(RNS) — In his statement about International Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, Vice President JD Vance omitted any mention of Jews. He said on X:
Today we remember the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust, the millions of stories of individual bravery and heroism, and one of the enduring lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history: that while humans create beautiful things and are full of compassion, we’re also capable of unspeakable brutality. And we promise never again to go down the darkest path.
His statement is just one example of how many less-than-friendly actors have distorted the meaning of the Holocaust. Here’s my taxonomy of ways its memory has been distorted:
- Holocaust minimization: “The Holocaust happened, but the Jews have exaggerated the numbers.”
- Holocaust trivialization: “The Holocaust happened, and Jews have used it to play the victim card.”
- Holocaust inversion: “The Holocaust happened, but the genocide [sic] in Gaza is worse.”
- Holocaust universalization, part 1: “The Holocaust happened, but it was not just about the Jews.” (This is where the Vance statement falls.)
- Holocaust universalization, part 2: “The Holocaust happened, but other groups have had huge losses as well.”
- Holocaust denial: “The Holocaust did not happen.”
- And the paradoxical: “The Holocaust did not happen, but I wish that it would happen again.”
Drilling down on the universalization/Vance version, he is still far from alone in making this type of remark. In fact, I have encountered many Jews who rush to universalize the Holocaust. It is as if our own extended family’s pain — the murder of 6 million Jews — was not bad enough for us to endure, as if we are afraid to name our own particular pain. Some have even accused me and other Jews of playing the game of comparative victimization.
Is there any justification for the universalization of the Holocaust?
In one sense, yes. When it came to the concentration camps, Jews shared those wretched, subhuman quarters with Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men, labor leaders, people with disabilities, political dissidents, Slavs, Poles and others.
But that limits the Holocaust only to the concentration camps. For the Jews, the horror began with the Holocaust by bullets, or mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen. That’s because the Nazi obsession was to hunt down every Jew — man, woman and child — everywhere. Nowhere in Europe did Jews find safety simply by staying put. No other group faced that total, relentless, continent-wide pursuit. It was about destroying the entire Jewish people and the Jewish religion. How else does one account for the savage glee with which Nazis desecrated Torah scrolls and other sacred objects?
Knowing that, how should we think about those other groups who suffered?
In Dante’s “Inferno,” he described many circles of hell. In Hitler’s inferno, the Jews were in the innermost circle. But there were outer circles, and you cannot tell the story of World War II without including them.
When you walk into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the first things that you will see is an exhibit on the killings of people with physical and mental disabilities. The Nazis labeled them “life unworthy of life.” The Nazis perfected the grim science of execution by carbon monoxide on them. An estimated 250,000 peo