Friday, March 7, 2025 | 2 a.m.
A line of people wound toward the doors of UNLV’s Greenspun Hall on Wednesday night, clutching in their hands copies of “Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” the thick novel of award-winning journalist Yardena Schwartz.
Schwartz writes about the almost century-old massacre of Jewish people in Hebron that she said started the conflict between Israeli and Arab communities.
She spoke to a crowd — a mix of young and old, students and community members — about the importance of informing the public about Jewish history and combating antisemitism.
“Universities, colleges and students are on the frontlines of what has increasingly become a war of information, and that war is increasingly being fought with disinformation, and so much propaganda, misinformation and disinformation is just flooding students’ social media feeds,” Schwartz told the Sun. “That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make sure that when I speak about my book, it’s at as many college campuses as I can possibly reach, so that I can really help students have the kind of information and historical context they need to kind of navigate this world of disinformation.”
Schwartz began writing “Ghosts of a Holy War” in 2019, traveling to Hebron in the West Bank to interview Israeli and Palestinian residents about the 1929 Hebron massacre, where 67 Jewish people were murdered in attacks by a group of Muslim men.
Her work began in Memphis, Tenn., with the family of David Shainberg, a Jewish American who had left letters, photographs and a diary for his family documenting his experiences in the British Mandate Palestine during 1928, when he moved there to study. He was later killed.
Gregory Brown, a professor of history at UNLV, told members of the audience that he had read Schwartz’s book last fall and it “puts crucial elements of both the present and recent past” in context.
Though the history department consistently tries to expose students to specific parts of the past they may not learn in normal curriculum, Brown said hosting Schwartz was specifically to help people gain an understanding of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians “without adopting the narrative of an activist group.”
He added in his opening remarks that he thought Schwartz conducted “thorough research” into the topic through interviews, “contextual understanding” and various source material.
“I thought this book did that so, so beautifully,” Brown said. “(Schwartz) was very interested to come and speak to us precisely because it is a university; precisely because it is a place where people would want to hear about this book in the context of learning about a broader series of questions, and so that’s something that I’m really, really proud of (that) we’re able to do.”
Schwartz said misinformation became “rampant” online after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in southern Israel that left about 1,200 Isrealis dead and resulted in 251 others being taken as hostages.
In the 16 months since, news outlet Al Jazeera said Israel’s military has killed at least 46,707 people in Gaza — including 18,000 children — and wounded over 100,000 people. Many analysts believe the actual toll is much higher.
Because of the ongoing conflict, Schwartz worried that there may never be peace between Palestinians and Israelis in her lifetime, but she said learning about the history between them was important in combating hatred and discrimination.
It’s why coming to UNLV was important to her.
In April 2024, the Anti-Defamation League released its annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents and found that antisemitism rose significantly in 2023 in the United States.
The Anti-Defamation League recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents across the country, a 140% increase from the 3,698 incidents recorded the prior year — making it the highest number on record since the organization began tracking these events in 1979.
A “dramatic increase in incidents” occurred following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in Israel, but even excluding the 5,204 events tabulated from that day to the end of the year, record-breaking monthly increases of antisemitism were reported during February, March, April, May and September of 2023.
A survey commissioned by the Nevada Governor’s Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust revealed in 2024 that Holocaust denial and distortion was increasing in Nevada, and young adults were especially prone to possessing inaccurate knowledge of the WWII genocide.
Of the 1,400 survey-takers, 54% of respondents could not correctly define antisemitism as prejudice against Jewish people and 14% said they know someone who doesn’t think the Holocaust happened or attempt to minimize its casualties.
About 8% believed the number of Jews killed in the Nazi atrocity has been “greatly exaggerated” — a form of Holocaust distortion that also includes blaming Jews, minimizing the number of victims or otherwise intentionally obscuring facts regarding the Holocaust.
“Antisemitism is not gone,” Schwartz said. “We’ve been seeing a massive rise in antisemitism and antisemitic attacks, and I think that much of that is a result of this disinformation that I mentioned. I think that the only way we’re going to see a reduction in the antisemitism we’ve witnessed is people being educated in what it means to be Jewish, what Israel means to the Jewish people (and) what Zionism actually is.”