When I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University from 1978 to 1982, a tenured mechanical engineering professor named Arthur Butz published a book called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century denying the Holocaust. Occasionally, a small group of students—mostly Jews, but not exclusively—protested outside his classroom demanding his dismissal. I joined the demonstrations a few times. The administration, not surprisingly, mostly ignored us. Northwestern’s president denounced the book but defended the professor’s academic freedom. Amazingly, at the age of ninety-two, he’s still listed as a tenured faculty, at Northwestern. 

My senior year, I was curious enough to check the book out of Northwestern’s library. I plowed through the turgid prose and the confusing graphs and tables, but the only evidence I remember now (I’m not about to read the book again) is the remarkable first chapter, where he quotes from ancient sources—mostly the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud—to demonstrate that Jewish texts chronically exaggerate Jewish casualties. In other words, Jews always lie about their losses and exaggerate their wounds. They’ve been doing it for a long time. 

That first chapter clarifies the solid link between Holocaust denial and antisemitism. If the Holocaust is a hoax, who perpetrated it? Obviously the Jews, for their own nefarious reasons. After all, Butz writes, they have a tendency to lie and exaggerate. Antisemitism is one of the world’s oldest and most enduring conspiracy theories. What kind of people would make up a monstrous story about gas chambers, mass graves, and the deaths of millions of children and get the world to believe it? A dangerous, slippery, conniving people—the Jews. To deny the Holocaust is to hate and fear Jews. 

When I attended Northwestern, I never considered Butz a threat. Aside from myself, I didn’t know anyone who actually read the book, much less purchased it. And the evidence for the historicity of the Holocaust was overwhelming. It irked me that the university continued to employ him. In a place of serious learning, he seemed more like a clown, an oddity, not a serious teacher. 

But times change. While Holocaust denial never made it to the mainstream of academic culture, it has certainly spread past Northwestern University. Twenty-five years after Butz’s book, a well-known British historian, David Irving, denied that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. A British court determined that he’d engaged in Holocaust denial. And, as a few quick searches demonstrate, the internet today is awash in Holocaust denial, mostly, but not entirely, in the web’s growing antisemitism corner. 

Like many American Jews my age, my shock and disgust at Holocaust denial was personal. Minna and Willie, my two Israeli cousins whom my mother forced me to visit whenever I was in Israel, had Auschwitz tattoos on their forearms. Willie usually covered his up, but Minna seemed to push her thick forearm under my nose whenever she served me weak tea or heavy Ashkenazic dishes. I went to a series of Jewish day schools when I was growing up, and several of my teachers had survived Auschwitz or Belsen or spent the war in the forests or hidden in cellars or monasteries. They all had stories, which I remember much more vividly than anything they taught us. As a rabbi, I worked with and for the survivor community and over the years hired dozens of survivors. My synagogue, like many others, featured reminiscences by Holocaust survivors every year on Yom Kippur. It was the section of the service that drew the most attention (much more than my sermons). The idea that all these brave folk were lying struck me as ludicrous. Why would Minna lie while making me kugel? Why would Rav Eskovitz, one of my early Torah teachers, drift off into a digression of how he lost a toe to frostbite while hiding with partisans in Lithuania’s forests? 

The survivor I became closest to was Trude, the mother of a girl I briefly dated in college. We connected long after that doomed romance when she showed up one day at the synagogue I was leading in New England. After services, we spoke for hours. She told me her story for the first time: forced separation from parents, hiding in the woods, being caught, the ghetto, hunger, thirst (the worst of anything), screams, disease, filth—all the familiar tropes but, of course, utterly unique to her personal experience. Nothing she said surprised me, but I couldn’t turn away from any of it. Over the years, we became friendly. We’d have lunch or dinner whenever she was in town. After my mother died, she felt obliged to strategize with me over my career choices. I almost always followed her advice. Every once in a while, she’d tell a Holocaust story. The oddest one was when she casually mentioned that she’d known Anne Frank. “Three years older than me,” she said as I stared at her. Same Amsterdam school. Same neighbourhood. She must have seen my face light up, because her mouth immediately twisted into a frown. “I didn’t like her,” she said and scowled. 

“You didn’t like Anne Frank?” 

“She was a mean girl. You know that movie Mean Girls? That was Anna. A mean girl.” 

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Trude,” I said, “that’s sort of like being Catholic and not liking the Virgin Mary. I don’t think we’re allowed not to like her.” 

She shrugged. “A mean girl.” 

