How to Create a Holocaust
Essential Steps for Successful Dehumanization
Lessons from my Teacher, Dr. Jeff Z.
Perhaps 20 years ago, I hosted a renowned psychologist and esteemed teacher of mine in Minneapolis for three or four years in a row. Our group of 16 clinicians immersed ourselves in intensive therapeutic and hypnotic training for 8 hours a day for four days in a row. We learned about the process of change, how to foster it, how to evoke it, and how to influence it in the direction of better meeting our clients’ needs. One particular lesson from that training stands out for me. That lesson forms the foundation of my comments: Language doesn’t just convey information. It also contains beliefs, biases, and blatant prejudices, regardless of our deliberate awareness of them.
At one point, Dr. Jeff asked us to notice the differences between the following phrases.
I am feeling a bit sad.
I believe I’m depressed.
I am depressed.
I am a depressive.
He attuned us to the profound implications embedded in the language that defines a passing experience (I am feeling a bit sad) versus a pronounced and permanent feature of a person’s indelible, unchangeable character (I am a depressive). The implications for successful treatment of these seemingly minor linguistic descriptors are immense. I learned that noticing the language deployed by people as they describe themselves or describe others is of paramount importance to the psychotherapeutic context and potentiality of a given treatment’s outcome.
I recall his precious teachings now as I seek to better grasp the significance and consequences of the language we too casually and half-consciously use when describing one another, when we convey our views and expressing our judgements about the actions that others undertake, or when we justify without adequate reflection or consideration what the actions are that we support, which flow so seamlessly from those judgements. As the title of this piece suggests, I firmly believe that there are great risks to us all when we utter, express, or loudly proclaim our views, with impassioned, indignant, self-righteous, but often ill-informed voices. The risks, I believe, are much, much greater than we may recognize.
Sad Lessons from Our Shared Past
If we are truly intent on successfully destroying a designated group of people, whether they are a select tribe, people, members of a given faith, or a state that we’ve come to view as illegitimate and undeserving of membership among the accepted “family of human-kind”, there are tried and true methods that history has shown to work quite satisfactorily.
Take, for example, Rwanda 1994: Longstanding ethnic and tribal tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples of Rwanda boiled over. A civil war broke out. However, a temporary respite from the military campaigns was in effect when the slaughter that ensued during the 100 days between April and July 1994 broke out. It was perpetrated by the soldiers of the Hutu militias against largely unarmed Tutsi civilians and occurred separate from active military conflict. More than 800,00 people – men, women, and children – were savagely murdered, many by frenzied and crazed machete-wielding Hutu militiamen against the defenseless Tutsi people who had previously been their neighbors. As approximately 8,000 people per day were raped, beaten, and ultimately murdered, to an unsettling degree the world stood by, tut-tutted, and went on about their daily business.
Importantly, preceding that violence was the systematic use of the following well-worn dehumanizing methods:
Exclusion of Tutsi individuals from educational, political and social opportunities
Denial of access to healthcare and employment for Tutsi individuals
An active depiction of Tutsi people as subhuman, as cockroaches, and vermin, in publicly acceptable forums
Social isolation and marginalization
Absorption of the “truthiness” of vile lies about the reviled group under relentless pressure of systematic public broadcasts about the Tutsi as a distinct and identifiable group
These time-tested seeds for the eventual slaughter were actively sown for years. Each deliberately chosen seed reinforced systematic dehumanization of the Tutsi, which lowered the threshold of tolerance among the non-Tutsi population for the violence eventually perpetrated against them.
Who Creates the Narrative
That at different periods in history, most of us have either been identified as “the Hutu” or “the Tutsi”, is without question for any serious student of history. The fate, legitimacy, or value of the “outgroup” at any point in time depends in large measure on who is in control of formulating the prevailing socio-cultural narrative that is being spread.
Hero – Occupier – Liberator – Conqueror – Savior – Villain. So goes the cycle.
There is an important shortcoming to this view, however. It implies that all that determines good vs. evil is who happens to be in charge of defining good and evil at any given moment in time. Who runs the press and the broadcast media determines the narrative. So I ask, Is there no legitimate historical difference between what occurs under the yoke of domination expressed by one controlling power as compared to another controlling power? Remember: the title of this essay is, How to Create a Holocaust: Essential Steps for Successful Dehumanization. My premise is that important distinctions can and should be made between what constitutes harsh and even violent authoritarian control versus what unleashes the full force of human barbarity, as exemplified by a holocaust.
