The repeated use of Jewish trauma as a rhetorical shortcut should, by now, give us pause. Lots of people wiser, braver and blunter than I have pointed out that this is offensive. I’m going to tell you … it’s not even working.

The move is familiar. If you want to mark someone as uniquely evil, you call them a Nazi. If you want to shock others into moral urgency, you ask: What would you have done if the Gestapo were at your neighbor’s door? The assumption beneath these comparisons is straightforward: You don’t care enough because you don’t really understand how bad this is. If you did, you’d respond the way people responded to the Holocaust.

Sometimes there’s bitterness, and the resentment towards Jews is plain. But this rhetoric is just as often earnest and based on the belief that Americans all agree on this one thing: the Holocaust (or Shoah, Hebrew for catastrophe) was very bad, and we, as a nation in this time and place, are morally superior to both the Nazis and those who supposedly stood by and let it happen.

But it’s not working. No unity is formed on the back of this rhetoric; no moral clarity emerges in a mass awakening. So why isn’t superlative rhetorical strategy stopping people in their tracks?

Because the premise is false: Americans never actually agreed that the underlying hatred that produced the Shoah was wrong. We agreed, retroactively, that the methods went too far — but not that the animating logic itself was intolerable.

You may viscerally react to that statement, as it cuts against the American version of events we’ve all held close to our hearts. That version is comforting. It allows Americans to see ourselves as heroes, as liberators who arrived in time, bending the moral arc of history with might and a unified, righteous will. It is especially important as a mythology for immigrants, including American Jews raised to practice gratitude and to search relentlessly for goodness. We want to believe we made it. After all, we have tried so hard.

But it is a fantasy. And conjuring it will not unlock moral action today.

Why do Americans reach so reflexively for Holocaust comparisons, rather than invoking our own unfinished histories: Indigenous land theft, chattel African enslavement, Jim Crow, Japanese internment? I have yet to hear people even compare January 6th with the horrors unfolding in Minneapolis. We do not treat those atrocities as settled or sealed. We recognize, however unevenly, that their legacies endure, and we are very aware that, as a nation, we don’t entirely agree on these things as wholly “who we are” or “not who we are.” The Shoah, by contrast, has been mythologized as resolved. Institutional antisemitism, we tell ourselves, died when Germany was defeated. Cue Springtime for Hitler…

The uglier truth is this: the world did not suddenly come to embrace Jews after centuries of exploiting, murdering, and chasing us around the globe. That belief itself rests on avoidance — of accountability, of complicity — and on the continued usefulness of antisemitism as a social tool. Believing hatred disappears when the people you hate disappear is not a moral insight; it is the premise of genocide.

The Shoah did not erupt because one deranged, mustachioed man seized power while everyone else stood helplessly by. Nor were Americans naïve. That framing makes the crime feel anomalous … horrifying, yes, but safely sealed in the past and culturally foreign. It reassures us that such evil requires extraordinary villains rather than a deeply rooted, widely shared, and socially functional hatred.

What is harder to face is what was obvious at the time: much of the world agreed there was a “Jewish problem.” Antisemitism — formerly called Judenhass, hatred of Jews — has never been a personal quirk. It has long functioned as a durable social mechanism, bolstered by intelligentsia, offering societies a way to displace blame and moralize their own failures.

By the time the Nazis took power, this logic was not only entrenched, but in vogue again across Europe and beyond. A hatred that is always simmering at the surface, antisemitism as ideology boils over into whole, open movements every so many years in the midst of social unrest. In Germany, Jews made up less than one percent of the population, yet were widely blamed for defeat in World War I. By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of citizenship. The world responded not with outrage but with agreement. Many countries followed suit, passing similar laws against Jews.

In 1938, the Evian Conference convened to address what was openly called the “Jewish refugee problem.” (Surely you are aware of the term “Final Solution”… ever ask yourself, solution to what?) Thirty-two countries attended. The U.S. did not even send a senior official, so unserious were they about doing anything more than a little diplomacy with the Nazis, who at the time, wanted the Jews to be someone else’s problem (industrialized murder was not yet on the table). Only the Dominican Republic offered to accept a small number of Jews, largely supported by Jewish organizations themselves. Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine. The message to the Reich was unmistakable: the world agrees. 

Months later came Kristallnacht. The machinery of mass murder followed.

In 1939, 937 Jewish refugees boarded the MS St. Louis believing they had secured safe passage out of Germany. They were turned away by Cuba, the United States, Canada, and multiple Latin American countries. The ship returned to Europe. Many of its passengers perished in concentration camps.

The United States entered World War II in 1941 after the Pearl Harbor attack, and in response to fears of Japanese imperialism — not in response to genocide. In 1942, the New York Times ran only one front-page story about the ongoing mass murder of Jews, hedging its claims as unverified. The Farhud massacre of Jews took place in Iraq that same year as Nazi influence spread to the region. By the time Allied forces reached the camps in 1945 (pursuing military victory, not a primary mission of rescue) nearly forty percent of the world’s Jewish population had already been killed.

Liberation did not roundly bring care. Survivors were placed in displaced-persons camps, often alongside and even under guard by former Nazis, sometimes housed in the very concentration camps they had survived. An American envoy, Earl Harrison, reported that Jews were being treated “as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.” General Patton, who ran the DP camps, wrote, “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” These were not fringe views — 95% of Americans opposed expanded immigration after the war.

President Truman eventually acted, pushing for expanded immigration and recognizing Israel, against overwhelming public opposition including from within his own state department. This was at least partly a political calculation. To make conquered peoples across the globe believe in American dominance and ensure that the conquered remained conquered, the American president would have to visibly offer a counter approach to “the Jewish problem,” that, for the world over, still had not been resolved. 

Antisemitism did not end with the Shoah any more than anti-Black racism ended with emancipation. Pogroms have continued. Scapegoating has endured. This is the legacy invoked when Holocaust comparisons are deployed today. 

So where does that leave the reader still searching for a moral lever?

First, understand this: when you ask whether people are giving a crisis “the same weight as the Holocaust,” they probably already are, just not in the way you think. Overreach by police, colonial violence, systematic violence towards non-white Americans, inconsistent authoritarian control — none of these are new on our shores. If you are afraid to name their proximal, context-specific roots directly, ask yourself whose comfort you are protecting (and why does bringing the Jews into it provide some of that comfort). Antisemitism has always served this function: a way to avoid facing one’s own intractable problems by projecting them onto a tiny minority, wrapped in myth.

Recent events do not need Jewish trauma as proof of their seriousness. Invoking the Holocaust doesn’t make people examine their values, but it does reveal the dark truth: our society can live with hate. Collectively, historically, we’ve only proved that we can’t live with the disruption of power. When violence shocks us, the real question is not, Whose violence is this? but What earlier version of this did we already agree to? Instead of, This is not who we are, we must try, Is this who we want to continue to be? And, what does it take to do things truly differently?

I am tempted to end with lessons, with hope. Whenever any Jewish person speaks of the Shoah that is where we must go: there was Jewish heroism and extraordinary allies, and those stories matter. But so do the legacies of resilience held by the communities at the center of today’s crises. If we want to respond meaningfully, we must stop borrowing each other’s trauma for rhetorical force and start listening to those who have been living inside the particular crisis.

That is what I am trying to do now. Learn. Listen. Exactly as my own people’s history has taught me to do.