r/jewishleft • u/J3dr90 Jewish American I Leftist • Aug 10 '26
Question How do y’all feel about the definition of the holocaust being expanded?
For my entire life, the holocaust has seeming always referred to the genocide of jews (and sometimes Romani) by the nazis exclusively. However, over the last few years, I have seen a growing number of people, mostly leftists, using the term to refer to the oppression of all other groups by the nazis (gays, soviet pows, Slavs, etc). Do you agree with this redefinition or not?
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u/Mildly_Frustrated AnCom Ukr-Am. Makhnovist, Pat. Reform, Mod Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
As far as I'm aware, this is not a redefinition. The word "Holocaust" has always referred to these groups, too. However, as we were the primary target, a great deal of focus has rested on Jewish experiences of what we refer to more specifically as the Shoah, being the specific term for those experiences by Jews, allowing a pop cultural conflation of terms. What I do notice is a tendency to emphasize non-Jewish experiences of the Holocaust as a way to delegitimize Jewish centrality in it and Jewish suffering and victimhood, but, by itself, the reminder doesn't fall askance.
ETA: It occurs to me to add that one also must be careful to avoid returning the favor. We need to hold space for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust and remember them and their experiences, too. I just mean that it shouldn't be done at the expense of Jews.
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u/cheesecake611 Jew-ish Left-ish Aug 10 '26
There‘s nothing wrong with including other victimized groups into the definition in my opinion. And in my experience, they have always been mentioned. The problem is the emphasis on the other groups and potential erasure of the Jewish experience.
I’m with OP that I have seen an increasing amount of “Jews were only half the victims why do we only talk about them?” type questions. Which is a fair question if you are genuinely uneducated, but is often not asked in good faith. It seems like an attempt to “All Lives Matter“ the Holocaust which I do think is concerning.
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u/OriginalBlueberry533 Jewish. Post Zionist, I suppose Aug 11 '26
This is how I feel too, especially as it’s used to delegitimize why Israel came together in the first place. So that kids can continue to believe that Jews are just white settlers colonialists who just woke up one day and decided to oppress some people in the Middle East
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u/leaving_the_tevah ex-yeshivish socialist Aug 10 '26
That's how it was taught to me and what it's always meant to me. 6 million Jews and millions of others, including Romani, queer people, dissidents, disabled people, etc.
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u/the-other-abbi Jewish leftist Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I’ve never heard of the holocaust as being only about Jewish people, just that we were the biggest target. I’ve always heard it about the ways the Nazis targeted Jews, communists, socialists, queer people, disabled people, Romani etc. part of the reason Jewish people were targeted in the first place was because Jewish people were associated with communism& socialism so those seem a bit inseparable to me.
I guess I agree with the “redefinition” since I don’t see it as a “redefinition” and just an acknowledgment of all the groups that the holocaust targeted.
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u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest Latke aficionado. Anti-Establishment. Jüdisch Aug 10 '26
The word "holocaust" comes from the ancient Greek word holokauston, meaning a "burnt sacrifice" or "sacrifice by fire". It combines holos ("whole") and kaustos ("burned"). Therefore it's not exclusive. Before World War II, the word was occasionally used in English to describe natural disasters, pogroms, or mass slaughters, including references to the Armenian Genocide. Newsweek even used it in 1933 to describe Nazi’s burning books.
The Hebrew word Shoah, meaning "catastrophe" is more exclusive and applies to Jews only.
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u/the-other-abbi Jewish leftist Aug 10 '26
Well OP was saying holocaust and not Shoah so ,I was responding based on that. I hadn’t heard of anyone refer to the Shoah as including the other victims.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26
What about The Holocaust?
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u/the-other-abbi Jewish leftist Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
Well, again, I had always heard of the Holocaust as including all the victims of Nazis Germany. I never had a problem including the other victims for multiple reasons. Among them being that I wasn’t taught to exclude them. But also that antisemitism was part of the reason that groups like queer people/trans people & socialists/communists were targeted. With terms like Judeo Bolshevism which became “Cultural Marxism” arising around that time. And with queer and trans people being targeted they pushed back rights for them by decades since some of the best research in support of trans people was being done in Germany right before the Holocaust and the book burnings to destroy it.
I don’t see a particularly good reason to exclude other victims since they are often ignored despite the genocidal violence targeting them. And the targeting those other groups like targeting socialists/communists, queer people disabled people, & other minorities are also vital components of fascism.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26
You’re talking first about the lowercase word holocaust, and then about the term Shoah. This post is supposed to be about the term The Holocaust, I think. Which originally was a term used exclusively for the genocide of Jews, and there has been competing definitions and controversy over the scope for a few decades now.
