Table of Contents
Greg Bouwer
IINZ
In an age where identity is increasingly constructed through grievance, suffering has become a form of moral capital. Victimhood is no longer merely an historical condition or a human tragedy: it is a credential. It confers legitimacy, authority, and insulation from scrutiny. Within this framework, no event carries greater moral weight than the Holocaust.
That singular status has produced an uncomfortable but increasingly visible phenomenon – what might be called Holocaust envy.
This is not envy in the trivial sense. It is not a desire to see Jews suffer again, nor a crude competition over pain. It is something more structural and more corrosive – a resentment toward the unique moral authority that the Holocaust confers upon Jewish history and a corresponding impulse to detach that authority from Jews themselves.
Victimhood as identity
In much contemporary political and cultural discourse, suffering functions as identity. To be recognised as a victim is to occupy the moral high ground. To be denied that status is to be suspect. Movements, causes, and ideologies increasingly define themselves not by what they build, but by what has been done to them.
Within this hierarchy, the Holocaust sits at the apex. It is the most thoroughly documented genocide in history. Its moral clarity is unmatched. It is foundational to post-war human rights law, genocide prevention norms, and international moral language. It is institutionally embedded in education, memorialisation, and law across the democratic world.
For those seeking moral legitimacy through inherited suffering, the Holocaust represents the ultimate benchmark — one that cannot be surpassed.
The problem of Jewish particularity
Yet Jewish history poses a problem for this framework.
Jews were unambiguously victims of history’s most systematic attempt at annihilation – and yet they survived. They rebuilt. They exercised agency. They asserted political self-determination. They refused to remain permanently frozen in victimhood.
That refusal is deeply destabilising to a worldview in which moral authority flows from sustained powerlessness. Jewish survival disrupts the expectation that authentic victims must remain passive, broken, and dependent on the recognition of others.
The result is a pressure to universalise the Holocaust – not as a lesson drawn from Jewish experience, but as a moral asset stripped of Jewish meaning.
From universal lessons to de-Judaisation
There is nothing objectionable in drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust. Indeed, that is both inevitable and necessary. The problem arises when universality becomes erasure.
Increasingly, the Holocaust is presented as a generic story about “what humans do to each other,” with Jewish specificity treated as incidental or even inconvenient. Jews become interchangeable placeholders rather than the historical subject. Jewish suffering is abstracted, redistributed, and rebranded.
This de-Judaisation serves a purpose. It allows the moral authority of the Holocaust to be claimed without acknowledging the particular history, vulnerability, and continuity of the Jewish people.
In this reframing, the Holocaust becomes available for symbolic appropriation – something to be invoked by unrelated causes, weaponised against contemporary Jews, or inverted entirely.
Inversion: from Jews as victims to Jews as villains
Nowhere is this more visible than in discourse about Israel.
The moral capital of the Holocaust is routinely inverted so that Jews are cast not as the historical victims of genocide, but as its modern perpetrators. Holocaust language – ghettos, camps, genocide, Nazis – is deployed not to remember Jewish annihilation, but to accuse Jews of reenacting it.
This inversion relies on a prior act of de-Judaisation. Once the Holocaust is severed from Jewish history, it becomes a floating moral weapon. Its emotional force remains intact, but its historical anchor is removed.
The message is implicit but unmistakable: the Holocaust belongs to everyone – except the Jews.
Distortion, not denial
This phenomenon should not be mistaken for Holocaust denial. Denial attacks the fact of the Holocaust and is easily identified and condemned.
What we are witnessing instead is Holocaust distortion – the manipulation of its meaning, ownership, and moral implications. Distortion is more socially acceptable, more intellectually camouflaged, and ultimately more dangerous.
It allows people to affirm Holocaust remembrance while hollowing it out. It preserves the symbolism while discarding the Jews. It transforms Jewish memory into a resource others feel entitled to exploit.
The quiet antisemitism beneath the rhetoric
This process rarely announces itself as antisemitism. It often presents as empathy, universalism, or moral concern for others’ suffering. Yet its effects are consistent and deeply antisemitic in outcome.
Jewish trauma is treated as negotiable. Jewish memory is subjected to external moral arbitration. Jews are told when, how, and for whose benefit they may remember their own catastrophe.
No other people are asked to surrender ownership of their genocide in order to prove their moral worth.
The de-Judaisation of the Holocaust is not merely an academic concern. It reshapes public understanding of antisemitism, delegitimises Jewish self-definition, and corrodes the foundations of Holocaust education itself.
When Jewish history is treated as a transferable moral asset rather than a lived inheritance, remembrance becomes performative and empty. Worse, it becomes a tool for hostility rather than a safeguard against it.
Holocaust memory does not require dilution to be universal. Its lessons do not depend on erasing the people to whom it happened.
If remembrance is to mean anything, it must begin with historical honesty – and that means recognising that the Holocaust was not an abstract crime against humanity, but a concrete attempt to destroy the Jewish people.
To deny Jews ownership of that history is not progress. It is erasure.
And erasure, however elegantly framed, is always a warning sign.
A warning for New Zealand
In New Zealand, this dynamic is no longer theoretical. Holocaust distortion increasingly underpins contemporary antisemitism, particularly in activist and academic spaces where Jews are recast from a protected minority into a morally suspect group. Holocaust memory is invoked to frame Jewish power as illegitimate, Jewish self-defence as genocidal, and Jewish history as something that must be morally redistributed. This allows antisemitism to present itself as ethical critique, importing global narratives while local Jewish communities bear the consequences – social exclusion, intimidation, and the delegitimisation of Jewish identity itself. When the Holocaust is stripped of its Jewish meaning, it does not produce universal solidarity – it produces a moral vacuum in which antisemitism can once again speak the language of virtue.
Readers encountering Holocaust language in contemporary political debate may sense that something has shifted, without always being able to name it. The issue is not Holocaust denial, which is now widely marginalised, but more subtle forms of manipulation. To clarify this distinction, the accompanying explainer sets out the difference between Holocaust denial, Holocaust distortion, and Holocaust inversion – showing how the erosion of Jewish specificity enables the Holocaust’s moral power to be repurposed, and ultimately weaponised against Jews themselves.
Holocaust Denial, Distortion, and Inversion: A Short Explainer
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
