On November 1, 1938, the Hamburger Anzeiger newspaper ran a picture of a man replacing a Hamburg street sign reading “Hallerstrasse” with one that read “Ostmarkstrasse.”
Hallerstrasse was named after Nicolaus Ferdinand Haller, the Jewish-born mayor of Hamburg (later baptized) in the 1860s. The move to change the name of this street was part of a Nazi campaign to erase Jewish names from the urban landscape.
Renaming streets and plazas was ideological; it was part of a broader Nazi effort to define who belonged and who didn’t. This symbol-cleansing was a precursor of things to come, which is why seemingly minor acts of erasure resonate so deeply with Jews today.
Fast forward 87 years to December 1, 2025. On Monday, the Dublin City Council was initially set to consider a motion to rename a park that, since 1995, has carried the name of one of the city’s famous sons – Israel’s sixth president, Chaim Herzog. One of the proposed new names: Free Palestine Park.
Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, no friend of Israel, stepped into the fray and said in a social media post on Sunday that the move would “without any doubt be seen as antisemitic.”
You think? Why, just because scrubbing public spaces of Jewish names is precisely what the Nazis did?
In the end, the proposal, which had drawn sharp criticism from politicians in Israel and the US, was withdrawn on a technicality, and the vote on the matter was delayed.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who last year closed Israel’s embassy in Ireland because of that country’s stridently anti-Israel positions, said Dublin “has become the capital of antisemitism in the world” and that Ireland’s “antisemitic and anti-Israel obsession is sickening.”
And US Senator Lindsey Graham posted, “When you think it couldn’t get any worse in Ireland regarding animosity toward Israel and the Jewish people, it just did.”
Although the move was pushed off, at least for now, what is disturbing is that it was even being considered and that it likely would have passed had it not drawn international attention and had the Irish not been so skittish about how such a move would affect their economic and diplomatic ties with the US. That relationship, unlike the one with Israel, is one they care deeply about.
A move not against Israel, but against Jewish identity
Removing Herzog’s name from a park with a few tennis courts in Dublin will not affect Israel. The Jewish state can withstand that kind of affront. But what is pernicious about this episode – and similar moves elsewhere (cue New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani) – is the effort to delegitimize something central to the identity of Jews around the world: Israel.
Such a move tells the tiny Irish Jewish community, now numbering just over 2,000 people, that something they hold dear is illegitimate and that any reference to it is repugnant.
There is much more at work here than just a name. In some ways, it’s like banning ritual slaughter, shechita (which, by the way, some European countries have done).
True, shechita is a Torah-ordained commandment, and identifying with the State of Israel is not. But for most Jews, affinity with Israel is as fundamental to their Jewish identity as observing kashrut. Dublin’s city elders wanted – at least until persuaded otherwise – to say that this part of their Jewish identity is unacceptable, that it has no place in their polite society.
And this same dynamic, this same attempt to delegitimize what many Jews hold dear, is playing out elsewhere, in places with far larger Jewish populations, like New York.
Last month, a protest was organized in front of a prominent New York synagogue because Nefesh B’Nefesh was holding an aliyah fair. Such a fair, the protesters screamed with slogans such as “Death to the IDF” and “Globalize the intifada,” was illegitimate.
Mayor-elect Mamdani, through a spokesperson, remarked that although he disagreed with some of the protesters’ language, sacred spaces should not be used “to promote activities in violation of international law.”
In other words, the protesters had a point.
Mamdani, whose anti-Israel positions are well known, has made clear that he does not intend to march in the city’s annual Israel Parade to mark the Jewish state’s Independence Day.
So what, some might ask. Who needs him to march? Why does it matter?
It matters because by refusing to attend, Mamdani is signaling that the parade, which for many New Yorkers is a celebration of their Jewish identity, is wrong and illegitimate, and that identifying with Israel is likewise wrong and illegitimate.
During an anti-Israel demonstration in New York on May 11, 2021, Mamdani said with derision that “we have elected officials” who “show up to [the] Israel Day Parade, and they say, ‘We stand in solidarity.’”
Solidarity with Israel is something that the vast majority of Diaspora Jews feel. But what the delegitimization campaigns, whether in Dublin or Manhattan, are trying to do is to shame Jews out of a central pillar of their identity, to signal to them that this part of their identity is unacceptable.
The saga over the park in Dublin is not a trivial matter. It is about the right of Jews to be fully themselves in the societies they helped build. For many Jews, affinity with Israel is woven into their identity. To attack that connection, to label it illegitimate, is to say a core part of their identity is illegitimate.
Yes, the renaming effort in Dublin has been postponed, at least for now. But the broader campaign will reappear in other forms, in Dublin and in other cities, and under other pretexts. And each time it does, it must be met with the same unapologetic clarity: Delegitimizing Israel is delegitimizing an indispensable part of most Jews’ identity. That is a line that cannot be crossed, and any attempt to cross it will be met with fierce resistance.