Amsterdam, Anne Frank, and the Dialogues We Need to Have
Posted on 08/28/2026 @ 06:30 AM
Photo by Ronni Kurtz on Unsplash
By Mark B. Kravitz, Chair of the Board of CAJE. Mark also serves on the Executive Board of The Jewish Education Project, and he is a passionate advocate for inclusive Jewish learning, Israel education, and a vibrant, resilient Jewish future.
Amsterdam is almost impossible not to love.
Canals flow through neighborhoods of narrow seventeenth-century houses, flowers spill from windows, boats glide beneath bridges, and some of the greatest art in the world sits in museums that somehow feel like part of the neighborhood.
There is history everywhere, along with several million bicycles whose riders apparently operate under a different set of traffic laws than the rest of humanity.
I went to a city with a Jewish history that is both outstanding and devastating.
Sephardic Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal began arriving in significant numbers at the end of the sixteenth century, followed by Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
Amsterdam became one of the great centers of Jewish life in Europe.
Jews even called it Mokum, from the Hebrew Makom: “place.”
That word says more about the Jewish experience in Europe than perhaps anyone intended.
For centuries, Jews searched for places where we could live safely. Amsterdam was one.
We built synagogues, businesses, schools, and homes. We became citizens. We assimilated.
And history repeatedly reminded us that being accepted and being secure were not the same thing.
We were tenants in Europe with a lease that could apparently be terminated without notice.
By 1940, approximately 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands.
Then the Nazis invaded. Jews were registered, isolated, stripped of their rights and property, and deported.
Approximately 107,000 Dutch Jews were sent to concentration and extermination camps.
Among those forced into hiding was Anne Frank.
So one of my first stops was the Anne Frank House.
Everyone knows her story before entering, but standing inside those rooms changes its scale. History stops being history for a moment. It becomes a family trying not to make noise.
Our guide that day was a smart, worldly Spaniard who had made Amsterdam his home. We liked him immediately.
Then I mentioned that we were Jewish.
There was a slight pause. Nothing hostile. Just one of such subtle changes in conversation Jews have become fairly good at recognizing.
Then he said, “I find it amazing that Jews who survived the devastation and abuse of the Holocaust are doing the same thing today to the Palestinians.”
And soon came the increasingly familiar addendum: “I have nothing against Jewish people. It is the Zionists that I can’t stand.”
We were standing near the Anne Frank House. The irony did not require much assistance from me.
I could have become angry, but anger would have ended the conversation.
Instead, I asked him a simple question: “What is a Zionist?”
He couldn’t really answer.
He knew Zionism was bad. He knew Zionists were responsible for things he opposed.
But when asked to define the word itself, the certainty disappeared.
That moment illuminated something much larger.
We now live in a situation where people passionately oppose concepts they cannot define, repeat slogans whose histories they do not know, about a region many could not reliably identify on an unlabeled map.
I explained that Zionism, at its most basic level, is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
It is not a synonym for Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not a political party. And it certainly does not require indifference to Palestinian suffering.
Then I asked him why he thought Jews believed they needed a homeland in the first place.
He struggled.
So I looked at him and said, “Europe. Your people.”
That one landed!
Zionism was not invented because Jews suddenly developed an irrational desire for Mediterranean beachfront property.
It grew from centuries of exile, expulsions, pogroms, and discrimination, and from the recurring realization that Jewish security could disappear whenever the political winds changed.
The Holocaust did not create Zionism. It provided horrifying evidence that its central concern was not paranoia.
We talked about Palestinian suffering, Israeli policies, Netanyahu and Gaza.
I told him what I believe strongly: criticism of Israel is legitimate, necessary, and profoundly Israeli.
Israelis certainly do not require international assistance in criticizing their government; they have that covered.
I can oppose Israeli policies. I can believe Israeli leaders have made terrible decisions.
I can be horrified by Palestinian civilian suffering and demand that Israel live up to the moral values it claims as a Jewish and democratic state.
None of that requires me to believe Israel should cease to exist.
Governments are temporary. Peoples are not.
If the only Jewish state on earth is the only country whose mistakes routinely produce demands for its disappearance, Jews are entitled to notice the pattern.
My guide listened. I listened to him.
Neither of us underwent a political conversion that afternoon.
Something better happened - his certainty softened.
And that matters because we live in an era that treats complexity almost as a character flaw.
The Israeli - Palestinian conflict, involving competing national movements, wars, terrorism, occupation, displacement, security, religion, trauma, and generations of failed diplomacy, is now routinely explained in a thirty-second video by someone speaking very confidently into a phone.
Jewish education has to be better than that. That is where CAJE’s work matters enormously.
Our goal cannot simply be to give Jews better talking points so they can “win” arguments.
We don’t need more slogans. Slogans already surround us.
We need knowledge.
We need Jewish history, Zionist history, and Israeli history.