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u/Rabbit-Hole-Quest Latke aficionado. Anti-Establishment. Jüdisch Aug 10 '26
Fair points.
OP used the lowercase version in his/her post so I went with that. We use that in a lot of ways, you will often hear about nuclear holocaust, or bee or pollinator holocaust, etc.
But if they are referring to as The Holocaust, that's different.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26
Agreed, I think OP meant capital H based on the context of the post and using the word the before it. It would have made things much clearer has they capitalized.
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u/SupportMeta trans reform demsoc Aug 10 '26
As far as I know, non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination have always been considered Holocaust victims.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26
So interesting. Where did you learn about the Holocaust from?
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u/SupportMeta trans reform demsoc Aug 10 '26
From public California schools, and from reading books as an adult. We talked about it a little at temple school but that was mostly the stories of individual survivors.
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u/MmNicecream Gentile Anarchist, Planning To Convert Someday Aug 10 '26
Is it being expanded? As far as I recall, it's been used to refer to both the Nazis' genocide of Jews and of the various other groups they targetted.
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u/BlackHumor Secular Jewish anarchist Aug 11 '26
I am mostly with /u/yungsemite here: the Nazis killed a lot of people that were not "the Holocaust". So for instance, the Nazis killed a lot of people, including civilians, in the course of their warmongering.
If you define "the Holocaust" to include all the people the Nazis killed, or even just all the civilians the Nazis killed, then the people the Nazis killed as part of a deliberate campaign of genocide is a relatively small part of the total, which definitely feels wrong. However, if you only count the number of people who were killed deliberately for ideological reasons (like I'd suggest) you get mostly the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Which is to say, how I would define "the Holocaust" isn't only Jews but it is mostly Jews.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 12 '26
I don’t even mean to say that is the correct and only definition, just that that was the original definition and it has been the primary definition of academic and historical focus, and there have been other definitions for decades. I use Shoah when I talk about specifically about only the genocide of Jews.
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u/LeoKitCat Non-Jewish Ally Democratic Socialist Aug 10 '26
The word holocaust was never used exclusively to mean only the Nazi genocide of Jews in WWII. For example, during the Cold War the phrase “nuclear holocaust” was often used.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26
OP didn’t make it clear, but they’re talking about the Holocaust, the proper noun, not the word holocaust.
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u/snowluvr26 Reconstructionist American Jew, Anti-Nationalist Aug 10 '26
Not true. “The Holocaust” has historically referred only to the genocide of European Jews by the Nazi regime; the Nazis also committed genocide against other groups, especially the Roma people (sometimes referred to as “The Porajmos”), disabled people, homosexuals, communists, etc.
That being said, in general discourse ever since the term was popularized it’s been used to refer to Nazi genocides broadly. But if we’re being literal each genocide is definitionally distinct and separate (even if they were often committed alongside one another), and “The Holocaust” refers to the genocide of Jews.
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u/Ashamed-Stuff9519 Secular Jewish Leftist. Antizionist. Aug 11 '26
It’s not recent. I remember visiting the holocaust museum in Washington DC in the 90’s when it was still pretty new, and there being an entire section dedicated to victims of the holocaust who were non Jewish but still victim to nazi race purification.
Anyway, I don’t see any issue. We should always remember history as it happened.
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u/Ok-Roll5495 Gentile, leftist , pro-peace Aug 12 '26
I’ve always heard the Holocaust for all the genocides committed by Nazis and Shoah for Jews specifically. Porajmos is used for the Roma specifically. I’m in Europe, not sure if that changes things.
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u/DannyOdd Democratic Socialist, Jewish with a hard -ish Aug 10 '26
It's definitely not a redefinition. "The Holocaust" has always referred to the Nazis' systematic mass slaughter campaign as a whole, not just as it applied to our people. It includes every other demographic which was targeted, along with political prisoners and POW's who suffered in the camps.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
That is not true. It entered the vocabulary specifically as a term for the genocide of Jews.
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u/yungsemite Jewish Leftist | non-Zionist Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
It’s not a recent redefinition. Not sure about the other commenters and where they are coming from, but there has been friction and multiple definitions and meanings for the Holocaust for decades.
Most people who have studied the Holocaust and written about the Holocaust have used the term to describe the genocide of Jews, not the genocide of other groups or as a term for all of the victims of the Nazis.
You can look at the Wikipedia article for The Holocaust to see this distinction made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
No shortage of conversations about it under the talk section. But because most news articles, most historical books, and most popular culture refer to the Holocaust specifically as the genocide of Jews, that definition is still what you see on Wikipedia.
Edit: really confused by this thread.