American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
The most common Jewish response to the charge that Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics has been to protest that it was others, not they, who were engaged in competition. Jews were the aggrieved party — “they are stealing the Holocaust from us,” said Elie Wiesel; others were illegitimately appropriating language and imagery to which they were not entitled… The use of the word “ghetto” for black slums were frequently cited as an example of “stealing the Holocaust”: “there is no barbed wire across 125th Street and there are no guard towers”; “no place in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago was even remotely like Buchenwald in 1938 or Warsaw in 1942 or Auschwitz in 1944. The most commonly expressed Jewish grievance was the use of the words “Holocaust” and “genocide” to describe other catastrophes. This sense of grievance was rooted in the conviction, axiomatic in at least “official” Jewish discourse, that the Holocaust was unique. Since Jews recognized the Holocaust’s uniqueness — that it was “incomparable,” beyond any analogy — they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable…
Over the years, various grounds for the Holocaust’s uniqueness have been offered, but many, for one or another reason, were found wanting: Stalin killed more innocents than Hitler; over the centuries many other targeted populations suffered greater proportional losses than did European Jews during World War II. Other criteria presented other difficulties. The most comprehensive argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust was also the most radical. Whereas many other writers were willing to acknowledge that there had been other genocides but only one Holocaust, Steve Katz, in a book of more than seven hundred pages (the first of three projected volumes), argued that even the word “genocide,” if correctly understood, could be applied only to the travail of European Jewry in World War II. It was on the basis of this book that Katz was named head of the Washington Holocaust Museum — which suggests the appeal of its argument.
…the very idea of uniqueness is fatuous, since any event — a war, a revolution, a genocide — will have significant features that it shares with events to which it might be compared as well as features that differentiate it from others. The claim that an event — as opposed to some features of an event — is unique can be sustained only by gerrymandering: deliberately singling out one or more distinctive features of the event and trivializing or sweeping under the rug whose features that it shares with other events to which it might be compared… [Katz] writes that while the Final Solution had many other features, “only the element of intentionality can serve as the individuating criterion by which to distinguish the Sho’ah from other instances of mass death.” Translation: I was determined to find that feature of the Holocaust which set it apart — made it unique — and this is the one I settled on…
The question transcends Katz’s book, which is of interest to us only insofar as it is the most systematic exposition of the doctrine of uniqueness, which sits astride all of contemporary Jewish discourse on the Holocaust. Katz, like virtually everyone who makes this argument, asserts again and again that “unique” doesn’t mean “worse,” that the claim is not for greater but only for different Jewish victimization, that no one is saying the Holocaust is more evil than other atrocities, just that it’s…unique. Such disavowals are either naive or, more often, disingenuous. They are naive or disingenuous because all the talk of uniqueness takes place in a context in which, for various purposes, atrocities are constantly compared. And the talk of uniqueness coexists with, overlaps with, and is inextricably intertwined with repeated insistence that comes from secularists like Raul Hilberg, for whom the Holocaust is “the benchmark, the defining moment in the drama of good and evil”; from rabbi like Michael Berenbaum, for whom it is “the paradigmatic manifestation of evil.” The claim that the assertion of the Holocaust’s uniqueness is not a form of invidious comparison produces systematic doubletalk. A rabbi, in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, writes that “it is degrading, even ghoulish, to seek to provide preeminence in suffering.” But, he continues, “the holocaust was unique,” and proceeds to offer a statistical demonstration. Does anyone (except, just conceivably, those making the argument) believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything other than a claim for preeminence?
“Holocaust envy” contends with “Holocaust possessiveness.” Claims by others that they have experienced genocide or a holocaust — claims that are indeed sometimes hyperbolic — are treated as felonious assault.
