Yom HaShoah and the Weight of Words

Each year on Yom HaShoah, we remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. We remember in synagogues and ceremonies, in classrooms and public squares. We light candles, recite names, and pause to bear witness. But memory is not static. It requires vigilance — especially when the language we use to describe genocide is increasingly distorted, politicized, and misunderstood. This year, Yom HaShoah falls during April, a month that also marks Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month — a sobering reminder of just how many communities are called to mourn in this same stretch of days.

I teach a course at the University of Southern California, “Antisemitism, Racism, and Other Hatreds.” Each spring, my students study the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and Guatemala. They come from diverse backgrounds — some have never encountered these histories before. For many, the class is their first deep encounter with genocide as lived experience, not just historical fact.

It is not easy material. But that is the point.

Genocide education often risks oversimplification. Timelines, statistics, and legal definitions take precedence over human stories. We learn about regimes, perpetrators and treaties. What we don’t always learn is what genocide feels like. What it does to language, family, tradition and identity.

We name the violence. But we lose the people.

This is a mistake — especially on Yom HaShoah, a day created to remember the lives, not just the losses.

This semester, I invited two survivors to speak with my class. Pinchas Gutter survived the Warsaw Ghetto and six concentration camps. Edith Umugiraneza lived through the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. They did not compare their experiences. They shared their truths. And in doing so, they called on us not to memorize their suffering, but to understand its ongoing impact.

That’s what Yom HaShoah must do. It’s not only about looking back. It’s about learning how to move forward with responsibility and with precision.

Lately, I’ve grown concerned about how casually the word genocide is being used in public discourse. Since Oct. 7, the term has appeared in social media posts, placards, and political statements, often stripped of legal meaning or historical context. At best, this is careless. At worst, it is deeply disrespectful.

Genocide is not a synonym for tragedy. It is not an emotional expression. It is a legal term coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin and brought into International Law in 1948 to describe the planned destruction of a people — the very crime committed against Europe’s Jews. 

Lemkin’s word filled a linguistic void. Before genocide, we didn’t have a way to name what had happened. That made it harder to prosecute and even harder to prevent. The term exists not to dramatize, but to clarify. And clarity matters—especially when lives are at stake.

When we misuse the word genocide—when we apply it to situations that do not meet the definition—we do more than dilute its meaning. We risk erasing the specificity of the very crimes the word was invented to describe.

This doesn’t mean we avoid uncomfortable truths or look away from human suffering. Quite the opposite. As survivor George Papanek said in his USC Shoah Foundation testimony: “Just because the Nazis are gone does not mean that evil is gone in this world.” He wasn’t making comparisons. He was making a call to action — to be engaged, to stay alert, to act when needed. But also to be careful not to make all evils equivalent.

That nuance matters. We cannot protect memory by flattening it. Nor can we build empathy by weaponizing language.

Yom HaShoah reminds us that the Holocaust was not inevitable. It was made possible by a series of silences, failures, and choices.

Yom HaShoah reminds us that the Holocaust was not inevitable. It was made possible by a series of silences, failures, and choices. If there is one lesson to carry forward, it is this: language shapes memory. And memory shapes our moral imagination.

What we say, and how we say it, matters.

So this year, I ask: How do we teach the Holocaust in a world that increasingly struggles to distinguish history from rhetoric? How do we speak for the dead without simplifying their lives? And how do we make sure that in trying to connect the past to the present, we don’t lose the integrity of either?

Memory, like justice, depends on the responsibility that remembrance requires.

Stephen D. Smith is CEO of Memory Workers and Executive Director Emeritus of USC Shoah Foundation.