Responses to October 7
These scholarly responses to the October 7 Massacre and the war in Gaza were written in February and March
of 2024. They were published in the October 2024 issue (volume 8, issue 2) of Antisemitism Studies.
of 2024. They were published in the October 2024 issue (volume 8, issue 2) of Antisemitism Studies.
- Omer Bartov
Genocide, the Holocaust, and October 7: On the Use and Misuse of Terminology
If the Holocaust was the clearest justification for the need to create a Jewish state, what role has it played in Israel’s history for the last seven decades? For most Jews around the world, the establishment of a Jewish state as a haven for world Jewry seemed the only logical conclusion of the Holocaust. But what appeared as an act of supreme justice became entangled in an act of injustice from its very inception. Click here for full text
- Steven Beller
Israel and Its Elephants: Problems of Definition, Narrative, and Analogy in Discussing Antisemitism
The ongoing crisis in the Middle East should force us to reconsider what it means to study antisemitism in 2024. I offer these comments in a spirit of seeking some way forward to a clearer and more productive approach. One place to start is to ask how our conceptions of antisemitism can help—or hinder—greater understanding of the crisis as a whole. Click here for full text
- Catherine Chatterley
A Saturday in October
I cannot say that I was completely shocked by the Hamas invasion of Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, which was also Shabbat and Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, a time when many Israeli Jews had their technology turned off. I was, however, and continue to be, astonished by the massive intelligence and defence failure this invasion represented. Click here for full text - Phyllis Chesler
Why Were Feminists Silent After October 7?
In the early 1970s, I experienced antisemitism among leftwing and lesbian feminists. It was not political. I was told that Jews like me were too pushy, too smart, too sexy, and were taking over the movement. Such views sent me straight to Israel. A small group including myself, Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, the founder of Lilith Magazine, and Cheryl Moch held a press conference on the subject of antisemitism. Click for full text - R. Amy Elman
October 7: Passionate Anti-Zionists, Pornography, and Feminist Impersonators
It has become fashionable among anti-Israel protestors to deny Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israelis and the sexual violence that accompanied it. Their revisionism exploits the unspeakable character of the atrocities to inflict further harm on Jews, negating the victims’ experiences and denying that victims even exist. This essay focuses on three elements of this trend on American campuses. Click here for full text - Jeffrey Herf
October 7: The Problem of Underestimation Yet Again
The mass murders, rapes, and kidnapping of Israeli men, women, and children by Hamas on October 7, 2023 were a logical outcome of ideas clearly expressed in the Hamas Charter of 1988 and in its programmatic statement in 2017, in which Hamas reiterated its determination to attempt to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms. Just as Hitler’s contemporaries underestimated the seriousness and centrality of his Jew-hatred, so much of the world, and even the government of Israel, underestimated Hamas’s determination to unite an evil ideology with murderous practice. Click here for full text - Günther Jikeli
The Universal and The Particular: 10/7 and Its Aftermath Challenges the Very Concept of Humanity
“Humanityyyyyy, we certainly could use a little bit of it. Since the attack of Hamas, I no longer know what this is supposed to be,” wrote Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature after deleting all her other work from her website. And indeed, the massacre itself, which can hardly be put into words, as well as the lack of condemnation in its aftermath, the many relativizations of what happened, and the two-sideism blaming both Hamas and Israel, put into serious question whether there is even such a thing as common humanity. Click here for full text - Jonathan Judaken
Reckoning with Postcolonial Judeophobia after October 7 and the Gaza War
“Racial reckoning” was the global watchword after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. October 7 and its aftermath marks another watershed for reckoning with racism, revealing two stark facets of the fight against antisemitism that must be addressed if this moment is not going to spiral into a new era in the history of Judeophobia. Click here for full text
- Steven T. Katz
Reconsidering Where We Are After October 7
October 7 has forced the intensive reconsideration of two fundamental issues that are separate but inter-related. The first is related to Israeli security; the second concerns the present state of the American Jewish community. The events of October 7 radically unsettled, if they did not altogether destroy, defining ideas many people have lived with throughout their entire adult lives. Click here for full text - Dina Porat
October 7 and Shattered Illusions
The terrible events of October 7 served as an eye opener—even a blow to the face—for Israeli society and its authorities. The illusion, fostered during recent years, that Hamas would come to terms with Israel if given enough funds for its leaders and for the development of a better economy for the residents of the Gaza Strip, has now been shattered. Click here for full text - Alvin H. Rosenfeld
Longing for Auschwitz: The Ultimate Aims of the War Against the Jewish State would Rival the Worst Horrors of Our History
Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israelis was not an act of war as we normally think of it but something far worse. We do not have an adequate term for what occurred on that day, so people use words like “terrorism,” “barbarism,” “atrocity,” “depravity,” “massacre,” and so on. All are correct, and yet all fall short of capturing the annihilationist fury set loose at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim and small towns of southern Israel. The people attacked in those places were not only to die, but to die in torment. Click here for full text - Richard Wolin
From the “Socialism of Fools” to the “Jihadism of Fools”: The Lessons of October 7
The October 7 attacks, in which over 1200 Israelis were massacred in the most brutal fashion imaginable, were not surprising because they were committed by Hamas. After all, the Hamas Charter invokes the precepts of Islamic fundamentalism—a discourse of uncompromising theological intolerance that is inimical to all forms of secular and religious pluralism—in order to justify its commitment to the ethos of “redemptive antisemitism”: the conviction that the world will not be “redeemed” or “made whole” until Jews are eliminated from the Middle East. Click here for full text