WAVE OF ANTISEMITIC ATTACKS SHOWS ‘NEVER AGAIN’ MUST BECOME MORE THAN A SLOGAN

Elie Wiesel famously warned, “To forget is to become the executioner’s accomplice.”

In broad daylight, in Golders Green, one of London’s most iconic Jewish neighborhoods, two Jewish men were stabbed in what British authorities formally declared a terrorist incident. One victim, 76 years old, was standing at a bus stop pulling on his kippah when an attacker shoved him against a sign and stabbed him repeatedly. Both men were treated by Hatzolah volunteers, the same Jewish emergency service whose ambulances were set on fire just weeks earlier.

A group believed to be an Iranian front claimed responsibility, and London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner warned, “Hostile states are paying individuals to commit acts of violence.”

This was not random street crime. It was a campaign, and Americans should recognize what can happen when antisemitism is normalized and societies begin to forget.

In Nassau and Suffolk County, communities that include one of New York’s largest Jewish populations, the same McLaughlin poll found that 15% said Holocaust death figures were exaggerated, while 27% said Jews are too focused on the Holocaust and should move on.

Six million Jews were systematically murdered in civilized Europe, within living memory, aided by governments, institutions, neighbors, and bystanders. That is why Holocaust education cannot become optional.

Yet ignorance is spreading. A Claims Conference survey found that 63% of millennials and Gen Z adults did not know six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and more than half could not identify Auschwitz.

When societies fail to teach history clearly, they create vulnerability.

Across K-12 education, growing concerns over ideological activism and insufficient oversight have left many parents alarmed about how antisemitism, Jewish identity, and Israel are discussed in classrooms.

Sid Rosenberg of 77WABC put it bluntly: “The rise of antisemitism in New York is not abstract. It is a rehearsal. London is showing us what comes when a society normalizes Jew hatred and calls it politics.”

Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) recently introduced a bipartisan resolution condemning antisemitic rhetoric from prominent online figures. As Gottheimer put it, “Hatred is hatred, period. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the far-Right or the far-Left.”

That should be baseline leadership, which is why what happened at City Hall on January 1st was so jarring.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on his first day in office, revoked the city’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, stripped the ban on BDS from city agencies, and canceled protections limiting hostile protests outside houses of worship. Jewish organizations warned these moves posed “an immediate threat to the safety of Jewish communities.”

At a moment when Wisconsin and Chicago are moving to codify the IHRA definition to confront rising antisemitism, New York’s largest city moved in the opposite direction, weakening key civic guardrails instead.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with the slow erosion of moral urgency, when hatred was minimized, ignored, or politically rationalized.

JEWS ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. STARMER IS OUT OF EXCUSES

The question is whether Americans are willing to recognize these warning signs before historical ignorance, political complacency, and cultural indifference allow them to become something far more dangerous.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks warned, “The appearance of antisemitism is always an early warning sign of a dangerous dysfunction within a culture, because the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

Juda Honickman is a former New Yorker living in Israel. He is a writer, entrepreneur, and spokesman for One Israel Fund.