Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust and Genocide studies, wrote in the New York Times about the evolving nature of Israel’s war in Gaza, concluding that ‘genocide’ is an accurate way to describe it. His argument was sophisticated, and his credibility warrants serious consideration.

Bartov’s claim reaches beyond Israel and Gaza—it touches on the larger struggle over who gets to define moral truth in the aftermath of catastrophe. In doing so, he exposes how easily debates about genocide and antisemitism become entangled, and how fraught that entanglement has become, even for a genocide scholar such as himself. 

He explains that “discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies,” to which I must largely agree. The tendency to decry any statement that is hard to stomach or politically dislikable, as ‘antisemitic,’ takes away from the real antisemitism that is very much on the rise around the world. And, stifling the scholarly debate on the issue of genocide is not a good practice. Someone’s accusation of genocide may be legitimate and well-argued, while another’s can be virulently antisemitic and unfair. 

In this case, Bartov writes a thorough, reasonably fair, and emotional argument as to why he reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people. He gives credence to potential dissent, acknowledging the overwhelming tendency to employ the term ‘genocide’ more to express “outrage than to identify a particular crime.” 

Despite this tendency, Bartov manages to present a compelling argument, aligning himself with the growing number of genocide scholars who contend that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. 

He not only proves his point, but also illustrates how the erosion of critical education will unfold and what that deterioration means for our society’s moral compass.

Bartov writes, “What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner as we did before…”

If he stopped there, I’d certainly agree. Every lesson on the Holocaust could easily devolve into an anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist tirade about the destruction of Gaza. Israel’s own history and complexities would become inseparable from the Holocaust, reducing both subjects to mere political weapons rather than serious areas of study. Instead of understanding the Holocaust as a singular human catastrophe or Israel as a modern nation grappling with its identity and policies, students would be encouraged to view them through a distorted moral equivalence. 

This is where I thought Bartov was headed—with a warning about the danger of allowing narratives of Jewish suffering to be twisted into accusations of Jewish cruelty. I can already see that dynamic taking shape, with people asking, “How could a people so tortured and oppressed turn around and do it to others?” It’s an anxiety that weighs on me when I think about the reputation Israel has acquired, and how that reputation risks eroding empathy for Jews everywhere.

Except, he continues. “Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance of the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II – as… an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, in finding its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole.” 

I take issue with this on two levels. 

One can claim that the State of Israel and the IDF frequently invoke Holocaust rhetoric to justify their military actions against Palestinians, and that it stains our collective memory with even more bloodshed. However, the State’s unfortunate use of a very personal trauma does not actually explain why the study of the Holocaust is in jeopardy. Bartov ignores the growing reality of holocaust denial, holocaust inversion, and downright apathy to Jewish suffering. These trends are not the result of Israel’s actions, but of a broader moral decay in how the world confronts atrocity and memory. 

Indifference to Jewish suffering isn’t new; in fact, Europeans were largely silent even in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. To claim that this indifference stemmed from the “ethnic ghetto” of Yiddish-language survivor testimonial projects not only misrepresents history but also insults those who fought to preserve the truth of what they endured. The so-called “failure” of Holocaust survivors—to inspire lasting empathy and universal vigilance against hatred—was never theirs to bear, but humanity’s.

This brings me to my second objection to Bartov’s statement, which could only be explained with the insights of Dara Horn, a novelist, essayist, and expert on Jewish and Yiddish literature. 

The very notion that the Holocaust exists as a symbol of “universal justice” or as a “lesson and warning for humanity” is deeply flawed. It is not only historically inaccurate but also dangerously misleading. To universalize the Holocaust is to diminish the specific experiences of its victims and to adopt an approach that is both ineffective and irresponsible in the fight against antisemitism. We should stop pretending the Holocaust could’ve happened to anybody when it happened to 6 million Jews. 

Dara Horn writes, reflecting on the year after October 7, 2023, that “the Holocaust is mainly of interest when it’s extracted from Jewish history, used to teach a lesson about the humanity we all share.” In much of American Holocaust education, this is exactly how it’s treated: the lessons matter most when we can feel good about ourselves for not being like Hitler. 

This approach implies that Hitler hated Jews only because he hated “others,” and society’s duty is simply to make sure nobody else suffers hatred. As Horn observes, instead of teaching students to understand antisemitism as a specific, recurring pattern or to grasp who Jews are as a people, the curriculum of Holocaust education suggests that “what happened to Europe’s Jews—who were just like everyone else—actually happened to all of us.” 

