Katherine Wela Bogen says college changed how she saw Israel. She says it also forced her to question the story she had learned at home.
That is a hard sentence to sit with.
Bogen is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. In a TikTok video, she described how college coursework and historical images led her to “unlearn Zionism.” She said the material challenged what she had been taught about Israel, Palestinians, and the history of the region.
Her words were blunt: “I’ve been propagandized much of my life,” Bogen said.
The claim is hers. It is not proved by the article about her video. No outside evidence is given for her account of childhood education. No response from a school, family member, or opposing source is included.
That matters.
The story is not that a college class magically reveals the truth. It is that one person says her beliefs changed after she gained access to books, images, and courses that offered a different account of the past.
That can happen. Education should make room for it.
Bogen said she had to leave her town, her Chabad, and her family system to find textbooks that showed a Palestinian city in 1910. She said those images did not fit the history she had learned before college. She also described courses in political science and history that covered Middle East politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinian indigeneity, and colonialism.
The details are powerful because they are simple. A picture. A class. A new question.
Then comes the catch.
A change in belief does not prove that every earlier belief was propaganda. It also does not prove that every new belief is complete or correct. A university can widen a person’s view. It can also present its own limits, values, and blind spots.
That is not an attack on college. It is the basic warning that should follow any major shift in belief.
The word “propagandized” carries a heavy charge. It suggests deliberate control. Bogen uses it to describe her own experience, but the available report does not establish who controlled what she learned, how that process worked, or whether it was planned.
Those questions are not small. The history of Israel and Palestine is filled with real suffering, competing claims, and political language that can erase people. It is also tied to the Holocaust, Jewish safety, Palestinian displacement, and the actions of states and armed groups. Any account that makes one part disappear is too thin for the subject.
Still, I understand why Bogen’s story may strike people so hard. Her family history gave Israel a personal meaning before she reached college. The Holocaust survivor in her family was part of that inheritance. When a later education challenges the political story connected to that history, the change can feel like a break with more than an idea.
It can feel like a break with home.
That is where the story becomes larger than one TikTok video. People often speak of education as if it adds facts to an empty mind. In real life, it can press against family memory, religious teaching, national identity, and moral duty. Sometimes the result is growth. Sometimes it is anger. Often it is both.
Bogen says college gave her tools to question what she knew. Good. But tools do not use themselves. Students still need time, care, and honest teaching. They need to test sources. They need to hear how different groups describe the same event. They need to know when a statement is documented, when it is an argument, and when it is a personal memory.
That standard should apply to Bogen’s account too.
Where Is The Buzz reported her claims, and Yahoo carried the story. The available reporting centers on her video. It does not provide a full record of her education, the textbooks she used, or the views she held before and after college. It does not offer a counter-narrative from people who would describe the history differently.
So I would not treat this as a final verdict on Israel, Zionism, college, or Jewish education.
I would treat it as a warning about inherited certainty.
A person can grow up hearing one story and later find another. That discovery can be freeing. It can also leave a person unsure which parts of the old story were false, which parts were incomplete, and which parts still matter.
That uncertainty deserves room. So does the pain behind it.
The most responsible response is not to cheer a conversion or reject it on sight. It is to ask what was taught, what was left out, and what evidence changed the person’s mind. Then ask the same questions of the new account.
Bogen says she learned this in college. The deeper lesson is less settled: education can open a door, but walking through it does not end the work of checking where it leads.