We need to understand Jewish peoplehood and the Jewish bond to the Land of Israel.
We also need to know the Palestinian narrative, the wars, the peace agreements, the failed negotiations, and the forces molding the region today.
Most importantly, we need to know that loving Israel does not require pretending Israel is perfect.
A strong Jewish identity cannot be built on information too fragile to withstand a difficult question.
CAJE approaches that challenge from many directions.
Through the Chandra & Michael Rudd Department of Adult Jewish Learning, CAJE establishes environments in which our community can wrestle seriously with Jewish writings, history, Israel, and the questions confronting Jewish life today.
Adults need this education as much as our children do — perhaps more.
Children generally admit when they don’t know something. Adults have Facebook.
The Miami Jewish Film Festival allows people to encounter Jewish and Israeli life through human stories rather than political abstractions.
Israelis become more than headlines: parents, soldiers, artists, immigrants, Arabs, Jews, religious people, secular people, and families living in a society every bit as complicated as our own.
The Leo Martin March of the Living makes history visceral.
Young people stand where Jewish civilization flourished and where it was nearly destroyed. They walk through Auschwitz and Birkenau and then travel to Israel.
From Auschwitz to Jerusalem. From Jewish powerlessness to Jewish agency.
That agency carries moral obligations and difficult questions. But after two thousand years, it also represents something Jews should never again apologize for having.
And through intensive professional development with some of the world’s strongest Jewish and Israel educational organizations, CAJE is helping Miami’s educators teach Israel with sophistication, nuance, and confidence.
We are not training teachers to avoid difficult questions; we are training them to welcome them.
I don’t believe my guide in Amsterdam hated Jews. I’m not even convinced he truly hated Israel.
I think an algorithm had educated him.
Algorithms are very good at learning what keeps us watching.
Algorithms are somewhat less accomplished at teaching Middle Eastern history.
There are genuine antisemites whose minds we will never change.
But there is a much larger group that should interest us: our children’s classmates, our coworkers, our neighbors, our friends and, occasionally, our tour guides.
Many are not filled with hatred. They are filled with information that is incomplete, distorted, or simply wrong.
That is a problem education can actually address.
My last day in Amsterdam brought that idea full circle -- it was World Pride.
Amsterdam has been a pioneer in LGBTQ rights for decades, and the Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage.
But what impressed me was not the legislation. It was how completely Pride belonged to the city.
Young and old, gay and straight, families, businesses, and institutions celebrated together.
Boats filled the canals. Rainbow flags hung everywhere. Pride did not feel like a minority asking Amsterdam for permission to belong.
It felt as if Amsterdam was celebrating a part of itself.
As a gay man, I found that deeply moving. And as a Jew, I found it instructive.
Amsterdam did not get there overnight.
It took visibility, education, difficult conversations, and generations of people discovering that the gay people they had heard so much about were their children, friends, doctors, teachers, and neighbors.
Visibility created familiarity. Familiarity created understanding. Understanding changed a culture.
Perhaps there is a lesson there for Jews.
We understandably spend enormous energy responding to the crisis of the moment: October 7, Gaza, antisemitism, campus protests, elections, governments and headlines.
We must respond.
But we also need a twenty-year strategy.
What if the goal of Jewish and Israel education were not simply to create better defenders of Israel, but to create a world that better understands the Jewish story?
What if Zionism were understood before it was condemned?
What if people understood why a people expelled from country after country eventually concluded that sovereignty was not an indulgence but a must?
And what if people could hold two thoughts at the same time: Palestinians deserve dignity, safety, and a future. Jews deserve sovereignty, safety, and a future.
Those ideas are not mutually exclusive. We should stop allowing people who hate one side or the other to convince us that they are.
My trip to Amsterdam took me from the Anne Frank House, where a Jewish family hid because Europe had decided there was no place for them, to World Pride, where an entire city celebrated another minority’s belonging.
The spatial distance was only a few miles; the moral distance took generations.
We will not defeat antisemitism with a better Instagram post.
We will not secure Israel’s future by shouting louder than the people shouting at us.
And we will not prepare the next generation of Jews by ignoring questions we are afraid to let them ask.
We have to do the slower work: teach history, build identity, train educators, create experiences, tell our story, and have difficult conversations.
For generations, Jews asked Europe for a place where we could belong. Eventually, history taught us a harder lesson:
Membership that can be revoked is not security.
That is why Israel exists.
Jews have built homes, businesses, synagogues and lives in places we believed were home.
We became citizens, neighbors and part of the fabric of the countries where we lived.
But ultimately, someone else was always the landlord. And Jewish history has a rather unpleasant collection of eviction notices.
Anne Frank should never have needed a hiding place because someone decided her family no longer belonged.
Israel is what happened when the Jewish people finally stopped looking for a more sympathetic landlord and bought the building.
After two thousand years of renting, we’re keeping the keys.
