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Holocaust Memorial Day Without Jews?
Why leaving Jews out of the Holocaust has become fashionable and what you can do about it.
By: Feminists Against Antisemitism
Linguistic blurring does not make Holocaust Memorial Day more universal. It makes it less honest, says Ceri, a member of Feminists Against Antisemitism. As Holocaust Memorial Day is fast approaching, and many of us are steeling ourselves as Jews are deliberately erased from the language around it, Ceri shows how this is a deliberate choice shaped by current political narratives. She looks at examples and concludes with advice on what to look out for and what you can do in response.
Scrolling idly through my staff intranet one day over lunch last week, I landed on a calendar detailing significant dates and events relevant to various staff diversity networks.
First on the list for this year was 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day. I was struck immediately by the description given: “A day of commemoration dedicated to the remembrance of those who suffered in the Holocaust under Nazi persecution, and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.”
The omission was as glaring as it was baffling – there was no mention of Jews.
Yet it seems that this is not an isolated incident. This kind of phrasing appears again and again. Half an hour on Google later that evening showed me that in recent years, councils, universities, broadcasters, and public bodies have increasingly described Holocaust Memorial Day in this kind of broad, abstract language: ‘millions of people’, ‘those who suffered’, ‘victims of Nazi persecution’. The Holocaust is referenced but is hollowed of its primary victims and quickly gathered into a catalogue of other genocides and atrocities, with no explanation of why this particular event is being commemorated in the first place.
Last year, for example, ITV’s flagship breakfast show Good Morning Britain introduced an item on Holocaust Memorial Day by referring to ‘six million people’ killed, alongside other victim groups, without naming Jews at all. A huge storm developed around this; in a few days we will find out whether they have learned anything at all.
But they are not alone, and others certainly do not seem to have learned. In 2024, complaints were made after a BBC News short made no mention of Jews. Feminists Against Antisemitism co-founder Susan ended up escalating her complaint to the BBC after two of their website stories on Holocaust Memorial Day made no mention of Jews. Ultimately, the story was amended, but by that time, they were no longer news. As ever, the BBC said it would learn lessons, but it clearly did not. Not only did they later in 2024 refer to the Kindertransport as being arranged ‘to avoid pre-war tensions’, but in 2025, they managed to write an article about Auschwitz for Holocaust Memorial Day – without mentioning Jews.
Even where Jews are mentioned elsewhere on the same webpage or in supplementary materials, they are often omitted from the headline definition. That choice matters. Headline language creates the frame, signaling what is central and what is optional. When Jews are excluded from the defining description of Holocaust Memorial Day, they become an add-on, not the core reason the day exists.
The Politicization of Holocaust Memorial Day
Possibly some of these omissions stem from basically well-meaning but hugely misguided attempts to be more ‘inclusive’. Maybe some feel that it goes without saying that the Holocaust refers to the mass murder of Jews; that was the Historical Society‘s response to Feminists Against Antisemitism’s co-founder Ali’s complaint about Jewish erasure (they corrected the text after her complaint). Or perhaps it is a demonstration of an ingrained antisemitism that cannot even allow Jews the ‘privilege’ of marking the systematic attempt to annihilate them. This is deeply troubling in the current climate.
Since the atrocities of 7 October, we have seen a sharp increase in antisemitism. Instead of prompting reflection on the persistence of antisemitic violence, the massacre has been met by too many groups and individuals with absurd attempts at justifications, evasions, or outright denial. At the same time, a grotesque false equivalence has taken hold — one that trivializes the Holocaust and grants license to contemporary antisemitism by casting Israel’s military response as comparable to the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate the Jews, the very crime that demonstrated beyond doubt the need for a Jewish homeland.
This is the context in which the erasure of Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day must be understood. This deliberate erasure functions as a punitive gesture towards Jews for Israel’s actions – evident not only in the removal of Jewish focus from the day, but in some cases in the decision not to mark Holocaust Memorial Day at all. It has now been reported that, since the October 7 attacks, the number of UK schools commemorating the Holocaust has more than halved, which is an alarming indicator of how quickly hostility towards Israel is being displaced onto Jewish memory itself.
