Portside

Debates over how to describe conflicts in Gaza, Myanmar and elsewhere are channeling a controversy as old as the word itself. The Genocide Convention emerged as an immediate response to World War II-today its being renegotiated to bring it up to date

A ceremony at an old food market in Amsterdam prompts reflections on tragedy, indifference and survival. How could so many Israelis feel indifferent to such grief and afflictions — that recalled how so many Germans had turned a blind eye to the Nazis

For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism....

The dark meaning the Israeli state has drawn from the Shoah, and then institutionalized in a machinery of repression. Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism, ignoring the Shoah.

In an Israeli war that has been retrofitted onto a Holocaust template, it is obscene that a plea to stop further killing is now read as moral failure.

Some continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians - this only fuels militant Zionism. What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines.

The Jewish community is now with a profound moral challenge. Even as we mourns our dead in Israel, we must acknowledge and protest the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in their memory in no uncertain terms.

As Jewish Berliners, we are involved, both as an organization and as individuals, with ongoing traumas that are inherent to this process of the ongoing Nakba — of the oppression of Palestinians by Zionists in Palestine.