A sign in my neighborhood says ‘The Holocaust is fake’ — I wish I felt surprised
In a time of so-called ‘fake news,’ the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore
A photo taken at Auschwitz, after the liberation of the extermination camp, 1945. Photo by Yad Vashem/AFP via Getty Images
Aviya Kushner October 30, 2025
When I saw a sign on my streetcorner in Chicago that said “The Holocaust is fake,” I immediately stopped. I had just left the pool and was on my way to shop for Shabbat. Disgusted, I brought an older neighbor to take a look. I knew he had taken down his mezuzah in fear after some of the protests after Oct. 7 and had only recently put another Jewish symbol back up.
I wanted company as I snapped a picture of the sign, but I also wanted him to be aware of what was happening in the neighborhood. Because these days, the truth and lies are blurred.
Later, I learned that similar stickers and graffiti, some of it misspelled, had appeared on other corners and benches on the Far North side of Chicago, traditionally a stronghold of the Jewish community here, which is the third largest in the U.S.
“Holocaust” and “fake” are two words whose meanings used to be clear to all. Yet the doubt cast on both “Holocaust” and “fake” represent two disturbing trends; their convergence is dangerous, and entirely predictable.
Those who traffic in Holocaust minimization and denial have been recent guests on The Joe Rogan Experience, the country’s #1 podcast, which has far more listeners than network television. Rogan, who has hosted the “Holocaust revisionist” Darryl Cooper, has 19.4 million subscribers on YouTube, 19.7 million on Instagram and 15 million on X. Meanwhile, NBC and CBS News average 5.6 and 3.6 million viewers, respectively.
Redefining fake
Meanwhile, the mainstream news media, where fact-checking is prized, has been maligned for years as “fake news,” a term the current U.S. president uses so often that no one blinks when something real is dismissed. When fact-checked information is “fake,” it’s not surprising to see history described that way too.
The Holocaust was the ultimate truth of the 20th century. The ghettos, the crematoria, the gas chambers — so many elements of the industrialized and intentional slaughter of an entire people were without precedent and were the final stop on centuries of anti-Jewish hatred.
In the weeks after Oct. 7, I was haunted by the thought that the “genocide” charge against Israel was not just about criticizing Israel, but at root, about minimizing the Holocaust.
The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.
Yet the world’s oldest Holocaust archive changed its name in September 2019 from the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide to the Wiener Holocaust Library. The Library, located in London, stated that it wanted to clarify “the centrality of the Holocaust” to our work without changing its “commitment to furthering the study of genocide.”
A few years earlier, in 2011, Jeremy Corbyn, who would become Labour Party leader in 2015, sought to change “Holocaust Memorial Day” to “Genocide Memorial Day — Never Again for Anyone” in 2011. That prompted swift backlash.
“Holocaust Memorial Day already rightly includes all victims of the Nazis and subsequent genocides,” Karen Pollock, chief executive of the UK’s Holocaust Educational Trust, wrote at the time on Twitter. “But the Holocaust was a specific crime, with antisemitism at its core. Any attempt to remove that specificity is a form of denial and distortion.”
Changing the meaning of the word ‘Holocaust’
Increasingly, the word ‘Holocaust’ is being used to describe what was not the Holocaust.
Simon and Schuster is currently promoting a forthcoming book edited by Susan Abulhawa that it describes as documenting “the holocaust of our time.” The editor’s note accompanying the copy that reviewers have received is signed “From the river to the sea.”
According to the United States Holocaust Museum, “approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. This number represented 1.7% of Europe’s total population and more than 60 percent of the world’s Jewish population. By 1945, most European Jews — 2 out of every 3 — had been killed.”
The world Jewish population still hasn’t recovered its 1933 levels.
Even in this moment where words and numbers increasingly do not matter, there is no account — not even from the Hamas-run Health Ministry itself—-that suggests that 2/3 of Gazans have been killed in this conflict.
This is not to minimize the tremendous suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians in a war that began with a Hamas-led attack on Israel, in which some Gazan civilians participated. It was a horrible and harrowing two years.
Returned Israeli hostages have described being held in the homes of ordinary Gazans. CNN reported that three hostages were held in the home of a physician whose son was a freelance journalist for the US-based Palestine Chronicle. The son filed dispatches about the war in Gaza while his family held hostages.
Fact-check: A military attack and hostage-taking were not features of the Jewish community’s experience during the Holocaust.
What is real? What is fake?
Who’s a journalist? Who’s a hostage-holder?
What’s “news”? What’s “experience”?
What’s the difference between the Holocaust and the holocaust?
In this world where facts can be fake and nothing is taboo, anything seems possible. You can make the Holocaust into a lower-case “holocaust.” You can make Raphael Lemkin, the columnist for Zionist World, into an anti-Zionist, which was what Lemkin’s family asserted that the Lemkin Institute was doing, as it used their relative’s name while attacking Israel. And you can put up a sticker in a Jewish neighborhood claiming that the “Holocaust is fake.”
Holding on to disgust
I wrote to various family members with a photo of the sign in my neighborhood. None reacted too strongly; “I hate to say it, but I’m numb to this already,” one wrote.
I’m glad I’m still disgusted. I’m writing this to encourage you to be disgusted, too. Resist the guests on podcast “experience” forums who claim that antisemitism is being exaggerated, and that the Holocaust wasn’t that bad.
Because once holocaust is just a word, marketing copy from a publisher, devoid of Jewish content, and cleansed of historical accuracy, all words can be redefined to serve this kingdom of lies we increasingly seem to be living in.
