By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
The memory of the Holocaust is not merely fading; it is being actively dismantled through the quiet, calculated tool of abstraction.
On January 27, 2026—International Holocaust Remembrance Day—the world marked 81 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a day intended to honor the six million Jewish souls systematically extinguished by the Nazi regime. Instead, two of the world’s most influential entities—U.S. Vice President JD Vance and the BBC—delivered messages that achieved a chilling feat: they commemorated the Holocaust while effectively erasing the Jews.
Politically, Vanee’s lapse of memory carries indirect but troubling relevance to Iran’s nuclear ambitions through the lens of historical memory, antisemitism, and geopolitical signaling. By universalizing the Holocaust into a vague lesson about “human brutality” without naming the targeted Jewish victims or Nazi perpetrators, Vance’s wording risks echoing patterns of Holocaust minimization or denial that Iran has long weaponized to delegitimize Israel and justify its own existential threats against the Jewish state.
Vice President Vance’s official statement was a masterclass in sanitized platitudes. He tweeted of “millions of lives lost” and “unspeakable brutality,” framing the Holocaust as a generic cautionary tale about the duality of human nature. Accompanied by polished photos of himself and his wife at a memorial, the post conspicuously avoided the words “Jew,” “Nazi,” or “antisemitism.”
This was not an accidental omission. To craft a statement on this specific day without naming the victims or the perpetrators requires a deliberate, editorial effort to strip the event of its historical heart. As Halie Soifer of the Jewish Democratic Council of America noted, it takes “real effort” to ignore the specificity of the six million. The backlash was swift and bipartisan. Even within the Trump administration, the contrast was glaring: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House’s official statement explicitly named the Jewish people and the scourge of antisemitism.
Vance’s abstraction is part of a disturbing pattern of downplaying right-wing antisemitism and shifting the focus of “Jew-hatred” from ideology to demographics. By universalizing the Holocaust into a vague lesson on “human brutality,” he dilutes the “Final Solution.” “Never again” becomes a hollow slogan when the targeted group is left unnamed. It transforms the Shoah from a Jewish tragedy into a generic “dark chapter,” inviting a revisionism that blinds us to the unique persistence of antisemitism.
Across the Atlantic, the BBC—Britain’s taxpayer-funded voice of record—committed a parallel erasure. Throughout its broadcasts, presenters referred to “six million people murdered by the Nazi regime,” or “six million mostly Jewish people.” Jews were reduced to a parenthetical afterthought.
The outcry from the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Campaign Against Antisemitism was immediate. Any attempt to strip the Holocaust of its Jewish specificity is not just a “slip of the tongue”; it is an insult to the victims and a gift to extremists. While the BBC eventually issued a correction, the incident followed a pattern. Just weeks earlier, the BBC program The Repair Shop featured a Kindertransport cello, detailing the rescue of 10,000 children without once mentioning that they were overwhelmingly Jewish.
These are not innocent linguistic choices. They reflect a growing, global reluctance to center Jews in narratives of Jewish suffering. Whether driven by political caution or a misguided “universalism” that seeks to avoid offending modern sensibilities, the result is a form of violence against memory.
Naming the victims is the first act of justice. To say, “six million Jews” is to affirm that they were hunted not for “humanity’s duality,” but for their Jewish identity. When we omit their name, we normalize a soft form of denial. We turn the industrial murder of a people into “just another tragedy,” weakening our ability to confront the rising tide of antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets.
The Holocaust demands that we confront the abyss where Jews were targeted and where the world’s leaders failed to rescue and challenge evil. JD Vance’s photos at a memorial and the BBC’s illuminated studios are empty gestures if they lack the courage to speak the truth: Six million Jews were murdered by Nazis because they were Jews.
Vance’s pattern of downplaying right-wing antisemitism, refusing to condemn certain figures, and framing immigration rather than ideological confrontation as the primary antidote to Jew-hatred only deepens the concern. The party that claims to stand for “never again” cannot afford leaders who soften the very language that vow demands.
“Never again” begins with the courage to name the victim and the hatred that killed them. Anything less is not remembrance—it is a betrayal. Republicans would be wise to reconsider who they wish to represent them in the next presidential election.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.