Former White House aide Sarah Hurwitz, who served as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama, warned this week that Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with “weak, skinny Palestinians” instead of “powerful Israelis.”
She continued:
“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. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they’re just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.”
And you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but 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. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
I’ve kind of realized after my diagnosis and journey into understanding and reframing my whole life, that for people who are on the spectrum, in a lot of cases it’s almost entirely a syndrome of “thinking too much.”
This is a curse when you’re in a social situation and need to be spontaneous and witty and relatable, but it can also mean you have a very strong internal language system for working out situations and seeing things from many angles.
This isn’t to say that autistic people can’t get stuck in wrong modes of thought, or that neurotypical people don’t also have the capability to work things out in their mind, but it is going to have an effect on your politics and how you view the larger world.
I’ve read that autistic people generally have a very strong sense of “justice” in this regard, and this is why it can feel far more painful to see injustice happening, because the power of overthinking lets you experience it from all different angles or imagine being the person experiencing injustice. It’s like brute-forcing empathy.