What does it mean to say ‘never again’? It is etched into memorials, inscribed in textbooks, whispered in the shadows of history’s darkest hour. It is a phrase uttered by world leaders at solemn ceremonies, by teachers guiding young minds through the horrors of the past, by those who stand in Auschwitz, tracing their fingers over the cold, cracked walls of the barracks. It is repeated so often that it risks becoming just that – a repetition.
Is it a promise? A warning? A plea? A moral incantation to ward off the unthinkable? For some, ‘never again’ means that Jews will never again be led to slaughter – that the gas chambers, the mass graves, the methodical machinery of annihilation will never be allowed to return. For others, it is a broader appeal: that genocide itself must never again be permitted, that humanity must learn, must evolve, must overcome its worst instincts. Some invoke it as a lesson about the fragility of democracy, the dangers of authoritarianism, the capacity of man’s inhumanity to man. But over time, as it has been stretched, reshaped, and universalised, has it lost its very essence?
‘Never again’ has, in some quarters, ceased to be about Jews at all. It has been repurposed, rebranded, and sometimes even turned against us. How often have we heard that, because of the Holocaust, ‘Jews should know better’? That the ultimate lesson of Jewish suffering is that we must be moral exemplars, that we must offer no resistance, that our historical trauma somehow obligates us to endure fresh violence in silence? What, then, are we really promising? Because if ‘never again’ is merely an exercise in memory – if it is a phrase reserved for poems and candlelight vigils, if it is a convenient slogan but not an imperative for action – then we have already broken it.
On 7 October 2023, as Jews were slaughtered in their homes, as families were burned alive, as women were raped beside the bodies of their children, there were those who looked upon this horror and did not recoil. They did not grieve. They did not condemn. They mobilized. In London, just five hours after Hamas’s massacre began, activists were already planning a protest – not against the murderers, but against the murdered. The blood was still wet, the bodies still warm, and yet the chants had already begun.
This is the world we live in. So I ask again: What does ‘never again’ really mean?
There is a modern impulse – subtle, insidious – to universalise the Holocaust. To smooth out its jagged specificity, to fold it into the broader fabric of human cruelty, to turn it into a generic warning about intolerance.
In 2022, the American comedian Caryn Elaine Johnson, who goes by the Jewish stage name Whoopie Goldberg, commented on the popular American TV show The View that ‘the Holocaust wasn’t about race… It was about man’s inhumanity to man’. An argument between ‘two groups of white people’. How convenient.
Goldberg later apologised for her comments. But if the Holocaust was simply about inhumanity, then it belongs to no one and everyone. It becomes a parable, an abstract moral failing, a floating lesson unmoored from the reality of what actually happened. It demands nothing of history, nothing of responsibility, nothing of vigilance. It allows the world to say, ‘this is not my story. This is not my failure’. It exists as a warning to all, and as the burden of none. It becomes a story of what people do to people, rather than what was done to the Jews. But the Holocaust was not an open-ended tragedy. It was not a crime against some vague notion of humanity. It was an attempt to erase the Jewish people.
Of course, we should all learn from the Holocaust. But we cannot allow a universal message to erase the particular truth: that the Holocaust was a campaign for the total, systematic extermination of the Jewish people. Not for our land. Not for our wealth. Not for our politics. But for our very existence.
Yes, others were persecuted – Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled. The Nazis brutalised and enslaved many. But there was only one group that was singled out for total eradication. Jews were not just unwanted; they were intolerable. From the Warsaw Ghetto to the forests of Lithuania, from the villages of Greece to the streets of Amsterdam, they did not pause to consider who was politically active, who was rich or poor, who was religious or secular. All Jews were marked for death. The only criterion was Jewish blood.
And yet, today, that truth is being diluted. This year, on Holocaust Memorial Day in January, Good Morning Britain presenter Ranvir Singh introduced a report on King Charles’ visit to Auschwitz by saying: ‘Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belong to another ethnic group.’ People. Not Jews, not Jewish people.
Our Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, shared online a photo of herself lighting a candle. She wrote: ‘Tonight I’m lighting a candle to remember all those who were murdered just for being who they were.’ Statements from councils across the UK didn’t mention Jews. In Lowestoft, at a council-organised wreath-laying ceremony, Jews were not even invited to lay a wreath.
The anti-religion Humanists UK organisation posted online about ‘all the victims of genocide’. The Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of ‘all victims of genocide’. In Dublin, Irish President Michael D. Higgins gave a speech politicising the Holocaust by drawing a false equivalence between it and the ongoing war in Gaza – a war instigated by a genocidal group that massacred Jews. As she took a stand against this outrage, a Jewish Israeli-Irish PhD student was forcibly removed from the audience. Even the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust decided to issue an official invitation that shamefully focused on the ‘devastating violence against Palestinian civilians in Gaza’. This year on Holocaust Memorial Day, the word Jew seemed to have fallen out of fashion.
