High Holidays and the New Holocaust
What Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza is genocide--and it is a Holocaust
A dear friend asked me recently what I was doing for Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish High Holidays. I answered that I didn’t have any plans, and after a moment, I added that I didn’t want to make any, either.
For those not steeped in Jewish tradition, here’s the quick primer: Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—falls this year from sundown September 22 to nightfall September 24. It kicks off what we call the Ten Days of Awe, a stretch of soul-searching, repentance, and making amends. Those ten days carry us directly into Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which this year runs from sundown October 1 to nightfall October 2. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, a day of fasting and prayer, when Jews ask forgiveness and reflect before the metaphorical Book of Life is sealed for another year.
In other words, the High Holidays are designed to be a season of reckoning—a time to stop, take stock, and confront both the fractures in our own lives and the damage we’ve done in the wider world.
And maybe that’s part of why I balked when my friend asked about plans: the weight of that reckoning feels very close to me right now, too close to treat lightly.
The mantle of Jewishness wears more heavily on me this year; not the gentle weight of a prayer shawl, but more the yoke of a spiritual burden.
I am what you might call a “Jack Jew”. I am culturally Jewish, of a sort. I get the jokes and the songs and the stories, but I can admit here that most Jewish holidays slip me by.
I won’t pose and pretend that past High Holidays have often found me inside a synagogue. My relationship to Judaism has always been tenuous at best.
My mother converted when she was pregnant with me so that I would be born Jewish, and I’ve long joked that it didn’t stick.
At five, I demanded that we have a Christmas tree. Who can resist those lights?!
At twelve, when I was asked if I wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah, I answered, “I’m not really sure God exists, and so I’m not ready to commit to being Jewish.”
But here’s the thing: as I’ve aged, I’ve become more convinced that there is, indeed, some kind of great mystery that connects all of us to the universe we find ourselves in. I am also increasingly convinced that the motive force of love that is the nature of that creator-being is nothing like the murderous, rageful God of the Old Testament, the Jewish bible.
In finding that agnostic conviction, I find a greater love for all humankind. I don’t hate Jews. I don’t hate Christians, or Muslims, or Zoroastrians, or Rastafarians.
I don’t hate anyone of any faith, unless they’re an asshole; I don’t like assholes of any religion, gender, sexuality, or species.
I once met a cat who was a total fucking dick—I hated that specific cat, even though I love cats in general. As a rule, it’s pretty straightforward.
But my personal faith is complicated and always has been. And when faith is used as a weapon, or a means of silencing us, by authoritarian assholes in power, that deep unease of complication becomes something more primal and more urgent—a wailing ghost, a howling fury, screaming for justice that begins deep within my soul and which cannot be silenced.
Like the foghorn of a shofar, whose shout will call the silenced, the dispossessed, and the murdered from their graves into an army that will not rest until it can speak the unvarnished truth to power.
Because I’ve wrestled with my Judaism—the way Jacob wrestled with the angel of God in that dark forest—I’ve found parts of the faith that were not taught to me by my parents or grandparents or by any rabbi.
The Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam speaks most deeply to me. Tikkun Olam tells us our responsibility is to fix a broken world, to confront brokenness not just out there, but within ourselves.
It is like the Japanese art of Kintsugi: when something shatters, we mend it with gold, and the healed fracture is stronger and more beautiful than before. That image has guided me through grief, through doubt, through fractured faith.
And that’s why I have to say this: what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza is not just war. It is not just tragedy.
It is genocide—and it is a Holocaust.
Recently, my new friend,
, used the term Holocaust to describe what is happening in Gaza, and it literally made me gasp—it took my breath away.“Holocaust” with a capital H usually refers to the Nazi extermination of six million Jews, along with millions of others—Roma, disabled people, LGBTQ people, political prisoners. It was unique: an industrialized, bureaucratic system of murder across a continent.
It must never be minimized.
But genocide is not unique to the Nazis. The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 defines it as killing, causing serious harm, or imposing life conditions designed to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It doesn’t have to look like Auschwitz.
Starvation sieges, mass displacement, and rhetoric of dehumanization are also genocide.
So why use “Holocaust” now?
Because it shocks. Because it is a rhetorical slap across the face to wake the disbelieving into action.
Because it forces a reckoning inside the Jewish community. Because it says: never again doesn’t belong to the past, it belongs to the present.
It belongs to us—to all of us—and if we cannot see that, then we are failing in our mission as humans. We are failing to live up to the simple act of recognizing our shared humanity in the faces of other people.
