Sarah Hurwitz was treated like a celebrity at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington in November, and her remarks connected to her new book, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us, received enthusiastic applause. But it didn’t take long for hostiles—the same blamers, shamers, and erasers of her subtitle—to focus on one moment from her appearance and use it to vilify her. A speechwriter for President Barack Obama before taking on the same role for First Lady Michelle Obama, Hurwitz has since made a second career out of writing about how she has reconnected to her Judaism.
At the General Assembly, she made the point that young people are getting superficial, image-based information from social media about Israel and Gaza, and when she tries to present arguments based on data, they “are hear[d] through this wall of carnage” and they make her “sound obscene.” In remarks at a conference for young Zionists, she
was also tagged for saying that pro-Israel arguments are being heard through “a wall of dead children.”
But it was her criticism of the way young Americans are taught about the Holocaust that really gave her critics their opening. Here was Hurwitz: “Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism 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. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people.’”
Professional libelers of Israel, such as the radical journalist Spencer Ackerman, claimed Hurwitz was confessing in these words that “Holocaust education has worked too well,” because the lessons it teaches make it harder for her to “rationalize Israel’s genocide.”
In so doing, Ackerman and others were actually validating one of the central themes of As A Jew. In this, her second book, she continues to tell the story of her own journey, which was the subject of her first, Here All Along (2019). Hurwitz explains here that her former identity, based on “cultural/ethnic/social justice/be a good person/Holocaust remembrance,” provided her little more than a superficial and largely unexamined Jewish persona—a persona that, polling indicates, she shares with most American Jews. Hurwitz ruefully describes her younger self’s lack of curiosity about Jewish history or Jewish observance and her rejection of anything that might have made her seem less cool to the non-Jews surrounding her. In this way, she has come to believe, she was internalizing the anti-Semitism that pervades Western culture.
Her new book came out around the same time as the second season of Nobody Wants This—a TV show about a “hot rabbi” who doesn’t know the difference between Tu B’Shvat and Tisha B’Av, who is in love with a shiksa goddess, and is badgered by his bossy, judgmental mother and other shrill Jewish harpies in his life. That the show was a huge hit not only for Netflix broadly but among American Jews as well seemed to prove Hurwitz’s point.
Hurwitz skillfully weaves her experience and internal deliberations into a history of how Jewish identity has evolved over millennia—as when she writes, quoting a friend, that Jewish homes are “millions of temples born from that one destroyed Temple.” Since the Holocaust, these temples in America have not provided most young Jews with enough knowledge about the historical reasons for this unusual fact. Much instruction, rather, centers on the Jewish trauma of the 20th century. Young American Jews get the impression that Germany’s loss in World War I and the economic depression that followed caused Germans to lose their minds and become genocidal. They are not taught, as she writes, that “the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust is one of the least mysterious phenomena in history…. It’s a neural groove worn deep into the world’s psyche…for more than two thousand years.” They don’t learn that, while photos of survivors show us horrifyingly emaciated and weak Jews who couldn’t hurt a fly, anti-Semitism centers on “the idea…that Jews are inferior but also somehow superior: smarter and more cunning, wealthier and more professionally successful—qualities they use to harm others,” and that “antisemitic acts are therefore self-defense.”
As a Jew provides a useful framework for analyzing anti-Semitism, which she says runs on three central themes, dating back to early Christianity: first, the ludicrous notion of hidden Jewish power; second, the depiction of supposed Jewish depravity through the portrayal of a demonic people who would kill Christ and pour Christian children’s blood into matzah dough; and third, the Jewish conspiracy to hide the first two secret truths.
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The reaction to Hurwitz’s own remarks shows how right she is. Searching her name on X, one sees that her critics focus on exactly these themes of power, depravity, and conspiracy. This former presidential speechwriter, they say, is pro-genocide and supports killing children and wants to work in tandem with the equivalent of the Elders of Zion to keep non-Jewish kids in the dark by taking away their smartphones and not educating them.
The full video of her appearance in Washington makes clear that what Hurwitz actually wants is to educate Americans more fully, so that they understand the Holocaust properly as part of Jewish history, not an exception to it. Moreover, the book makes clear that Hurwitz is, at the very least, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians—and critical of Israelis.
Hurwitz dedicates a significant portion of her book to defending Zionism and Israel, and she calls her avoidance of the topic in Here All Along a “cop-out.” She blames herself for having wanted to spare the controversy and avoid acknowledging the importance of Israel to today’s Jews and the justice of its existence. But she still makes sure to broadcast that she’s not one of those Zionists. She’s “appalled by Israel’s current right-wing government; sickened by the racism and extremism of its most senior government officials; horrified by radical settler violence…deeply troubled by Israel’s ongoing military occupation…anguished about the war in Gaza with its devastating casualties and destruction.”
This kind of virtue-signaling is not surprising from a former Obama staffer, even one who has immense Jewish pride and who has engaged in serious self-examination on the matter and hopes to encourage other Jews to do the same.
Hurwitz repeatedly refers to her political “side,” facetiously and in scare quotes, when distancing herself from the left because of its weaknesses on anti-Semitism. She admirably takes on some liberal Jewish shibboleths, as when she expresses “a feeling of loss” about how Reform Judaism chose to discard Jewish spirituality. She is correct to question whether those who pursue social justice as the true core of Judaism are implying that their “existence as a Jew is valid because it benefits people other than Jews.”
As a Jew is peppered with reminders, however, that Hurwitz is willing to distance herself from liberal axioms only up to a point. She writes that she doesn’t mean to dwell on Christian anti-Semitism—and one can grant her that it is, historically, very important—but she mentions the Soviet-inspired and Muslim-dominated anti-Semitism of our current discourse only glancingly.
Hurwitz is reminiscent of the talented British-American writer Hadley Freeman, who wrote the book House of Glass, about how her family survived the Holocaust. It could have been a classic, if only she hadn’t larded it with constant references to President Donald Trump being a fascist. In As a Jew, Hurwitz lays her incomplete self-examination bare by essentially blaming rising anti-Semitism in America on Trump.
Hurwitz says that she was first struck by the anti-Semitism of her side of the aisle during the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. But more than once she makes the argument that “this rhetoric from the far left came in the wake of a wave of alarming rhetoric and violence from the far right, particularly during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.” While the spike in online anti-Semitism in 2016 was undeniable, and while there has been an alarming increase in anti-Semitism, or at least a willingness to accept it, by influential right-wing figures in 2025, data unambiguously show that anti-Semitism in the U.S. started to rise sharply in 2014, when the first wave of Black Lives Matter riots began and when Hurwitz was still working for the Obama administration.
As a Jew is well written and thoroughly researched, and worth recommending to the people Bret Stephens called “October 8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and suddenly realized that a lot of people hate us. It’s really not a book for people who came to that realization long ago and have knowledge of Jewish history beyond a 101 class. Perhaps, in her third volume, Sarah Hurwitz will follow the logic of her own arguments, take account of her own experience at the Federation General Assembly, and go to battle openly with the enemies she refuses to engage with directly in the pages of As a Jew.
Photo: Thor Brødreskift / Nordiske Mediedager via Flickr
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