they speak for all Jews, all Israelis. They ignore the millions who long for dignity, safety, and coexistence. They overlook the deep internal debates, the protests in Israel’s streets, and the constant push within Israeli society to do better.

Likewise, we should not hold all Palestinians responsible for the decisions of their leaders. Many are trapped under leadership that has failed them — rejecting peace, diverting international aid and prioritizing violence over their people’s future. Hamas’ use of its own Palestinian civilians as human shields is an empathocidal strategy meant to confuse the world, to make it harder to see who is protecting life and who is assaulting it.

Overreach in the Name of Fighting Antisemitism

Empathicide is not confined to activist circles or ideological opponents. It also emerges from reactionary overcorrection, even in the name of fighting antisemitism. Empathicide is nonpartisan. It is a ubiquitous human failure — a failure to anchor compassion in truth. It manifests during times of fear, retaliation, or when political movements utilize suffering to advance their agendas.

If the fight against antisemitism becomes an excuse to indiscriminately defund scientific research or blanketly purge international scholars, then empathy has not been restored; it has been corrupted. That, too, is empathicide.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Empathy

As we’ve seen, empathicide is a phenomenon that takes many forms:

• The pressure to conform

• The distortion of truth

• The manipulation of empathy

• The denial of trauma

• The justification of martyrdom

So where do we go from here?

We name and call out empathicide, no matter where it comes from — left, right, or anywhere in between.

We embrace intellectual honesty and viewpoint diversity in education.

We resist the temptation to become what we oppose.

If we don’t recognize empathicide, it will keep distorting how we see each other — and what we call right or wrong.

Real empathy sees humanity truthfully. It feels and cares for all pain, yet itself has no agenda.

---

Dr. Kira Stein is a psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at UCLA. She is the founder of the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFrg) at UCLA, and the originator of the term ’empathicide.’