These are not careless omissions. This is a quiet erasure. It is history being rewritten in real time, moulded into something softer, something more comfortable.
But the six million were not murdered as an indistinct mass of humanity. They were murdered as Jews. And if the world forgets that, if it strips the Holocaust of its essence and reduces it to an empty platitude, then it will fail to recognise when history begins to rhyme once more.
There is a danger in memorials. Not in their existence – they are essential – but in their quiet finality. They stand as symbols of what was lost, as markers of what must never be forgotten. Yet they risk something deeper: they risk trapping the past in stone or concrete, in the stillness of history, while the present roars past, unheeded. They risk embalming history, freezing it in time, locking it behind glass as though it were no longer a living, breathing part of our present.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, one of the great scholars of Jewish memory, understood this danger. In his seminal work, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, he explained that for much of Jewish history, it was not historians who preserved the past. It was not books or archives that kept Jewish memory alive. It was rituals, prayers, and storytelling – the rhythms of Jewish life that wove history into the fabric of daily existence. To be Jewish was to remember, not in abstraction, but as if history itself was alive, urgent, present. To remember was a commandment, a sacred act: Zakhor – ‘remember’.
Yerushalmi suggests that museums often serve as places where history is preserved but no longer lived. Unlike Jewish rituals, such as Passover, where the past is re-enacted and made present, museums create a distance between people and history, treating memory as an object rather than a continuous experience. Yerushalmi feared that this shift might hollow out Jewish identity – that remembrance would become passive, detached, academic. And nowhere is that fear more relevant than in how we remember the Holocaust today.
Take Berlin. In the heart of the city, just steps from where Hitler’s bunker once was, stands the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe: 2,711 concrete slabs rising from the ground in solemn, silent rows. It is vast, cold, disorienting – a physical representation of loss. But does it prevent anti-Semitism? Does it stop hatred from taking root once again? A short walk from that memorial, Jewish children are warned not to wear kippot in public. In 2023, the Kachal Adass Yisroel synagogue in Berlin was firebombed by two men, just twelve days after the 7 October invasion of Israel.
Or consider Hyde Park in London last year, where officials covered over the Holocaust memorial with a blue tarpaulin during a so-called pro-Palestinian demonstration – not because it had been vandalised, but as a ‘precautionary’ measure. They feared that leaving it exposed might provoke the crowd. The memorial to the six million was not desecrated by extremists; it was hidden by those tasked with its protection. The irony is unbearable: a monument built to ensure ‘never again’ was hidden to appease those who chant for it to happen again. This is where we are.
We have built monuments to the past, but we have failed to apply their lessons to the present. We light candles, we recite prayers, we say ‘never again’ – but all the while, anti-Semitism festers. We are preserving the memory of the Holocaust, but we are not stopping the forces that would lead to another. Yerushalmi understood that memory cannot simply be built into stone; it must live. And yet, we are failing to let it live.
We have traded the immediacy of memory for the sterility of memorialisation. We have locked the past away in monuments, while the present rages unchecked.
So I ask you: is ‘never again’ merely a call to build museums, to lay wreaths, to light candles? Or is it a demand to act? To fight? To ensure that history’s echoes are silenced before they become its verses? Because if we leave the Holocaust entombed in the past, we are not honouring the dead – we are abandoning the living.
If we are waiting for the next Holocaust to arrive dressed in the same uniform, we will not see it coming. It will not announce itself with jackboots and yellow stars, nor will it begin with cattle cars and ghettos. History does not repeat: it rhymes.
Anti-Semitism has always adapted to its era, shape-shifting to fit the language and anxieties of the time. In the Middle Ages, it was religious: Jews as Christ-killers, as agents of Satan, as heretics who poisoned wells and spread the plague. In Nazi Germany, it was racial: Jews as vermin, as parasites, as an existential threat to Aryan purity. Today, it is political: Jews as ‘oppressors’, as ‘colonisers’, as a foreign presence with no right to exist. The accusations have changed, but the logic remains the same: the Jew is always the problem, and the world would be better without him.
Look at what’s happening now. A new generation, raised on the language of human rights, has been taught to believe that Jews – this ancient, indigenous, repeatedly exiled people – are somehow foreign invaders in their own homeland. The Holocaust was barely one lifetime ago, and yet we hear that the descendants of its survivors are now the ones committing genocide. The irony is grotesque. The accusation is familiar. Europe – the world – will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.
