It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning.

By Allan Joffe

(*First appeared in the SAJR)

I recently participated in the March of the Living, a journey of remembrance and reflection that takes thousands of Jews and others on the walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Marching alongside survivors, rabbis, teenagers, and dignitaries, I expected grief and outrage. I found those emotions, but I also encountered deeper, more unsettling realisations – about Jewish identity, the nature of evil, and the troubling patterns of silence that persist today.

One of the first things that struck me was the sea of Israeli flags. Everywhere I turned, it was Israeli flags, not American, not Canadian, not British, or South African, only Israeli. It wasn’t just a matter of national pride. It reflected something deeper: the vast majority of Jews today, whether religious or secular, weave their Jewish identity with Israel.

Among the most powerful things I witnessed on the march was the overwhelming sense of Jewish pride, solidarity, and resilience. Thousands of Jews, from dozens of countries, marched carrying Israeli flags and family memories, not in bitterness or anger, but in remembrance and hope. Their Jewish identity was something rooted in history, faith, and the unbreakable link between past and future.

It also struck me that in stark contrast to the marchers, a small but vocal minority defines their Jewish identity almost entirely through opposition to Israel. Jenny Manson, the co-founder of Jewish Voice for Labour, admitted with breathtaking candour that she “began to identify as a Jew in order to argue against the state of Israel and its behaviour.” In other words, Jewish identity – for her and many like her – isn’t a source of pride, culture, or continuity. Unlike the marchers, their Jewishness isn’t an inheritance but a hollow construct, worn only when it serves their campaign against their own people. The irony and cognitive dissonance are staggering. If their opposition were ever successful, if Israel were dismantled, their connection to Judaism would collapse with it.

As we marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the sheer scale of horror became almost impossible to process. Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn’t just a site of death, it was an industrial complex designed for the systematic extermination of human beings. The Nazis refined murder into an assembly line. Every detail, from the layout of the barracks to the chemical engineering of Zyklon B, spoke of cold, calculated efficiency. The Holocaust is often compared to other atrocities, but in its bureaucratic dehumanisation, it remains a category of its own. It was genocide engineered with industrial precision, and that horror echoes uniquely across history.

Another realisation gnawed at me during the march: the Holocaust wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t tucked away in forests or isolated deserts. It was right there, often within earshot and eyesight of Polish towns. Ordinary people lived nearby. They saw the smoke, they heard the trains, they knew. And it wasn’t only in Poland. Trains packed with Jews crisscrossed Europe, rumbling through hundreds of towns and villages. Entire communities watched cattle cars filled with human beings pass by, and the knowledge of what was happening seeped across borders and societies. The idea that people “didn’t know” is a comforting myth. In truth, many knew, and chose to look away.

This is the bystander effect in its most extreme form – the phenomenon in which individuals don’t offer help to a victim when other people are present. Seeing it on such a massive, lethal scale forces uncomfortable questions about human nature. But it also forces questions about today.

Over past months, we have seen this silence, and, at times, outright hostility, play out painfully across many parts of society. For example, universities, which once prided themselves on defending free thought and moral clarity, had students and faculty respond to the atrocities of 7 October not with empathy, but with strident hostility toward Israel and often toward Jewish students themselves. In some cases, it wasn’t merely individuals but the institutions themselves that adopted stances indistinguishable from antisemitism. Meanwhile, faculties and students in science, technology, engineering, and medicine largely remained passive bystanders. Even today, many within these fields haven’t meaningfully confronted the moral failure of their silence. Their grievance is narrowly framed:

“We weren’t involved; we don’t discriminate; yet we’re losing our funding.”

This isn’t merely an institutional failure; it’s a collapse of moral courage at the very hour it was most needed.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, has described antisemitism as a virus that mutates. In the Middle Ages, we were demonised as Christ-killers, accused of blood libels and poisoning wells. In the 19th century, we were vilified as capitalist exploiters and simultaneously as revolutionary subversives. In the 20th century, we were depicted as a racial threat to Aryan purity. Today, we’re denounced as colonial oppressors for having a sovereign state. The language and justifications change; the hatred remains constant. It’s precisely because of this relentless mutation that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a working definition of antisemitism, a definition that recognises that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, such as by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavour, is itself a form of antisemitism.

We don’t need an impossibly high bar to recognise antisemitism. History teaches the opposite: we need a low bar. We need to be alert to the early signs, the coded language, the double standards. Waiting until antisemitism becomes undeniable has always meant waiting too long. It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning.

After 7 October, the painful reality became impossible to ignore. The silence across much of the world was profound. The hesitation, the equivocation, the indifference, all made clear that even in the face of unspeakable brutality against Jews, outrage would be rationed, sympathy would be conditional, and solidarity would be rare. As Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author known for his work on ethics, religion, and the human mind, bluntly observed:

 “Who can be counted on to defend the Jews but the Jews.”

Many Jews who had lived comfortably in secular or universalist identities, people like Harris himself, found themselves transformed into “post-7 October Jews”. Not necessarily more religious, but far more aware: of vulnerability, of abandonment, and of the need for Jewish self-reliance.

Of course, there are courageous non-Jewish voices of solidarity today, just as there were righteous gentiles during the Holocaust. Voices like John Spencer, Douglas Murray, and Richard Kemp have stood with Jews when many others wouldn’t. But they are too few and far between. Their courage only highlights the broader loneliness.

Marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau, I felt pride in our resilience. We’re still here. We carry the memory of the dead, and we stand defiant against those who would wish to erase us.

About the writer:

Allan Joffe is a businessman based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is married with three children and recently participated in the March of the Living, an international Holocaust education program.

*Feature picure: Participants with Israeli flag walk along the infamous rail track leading to the gate of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, during the annual March of The Living to honor the victims of the Holocaust on April 24, 2025. (Photo: Wojtek Radwanski/AP).

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