What is striking is that these omissions are rarely challenged at the point of production. They pass internal reviews, diversity checks, and editorial sign-off. In other words, removing Jews from Holocaust remembrance is not seen as a problem. In some circles, it appears to be seen as safer. I would urge you to help make this form of erasure as uncomfortable as it should be.
When I complained about the language on the staff intranet, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a prompt, positive reply that agreed with my points. While my experience might be the exception rather than the norm, it is always worth challenging examples of erasure where you see them, because linguistic blurring does not make Holocaust Memorial Day more universal. It makes it less honest.
Why This Matters
The plain historical fact is that six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered not as incidental victims of a wider conflict, but as the primary target of a uniquely industrialized genocide. Other groups were persecuted by the Nazis, including Gypsy, Roma and Sinti people, lesbians and gay men, disabled people and political opponents, and it is right that they are also remembered, but not at the expense of erasing the identity of the primary target group – Jews.
Likewise, commemorating other genocides is important, and Holocaust Memorial Day has long encouraged reflection on atrocities beyond Nazi Germany, but ‘and also’ has quietly shifted to ‘instead of’.
When Jewish history and Jewish victims are repeatedly edited out of public memory – and out of their own specific memorial day – it is reasonable to ask what this reveals about whose suffering it is deemed acceptable to name.
Click here for resources on how to report inaccurate or harmful reporting.
Feminists Against Antisemitism is a space for women to name and challenge antisemitism in feminist spaces.
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https://thejewishvoice.com/2023/12/letters-to-the-editor-348/
12-06-2023
Broken Pelvis, Broken Moral Compass
Dear Editor:
The View, “…sexual violence was used against Israeli women, the major women’s groups in this country have not come out and denounced it…It is the height of immorality that the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Women Empowerment has been silent, the U.N. Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has been silent, and the international MeToo movement has been silent,” Griffin said”…”Goldberg chimed in and suggested that the groups have been silent because they don’t want to exacerbate the problem.”
They say only a fool makes the same mistake twice. Goldberg previously wondered aloud if Hamas was really a terrorist organization. She was sent home from The View because of her ignorant, offensive comments on The Holocaust. Kidnapped women were so violently gang raped, and then shot by the final rapist, that forensic teams identified their pelvic bones were broken. They are silent precisely because the women who were raped are the “wrong” victims.
Our cultural Marxists who divide the world into false victims and false oppressors are silent because these are Jewish women, Israeli women and for no other reason. The “Palestinian” Arabs, leftists, fake progressives have worked tirelessly to falsely malign Israel’s legal existence as a colonial state, as an apartheid oppressor, despite Tel Aviv being a haven to “Palestinian” gay men, despite Israeli Arabs sitting in the Knesset, despite all Israeli citizens having full legal, religious and full civil rights, in stark contrast to any of their Arab neighbors.
During her forced sabbatical from The View apparently Goldberg did not read up on how the selective silence of the world, the NY Times, and the Pope, enabled the mass murder of Jews to continue unabated. “We’ve sent letters and shared graphic documentation,” Sarah Weiss Maudi, a senior diplomat and legal adviser in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” “Their silence is so deafening that it’s sickening…” “What I don’t understand is that we provided very graphic and descriptive evidence of rapes, including gang rapes and the remains of semen on young girls. It was not good enough for the U.N…” “Yet data provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health is accepted and quoted without any verification at all.”
In a world where facts are deliberately ignored in favor of biased “narratives”, where institutions like the U.N, UNRWA, UNESCO, Human Rights Watch, continue to spew easily disproved Big Lies against Israel, it’s no wonder our moral compass and Jewish women’s pelvises are broken beyond repair. I hear the “silence” of no one wanting to publicly condemn the Jew hate speech of the “Palestinian” Arabs for all to hear on Palestinian Media Watch, this silence broken only to demonize Israel and Jews into the subhuman, worthy of ostracization.
Loudly Yours,
Ginette Weiner, A Zionist Jew
Scottsdale, AZ