For the last ten years of her life, Trude worked on her memoir. Since I’d published a few books, she assigned me the task of finding a publisher. We found a few small presses, but she insisted I contract with a “real publisher,” which I guess meant a publisher she’d heard of. When I asked her why—I figured the memoir was basically for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren—she told me she needed to fight the Holocaust deniers. By this time she was using the internet, and Holocaust denial had spread well beyond the confines of one kooky Northwestern professor. According to her daughter (we’d been back in touch since I became close with her mother), Trude could spend half a day surfing the obnoxious Jew-hating quarters of the World Wide Web. One morning when she was in town, she visited my office and immediately asked to use my computer. I stood next to her as she expertly typed in a few prompts, then pointed a shaking finger at the screen. It was the website of the Institute for Historical Review, a weird neo-Nazi organization that specialized not just in Holocaust denial but also in general anti-Jewish accusations and insinuations. I skimmed a few topics—no gas chambers in Auschwitz, the sordid history of Jewish nefariousness, a defence of the Spanish Inquisition—then shook my head and tried to reassure Trude that no one paid attention to this nonsense. But I was shaken by her fluttering lips, her obvious fear. Trude was both the bravest and the most cheerfully confident person I’d ever met. But now, well into her eighties, some wall was breaking down. 

We eventually found a small Canadian publisher. Trude masked her disappointment and with a clear, strong voice read from her memoir to a respectably sized crowd at my synagogue. Three days later she died. At the funeral, my former girlfriend told me Trude had been fighting leukemia for the past three years. “Three years?” I asked. She nodded. Right around the time she found the Institute for Historical Review website. 

But I don’t believe that website killed her. I disagreed with the sentiment of some at the funeral that Trude was yet another of Hitler’s victims. No, I thought. Trude survived. But I do think Holocaust denial constituted an additional assault, a psychological torment equal to some of the worst tortures she’d endured in the camps. Primo Levi, in his book Survival in Auschwitz, describes nightmares where he’d make it home alive and no one would believe what happened. It was a dream that continued to plague him long after his liberation, until the day he took his own life. 

I thought about Trude, Butz, and Holocaust denial recently when a friend sent me a video clip of University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer denying that Hamas slaughtered close to twelve hundred Israelis on October 7. Instead, Mearsheimer claims, most of the victims were killed by Israeli Apache helicopters. Hamas, he asserts, “did not murder most of those civilians.” If so, why does much of the world believe that Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities? “Israeli propaganda,” Mearsheimer explains, manipulating Western media. Like Holocaust deniers Arthur Butz and David Irving, Mearsheimer invokes sneakily clever Jews who exaggerate, deceive, and manipulate. 

At first glance, Mearsheimer’s claims seem as ludicrous as Butz’s. After all, October 7 is one of the most documented war crimes in history. Besides the voluminous survivor testimony of cruelty, massacre, and sexual assault, the perpetrators themselves filmed their crimes in hundreds of hours of gory video clips. But conspiracy theories find a welcoming ecosystem in today’s internet culture, and they spread rapidly. As of the day I watched the Mearsheimer video, 577,000 viewers had seen it. I wondered how many books Arthur Butz had sold in the past forty-five years. One hundred? One thousand? But nowadays a hateful, pernicious denialism catches the attention of hundreds of thousands—and almost certainly more—in a day or two. In one way at least, Mearsheimer and other October 7 deniers outdo Arthur Butz. Butz denied the Holocaust, but he didn’t claim the Jews did it to themselves. 

My response to October 7 deniers is, like Trude’s response to Holocaust deniers, visceral and personal. Like most American Jews, I’m personally acquainted with several victims of the massacre, or their family members, or their friends. For the past twenty-five years, my San Diego Jewish community has developed a sister-city relationship with a region in Israel known as Sha’ar Hanegev (Gateway to the Negev), a network of several small villages and kibbutzim sitting close to the Gaza border. Some five hundred residents of that region were murdered on October 7. About a year after the massacre, in a sad, morbid mood, I attempted to count everyone I knew who had died. I stopped at fifteen. None of these were close friends, or even regular correspondents. But I knew them—their children, their families, their peaceful aspirations, their extraordinary courage, their modesty. Their humanity. 

Twenty summers ago, I taught a two-week course on Jewish texts in the Sha’ar Hanegev community. Because of a scheduling mix-up, I stayed in a hotel in Ashkelon, a twenty-minute drive from the dining hall in Kibbutz Beeri, where we held the classes. On the morning of October 7, 2023, that dining hall became the site of an unspeakably horrific act of carnage. But back then, for me, it was just a circle of ten or twelve chairs and a steady stream of coffee and cookies. I’d arranged for a taxi to take me to and from the kibbutz every day, but the first morning a young woman named Livnat picked me up in her car. She’d volunteered to drive me back and forth to save the taxi fare. Occasionally, she’d bring along her year-old baby girl, Rotem, who cooed and sang and sometimes whimpered softly in the back seat. We didn’t become close friends, but she shared her artistic aspirations, her yearning to raise her children in a safe, healthy environment, her work with Gazans on coexistence projects, her fears. She told me jokes in Hebrew that I pretended to get. My last day at the kibbutz she took me out to dinner with her husband Aviv and the baby. They let me hold Rotem on my lap. They told me how they’d met. Livnat had been a dispatcher and Aviv a driver. “It was her job to tell me what to do,” Aviv laughed. “And she still does.” They told me they wanted two more children—the perfect size for a family, they claimed. “God willing,” I said, and they smiled. 