And then there was 7 October. As Jews were burned alive in their homes, as infants were shot in their beds, as families were dragged from their houses and slaughtered, something chilling happened. The world did not grieve. It did not condemn. Instead, almost immediately, it turned on the victims. In London, within hours of the massacre, activists were already planning an anti-Israel protest. In Sydney, as news of the atrocities spread, a crowd gathered on the steps of the Opera House, lighting flares, waving flags, and chanting ‘Gas the Jews’. And across the world, on university campuses, at political rallies, on social media, a single, terrible message emerged: ‘They had it coming’.
Here in once-great Britain, an organiser for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign contacted the Metropolitan Police at 12.50 p.m. on 7 October, 2023 to inform them of the group’s intention to protest in the capital the following Saturday. The call was made as Jews were still being slaughtered, were still cowering in bomb shelters in their homes, were still being hounded through fields, chased by terrorists who poured through the border fence and paraglided through the air, baying for blood. This is how history rhymes.
It is not merely that Jews are murdered – it is that their murder is justified. It is that their self-defence should be protested against. It is that, in the eyes of the world, Jewish suffering is always secondary to someone else’s grievance. The question is: will we recognise the pattern in time?
If ‘never again’ is to mean anything, it must be a promise to the living, not just an elegy for the dead. It cannot be confined to candlelit vigils or solemn speeches at memorials. It must be a demand – a relentless, urgent call to confront the anti-Semitism of today, not merely to commemorate the anti-Semitism of yesterday. Because anti-Semitism is not a relic of the past. It is here, now, rising in ways both familiar and disturbingly new.
In Melbourne, Australia, just four months ago, masked attackers smashed the windows of the Adass Yisrael Synagogue, poured petrol inside, and set it ablaze, forcing worshippers to flee as flames consumed their place of prayer. In Paris, in 2018, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, was stabbed 11 times and set on fire in her own home by two Muslim men. She had survived the Nazis, only to be murdered decades later for being a Jew in France.
In 2017, Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired physician and schoolteacher, was attacked in her Paris apartment by her neighbour, a 27-year-old Muslim who broke into her home and beat her while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. He then threw her from her third-floor balcony. Legal proceedings concluded that he was not criminally responsible due to cannabis use.
In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew, was lured by a young woman to an apartment in the Paris suburbs, where he was ambushed by a Muslim gang and kept captive for 24 days, enduring unthinkable torture. Ilan was found near death, his body bearing the scars of prolonged torment, and he succumbed to his injuries shortly thereafter.
The list does not end there. It does not even slow down. It stretches across continents and years, accelerating with a terrifying momentum.
And nowhere is the rise of anti-Semitism more blatant than on university campuses. In the United States, since 7 October, there has been a 700 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses, according to Hillel international. Jewish students have been harassed, threatened, and assaulted in classrooms and lecture halls, in dormitories and student unions, the message is clear: Jews are not safe. Professors praise Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’. Administrators, when asked if calls for genocide against Jews violate their own codes of conduct, hesitate.
The political arena is not immune. In Britain in 2018, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell called for Holocaust Memorial Day to be renamed, using an early day motion in the Commons to suggest it should be called ‘Genocide Memorial Day – Never Again For Anyone’. A clear attempt to erase the unique characteristics of the Holocaust and the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jewry. During these events, and so many others, where was ‘never again’?
Anti-Semitism has always found new disguises, new justifications, new languages in which to cloak its ancient hatred. It once masqueraded as religion, casting Jews as Christ-killers. It then wore the garb of race science, portraying Jews as an impure contamination. Today, it speaks the language of anti-colonialism and social justice, reinventing itself as Palestinianism. Make no mistake: this is not about land. It is not about borders. It is about erasure. Those who chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ are not calling for a peaceful resolution. They are calling for the obliteration of the only Jewish state in the world. They are not demanding coexistence, but annihilation. In their vision, there is no room for Jews – not in Jerusalem, not in Tel Aviv, not anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
And yet, Palestinianism has become a vehicle for a socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism. It dresses itself in the rhetoric of liberation, of resistance, of human rights – all in the name of a cause and a group which has never been shy to declare its intentions to wipe out or completely expel Jews, inspired by a broader world-wide ideology which sees Jews as worthy of erasure. It casts Jews not as a vulnerable minority, but as a global oppressor class. It does not see Israel as a country, but as an illegitimate, foreign entity – one that must be dismantled. This distortion of history is not accidental. It is strategic.
This year, the Islamic Human Rights Commission urged councils and universities across the UK to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day because Gaza was not included as a genocide. This was not just an insult to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis – it was an outright attempt to rewrite history. By placing Gaza alongside Auschwitz, by equating Israel’s self-defence with the mechanised slaughter of Jews, they sought to hollow out the meaning of the Holocaust itself.
