Empathy Needs Historical Memory

Where were you on this day 25 years ago?

Where were you during that earth-shattering moment on September 11, when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center—and the world as we knew it—came crashing down?

Who did you first hear it from? Do you remember your initial reaction? Do you remember what the days and weeks that followed felt like?

Looking back on that dark day in American history—perhaps one of the darkest within living memory for many of us in this room—what has changed since then?

For those of us who lived in both worlds—the world before September 11 and the world after it—the answer is simple:

Everything.

I was a student at NYU at the time. I had planned to take just one semester away to help my mother care for my terminally ill father. Because of that decision, I wasn’t in my dorm near the South Street Seaport—literally blocks from the World Trade Center—when the terrorists struck.

That morning, I was awakened by an early phone call from a friend at NYU telling me to turn on the television. He waited while I groggily searched for the remote. And then we sat together, completely silent, connected by the telephone, watching as the buildings collapsed.

The days and weeks that followed were surreal. We were living through history—and not the kind anyone wants to live through. We all knew it.

And, just as the terrorists intended, we were all terrified.

Speaking after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.”

September 11, 2001, became another such date.

But it would appear that even infamy has a shelf life—and perhaps a surprisingly short one.

My eight-year-old son has very little understanding of September 11. We have taken him to the new World Trade Center and to the powerful memorial built within the footprints of the Twin Towers. But he cannot truly understand how that moment changed our world.

He didn’t live in the “before.”

His entire young life has been lived in the “after.”

For him—and for the nearly 89 million Americans under the age of 25—the “after” is simply normal.

If you have children under 25, ask them whether they know why we take off our shoes at airport security. Ask them why we cannot bring large containers of liquid through the checkpoint. Ask whether they know that neither the Transportation Security Administration nor the Department of Homeland Security existed before September 11.

The deepest change, however, was psychological.

Security stopped being something that happened quietly in the background. It became a ritual in which everyone was expected to participate.

Shoes in a plastic bin. Liquids in a clear bag. Locked doors. Concrete barriers. Identification checks. Constant watchfulness.

All of it became ordinary.

And yet, for those of us who remember the world before September 11, it still feels anything but normal.

As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, I would never want to reduce a tragedy like 9/11 to a “moral lesson” for humanity. But there were lessons we needed to learn.

In the weeks after the attacks, we kept asking the same question:

How did this happen?

That question led many Americans to want to learn more. A deep public conversation emerged. We wanted to understand what could drive religious extremists to commit such horrific acts. Where did this ideology come from? What was the relationship between Islam and Islamist extremism? How could we distinguish a world religion practiced by more than a billion people from a political ideology that claimed to act in its name?

Within days of September 11, Americans did something remarkable:

They bought Qur’ans.

Bookstores struggled to keep them on the shelves—not because Americans were suddenly embracing Islam, but because many believed that before judging the faith of more than a billion people, they ought to understand it.

But all that learning did not stem the tide of hate.

Following September 11, reported anti-Muslim hate crimes exploded—from just 28 incidents in 2000 to 481 in 2001. That was an increase of more than 1,600 percent.

The word “Islamophobia”—although not a new term—entered the American lexicon.

As we watched anti-Muslim hatred tear at the fabric of American society, workplaces, schools, public institutions, and houses of worship doubled down on education. We reinforced an essential moral principle: Muslims could not be held collectively responsible for crimes committed by extremists claiming to represent their religion.

We taught that a distinction must be made between a faith tradition and violence committed in its name.

That lesson was right.

It remains right.

And we must never surrender it.

But something else was happening at the same time—another form of religious hatred that was reported even more frequently.

Can you guess what it was?

In 2001, the FBI recorded 481 anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents. That number was horrifying.

That same year, it recorded 1,043 anti-Jewish incidents.

And this was not a momentary aberration.

In 2010, the FBI recorded 160 anti-Muslim incidents and 887 anti-Jewish incidents.

In 2016, anti-Muslim incidents reached their second-highest level since September 11: 307. That same year, the FBI recorded 684 anti-Jewish incidents.

Then came 2023.

The FBI recorded 236 anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents that year—a deeply troubling increase of about 49 percent over 2022.

But the number of anti-Jewish incidents rose from approximately 1,122 to 1,832.

That is an increase of 63 percent in a single year.

In 2024, the number climbed still further, reaching 1,938—the highest total the FBI had ever recorded.

The figure declined to 1,528 in 2025, but that was still the third-highest number on record. Jews—roughly two percent of the American population—were the targets of nearly two-thirds of all religiously motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI that year.

We hear statistics like these, and perhaps the numbers simply wash over us.

But when I place them beside one another—when I see them in black and white—I find them staggering.

I am particularly disturbed by what happened in 2023.

On October 7, Hamas perpetrated one of the most horrific attacks against the Jewish people in modern history—another date that will live in infamy.

In the year of that massacre, anti-Muslim hate crimes also rose, and we must not minimize that.

But anti-Jewish hate crimes rose even more sharply—by a staggering 63 percent.

Jews were massacred in Israel.

And somehow, because of it, Jews were targeted in America.

This was not merely an American phenomenon.

According to a 2024 review by the World Zionist Organization, reported antisemitic incidents worldwide were 340 percent higher in 2024 than they had been in 2022.