Rarely, if ever, are students taught about the horrors that have uniquely targeted Jews. The pogroms of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of roughly one million Jewish Arabs in the mid-20th century, or massacres carried out by Islamic extremists openly calling for the genocide of Jews. Horn points out that if we reduce the Holocaust to a story about basic human decency, we risk creating a self-congratulatory narrative in which antisemitism can quietly thrive. Comparing the Holocaust to genocides against other groups may be useful in some scenarios, but it does nothing to confront the antisemitism rising today. To truly understand the Holocaust—and to recognize antisemitism for the persistent, relentless threat it is—we must see it in the context of the broader history of systematic attempts to erase Jewish civilization. 

The Holocaust’s memory can do nothing as “a lesson and warning for humanity as a whole,” if it has not first been an effective lesson against Jew-hatred. 

Before the Holocaust can find its “rightful place” where Bartov wants to see it, it must first be recognized as yet another incident in the long, brutal, and ongoing history of antisemitic violence across centuries and continents. If people are to learn anything, we have to teach them to recognize antisemitism in all its forms, because it never really disappears; it only mutates. 

When Holocaust education abstracts the tragedy into a generic moral lesson, it ceases to illuminate Jewish suffering and instead provides a framework through which antisemitism can quietly persist under the guise of virtue.

Extremist or ideological actors exploit this moralized version to make false equivalences, such as claiming that Israel’s policies somehow mirror Nazi behavior, or that Gazans are living in concentration camps. The universalizing of the Holocaust has allowed outsiders to reinterpret the genocide for their own purposes, often in ways that serve political, ideological, or moral agendas rather than truth. 

In a deep dive into American Holocaust education, Dara Horn uncovered a troubling pattern. Much of the curriculum represents a “massive appropriation of the Jewish experience,” cloaked in a “screen of happy universalism.” She writes about her visit to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center and the ways instructors presented the use of Nazi propaganda to incite violence against Jews. They explained that the Nazi’s one-party control over the radio wasn’t questioned by the German people of the time, like it would be today. They let students believe that anybody would’ve been able to detect media bias better than a 1930s German, failing to convey any actual instruction on detecting said bias. 

Horn describes an intellectual framework that has long been used to justify the demonization of Jews. Non-Jewish societies, Horn notes, have historically followed a familiar pattern: claiming that Jewish suffering happened to “everyone,” insisting on a universal ideal that all must embrace, and then portraying Jews as failing to conform by refusing to be “just like everyone else.” This pattern stretches back as far as the Seleucid and Roman Empires, which turned the site of the Jewish temple into centers for their own worship while persecuting Jews. For centuries, Christianity claimed to supersede Judaism, presenting itself as the “new Israel” and condemning Jews for rejecting the Church’s vision of universal salvation. Islam adopted a similar stance, asserting that the Quran conveyed the ultimate truth and that the Torah—despite its shared stories and much earlier origins—had been distorted. Though both faiths eventually built their own deep and distinctive traditions, Christian and Islamic societies alike long treated the Jewish refusal to embrace their supposedly universal messages as justification for exclusion, persecution, and at times, mass violence.  

Horn calls this appropriation (and the subsequent rejection of Jewish identity) the “permission structure” for antisemitism: if the world can claim Jewish suffering as its own and then impose moral standards that Jews supposedly reject, it gains license to criticize, attack, or demonize them.

“Hating Jews thus becomes a demonstration of righteousness. The key is to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the shiny new moral reasoning for why the Jews have failed the universal test of humanity,” observes Horn. 

This is how it became cool to hate Jews. This is why so many people think Zionists are Nazis. 

We’ve coopted the trauma of the Holocaust and vowed to prevent it from ever happening again, yet have rarely asked the hard question: how did it ever happen in the first place? How did an “enlightened” Europe become enamored with systematically annihilating the Jewish people? 

These questions draw us closer to learning a suitable lesson from Holocaust education. We have thus far “used the Holocaust to activate moral reasoning” of our students, “to teach them to be good people,” Horn explains. What we haven’t taught students is how to recognize the patterns and cloaks of Jew-hatred, making it impossible for humanity to outsmart antisemitism. 

Moral reasoning and ‘love of thy neighbor’ can be taught through lessons on countless historical events, but the Holocaust should be reserved for more specific lessons on Jew-hatred. 

Omer Bartov’s insistence on labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza as ‘genocide’ is, at its core, a debate over semantics. While it’s fair to worry that such debates – or refusal to debate – could shape the future of genocide studies and Holocaust scholarship, his claim that Israel and the IDF are responsible for the decline of effective Holocaust education is absurd. The real threats to Holocaust teaching lie not in contemporary Israeli policy, but in centuries of misrepresentation, apathy, and the universalization of Jewish suffering, forces Bartov overlooks entirely.

Instead of passing around a political football with “The Holocaust” written all over it, it’s time we step up. To honor the Holocaust and confront the persistent threat of antisemitism, we must preserve its historical specificity, teach its lessons honestly, and recognize that Jewish suffering is not a metaphor for the suffering of everyone.