Two more children did come their way, but all five were murdered on October 7. I found out about their deaths shortly after reports of the massacre reached San Diego. But no one could tell me exactly how they died, and I didn’t pursue it. A little over a year ago, I was reading the book 10/7: 100 Human Stories, by Lee Yaron, a horror-filled chronicle of that dark day. When I arrived at page 265 of a 266-page book, this sentence awaited me: “A kibbutz member entered the house and found the five of [them] together, dead in bed, Aviv hugging Livnat and the children.” Apparently they’d been shot, execution style, while huddling together in bed. What were their final moments like? So many stories feature survivors who share the tragic or courageous or cruel events. But all we know of Livnat, Aviv, Rotem, Yonatan, and Yiftach is that they were lying in bed next to each other when the shots came. Hugging. 

Was it the Israeli army that murdered this family? Did an IDF helicopter pilot execute them while they lovingly reached for each other? Did a psychotic serial killer invade the kibbutz that morning? Or is it all a hoax? Did I make up the story along with Lee Yaron and our cabal of tricksters? What insane questions. Yet millions of people visit websites suggesting something of this sort. It’s a favourite topic at the Institute for Historical Review. 

What is going on with these denials, these warped accusations? Partly, it’s classic antisemitism—those tricky Jews manipulating our emotions and politics. But there’s a parallel human compulsion at play, equally common and equally pernicious: an evasion of empathy. Humans don’t want to see the pain of their enemies. To truly witness the trauma of another is to engage with their narrative—and that’s something we’d often rather avoid. Conspiracy theories are most harmful when they rob certain populations of their essential humanity. For antisemites, Jews are not parents, siblings, lovers, friends. They’re characters in some warped cosmic drama, the demons, the bad guys. There’s a similar dynamic at work when Israeli government ministers label Palestinians as Amalek—an ancient biblical enemy. With one word, millions of Palestinians lose their humanity. Like Jews, they—children, shopkeepers, healers, teachers—become unwitting characters in a narrative they know nothing about. Perhaps the most essential moral imperative of modern warfare should be “Don’t turn your enemy into a story.” 

I’ve noticed a sort of denial continuum. On one extreme side there’s the Mearsheimer charge, that the Israeli army perpetrated the killings and then manipulated all of Western media in a classic Jewish hoax. But toward the other side of the continuum are the partial deniers, denying some of the story, like the several Hamas apologists who deny that there was any sexual assault that day, despite a comprehensive UN investigation and a thorough New York Times report. Of course, there’s a difference between skeptics who rightly call for investigating these accusations and deniers who simply refuse to acknowledge the cruelty of a murderous terrorist organization. Somewhere on the denial continuum we encounter willful cultural forgetting—that is, erasing our own side’s crimes against humanity when we tell our story. If peace is ever to come, both Israelis and Palestinians will have to learn to tell their stories in different ways. 

I have to admit that I’ve encountered Jewish denial. Many of us quibble with the horrific and unacceptable civilian death toll in Gaza. Or we’ll deny any Palestinian claim to the West Bank and Gaza. And there’s a kind of denial in how Israeli media broadcast very little of the appalling civilian suffering during the war. The danger with a denial continuum is that it can easily become a slippery slope. You can slide from denying sexual assault, to denying the casualty numbers, to valorizing Hamas, to blaming the whole thing on Israeli helicopters and the Jewish-controlled Western media. Evasion of empathy can put you on a hellish road. 

For me, the most nakedly raw human element of this awful war is the reunion scenes, where hostages reunite with their desperate families. Cameras captured these unbearably poignant moments. A lover falls to her knees, prays, then embraces her beloved. Sturdy, steadfast, wounded mothers scream out their joy and hug their sons. Fathers cry on the shoulders of their daughters. Children cling to parents as if they’ll never let go again. Whenever a wave of hostages was released, I stared at my TV and computer screen for hours, trying unsuccessfully to control my weeping while I witnessed a profound miracle of creation. What is more elementally human than the mad, primal love between a parent and child or husband and wife? During the last, final wave, I suddenly realized I was missing half the story. While on one network Israeli hostages fell into the arms of their families, on another network Palestinian prisoners were reunited with their families. Mothers screamed for their children, children ran to their parents, and fathers wept. The messy, joyful human mix played itself out only a few miles from where Israeli mothers hugged their sons. I’m not, of course, equating terrorists and hostages; that’s not the point of this reflection. But if I don’t see the sacred humanity in a mother-child reunion on the other side, I’ve fallen into a dehumanizing denial trap, a trap that lies in wait for us all.