Beyond the debate over ‘antisemitism’: The case for rehumanization

I have worked in Holocaust museums and Jewish professional spaces for 30 years. I have also worked in universities and other secular spaces during that time, helping people of different backgrounds understand the Holocaust and recognize antisemitism around them. Moving between these worlds has taught me the danger of groupthink and the importance of reaching beyond the conversations we have among ourselves.

That work has become increasingly urgent amid rising antisemitism, particularly since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 and the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Over the past week, former colleagues and organizations I worked alongside during my eight years leading the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh have faced intense criticism over the use of the terms “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism.” But the intensity of this debate points to a deeper problem that cannot be resolved by arguing over definitions alone.

How serious is the problem?

Antisemitism is not an abstraction. Jews make up about 2% of the U.S. population but are the targets of roughly 70% of religion-based hate crimes reported to the FBI. A 2026 Brandeis University study including students from over 300 colleges in the U.S. found that 47% of Jewish college students surveyed had experienced prejudice because they were Jewish, while 37% described their campuses as hostile toward Jews.

Antisemitism presents a real danger to Jews — and ultimately to non-Jews as well — and many people outside Jewish communities struggle to recognize and respond to it. Yet as antisemitism has become more visible, the language we use to describe it has become increasingly contested. What is antisemitism? What is Zionism? What is anti-Zionism? Even within Jewish communities, we do not always agree.

These debates matter, but arguments over terminology are not making Jews safer.

They cannot be the center of our response. This moment calls for something more fundamental: rehumanization.

So how do we do that?

We begin with history. For Jews, that means relearning our story and telling it with pride and wonder.
Our story is not only about survival through millennia of exile and persecution, but also one of migration, adaptation, creativity, resilience and renewal.

My own approach is to teach the long history of the Jewish people, from our ancient beginnings in Canaan to the present. That history helps explain who Jews are, how our communities came to exist throughout the world, and why nearly half of the world’s

Jews now live in Israel. It also explains why the story of American Jews is more complicated than contemporary racial categories often suggest.

The Holocaust offers an important lesson in how we tell that story. In the United States, we have taught the Shoah in extraordinary detail since the 1980s. But our most compelling teachers were never the documents. They were the survivors.

Survivors reached students not simply because of the historical details they conveyed, but because of the human connections they formed by bravely sharing their stories. Students encountered an individual human being. History had a face, a personality, a family, a life before persecution and a life afterward.

As we lose these survivors, Holocaust museums and educators have embraced technology to preserve their testimonies. These tools can transmit information to millions, creating remarkable ways for future generations to continue to “interact” with survivors after they are gone. But information alone rarely creates the human connection that drives empathy and understanding.

That insight should shape how we confront antisemitism today.

Jews are facing powerful propaganda that draws upon age-old stereotypes while using the language and technologies of the present. Holocaust history itself is being inverted and redeployed, with Jews cast as the Nazis who once persecuted and murdered them.

Our response cannot simply be to retreat into our own communities or argue more forcefully over definitions. We must continue the work of building relationships, both with each other and beyond Jewish spaces. Making Jews safer does not require making other communities less safe. In fact, our safety is interdependent, and our histories have much to teach one another.

So let us continue to debate terminology. But when we seek connection with people outside Jewish spaces, let us begin somewhere else: with our stories.

Let us teach the story of the Jews. Let us invite people to encounter us as individual human beings rather than as abstractions in someone else’s political argument. PJC

Lauren A Bairnsfather is a past executive director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and now serves as CEO of the Anne Frank Center USA.