The most common betrayal of the Holocaust is not denial. It is abstraction.
The Shoah is increasingly spoken of as a tragedy that befell “people,” as a warning about intolerance, or as an example of what happens when societies lose their moral bearings. These statements are not false, exactly. They are incomplete in a way that alters the meaning of the event itself.
The Holocaust was not a general collapse into evil.
It was a specific project, aimed at a specific people, for a specific reason. To universalize it is not to expand its moral reach, but to empty it of its actual meaning. And today, more than at any time in our lives, the loss of meaning is something to be acutely aware of.
This misunderstanding now appears even in language meant to honor the murdered. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, prominent public figures, including Vice President J.D. Vance, referred to “six million people” killed, without naming Jews. His words may have been sincere, but sincerity does not absolve the loss of meaning.
When the Jewish people are removed from language describing the destruction of nearly half their entire population, something essential is lost. The Shoah becomes a parable rather than a critical, specific event in history. What is lost is not merely accuracy. It is truth.
Hitler (may his name be erased) himself was explicit about what the war was for. In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, he declared that if war came, its result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” This was not metaphor. It was demonic prophecy, a warped but deeply held theology, the articulation of a destiny he believed necessary to redeem the world.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler returned obsessively to the idea that Jews represented a moral corruption of nature itself. He described conscience, compassion, and restraint not as virtues but as poisons. “By defending myself against the Jew,” he wrote, “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” The line is chilling for its clarity: the Jew was more than a political enemy, more than a fifth column. The Jewish people and its Torah were a moral claim that had to be erased.
Again and again, Hitler framed Jews as the carriers of an idea that threatened his ability to dominate: that law stands above rulers, that truth exists outside power, that the weak have moral standing, that the wise use of restraint is strength. These were the very ideas Nazism sought to destroy. The murder of Jews was therefore not incidental to the Nazi project. It was its metaphysical center.
This is why the Nazis’ administrative language followed so seamlessly. At Wannsee, senior officials gathered to discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Not the “people problem.” Not the “humanitarian crisis.” The Jewish Question. The words mattered because the idea mattered. What was being eliminated was not only a population, but a conscience.
When the Shoah is universalized, this core disappears. The Holocaust becomes another lesson about generic human cruelty. And once that happens, history becomes malleable. It can be repurposed, borrowed, or deployed without fidelity to its origin or its broader significance. There is nothing before or after the Shoah that explains it or contains it. This is a profoundly moral issue, not simply a linguistic one.
Universalization often presents itself as generosity. It sounds inclusive. But it can also become a way of avoiding the discomfort of specificity. Particular truths are demanding. They require memory. They require naming. They demand the acceptance that not all suffering is interchangeable. And when universality is misapplied, it becomes a solvent. It dissolves distinctions. It flattens meaning. It allows us to speak in sweeping ethical gestures while avoiding truth itself.
In music, no one confuses accuracy with narrowness. An A-flat is not an A. B minor is not F major. Particularity is what allows harmony to exist at all.
The bitter consequence for the Jews, and for the world as a whole, is that the very thing the Shoah warns against—the erosion of moral limits—reappears in another form. Not only through hatred, but through abstraction. Not only through cruelty, but through intellectual laziness, or worse, strategic erasure. The end is the same: truth becomes negotiable, and the memory of six million murdered Jews is turned into a commodity.
As Dara Horn writes in People Love Dead Jews, “Holocaust memory has been shaped to tell a story that does not require the presence of Jews.” This is the final consequence of abstraction: memory without people, history without obligation, truth without cost.
To remember the Shoah is not to pound it into a cluster of words that can be used to describe every injustice, but to preserve the weight and meaning of its singularity. And in doing so, to protect that meaning from being made weightless, convenient, and ultimately disposable.
Peter Himmelman
