Sarah Hurwitz has become a kind of Rorschach test for the Jewish American community. Since beginning her book tour in early September for As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Try To Blame, Shame, and Erase Us, Hurwitz has found herself the target of accusations from across the ideological spectrum. She has become renowned for saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to Jewish identity in the diaspora and condemned, often in the same breath, for refusing to say it the way a faction demands. She is unshaken.
For Hurwitz, the future of American Jewish life depends on recognizing propaganda, pushing back on misinformation, and answering, with substance, the questions suddenly being asked of the Jewish public. This is precisely the impetus behind As A Jew. I sat down with her ahead of her keynote at Palo Alto’s Z3 conference to discuss what she hopes readers take away from her new book.
Hurwitz, originally from Wayland, Mass., attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School before beginning her career in speech writing. She worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and went on to serve as a speechwriter in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2017. At that point, her Jewish identity was very much on the backburner. “For so many years,” Hurwitz shared, “I’d say things like, ‘Oh, I’m a social justice Jew,’ or ‘I’m a cultural Jew,’ and what I really meant was: Don’t worry. I’m not that Jewish.” She described it as a whole vocabulary of qualifiers that let her avoid owning the identity she now speaks about on stage.
“That was my Judaism,” she said. “A few ethnic jokes rattling around in an empty void.” What changed was studying the tradition seriously as an adult and realizing how much she didn’t know about Jewish law, history, and philosophical debates. “I spent so long trying to make my Jewishness smaller,” she said, “because I didn’t have any intellectual content to stand on.”
Hurwitz began studying Judaism more seriously during her final years in the White House, eventually training in hospital chaplaincy as part of Clinical Pastoral Education. A decade later, her second book is both a dare for and a diagnosis of American Jewry. It takes its name from a suggestion by Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, whose own family survived the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 by barricading themselves in a safe room until his father, a retired general, fought his way down the country to rescue them.
Reflecting on the title, Hurwitz says “Jew is often used as a slur. But it’s not a slur, it’s what I am.” The purpose of her book is “not to convince billions of people not to hate [Jews], but to make sure that 16 million Jews know who we are.” To that end, the title also responds to a trend she finds maddening: Jews who preface anti-Zionist screeds with “as a Jew.” “If they’re gonna play that game,” she said, “I’m gonna play that game too.”
In her book, Hurwitz traces how and why Jews have come to see themselves through the eyes of their enemies. She begins with her own “humiliating” Jewish identity and the antisemitic stories she internalized as a young girl into adulthood. Then moves into a crash course in American Christian hegemony and her own journey of Jewish self discovery. From there, she traces the history of anti-Jewish ideas and shows how those ideas shape rising antisemitism among young people.
Hurwitz argues that the flawed nature of Holocaust education is partly to blame. First, she says, it often fails to explain that “what led to the Holocaust was 200 years of Christian anti-Judaism.” This was an ideological inheritance that carved what she calls a “neural groove” into the Western mind: the belief that Jews are “diabolically powerful, shockingly depraved, and in a conspiracy to harm you.” Decades later in Nazi Germany, Jews made up roughly one percent of the population, yet were portrayed as an existential threat. Jews were depicted drinking children’s blood and controlling financial tides. Meanwhile, Nazis emphasized that it was in the self-interest of Jews to hide these secret truths.
Hurwitz traces how those ideas migrated beyond Europe, including Soviet anti-Zionism, which reframed antisemitism as political critique. “The Soviets said, ‘We’re not antisemitic. We don’t hate Jews—that’s what Nazis do. We hate Zionists,’” she said. Hurwitz devotes a full chapter of her book making the point that, to erase the religious importance of Israel from Judaism is a fundamental misunderstanding of the religion – an antisemitic tactic first pioneered by the USSR that now appears “on a college campus near you.”
Instead, Holocaust education often leaves students with a simplified moral picture: powerful Nazis victimizing Jews. What it fails to teach, Hurwitz said, is how antisemites actually understand themselves. Throughout history, “antisemites thought they were punching up,” Hurwitz said. “They believed they were acting in self-defense.”
That inversion, Hurwitz argues in the book and on tour, is central to understanding antisemitism today. “Holocaust education doesn’t make that clear,” she said, “and as a result, people don’t recognize the antisemitism they’re seeing now.”
At the Z3 conference, she spoke to an audience of 1,500 American Jews hungry for clarity on how to heal and rebuild after a year when Zionism became a liability on campus and in professional life. Her keynote advocated for differentiating the war in Gaza from the Holocaust, criticized young Americans’ appetite for wartime disinformation, and warned against the pitfalls of a “contentless” Jewish identity.
“Feeling left out, feeling different is not the worst thing in the world,” she told the crowd. “The worst thing in the world would be for us to stop telling our story.” Whatever else American Jews do now, “an empty void of Jewish identity is no longer enough.”
While As A Jew was not inspired by the October 7th attacks in Israel, the urgency of its message is amplified in the face of rising antisemitism worldwide. As for how well-equipped Jews are to respond to this trend, Hurwitz warned from the stage, “The old cultural shorthand of ‘I’m Jewish because I like bagels and Seinfeld,’ collapses the second someone asks a real question about Jewish history or Israel.”
Weeks later, a clip of her making this point at the Jewish Federations of North America conference went viral, not for its clarity of purpose but because it was deliberately spliced to garner outrage. It reached millions of views and an onslaught of hateful comments.
“Young people…learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think, ‘Oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people.’” Hurwitz said. “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.’”
In response, Instagram influencer Matt Bernstein said, “You think Jews have a monopoly on victimhood… I think never again means never again for anyone.” His video garnered two point one million views. Another creator Raven Schwam-Curtis accused Hurwitz of misunderstanding young Jews entirely: “[Gen Z Jews] are not brainwashed, Sarah. We just think that safety and liberation comes from building bridges with other communities on the margins, not burning them.”
Today, searching Hurwitz’s name on Instagram, X, or TikTok reveals overwhelming criticism of her as a “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) Jew, depraved enough to advocate for killing children in Gaza, and conspiratorial in her efforts to disseminate this perspective to the Jewish world and beyond – sound familiar? But just trying to have this kind of discussion on social media is doomed from the start.
In reality, Hurwitz – a self-described liberal Zionist – makes it quite clear in As A Jew that she is very sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians and deeply critical of Israel’s current right wing government. That combination satisfies almost no one online, but it is also precisely the kind of moral and intellectual orientation that public discourse claims to want.
She writes that far-right antisemitism after the 2016 presidential election predated the anti-semitism on the left that she first noticed during the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. Importantly, Hurwitz qualifies this as her experience alone – a reasonable choice given that most studies struggle to pinpoint whether antisemitism is more dangerous or prevalent in far-right or far-left circles. For this, she is skewered by conservatives for progressive virtue signaling and a cowardice in the face of the real enemies (who are no doubt progressive Jews).
In As A Jew, Hurwitz acknowledges that she isn’t immune to being cancelled. She simply refuses to be cowed.
“I will not let haters or purists or those smugly at home in their magnificent detachment lay waste to Israel’s story or turn my people into their thought experiment. I will not let them gaslight me into forgetting the Jewish past or ignoring the Jewish present. I will not let them do to the Jewish country what people have for thousands of years done to Jews,” she writes.
“The shame is on them, not on me. I am no longer ashamed.”
