A recent New York Post headline reads: New Yorkers issued stark warning about opening ‘Pandora’s box’ of doctor‑assisted suicide: ‘Like a holocaust’. At first glance, the phrase “like a holocaust” might seem like just another exaggerated political metaphor. But in the context of rising Holocaust‑related language in everyday speech, it is something more: it signals a quiet, grammatical shift from the Holocaust to a holocaust; from a singular historical catastrophe to a generic category of mass death that can be summoned to scare one, even when there is no mass killing in sight.

The wording matters here: not “like the Holocaust,” but “like a holocaust.” The indefinite article changes everything. Grammatically, it makes the Holocaust countable: there can be this holocaust, that holocaust, the next holocaust. This marks the definitive transition of the term from a proper noun (a specific name for a specific horror) into a common noun, a mere entry in a dictionary of disasters. The capital is gone, the specificity is gone, and with it, the historical weight. The phrase is no longer anchored in the Nazi extermination of Jews and the machinery of camps, ghettos, and Einsatzgruppen; it is floated into a pool of moral‑panic vocabulary alongside “disaster,” “war,” and “crisis.”

In the New York Post, the Holocaust has become a public‑relations scare label, not a historical event. What makes this especially jarring is the context. The headline is about a law that would let terminally ill people in New York request medical aid in dying under strict safeguards. It is a debate about consent, autonomy, and the risk of coercion, not about gas chambers or mass deportations. Yet the quote treated as a takeaway is that this policy might be “like a holocaust.”

There is a cruel irony here: evoking a voluntary, low‑scale, “medicalized” holocaust — a holocaust that has neither the racial ideology nor the industrial scale of Nazi extermination yet is still allowed to wear the same name. By using the word to describe a policy of individual patient autonomy, a bizarre semantic inversion is created. The Nazi “medical” crimes, such as the T4 program, were defined by the total absence of consent and the state’s assertion of power over “unworthy” lives. To use the same term for a voluntary, regulated medical choice does not just exaggerate the present; it fundamentally misrepresents the past. The vocabulary is there, but the history is gone. The result is not just a distortion of the present; it is a flattening of the Holocaust itself, turning it into a scare‑word that can be attached to any policy opponents find frightening.

This headline does not come from nowhere. It is the latest node in the same pattern I’ve traced before: the metaphorization of the perpetrators. Across political and media speech, the vocabulary associated with the Holocaust’s perpetrators: “Nazi,” “Gestapo,” “Hitler,” “Auschwitz”, has inflated into a set of general‑purpose moral intensifiers. Once these terms stop being historical descriptors and start functioning instead as metaphors, the present is elevated to the scale of genocide, and genocide is reduced to the scale of the present. This is not analogy; it is semantic collapse.

In these conditions, “like a holocaust” is the logical endpoint: the Holocaust is no longer a singular event to be studied, commemorated, or mourned; it is a template for the present, applied whenever the stakes feel high enough. The present is elevated to the scale of genocide, and genocide is reduced to the scale of the present.

Nisan 27, Yom HaShoah, is fast approaching. The date is meant to orient people towards the chronological and historical reality of the Shoah, the specificity of the Nazi genocide of Jews: the institutions, the antisemitic ideology, the millions of names and stories that cannot be collapsed into a slogan. Yom HaShoah is meant to fill the consciousness with the weight of what was lost. Yet in public discourse, the Holocaust is increasingly treated as a grammatical slot; a phrase one can drop into headlines, social‑media posts, and angry comments without any obligation to engage the history it points to. While the calendar calls towards memory, language drifts towards a convenient, ahistorical void.

When a headline frames a debate over doctor‑assisted suicide as “like a holocaust,” it is not only a cheap rhetorical move; it is a symptom of that same drift. The Holocaust is no longer being misused as a metaphor; it is being banalized as a grammatical intensifier. The day set aside to remember the Holocaust becomes, in practice, just one more occasion on which its vocabulary can be reused without restraint.

One can, at the very least, insist on a small discipline: every time someone says, “like the Holocaust” or “this is a holocaust,” ask quietly: Is this actually about the Nazi genocide of Jews, or is it just a Holocaust‑shaped intensifier for something else? If the Holocaust could be removed from the sentence and the argument still stand, then the Holocaust is being used as a moral decoration, not a historical reference.

The headline “like a holocaust” does not pass that test. It borrows the weight of the Holocaust to dramatize a policy debate, but it does not engage the Holocaust itself. That is why it hurts: it is not just a bad comparison, it is a small, public act of grammatical trivialization. The Holocaust is turning into a holocaust, and that is something one should refuse to normalize.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)