We are failing to own the moment when it calls us, like that shofar, into awareness and action for the good of our souls and this beautiful, broken world.
Since October 2023, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Independent humanitarian organizations report that the majority are women and children. More than 90% of the population has been displaced. Civilian infrastructure has been bombed to rubble. Famine has been documented, not as a natural disaster but as a weapon of policy.
Israel’s defense minister declared a “complete siege”: “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” This was not accidental language. It was policy. When hospitals run without power, when dialysis patients die, when babies starve because clean water is cut off—this is what a siege produces.
The International Court of Justice, in January and again in May 2024, ruled that Palestinians face a plausible risk of genocide and ordered Israel to prevent it, enable aid, and halt actions that could destroy the group.
This was not activist rhetoric; it was the world’s highest court.
Israel, under the leadership of Netanyahu, did not comply.
During the High Holidays, Jews reflect on the year past, repent for sins, and seek forgiveness. It is a time of personal accountability, of remembering who we are.
I can’t help but feel the weight of that tradition pressing on me this year.
To look away from Gaza during the Days of Awe would be to miss the point entirely. What good is repentance if it does not include solidarity with the oppressed? What good is atonement if it does not include naming evil when we see it?
I know that my Jewish friends will recoil at the word “Holocaust” being applied to Gaza, and I understand.
It feels like sacrilege.
But sometimes, sacrilege is necessary. Sometimes breaking a taboo is the only way to force a moral conversation.
The Armenian genocide of 1915–17 involved mass deportations and death marches that killed over a million. For decades, governments denied it, silenced it, refused to call it what it was. Recognition came late, but when it came, it clarified our moral vocabulary.
The Holocaust taught us the depths of industrial cruelty. But it was not the first genocide and not the last.
Rwanda in 1994, Srebrenica in 1995, Darfur in the 2000s—these names stand as reminders that the capacity for group destruction did not vanish with the Third Reich.
Now Gaza must be added to that list.
What the Jews once suffered at the hands of Nazi assholes, Israel now inflicts on Palestinian children—a drunken wretch of a father, beating his own children much as he was once battered and bruised by his father, and his father before him.
Hurt people hurt people, and generational trauma can apparently be carried by an entire nation and passed down through the ages.
Some will say: But October 7 happened.
Yes, Hamas committed atrocities, including mass killings and hostage-taking. Those acts were crimes against humanity. Nothing in genocide law excuses them. But Israel’s right to self-defense does not give license to starve, bomb, and displace an entire civilian population.
Some will say: It’s not genocide without gas chambers.
But the Genocide Convention anticipated that murder can be slow and structural: starvation, disease, forced displacement. You don’t need Zyklon B when you can cut off food and water.
Some will say: It’s not proven intent.
But intent can be inferred from policy, scale, and rhetoric. When officials call Palestinians “human animals” and impose conditions of life designed to make survival impossible, that is evidence of intent.
When I was twelve and said I wasn’t ready to commit to being Jewish, I thought I was just dodging a ceremony. Now I realize that perhaps I was dodging something larger: the responsibility that comes with being Jewish. The weight of history that comes with being part of the Tribe. To be Jewish is to carry memory, trauma, and the imperative of Never Again.
But Never Again can’t mean “never again for us alone.” If it means anything, it means solidarity across borders, across time, across people of every kind.
It means refusing silence when others are targeted.
It means refusing to let the trauma of one genocide become the justification for another.
This Rosh Hashanah, I won’t be in synagogue or sharing a meal with loved ones to celebrate a new year. My prayers won’t be for a sweet new year of personal success.
They’ll be for children in Gaza who go to bed hungry under bombardment. They’ll be for Jews everywhere to see clearly what is happening in our name.
When I call Gaza a Holocaust, I am not erasing the past. I am honoring it.
I am saying that the command of memory is not nostalgia but vigilance.
I am reminding us that the meaning of Never Again is not carved in stone but lived in action.
There has not been—and must never be—only one genocide that counts.
There was once only one Holocaust. This year, there are two.
If we mean what we say, then Never Again means now.
Friends, Qasim Rashid wrote an article in May about the "technical" definition of Holocaust, and in it he powerfully argues for this term. Please check out his article here: https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/holocaust
We owe you thanks for writing this with such honesty and moral clarity. The way you connect personal reckoning during the High Holidays with the urgent demand for justice now is powerful. Naming genocide for what it is will always unsettle people, but silence is far more dangerous.