Juda Honickman is Spokesperson for One Israel Fund
"Nearly a third of Long Island residents don't believe the Holocaust should be required teaching and suggest Jews just 'move on' from the 'exaggerated' genocide, according to a shocking new survey." - The New York Post
Do you understand what you just read?
Long Island. Not rural Alabama. Not a fringe online forum. Long Island, one of the most densely Jewish-populated regions in the United States.
Move on.
I want to sit with those two words for a moment. Because they reveal something. Not just ignorance. Something more deliberate. Forgetting isn't passive, it's a choice. And in 2026, with antisemitic hate crimes in New York City up 182% year over year, it's a dangerous one.
This is how it starts.
Not with jackboots. Not with armbands. It starts with a survey. It starts with reasonable-sounding people in suburban neighborhoods deciding that Jews talk about their own genocide too much. It starts with the word "exaggerated." It starts with “move on".
We've seen this before and we know how it ends.
In the 1930s, French Jews were among the most assimilated in all of Europe. France was enlightened. Educated. Civilized. Jewish anxiety about rising antisemitism was dismissed as paranoia. The Dreyfus Affair had been resolved, hadn't it? Things had gotten better. The hostility Jews thought they saw wasn't really there. They were imagining it.
Then the Vichy government came to power. And French citizens handed over their neighbors voluntarily. Without being asked.
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with words. Jews depicted as rats, as disease, as parasites. Dehumanization first. Legislation second. Violence third. By the time the camps came, the groundwork had been laid for years.
It began with people getting comfortable with contempt.
Sound familiar?
Four hundred people in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Civically engaged people, people who show up to vote. Thirty percent either don't believe Holocaust education should be required or wouldn't answer the question. Fifteen percent think the death toll was exaggerated. Twenty-seven percent think Jews should move on. These aren't fringe numbers. They are a trend.
And here's what makes it worse. These are people with smartphones. With Google. With access to Yad Vashem's digital archives, to survivor testimony, to footage of the liberation of the camps.
They chose not to look, or they looked and decided it was too much, or worse, a lie.
That's not ignorance. That's a decision.
Would you tell the families of September 11th to move on? Would you say the memorials are excessive? That the documentaries are too much? That twenty-plus years is long enough?
Three thousand people were murdered that day. We built a museum. We weep every single year, and nobody questions it. Nobody tells those families they're too focused on the past.
Six million Jews were murdered. Systematically. Bureaucratically. With paperwork and train schedules and quotas. And 81 years later people in Nassau and Suffolk counties want to close the chapter.
Here's the scale. The combined population of Nassau and Suffolk counties is approximately 2.8 million people. If every man, woman, and child in Nassau and Suffolk counties were wiped out, it would still be less than half of six million.
Move on?
New York State mandates Holocaust education. It's the law. And yet here we are. A third of Long Island voters either want it gone or won't even defend it.
This is the part that should terrify you. History doesn't repeat itself with a warning label. It doesn't announce itself. It creeps. It normalizes. It shows up first in survey results and casual eye-rolls at Jews who won't just move on.
Then it shows up somewhere else.
To the 27% who think we're overdoing it: we are not overdoing it. Six million people were systematically murdered in the middle of civilized Europe, within living memory, with the cooperation of governments, neighbors, and bystanders. Not in spite of civilization. Inside it.
That is the lesson that we cannot afford to lose.
Because when a society starts telling Jews they're too loud about the genocide they experienced in the not so distant past, it isn't a sign that things have gotten better.
It's a sign we've been here before.
The warning isn't buried in history books, it's in this survey. It's in the 15% who call the numbers exaggerated. It's in the shrug. The eye-roll. The two words.
Move on.
We've heard those words before in different languages. We know what comes next.
Never again isn't a slogan, it's a mandate. And right now, on Long Island, in the Five Towns, in Nassau, in Suffolk, that mandate is being quietly, casually, politely abandoned.
Wake up. Not for us.
For yourselves.