There is a famous scene in “Schindler’s List,” where Liam Neeson, playing Oskar Schindler, looks at his personal possessions and realizes that he could have saved more Jews from death. Schindler looks at his gold Nazi Party pin and laments he could have saved one more person if he had sold it off.

The Jews he did save, however, quote from the Talmud, telling him, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”

Countless books, movies, tv shows, plays, documentaries, museums exhibits, speeches and more have been dedicated to teaching Americans about the Holocaust and how to identify the warning signs so that it can never happen again. So it is perplexing and angering to many Americans that they should see the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and be told that this doesn’t qualify as a genocide.

The New York Times ran a column by Bret Stephens in which he argued that it is not a genocide, on the grounds that a genocide would be "more methodical and vastly more deadly.” But the idea that a genocide can only qualify as a genocide if it mirrors the horror of the Holocaust goes against the very teachings that countless survivors, professors, scholars and artists have warned us about. Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came” was an explicit warning that you cannot wait to hit some magic number before a mass killing becomes a genocide.

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