By 2025, 20 Jews had been murdered in antisemitic attacks—the highest annual death toll in more than three decades.

October 7 did not produce a worldwide outpouring of protection for the Jewish people.

Across much of the world, it produced an outpouring of hatred toward us.

And now, like Americans after September 11, we—the global Jewish community—find ourselves asking:

How did this happen?

I don’t have all the answers. But I do have a theory:

Our empathy is vast, but our historical memory is short.

For the 89 million young Americans born after September 11, the absence of lived experience has pushed one of the most profound terrorist attacks in American—and world—history further into the past.

They may know that it happened.

But they do not necessarily know it in their bones.

We spent the years after September 11 teaching our children an essential truth:

Islam is not Islamism.

Muslims are not terrorists.

Our neighbors must never be held responsible for crimes committed in the name of their faith.

That lesson was right. It remains right. And we must never surrender it.

But perhaps we failed to teach the other truth with equal clarity:

Islamism is real.

It is not a synonym for Islam. It is not an invention designed to discredit Muslims. It is a political ideology—expressed differently by al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and the Iranian regime—that seeks political power through religious absolutism and often sanctifies violence against civilians.

A generation learned to recognize prejudice against Muslims.

I fear that it was not always taught to recognize the zealots who exploit Muslim faith, Palestinian suffering, and Western guilt in pursuit of profoundly illiberal ends.

Without the first lesson, we would have become morally corrupt.

But without the second, we have left a generation morally unprepared.

Unprepared to recognize the difference between compassion for Palestinians and apologetics for Hamas.

Unprepared to distinguish resistance to oppression from the glorification of murder.

Unprepared to understand that a movement can speak the language of justice while pursuing goals that are fundamentally unjust.

So where do we go from here?

What is the antidote?

Jewish ritual and tradition—as they so often do—can show us the way.

Memory is powerful in Judaism.

When someone dies, we do not simply say, “Rest in peace.” We say, zichrono livracha, zichronah livracha, or zichronam livracha:

May his memory be a blessing.

May her memory be a blessing.

May their memory be a blessing.

Memory is not passive. It is not merely the preservation of facts. Memory places an obligation upon the living.

At Passover, we do not simply tell our children that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt. We are commanded to see ourselves as though each one of us personally went out from Egypt.

We reenact. We retell. We reflect. We repeat.

And we focus, first and foremost, on the education of our young.

Judaism is extraordinary.

We are a small but thriving civilization that has endured for more than 3,000 years. We have outlived empires that were determined to destroy us: the pharaohs, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans. Their empires are ancient history.

We are still here.

But Judaism did not survive for thousands of years merely because other people failed to destroy us.

It survived because it gave us—and offered the world—something worth preserving:

A day of rest in a world that worshipped labor.

Human dignity in a world ruled by despots.

The rule of law rather than merely the rule of rulers.

Prophets willing to speak truth to power.

Charity understood as an act of justice.

Argument for the sake of heaven.

And the audacious conviction that every human being is created in the divine image—and that one human life contains an entire world.

We are not simply a people who survived history.

We are a people committed to making history, teaching history, learning history, and preserving history.

In her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, Dara Horn examines antisemitism and the ways in which we might begin to counter it.

Rather than speaking of antisemitism only as racism, bigotry, bias, or even conspiracy theory, she describes it as something more fundamental:

A lie.

A manufactured story used to divert people’s attention whenever those in power find it politically or financially expedient.

Versions of that lie have been used by pharaohs, dictators, despots, Führers, muftis, and ayatollahs. Whenever a society is ailing, whenever a leader is failing, whenever someone needs the public to look the other way, the Jew is summoned to take the blame.

The details of the accusation change.

The purpose does not.

And it is a lie.

There is only one way to counter a lie that old and that persistent:

We must teach our children the truth.

We must teach them history—not as a collection of distant facts, but as a living inheritance.

They must feel immersed in it. They must see themselves as part of it. They must understand that they are responsible for carrying it forward.

September 11 cannot be merely something terrible that happened long before they were born.

October 7 cannot become merely something terrible that happened long before their children were born.

Our children need to understand the world that existed before—and the world that came after.

They need to inherit our empathy.

But they also need to inherit our memory.

Because empathy without memory can be manipulated.

Memory without empathy can become cruelty.

We need both.

If we want our children to build a better future, we must give them the compassion to care about every human life—and the historical memory to recognize those who would exploit that compassion in order to destroy life.

Empathy needs historical memory.

And passing on that historical memory is now our responsibility.

And so, as we enter this new year of 5787, may we refuse the false binary between compassion and clarity.

May we see the humanity of the stranger without closing our eyes to those who exploit suffering, faith, and fear.

May we protect our Muslim and Palestinian neighbors from hatred and dehumanization, while defending the Jewish people from those who excuse or sanctify violence against us.

May we teach our children not only what happened, but why it matters. May we give them more than facts and dates. May we give them a memory strong enough to recognize an ancient lie—even when it appears cloaked in social justice.

Our Machzor begs God to “Zochreinu l’chayim—remember us for life.”

May we be remembered for life by remembering what makes life sacred.

May our empathy be strengthened by memory, our memory be guided by empathy, and both be transformed into courage.

And may we enter 5787 not merely as a people who have survived history, but as a people prepared—once again—to shape it.

Shanah tovah.