Seventy-four years ago tonight, on August 12, 1952, thirteen Jews were executed by firing squad in the cellars of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. They were poets, writers, cultural figures – people who had given the Soviet regime almost everything they had to give: loyalty, talent, and the naïve belief that if they assimilated deeply enough into the great “family of Soviet peoples,” they would be left alone. They were not Zionists. They were not enemies of the regime. They were Jews. And at some point, even the Soviet state stopped being willing to say that word out loud.

That is the part worth remembering: the killing began long before the bullets. It began with language.

Soviet authorities did not like memorials at sites of mass murder to say, “Jews were murdered here.” The preferred formulation was something like: “Soviet citizens were murdered here.”

Technically accurate. Politically convenient. And a remarkably efficient way of making Jewish victims disappear into a larger, less uncomfortable category.

Because once you erase the word “Jewish,” you no longer have to confront what happened to Jews.

Sanitized language is rarely neutral. Sometimes it’s simply the most elegant way of avoiding the sentence nobody wants to say.

Which brings us – carefully – to Sephora.

Let me make the disclaimer absolutely explicit, before anyone decides to........

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