Former US President Barack Obama's presidential speechwriter, Sarah Hurwitz, expressed concern that young people in the United States are increasingly exposed to images of the destruction in Gaza through social media, which is reshaping their understanding of Jewish history and the Holocaust.

Speaking at a recent Jewish Federation of North America Summit 2025, Hurwitz said that access to uncensored content online, including footage of Palestinian civilians being massacred and maimed, is influencing how the younger generation interprets global power dynamics. She explained that people today are able to form opinions outside traditional media channels, which were long seen as gatekeepers of information.

Fmr Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz laments to Jewish Federation that people are finding content from "Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes" on social media and seeing videos of "the carnage in Gaza."

Holocaust education has backfired in part as people see Palestinians as Jews' victims,… pic.twitter.com/YQCkjHREVP

— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) November 18, 2025

Hurwitz suggested that widespread Holocaust education, meant to strengthen awareness of antisemitism, has in some cases contributed to this shift. She noted that many young people have come to "view Palestinians as victims,"  completely ignoring the ongoing genocide in Gaza, leading them to draw parallels between past and present injustices.

“They think the lesson of the Holocaust is… you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people,” she said.

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Massacres making it hard to isolate past from present

She added that videos of the suffering in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli occupation since October 2023, are making it difficult for youth to accept official messaging that seeks to separate the historical injustices faced by Jewish communities from current events. According to her remarks, the central issue for younger audiences is the human impact they witness daily online, rather than geopolitical arguments.

Hurwitz warned that this shift has heightened tensions within Jewish communities as some younger Americans resist efforts to frame the conflict solely through the lens of so-called collective Jewish security. The challenge, she said, lies in addressing the stark contrast between the historical portrayal of Jews as an oppressed minority and the realities of the Palestinian cause and the carnage faced by the Palestinian people. 

She also went on to chastise social media algorithms for shining a light on the Palestinian people's suffering and showcasing the brutality of the Israeli regime, rather than pointing out that the Israeli occupation forces are, indeed, massacring the Palestinian people.

Genocide is... a PR disaster?

Hurwitz completely sidelined famine and aggression, and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, for the sake of making the argument that the holocaust was never about "big vs small", giving oppression a racial aspect and attempting to ensure that only certain communities or ethnicities get the "privilige" of labeling themselves as oppressed or facing grave injustices.

Prominent Jewish-American scholar Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived Nazi concentration camps, has extensively examined the political use of the Holocaust in his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry. In that work, Finkelstein argues that the historical tragedy has sometimes been invoked in ways that position Jewish suffering as unique and beyond comparison, which he considers a barrier to universal human rights advocacy.

For Hurwitz, the issue is not the genocide in Gaza in and of itself but rather the fact that people all over the world, including the Jewish youth, are being exposed to the horrors being perpetrated by the Israeli aggression, making the genocide not an inhumane act but rather a PR disaster. Nothing more; nothing less.