In this case, I am not solely restricting my definition of holocaust to its most infamous instance: the deliberate and systematic murder and attempted wholesale eradication of every Jew living anywhere and everywhere in Europe between 1941 and 1945 as perpetrated by Hitler’s Nazi regime. Other recent holocausts included the Ottoman Turks extermination of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians between 1915-1923; the Cambodian genocide committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rough between 1975-1979; and the Holodomor mass starvation campaign perpetrated by Stalin that resulted in millions of Ukrainian people’s deaths between 1932-1933.
Expansion of what constitutes a holocaust beyond the paramount exemplar of the Holocaust as perpetrated against the Jews by the Nazis and their all-too-willing collaborators serves as a humbling reminder to me of what human beings are capable of. My intent in expanding the set of atrocities we describe as a holocaust is to blunt the convenience inherent in saying that since today I am not a German Nazi living in Germany in the 1940s, the relevance to me of dehumanizing efforts doesn’t apply to me. “I am not capable of that.” My aim is precisely the opposite. While I reserve the term Holocaust to describe the campaign of the Nazi’s Final Solution, history records other holocausts occurring when the universal human capacity to blithely disregard the systematic dehumanization of “others” goes unchallenged.
I am not composing this essay through a lens focused on the past, however. While I hope we can learn from the past, my focus is on how we risk repeating it today. In fact, aspects of it abound today. Look around. Focus. What comes into view?
Do you not see how the credulity of too many people, particularly those in the west, have once again begun to accept the calumnies that have historically been directed against history’s conveniently and preternaturally available target: the Jew? From pulpits, podiums, campus and public gatherings, and voiced as post-hoc justification from rogue drivers running Jews down at public gatherings or lone assassins murdering Jews frolicking on sunny beaches, the evidence is mounting. The death toll is rising.
The Current Dehumanizing Climate
Returning for a bit to my teacher’s lesson. I imagine Dr. J. Z. might have said, “Be careful about the differences between the following phrases.”
Are you Jewish?
Are you a Jew?
Those Jews
The Jew
Once again, moving from a phrase expressing a legitimate curiosity about another person’s cultural or faith-based identity (Are you Jewish?) the linguistic progression moves toward a different emphasis altogether. Here, “the Jew” is the focus. This focus lacks any curiosity about the other and instead reveals the intent to shoehorn the other into a pre-existing mold. No longer the Jewish person a unique individual about whom and from whom we might learn something new. “The Jew” is merely another instance onto whom we paste the pre-existing reductionistic and dehumanizing labels that allegedly encapsulates all there ever need be known about person standing before us. Once this reductionistic and dehumanizing identifier is accepted – the Jew or the Israeli – then the road to public tolerance for the erasure, the casting out from the collective “family of humankind”, by any means necessary, is open for business.
Of Dogs, Brutality, Inhumanity, and Lazy Disregard for the Truth
The New York Times recently published an attention-grabbing essay by a highly regarded journalist who broke a story that Palestinian prisoners had been repeatedly raped by dogs trained specifically for this purpose by their Israeli guards. Supposedly thoroughly researched and ostensibly containing eye-witness testimony, the story methodically delineated the bestiality of the guards. Of course, the outrage about such heinous inhumanity was instantaneous and, I would say, perfectly justified, IF IT WERE TRUE! Subsequent investigation into article’s primary source raises serious doubts about the story’s veracity. (See R. Altman’s article, A Miscarriage of Journalism at ‘The New York Times’ published in The Free Press on 05.18.2026, for more on this topic.)
I am not writing this essay to defend Israel’s imprisonment practices. Others have documented individual instances of unlawful and brutal treatment practices by Israeli guards or the outrageous public statements by select far right members of Israel’s government effectively calling for inhumane treatment of Palestinians to further the far right’s expansionist agenda.
I am instead writing for a different reason. I am reacting angrily and sadly to the contaminating effects of the years-long dissemination of overt and implied denigration of Jews, Zionism, Israel, and Judaism itself that has been engaged in by too many. The steady drumbeat of this messaging and the subtle and incremental acceptance of its message has created a credulity among people who more readily accept the premise contained in the journalist’s article.
