Some Lives Count More Than Others: The Nova Exhibition in Toronto
Sid Shniad
Some Lives Count More Than Others: The Nova Exhibition in Toronto
Independent Jewish Voices – Toronto & York Region (IJV–TO & YR), stands firmly opposed to the Nova Exhibition
(April 23 – June 8, 2025) currently being shown in Toronto. Cynically hijacking the emotional needs for grieving and
memorializing loved ones, this show weaponizes trauma, distorts historical context, and manipulates public sentiment
towards harmful political ends.
We recognize that many Israeli Jews are experiencing pain over the loss of loved ones at the Nova music festival. However,
recreating that traumatic environment — simulating burned cars, bloodstained tents, and charred earth — is not an
innocent endeavor, nor is it a path to collective healing. The Nova Exhibition is not a space for authentic mourning.
Rather, it is a calculated tool of emotional manipulation, intended to induce a sense of collective victimhood in viewers
— a victimhood that can then be instrumentalized to justify the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The exhibit also reinforces the idea that all of this began on October 7, 2023, editing out the 77-year history of ongoing Nakba.
As Naomi Klein powerfully argues in her Guardian article1, this exhibit is not about honest remembrance; it is about
building a political case. Klein notes that the Nova Exhibition deliberately avoids any mention of the broader context in
Gaza: the 17-year total blockade that made life barely livable before October 7th, and the genocidal assault on Gaza that
has followed. It is impossible to isolate October 7th from these realities without committing a profound act of distortion.
The exhibit manipulates viewers with a selective experience of solely Israeli trauma while keeping them carefully shielded
from the horrors inflicted on Palestinians — horrors that continue daily. This unprincipled presentation of suffering
fosters a dangerous moral framework: one in which some deaths are deemed worthy of public grief and artistic representation,
while others — tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths — are not even worthy of acknowledgement and consideration.
This is not the work of memory; it is the work of erasure.
By elevating Israeli victimhood, the Nova Exhibition furthers a narrative that seeks to depoliticize Israeli violence, to remove
it from the context of occupation, siege, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It instrumentalizes raw emotion — anger,
fear, heartbreak — to foreclose political discussion rather than open it. It discourages the difficult but essential conversations
that true healing demands.
As anti-Zionist Jews who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people — we reject the manufacturing of Jewish trauma
that is then used in the service of expanding the colonization of Palestinian lands and furthering the project of Jewish supremacy.
We reject the silencing of Palestinian suffering in favor of spectacles of selective mourning.
We reject the manipulation of grief to justify the mass annihilation of the Palestinian people by bombing, starvation and deliberate
destruction of medical facilities and infrastructure.
We urge all people of conscience to boycott the Nova Exhibition. In this context, we need to ask whose pain is being centered,
whose pain is being ignored, and whose political interests are being served.
Art should never be used to justify crimes against humanity. Grief work has never required simulating horrors. We are determined
not to let this cheap sensationalism distract us from actively opposing the relentless genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Independent Jewish Voices – Toronto & York Region, 15 May 2025
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/05/israel-gaza-october-7-memorials