The Holocaust was not just against Jews. It was about us.

When you lose 63 percent of your entire continental population, you do not dilute that experience into something abstract.

Auschwitz-Birkenau museum (photo: Lāsma Artmane/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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This Monday evening, something different happens.

While the world carries on, Jews do not. We stop, not out of ritual, but out of necessity. Because there is one day each year that does not belong to everyone, a day that cannot be shared.

That day is Yom HaShoah (Israel’s Holocaust Day) and it exists because what was done to the Jews was not just part of history; it was the point of it.

Because of the many millions murdered by the Nazis, six million were Jews, from a pre-war European population of roughly 9.5 million. That is 63 percent of European Jewry. In entire countries and regions, it was closer to 80 or 90 percent. Communities that had existed for centuries, languages, traditions, and entire ways of life were not displaced; they were erased. Not by accident, not as collateral, but as the central objective.

The Nazis did not simply hate Jews; they built an entire ideology around us. Jews were not just an enemy; we were the enemy — a global, existential threat that had to be eliminated everywhere. The “Final Solution” was not a policy of persecution; it was a policy of total annihilation.

And if that sounds like history — closed, distant, resolved — then look at the present. Because the ideas that made that annihilation possible did not disappear. They evolved, they adapted and, today, they are back in circulation, sometimes crudely, sometimes cleverly, but always recognisably.

On the streets of Western capitals, we have seen it with our own eyes. Placards showing Israel, or Jews, as an octopus, its tentacles wrapped around the world. The “puppet master” trope: Jews or “Zionists” depicted as controlling governments, pulling the strings of global events. Caricatures with grotesquely exaggerated features, large noses, distorted faces, straight from the playbook of 1930s Nazi propaganda. Images that echo blood libel, portraying Jews as child killers or as something monstrous, predatory, less than human.

But perhaps most insidious of all is the systematic comparison of Jews or the Jewish state to the Nazis themselves — the Star of David placed alongside the swastika, or Holocaust inversion, where the victims of genocide are recast as its perpetrators.

This is not fringe.

Mainstream outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times have, on multiple occasions, been forced to apologise and withdraw cartoons that leaned directly into these tropes, because the line between “criticism” and historical antisemitism was not just crossed; it was erased.

Beyond imagery, the cultural tolerance is just as telling. When celebrities and influencers openly praises Hitler, amplify Nazi symbolism, and traffic in explicit antisemitism — and are still able to keep their jobs — we are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: that what should be beyond the pale is, once again, being negotiated, debated, explained away.

Just this weekend, our own national broadcaster, the BBC, chose to platform on its flagship news programme Tucker Carlson, a man who has repeatedly amplified the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (positioning Jewish people as the orchestrators behind the alleged replacement of white populations) and other antisemitic-adjacent conspiracy theories. Yes, he was challenged, but since when did it become the BBC’s role to legitimise conspiracy peddlers of antisemitic tropes by placing them at the centre of its most trusted platforms?

This is not scrutiny; it is exposure, and exposure confers credibility.

Then there is the language of the streets, amplified by a Far-Left obsession: chants that do not distinguish between Israeli and Jew. Rhetoric from Islamist groups that does not criticise policy but calls, explicitly, for the destruction of Jews. A Far-Left discourse that repackages centuries-old conspiracies about Jewish power, influence, control into the language of “anti-Zionism,” while insisting it is something entirely different.

In the UK today, the Green Party of England and Wales is pushing motions to define Zionism (the belief in Jewish self-determination) as a form of racism. Its deputy leader, Mothin Ali, publicly celebrated the events of October 7th. Prospective local Green councillors have called for Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation, to be removed from the UK’s terror list.

This is not nuance, and it is not debate. It is the reframing of extremism as legitimacy. This is how it happens, not in one moment, but in many. Not through one voice, but through the accumulation of them, the steady shifting of what is acceptable, the gradual erosion of what should be obvious.

It is not different; it is painfully familiar, because we have seen this sequence before. It begins with words, it escalates through imagery, and it embeds as belief — and belief, when normalised, becomes justification. The Nazis did not begin with gas chambers; they began with cartoons, with slogans, with the steady dehumanisation of a people until their removal could be presented not as a crime, but as a necessity.

This is not a distortion of history, it is a continuation of it. So when Jews say that Yom HaShoah is ours, this is why. Because, when you have lost 63 percent of your entire continental population — when entire languages, cultures, and communities are erased within a generation — you do not dilute that experience into something abstract. You do not universalise it until it loses its meaning. You protect it, you define it, you hold it, precisely because the world has shown, time and again, how easily it forgets.

If any of this feels uncomfortable to hear, it should, because what we are witnessing today is not new. It is the rehabilitation of antisemitism in real time. Not always in its crudest form, but in something more dangerous: respectable, debatable, contextualised, excused.

We are told it is politics; we are told it is activism; we are told it is about a state, not a people. Yet the language, the imagery, and the accusations remain exactly the same. History does not repeat itself in identical form, but it echoes — and right now, those echoes are getting louder, which is why Yom HaShoah is not only about remembrance, but also about recognition. It is about the ability and the willingness to see what is in front of us, before it is too late.

It is about something else too: It is about strength. Because the 27th of Nissan¹ was not chosen at random. It is anchored in the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the moment when Jews, facing certain death, chose to fight back. Not because they believed they would win, but because they refused to disappear quietly. They drew a line and they held it.

That line did not end in Warsaw; it carried forward into the rebirth of a Jewish homeland, into the refusal to ever again be stateless, into a simple, unbreakable principle that Jewish existence is not conditional, not negotiable, and not subject to approval.

So this Yom HaShoah, the message is clear. To the world: Respect this day, learn from it, but do not redefine it. Do not dilute it, do not take something that is specific and render it meaningless in the name of universality. Leave it intact.

And to the Jewish People: Remember why this day exists. Not only because of how we died, but because of how we fought. Because of the moment we stood, when standing seemed impossible. Because of the line we drew and because, in every generation since, we have been tested on whether that line still holds.

This is our answer.

We remember, we draw the line — and this time, we hold it.

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1. The first month of the biblical Jewish calendar, typically falling in March or April