In effect, the article subtly stated that: The Jew and The Israelis ARE colonizers, ARE creators of an apartheid state, ARE perpetrating genocide against the hapless Gazans, ARE willing to actively utilize inhuman tactics to further their brutal campaign to subjugate and then eradicate any remnants of the rightful and original inhabitants of this ancient land. Don’t the recurring stories about the Jew, whether in economics and banking, Hollywood, the Mossad’s shadowy actions, the unseen, dark government lurking behind any country’s public government, prove that “the Jew” is capable of anything at any time?
It is the gradual corrosion of healthy skepticism of false stories about Jews that captures my concern. If you re-read, for example, the five steps about which I wrote earlier but insert The Jew into each blank below, you’ll find that the rhetoric being spewed by radical Islamic figures, the political positions of the radical right and the progressive left, the exploding rate of murderous violence perpetrated against Jews in London, Boulder, CO., Paris, Washington, D.C., Berlin, NYC, Montreal, and more, and the less noted academic, political, and social actions that are being undertaken around the country, (boycotting business that won’t agree to BDS propaganda) suggests that the conditions are ripening for ugly expression of the baseless and primal actions that we are all capable of exhibiting when the conditions fostered by dehumanizing messaging, regardless of the messenger, is allowed to go unchecked.
Re-read the conditions below with Jews, in mind.
Exclusion of ______ individuals from educational, political and social opportunities
Denial of access to healthcare and employment for _____ individuals
An active depiction of _____ people as subhuman, as cockroaches, and vermin, in publicly acceptable forums
Social isolation and marginalization
Absorption of the “truthiness” of vile lies about the reviled group under relentless pressure of systematic public broadcasts about the _____ as a distinct and identifiable group
Stepping Back from the Precipice
Holocaust is not an inevitability, but neither is it inconceivable. Not when the legitimate stature of The Jew, The Israeli, and the State of Israel, is so consistently, tirelessly, and falsely delegitimized and dehumanized. Not when this blind and blinding framework is systematically, calculatedly, and callously applied toward any group.
Therefore, I close with important lessons I’ve absorbed from my ethical tradition’s teachings, from my mentor, Dr. Jeff. Z., and others. I encourage you to consider subscribing to them, if you don’t already.
Carl Jung taught us that the parts of ourselves we find shameful, based on how the world external to us has taught us to perceive ourselves, get psychologically placed in “shadow” of our identity. Unless we integrate our shadow self into our conscious and public self, we are at risk of projecting those shameful characteristics and negative judgments onto others. We can do the work of coming to terms with our fuller nature, which enables us to relate to others in a more balanced and less biased manner.
The world is infinitely more complex than simple binary thinking allows for. If you find yourself characterizing others through a good/bad, right/wrong binary-ism, pause. There is invariably a more nuanced truth. Search for it. Explore it. Declare it.
Precisely because the world is complex, practice asking questions before making statements. Much is possible when the seeds of open-hearted curiosity are allowed to germinate.
The world’s wisdom traditions invariably land on some variation of the following: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. At the end of the day, no matter where we may hale from, we are brothers and sisters.
A 250-year-old European Jewish ethical tradition called Mussar (moral discipline) teaches machrio l’chaf zechut, which means to influence others toward virtue and to judge others favorably. Before our initial impressions of others can harden into fixed biases and prejudices, practicing this discipline of taking time to learn more about others, exploring further what we don’t at first understand, and remaining open to novel discoveries that expand our awareness, we advance the cause of peace and shared community one person at a time.
A beloved man and a moral compass, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks often focused on the role of individual responsibility in the conduct of our daily affairs. Sacks believed that each of us has a personal responsibility to work across the borders of faith and “be a blessing to humanity as a whole, seeking neither recognition nor reward.” Tears, he said, are a universal language pressing us to action to better the world. Each of us can pursue this path, working to lessen the burden carried by another.
None of us is perfect nor will we ever be. We inadvertently and sometimes intentionally cause someone else harm. An important practice that moves us back a step or two from the precipice is to acknowledge when we have done wrong, seek forgiveness for our action, and strive to avoid rationalizing harmful, destruction behavior directed toward others.
Taken as a whole, the choice before us is clear: Repair or Reject; Respect or Revile. What will you choose?