Second Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators; the Holocaust era extended from 1933 to 1945, with the organized mass murder known as the Final Solution implemented between 1941 and 1945.[6] Uses of “second Holocaust” invoke that history in discussions ranging from the survival of Israel to the continuity of Jewish communities.[1][2]

The expression has served different purposes: a warning about a future catastrophe, a retrospective description of existential fear, and a personal account of renewed trauma.[3][4] It has also been applied to assimilation and intermarriage, sometimes alongside the related expression “silent Holocaust.”[2] In a different application, the American Jewish Committee characterizes accusations that Israel is perpetrating a “second Holocaust” against Palestinians as factually wrong, antisemitic, and distortive of Holocaust history and Jewish memory.[5]

Holocaust remembrance became central to Israeli national identity after the state’s establishment through annual commemorations, memorials, the Kasztner trial and its repercussions, the Eichmann trial, and cultural works.[7] Within that wider setting, Holocaust imagery has repeatedly appeared in Israeli public discourse about the Israeli-Arab conflict and national security.[7]

A June 10, 1971 statement by Professor Franklin Littell, chairman of Christians Concerned for Israel, used the exact expression “Second Holocaust” retrospectively for the danger Israel had faced in 1967.[8] Speaking at a New York press conference, Littell described a threatened “massive assault” on Israeli Jews, said it had been announced as a “Holy War to kill the Jews,” and stated that the disaster had been averted.[8] He also described Jewish leaders’ fear that another major sector of world Jewry might have been wiped out.[8]

The weeks before the Six-Day War brought Holocaust memory to the forefront of diaspora Jewish consciousness as Israel faced a threat to its existence.[3] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks recalled in a February 2016 interview that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were massing troops, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had ordered the United Nations peacekeeping force out of Sinai, and the Gulf of Aqaba had been closed.[9] For his post-Holocaust generation, Sacks said, it appeared possible that they might live through “a second Holocaust”; he remembered fear and trauma among Jews in Cambridge, followed by a war that ended after six days.[9]

A retrospective account in Sapir Journal describes similar fears among French Jews and others, citing forces assembled by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, Nasser’s declarations that Israel would be destroyed, and PLO chairman Ahmad al-Shuqayri’s prediction that “no Jew would remain alive.”[10] The account characterizes Israel’s victory, achieved primarily with Mirage aircraft purchased from France, as having been greeted as a miracle.[10] In a 2007 retrospective, columnist Sever Plocker likewise described the catastrophe Israelis had feared, recalling threats to kill and destroy, parks prepared as mass graveyards in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Holocaust survivors’ sense that persecution had returned.[11]

The expression later appeared in Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s explanation of the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility: he vowed that Israel would not permit preparations for a “second Holocaust” during his lifetime.[7] The Israeli Air Force destroyed the reactor on June 7, 1981.[12] Then-chief of staff Rafael Eitan subsequently connected Begin’s decision-making to Holocaust psychology and recalled Begin’s insistence that he would not be the person “in whose time there will be a second Holocaust.”[12]

In literature, Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock placed the phrase within a satirical, metafictional argument about Jewish survival.[13] A character calling himself Philip Roth advocates “Diasporism,” proposing the dispersal of Jews in the West and the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European background in prewar European Jewish communities to avert a “second Holocaust” attributed within the fictional argument to Zionism’s exhaustion.[13] A 2025 essay in the Jewish Review of Books emphasizes the novel’s provocative character and argues that its ideas acquired renewed resonance after October 7.[13]

Warnings about Iran have been a prominent application of the expression to a possible future genocide.[14][15] Historian Robert Wistrich connected extremist Islam in Iran with planning genocide against Israel as a principal target, calling the prospect “a second Holocaust” while also discussing denial of the Holocaust that had already occurred.[14] In 2019, German-Syrian scholar Bassam Tibi warned Austria’s Parliament that Iran might carry out another Holocaust against Jews in Israel.[15] At a memorial for victims of Nazism, he said: “If there is going to be a repeat of the Holocaust, it will not be in Europe … but in the Middle East.”[15]

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs uses “Holocaust promotion” as an analytical term for encouraging genocide against Jews or Israel, explicitly or as the anticipated consequence of proposed policies.[16] Its analysis includes calls for Israel’s destruction that do not themselves mention the Holocaust or explicitly state that mass murder would be required.[16] As examples, it cites Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s October 26, 2005 address to a “World without Zionism” conference in Tehran, where he endorsed Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement that the Israeli regime “must be eliminated from the pages of history,” and his December 2006 prediction that the “Zionist regime” would disappear, comparing it with the Soviet Union.[16]

Calls in Middle Eastern media for “a new Holocaust to finish the job” were classified under Holocaust glorification in the United States’ 2010 monitoring of global antisemitism, alongside Holocaust denial and relativism.[17] At a November 8, 2023 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on American support for Israel after the Hamas attack, Representative Brad Sherman used “a second Holocaust” in discussing the slogan “from the river to the sea,” connecting the phrase to his assertion that Hamas intended to repeat October 7.[18]

Another application developed around American Jewish demography after the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, when some Orthodox leaders described assimilation and intermarriage as a “second Holocaust” or “silent Holocaust.”[2] The survey, conducted by the Council of Federations with a sample of 5,000 Jewish households, reported a 52 percent intermarriage figure, contrasted with a reported 9 percent in 1965.[2] Of 777,000 children in intermarried families, 28 percent were reported as being raised Jewish.[2] The findings generated extensive communal discussion, including a seven-and-a-half-hour symposium on intermarriage at the Council of Jewish Federations’ 1991 General Assembly in Baltimore.[2]

