The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem went so far as to call the assault on Gaza “our genocide.” No doubt the USHMM would take umbrage at that phrase. In early August 2025 Stuart Eizenstat, the chair of the museum’s board, published a statement in The Jerusalem Post, reproduced on the USHMM’s website, in which he objected to the “weaponization” of terms such as genocide “in order to attack the legitimacy of the existence of the Jewish State.” It is admittedly true that in public discourse critics will sometimes seize upon the strongest language to express moral disapproval or to condemn their opponents. But many human rights groups, including Jewish ones, find the charge of genocide legitimate. They did not reach that conclusion lightly, and the suggestion that they wield it only as a weapon is deeply unfair.
The museum would prefer, it seems, to see the persecution of the Jews as a singularity beyond all comparison, a crime that stands as an emblem of absolute evil and must not be enlisted for “political purposes” lest we profane the memory of the dead. But this idea threatens the universal standards it is meant to protect. Every crime is singular, but no crime is so terrible that it exceeds the bounds of comparison. To exempt any act—or, indeed, any individual or state—from comparison is to vitiate the very possibility of moral reasoning.
Genocide, too, we should recall, is a comparative term. Like all terms that we employ in legal deliberation, it refers not to a unique case but to a category of crime. It was introduced into international law chiefly thanks to the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland who eventually found refuge in the United States. He was one of the few in his extended family to survive—nearly everyone else was killed.
One wonders if Lemkin would be welcome in the US today. As I write this, the US government is turning on immigrants and even on refugees who seek asylum, a practice that clearly violates international law. Jewish Americans should be among the first to insist that this assault come to an end and that our government honor the injunction from Leviticus 19:34, which draws an analogy of its own: “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”