The Nazi Echoes in Modern Antisemitic Campaigns

Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we reflect on the sacred duty we all share to remember the six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. For me, it is personal. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Belgium, hidden and saved by courageous Righteous Among the Nations who risked everything to protect them. While they all have passed away, their legacy fuels the fight to ensure the lessons of the Shoah are never forgotten or perverted.

Internationally, January 27^th was established by the United Nations in 2005 to honor the victims and survivors. It is not only a commemoration but stands as a guardrail against the erasure of history and the return of hate.

In 2026, that guardrail is being tested. Holocaust memory is under attack by people who twist the story until it flips. Jews become the villains and those who harm Jews are recast as victims. I want to name what I am seeing clearly. There is a growing campaign to distort the Holocaust by inverting its moral meaning and by borrowing its symbols to make that inversion feel righteous.

The cultural appropriation of Jewish symbols and Jewish trauma is a deadly part of a broader campaign to use Jewish icons to advance an agenda that denies Jewish peoplehood. In Germany, a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into an antisemitic spectacle. Protesters exploited Anne Frank, a young Jewish victim of the Holocaust, as a symbol to advance their campaign against Israel. This grotesque appropriation hijacks Jewish suffering to delegitimize the Jewish state by inverting the victims and perpetrators.

Anne Frank is not the only figure being weaponized. We are witnessing a campaign that cloaks her and even Jesus in keffiyas, a blatant attempt to deny Jewish history and erase the Holocaust itself. This movement reflects what Joseph Goebbels understood well: repeat a lie often enough and some will accept it as truth.

This dehumanizing playbook has become all too familiar. First, activists purposely blur the line between victim and perpetrator. Then they misuse Holocaust symbols and Jewish trauma to make their cause look morally urgent. And, unfortunately, the antisemites have been succeeding.

Since 2019, at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), we have tracked how this hate evolves and spreads. Last year, our research center documented 6,819 antisemitic incidents worldwide, up from 6,326 in 2024. Even more chilling, while recorded incidents involving physical violence or threats declined, attacks became deadlier, with fatalities increasing by two-thirds from 2024 to 2025.

In this bloody shadow, Holocaust memory has been under direct attack by people who twist the story until it flips. Jews become the villains, and those who harm Jews are recast as victims. The Claims Conference found that 48% of Americans cannot name a single Nazi concentration camp or ghetto, and 31% believe “two million or fewer” Jews were killed, dramatically understating the Holocaust’s scale.

Our research has shown that Jew-haters have been labeling Gaza as a “holocaust” and asserting that Israel’s actions surpass Nazi atrocities—claims that do even more than minimize the systematic extermination of six million. As they wield these lies, they ignore Hamas’s genocidal charter calling for Jewish annihilation and, of course, the barbarism of October 7^th. But it is not just about looking backward. They purposely scheduled a "Global Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Hostages" for January 31—just days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day to continue their calculated assault on memory, drawing insidious parallels between Palestinians and the Jews of World War II.

Consider the “Red Ribbons Campaign,” which brazenly appropriates the yellow ribbon symbol—a global emblem for the innocent Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in an attack that echoed the barbarity of pogroms. These hostages, including children and elders, represent unprovoked victims of terror. Yet activists are now using red ribbons to demand the release of so-called “Palestinian hostages.” This deliberate inversion equates the perpetrators with victims, erasing the unique trauma inflicted on Jewish civilians and delegitimizing Israel’s right to self-defense.

As the memory of the Holocaust is upended—Hamas kidnappers called “hostages,” Anne Frank used to smear the Jewish state, and concentration camp imagery made part of the propaganda of terrorists—society is being conditioned to normalize violence against Jews as justified.

Eight decades after the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, history is once again being twisted in the campaign for Jewish blood. On this day the world must understand what too many refused to hear in the Nazi rhetoric of the 1930s. While the antisemites seemed to have studied this history in support of the current dehumanizing campaign against Jews, this time the world must wake up before it is too late.

Sacha Roytman is the CEO and co-founder of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).