United Jewish Appeal’s David Sacks warned that future generations might ask why their elders had stood by, while symposium co-organizer Helene Berger viewed the statistics as a potential stimulus to action.[2] Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald used “silent Holocaust” for what he regarded as the erosion of American Jewish religious and communal life, but also criticized an emphasis on Holocaust memory that left young Jews identifying Judaism primarily with victimhood.[2] In July 2019, Israeli education minister Rafi Peretz described intermarriage, especially in the United States, as “like a second Holocaust” and asserted that assimilation had cost the Jewish people six million members over 70 years; Eli Ben-Dahan had used “silent Holocaust” for intermarriage in 2014.[19]

Accusations against Israel represent a separate application of Holocaust terminology.[5][20] After October 7, 2023, Arab media outlets and social media users described the Gaza war as a new Holocaust allegedly perpetrated by Israel.[21] The report cites an al-Yawm al-Sabi‘ article that used “the Gaza Holocaust,” while an October 22 opinion piece in Bahrain’s Akhbar al-Khaleej described Palestinians’ experience as their own Holocaust.[21] Such comparisons have appeared alongside analogies between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto and between the Israel Defense Forces and SS officers.[20]

Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Nirim, resident Rami Bar-Gil described his family’s experience, the kibbutz’s destruction, and the need to rebuild.[4] He spoke of supporting children, women, and older residents “who experienced a second Holocaust in their lives.”[4] His use of the expression conveyed trauma and loss within the community.[4]

Holocaust survivors affected by the attacks also used the phrase in personal testimony.[22][23] Bella Haim recalled thinking of a “second Holocaust” after her grandson told her that terrorists were in his kibbutz and his house was burning.[22] Michael Kuperstein, whose grandson Bar was abducted, said: “I went through a first Holocaust; I am going through a second one now.”[23] Other accounts included Rachel Achituv sheltering in a safe room in Nirim while her caregiver held the safe-room door shut against attackers, and Yehudit Shosh losing her grandson in Be’eri.[23]

Tzipora Rubin, a Holocaust survivor who survived the attack on Nir Oz, described hiding in a safe room as attackers entered and ransacked the house before setting it on fire.[24] She and her family escaped through a window and hid outside for hours.[24] In an April 2025 account, Rubin acknowledged that others might object to “second Holocaust,” but maintained that it expressed her own experience.[24]

The 1967 crisis and war became a turning point in Jewish consciousness, particularly among American Jews, with Israel’s survival becoming an emblem of a new Jewish identity.[3] Communal priorities shifted toward survival, and activism, fundraising, political lobbying, and support for Israel and Soviet Jewry gained prominence.[3] Sacks’s recollection of prewar fear likewise connected the prospect of another Holocaust with the outlook of a generation raised after the destruction of European Jewry.[9]

The demographic debate of the 1990s had institutional consequences beyond the language used to describe it.[2] The population survey contributed to deeper outreach to interfaith families and to initiatives including Birthright Israel.[2] Researcher Benjamin Phillips suggested that its greatest effect may have been on American Jews’ self-image.[2] Demographer Sidney Goldstein cautioned that a stable or declining population did not necessarily preclude a strong community or high levels of Jewish identity, while recognizing the importance of population density for local communal life.[2]

Debate about whether the Holocaust could happen again continued across decades.[1] The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs describes an intensification of that discussion in the United States in the early 2000s, contrasting Leon Wieseltier’s reassurance that “Hitler is dead” with columnist Ron Rosenbaum’s argument that contemporary antisemitism justified continuing concern.[1]

The historical specificity of the Holocaust is central to objections to these analogies.[25] Elie Wiesel said in 2012 that Iran was dangerous but could not create “a second Auschwitz,” insisting that “Only Auschwitz was Auschwitz” and warning that comparisons could diminish understanding of it.[25] In 2024, President Isaac Herzog distinguished October 7 from the Holocaust’s total, systematic genocide across countries and continents, emphasizing that Jews now have a state and army.[26] He recalled survivor Naftali Fürst telling his granddaughter Mika, a survivor of Kfar Aza, that the experiences were frighteningly similar but “not the same” and “not a Holocaust”; reporting on the speech stated that 10 percent of Kfar Aza’s residents died and close to 20 were abducted.[26]

Survivors Dov Golombovich and Francine Burstein also rejected equating October 7 with the Holocaust, while historian Maoz Azaryahu described the attack as a pogrom and writer Naomi Klein argued that connecting the traumas could serve political or military goals.[22][27] Peretz’s intermarriage analogy drew objections from Yuval Steinitz, who emphasized cultural and historical Jewish identity, and from Jewish leaders who said it trivialized the Shoah or alienated intermarried families.[19] Revital Poleg likewise criticized it as offensive to diaspora communities, including intermarried families active in Jewish life and connected to Israel.[28]

The American Jewish Committee characterizes accusations that Israel is perpetrating a “second Holocaust” as factually wrong and antisemitic, while the World Jewish Congress lists such accusations alongside comparisons of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto and the IDF to SS officers.[5][20] The INSS report criticizes the post-October 7 Gaza-war comparisons as trivializing the Holocaust.[21] Begin’s Osirak analogy accompanied a separate substantive dispute: Iraq denied Israel’s nuclear-weapons allegation, intelligence estimates differed, and Israeli cabinet opponents feared war, damage to peace with Egypt, an arms buildup, or an embargo.[12][29] UN Security Council Resolution 487 condemned the raid and noted Iraq’s treaty obligations and satisfactorily applied IAEA safeguards.[30]