And in London, at the Al Quds march, Hezbollah flags were waved freely in the streets – symbols of a terrorist organisation explicitly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Calls for jihad rang out in a city that claims to stand against hate. The mask slipped, and still, too many refused to see.
So I ask: why do we recognise anti-Semitism when it wears a swastika, but not when it waves a Palestinian flag? Why do we condemn it in history books, but excuse it when it shouts from the streets of our own cities? If ‘never again’ is to mean anything, it must include the courage to name today’s anti-Semitism for what it is.
Saul Friedländer, one of the great chroniclers of the Holocaust, understood that while the Shoah was unique, the warning signs of dehumanisation repeat throughout history. The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz, it began with words, with boycotts, with the quiet indifference of those who looked away.
Today, we see those signs again. We see the normalisation of violence against Jews. We see the world shift blame from the perpetrators to the victims. We see the grotesque Nazi comparisons: Jews told that ‘you of all people should know better’, as if surviving genocide requires surrendering to the next one. The world swore that it had learned from the past. That it would recognise the warning signs. That it would not remain silent again. And yet, here we are.
If ‘never again’ is to mean anything, it must be more than words whispered at memorials. It must be more than the sombre tone of a politician’s speech. It must be more than a candle lit once a year. A promise is not a slogan – it is an obligation. And yet, time and time again, we have watched as this phrase has been uttered without conviction, without urgency, without action. Because ‘never again’ is not just about stopping genocide. That is too low a bar. The world does not wake up one morning and decide to exterminate a people, it happens step by step, warning by warning, tolerated hatred by tolerated hatred. It happens when anti-Semitic slogans go unchallenged, when synagogues burn and we call it ‘isolated’, when Jews are murdered in their homes and it is dismissed as a crime of opportunity.
‘Never again’ is not just about remembering the past. It is about stopping the anti-Semitism of the present. Because anti-Semitism today does not look like it did in 1933, but its essence is unchanged. It’s Jewish students harassed on campuses. It’s synagogues attacked with Molotov cocktails. It’s ‘from the river to the sea’ projected on Big Ben. It’s Jewish children shot in their schools. It’s Jews held hostage on Shabbat in a synagogue in Colleyville, or shot dead in synagogue on Shabbat in Pittsburgh. It’s a Kosher supermarket siege in Paris. It’s Jews being raped at a music festival in Re’im. It’s ‘Free Free Palestine’. It’s ‘Jews control the media’. It’s journalists twisting history until the victims become the villains. It’s Holocaust memorials hidden beneath tarpaulin, because even the memory of our suffering is now considered offensive.
Governments have failed. Universities have failed. The media have failed. The institutions that claim to stand against hate have, time and time again, ignored anti-Semitism until it is too loud, too violent, too undeniable to sweep away. And then they say they are shocked.
Elie Wiesel once said: ‘The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.’ And indifference is what we have seen. Indifference as Jews are attacked in their places of worship, in their homes, in the streets of cities where they thought they were safe. Indifference as Hamas’s atrocities were excused. Indifference as the world let ‘never again’ become just another phrase, another platitude.
Must we wait for another 7 October, another Tree of Life, another Toulouse? Or will we act now? Because ‘never again’ is not a reflection on the past. It is a call to arms for the present.
We repeat these words at memorials, we etch them into plaques, we teach them to our children. But history does not listen to slogans. It is not moved by promises. It does not respect our moments of silence. And so, despite all the lessons, despite all the memorials, despite all the warnings, it keeps happening. Again, and again, and again.
Over and over, we say ‘never again’ out loud, because deep down, in silence, we know the truth is Forever Again. That is why ‘never again’ cannot be a passive hope – we must make it an active vow.
The world has always seen Jewish suffering as a tragedy, but never as a warning. The gas chambers of Auschwitz are mourned, the cattle cars are memorialised, but the Jewish families burned alive on 7 October are excused, and too quickly forgotten.
It is easy to condemn the past, to speak with moral clarity about the crimes of another era. It is much harder to recognise the dangers of the present, and to stand against anti-Semitism when it stares us in the eye. ‘Never again’ means recognising the signs before they reach their climax. It means understanding that when Jews are scapegoated, demonised, attacked, the world itself is already shifting into darkness. Because anti-Semitism is never just about the Jews. A world in which Jews are hunted is a world on the edge of collapse.
And so let us all declare: never again. But not as a phrase, not as a prayer, not as an empty ritual. To renew this promise is not just to remember – it is to act. To fight back. To refuse to let history rhyme once more. And to ensure that when we say ‘never again’, we live it in every moment of every day of our present, and our future.
Originally delivered as a speech on 9 February 2025, at a conference organised by ‘Our Fight’ at JW3 in London
Comments