Ex-Obama Aide Warns Holocaust Lessons May Be Misread by Young People Watching Gaza Footage

Sarah Hurwitz, a former senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, told attendees at a Jewish Federations of North America conference that Holocaust education may be unintentionally steering some young people to identify with "weak, skinny Palestinians" rather than with "powerful Israelis." She argued that sustained exposure to graphic videos from Gaza on platforms like TikTok is reshaping how younger audiences apply lessons from the Holocaust to contemporary conflicts.

"You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza, and this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing it through this wall of carnage," Hurwitz said. "I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they’re just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene."

Hurwitz cautioned that the traditional Holocaust narrative — of "big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews" — may now be producing a mental model that equates antisemitism with a simple powerful-versus-powerless framing. She suggested that when young people repeatedly view images of violence in Gaza, they may analogize the Holocaust lesson to contemporary events and come away with the impression that the correct response is to oppose what appears to be the more powerful actor.

"I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and then they think, 'Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.' So, when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, 'Oh I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel.'"

Public Reaction

Her remarks spread widely on social media and provoked strong responses. Jenin Younes, national legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said she was "almost literally speechless" and criticized Hurwitz's framing, arguing it seemed to imply that the Holocaust justifies severe actions by Israel. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, described the comments as unusually condescending, while Briahna Joy Gray, former press secretary to Senator Bernie Sanders, characterized the remarks as a rapid succession of flawed arguments.

The exchange has reopened debates about how Holocaust education is taught, how historical analogies are used, and how short-form social media imagery can influence young people's political perceptions. Commentators on different sides of the discussion have pointed to the need for clearer historical context in education and greater media literacy to help young audiences interpret distressing footage without collapsing complex political realities into simple victim-perpetrator narratives.