The Holocaust, Israel and Jewish Life Today

The 20th century transformed Jewish life. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews, roughly two-thirds of Europe's Jews, in the Holocaust (Shoah), through mass shootings, ghettos and death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Whole communities and centuries-old cultures, especially Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, were destroyed. Survivors, scholars and religious thinkers struggled with how to remember and respond, and Holocaust memory became central to Jewish identity and to international human rights.

In 1948 the State of Israel was established, a fulfillment of the Zionist movement's goals for many Jews, while the war that followed displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, a history remembered very differently by Israelis and Palestinians. Jews today number roughly 15 to 16 million by recent demographic estimates, most living in Israel and the United States, and range from secular to ultra-Orthodox. Debates about identity, religion and the state continue within Jewish communities.