The writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said, “The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened. You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.”

Yet the history of the word holocaust itself tells the story of our collective refusal to learn this lesson.

This feels to me the proper way to set into a history of the word holocaust, because so much of its history, as you will see, is actually not about Jews, and yet the word is now irrevocably about nothing other than man’s inhumanity to Jews. It is an inhumanity that seems only to fade in order to surprise you that it has been gaining strength in the shadows, an inhumanity that we felt was far behind us and now find right in our faces.

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