Antisemitism in the Oval Office

A confrontation seen with a historian’s eye

There are many ways to analyse the Donald Trump / JD Vance ignorant thuggish assault on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House’s Oval Office on Friday February 28 2025.

The historian Timothy Snyder carefully shows us that the presidential rapist from New York orchestrated an antisemitic assault

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Antisemitism in the Oval Office

The attempt to humiliate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi in the Oval Office a week ago was an American strategic collapse. It heralded a new constellation of disorderly powers, obsessed with resources, seizing what they can. Inside that new disaster is something old and familiar that we might prefer not to see: antisemitism. The encounter in the White House was antisemitic.

I am historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. He talked to me about antisemitism for decades, from the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union until his death in 2018. The way that I reacted to the scene in the Oval Office, and how I have pondered and considered it since, have to do with my research, but also with him.

Jerzy survived the Holocaust because his mother Wanda, a literary translator, refused to go with her children to the Warsaw ghetto. Thanks to her courage and ingenuity, and to others who helped her, he and his brother survived. Jerzy’s father was murdered, like more than three million other Jews in Poland. The family history emerged bit by bit, as we became friends, as some of his own colleagues wrote memoirs of childhood survival, as my own interests turned towards the war. During my research, I found a recollection, by his mother, of their time in hiding in Warsaw. It turned out that he had helped her to write it.