While the instinct to find a universal message in the destruction of European Jewry is understandable and in some ways admirable, it has increasingly taken the form of an effort to downplay the fact that the Holocaust happened, specifically, to Jews. James Kirchick comments on this tendency:
[T]o the mandarins of the progressive left, the Holocaust’s meaning is always and necessarily to be found in its “universalism.” According to this line of interpretation, the evil of the Nazis can be located in their abandonment of the European cosmopolitan tradition and descent into bestial particularism and nationalism—the very qualities that Israel, foremost among the nations, is charged with embodying today. This sleight of hand has the miraculous effect of clouding the causes of the Holocaust so that anti-Semitism is relegated to a background role, if it is mentioned at all.
Harping on the fact of six million dead Jews [in this atmosphere of opinion] becomes weirdly tribal, even Nazi-like; asserting Jewish peoplehood is too close to asserting Aryan-ness, the disastrous results of which Europeans have been expiating for the past seven decades. It doesn’t matter that there is no Israeli Auschwitz, or anything even approaching it; the particularism and nationalism of Israel is enough to implicate everything that has followed. . . . Israel is [seen as] the carrier of the European disease that wise Europeans have transcended through their enormous, Christ-like suffering, and their formation of the European Union. . . .
Today’s progressive narrative of the Holocaust-without-Jews is not altogether different from the last, great leftist attempt to deny the truth of the Shoah. After World War II, the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes in Central and Eastern Europe solemnized the Nazis’ victims as “anti-fascists,” lumping together the six million Jews who were, by dint of their birth, singled out for execution with the Communists and socialists who were targeted because of their political disposition. Emphasizing the specifically anti-Semitic nature of the Holocaust, Communists worried, would work against their political purposes as the populations over which they ruled were quite anti-Semitic themselves—and had by and large looked away, or even eagerly participated, as their Jewish neighbors were carried off to the gas chambers. . . .
Yet the Holocaust’s universal meanings are not inconsistent with an appreciation of its singularity. . . . Without independently acknowledging both the universality and the historicity of the Holocaust, we will fail to understand what happened, and to whom—and how to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again, to anyone.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/201420/the-holocaust-without-jews