The Recent US Election and Holocaust Trivialization
On September 30, 2026, the Atlanta Jewish Times published a paid political advertisement from a group which calls itself “Workers for Israel” claiming that had Donald Trump been president in the 1930s, World War II would not have occurred and six million Jews would not have been murdered in the Nazi Holocaust.
First, let me say that I am grateful that the AJT has issued a formal apology for this ad.
Now that the mid-terms are over, I would like to look back at this incident and attempt to help us see what we can all learn from it.
For me, as a rabbi, a Holocaust educator, and someone who has led more than twenty-five educational trips to Poland, this is a deeply troubling assertion that crosses an important line.
For many in our community, the Holocaust is deeply personal. Some of us had relatives who were murdered during the Shoah. In some cases, entire branches of our families were erased. More than a million Jews were murdered in mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and other German units, aided in many places by local collaborators. Millions of others perished in ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps, and killing centers.
Many of us have visited the places in Europe, particularly in Poland, where members of our families and millions of other Jews were murdered. We have stood at mass graves. We have walked through the remnants of ghettos and killing centers. We have seen the evidence of Nazi genocide firsthand.
For precisely this reason, we should be extremely careful about how we use the words Holocaust and genocide.
I recognize that there is intense and often painful disagreement over the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. I categorically reject that characterization and believe that applying the term in this context distorts both the meaning of genocide and the historical memory of the Holocaust.
By the same principle, I believe that the advertisement placed by “Workers for Israel” represented a troubling example of Holocaust trivialization.
No one can know what would have happened had a contemporary political figure somehow occupied the White House in the 1930s. To claim that one particular politician would have prevented World War II and thereby saved six million Jews is not serious historical analysis. It takes the murder of six million human beings and transforms their deaths into a speculative argument on behalf of a contemporary political leader.
The Shoah should not be used as a partisan political prop. The six million should not be invoked to promote a candidate, attack a candidate, advance a political agenda, or make claims about an alternative history that can never be known.
This principle should apply regardless of our politics. It should apply whether the analogy comes from the political left or the political right, and whether the politician being praised or condemned is someone we support or oppose.
As Jews, let us take the history and memory of the Holocaust both seriously and personally. Let us refrain from exploiting Holocaust imagery, history, and analogies for partisan political purposes and let us be willing to call out such misuse when we see it, regardless of who is responsible.
We have a particular responsibility to safeguard the integrity of Jewish memory. Whatever our political differences, surely we can agree that the murder of six million Jews should never be reduced to a partisan talking point.
Their memory deserves better.
