Tekiah Magazine

By Archer Berenson, October 2025

Credit: CNN

Recently, while having what felt like a civilized discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an acquaintance online, my interlocutor suddenly messaged me, “Sorry, I don’t argue with Nazis” and blocked me. Other than one girl at my high school who confided in some friends that I was, “worse than Hitler” (shout-out to you, Chloe), this was the first time I had ever been compared to any of the villains of World War II. Being Jewish myself, it’s quite difficult to take these sorts of comparisons or insults seriously. But they are serious. And they’re reflective of a much broader sociological phenomenon, one that I call, “Worst Thing Theory”.
Here’s the idea: what is the Worst Thing that’s ever happened? Seriously. Give it a go. Chances are, like most Americans, your mind immediately went to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. The two big ‘H’s simply occupy a special part of our collective imagination. They epitomize a sort of comic-book villainy evil, the kind that seeks to take over the world and exterminate the impure. It’s not that far off from reality, but this mental reflex to draw comparisons to Hitler, and the Holocaust in particular, has wide reaching consequences, not just on Holocaust memory, but on our ability to precisely analyze modern events.
The ongoing war in Gaza, for example, has people literally tripping over themselves to protest in the streets against Israel’s “holocaust” of the Palestinians. The term “Holocaust inversion” has become fashionable among Zionist intellectuals and scholars to describe this phenomenon, but I’m not convinced it captures the full absurdity. Holocaust inversion implies that a Harvard or George Washington University student likens Gaza to the Holocaust mainly to insult Jews by weaponizing their history and memory. That may be part of it. But something else is at work here.
This reflex surfaces in American domestic politics too. In 2019, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) compared migrant detention centers at the U.S. border to “concentration camps.” She later doubled down on Twitter, calling it a historically accurate label for “the mass detention of civilians without trial.” Technically, “concentration camp” has been applied to many contexts outside the Holocaust but, in the American imagination, the term is inextricably tied to Nazi death camps. Invoking it willfully conjures the Worst Thing.
And that’s the point. AOC, like the aforementioned college students, wasn’t just aiming to provoke Jews. She was leveraging the Worst Thing to inflate the moral urgency of an issue that had captured her interest. This is Worst Thing Theory in action: when accountability is low and passion is high, people instinctively reach for the Holocaust, not because they’re trying to disrespect its Jewish victims, but because no other comparison seems big enough. To be clear: there is no such thing as, “a holocaust” when it comes to moral comparisons, there is only The Holocaust. Any invocation, in the context of a moral argument, of a lowercase ‘h’ holocaust erases the Jewish specificity of the actual Holocaust. When we offer the Holocaust as a comparison for just about anything, it not only cheapens the memory of six million dead Jews, but it also decreases the moral legitimacy of whatever it is being compared to.
Consider the following two moral catastrophes. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocide in its strictest sense: a systemic effort to eliminate the Tutsi people. The indiscriminate murder of Tutsi men, women, and children over those hundred days in 1994 make calling it a genocide an unquestionably legitimate moral assertion. Now, think about South African Apartheid. Apartheid was discriminatory and dehumanizing, but it was not exterminatory. Calling Apartheid ‘genocide’ would be an inappropriate misapplication of a critical moral term, just like calling the Rwandan Genocide ‘discriminatory’ would be a criminal understatement. To understand either ethical disaster, it is imperative that we have precise moral language to be used appropriately.
Worst Thing Theory, at base, is about the failure to make distinctions and to do the —sometimes quite challenging— moral calculus of every tragedy. If you can label every humanitarian crisis a Holocaust, you can bypass the hard work of ethical reasoning and land directly in the moral stratosphere of absolute evil. This, of course, comes at a tremendous cost: bandying about words like Holocaust and genocide reduces the impact of our moral vocabulary. If every tragic event rises to the level of genocide, then nothing does. If everyone’s political opponent is Hitler and their supporters Nazis, then nobody is. When real atrocities happen, and real Nazis emerge, we must be able to talk about them with adequate moral seriousness.
There is no easy fix for this phenomenon. We need to demand better of one another and, especially, of ourselves. It is crucial that we are engaging with moral issues unflinchingly, but without hyperbole. Critically, but without reaching for imprecise comparison. Sensitively, but without disrespecting the victims of past tragedies by lowering or distorting their suffering. Precision is not pedantry, it’s the foundation of moral clarity. Without it, we risk losing the ability to recognize the Worst Thing when it appears again.

Here’s the idea: what is the Worst Thing that’s ever happened? Seriously. Give it a go. Chances are, like most Americans, your mind immediately went to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. The two big ‘H’s simply occupy a special part of our collective imagination. They epitomize a sort of comic-book villainy evil, the kind that seeks to take over the world and exterminate the impure. It’s not that far off from reality, but this mental reflex to draw comparisons to Hitler, and the Holocaust in particular, has wide reaching consequences, not just on Holocaust memory, but on our ability to precisely analyze modern events.

The ongoing war in Gaza, for example, has people literally tripping over themselves to protest in the streets against Israel’s “holocaust” of the Palestinians. The term “Holocaust inversion” has become fashionable among Zionist intellectuals and scholars to describe this phenomenon, but I’m not convinced it captures the full absurdity. Holocaust inversion implies that a Harvard or George Washington University student likens Gaza to the Holocaust mainly to insult Jews by weaponizing their history and memory. That may be part of it. But something else is at work here.

This reflex surfaces in American domestic politics too. In 2019, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) compared migrant detention centers at the U.S. border to “concentration camps.” She later doubled down on Twitter, calling it a historically accurate label for “the mass detention of civilians without trial.” Technically, “concentration camp” has been applied to many contexts outside the Holocaust but, in the American imagination, the term is inextricably tied to Nazi death camps. Invoking it willfully conjures the Worst Thing.

And that’s the point. AOC, like the aforementioned college students, wasn’t just aiming to provoke Jews. She was leveraging the Worst Thing to inflate the moral urgency of an issue that had captured her interest. This is Worst Thing Theory in action: when accountability is low and passion is high, people instinctively reach for the Holocaust, not because they’re trying to disrespect its Jewish victims, but because no other comparison seems big enough. To be clear: there is no such thing as, “a holocaust” when it comes to moral comparisons, there is only The Holocaust. Any invocation, in the context of a moral argument, of a lowercase ‘h’ holocaust erases the Jewish specificity of the actual Holocaust. When we offer the Holocaust as a comparison for just about anything, it not only cheapens the memory of six million dead Jews, but it also decreases the moral legitimacy of whatever it is being compared to.

Consider the following two moral catastrophes. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocide in its strictest sense: a systemic effort to eliminate the Tutsi people. The indiscriminate murder of Tutsi men, women, and children over those hundred days in 1994 make calling it a genocide an unquestionably legitimate moral assertion. Now, think about South African Apartheid. Apartheid was discriminatory and dehumanizing, but it was not exterminatory. Calling Apartheid ‘genocide’ would be an inappropriate misapplication of a critical moral term, just like calling the Rwandan Genocide ‘discriminatory’ would be a criminal understatement. To understand either ethical disaster, it is imperative that we have precise moral language to be used appropriately. 

Worst Thing Theory, at base, is about the failure to make distinctions and to do the —sometimes quite challenging— moral calculus of every tragedy. If you can label every humanitarian crisis a Holocaust, you can bypass the hard work of ethical reasoning and land directly in the moral stratosphere of absolute evil. This, of course, comes at a tremendous cost: bandying about words like Holocaust and genocide reduces the impact of our moral vocabulary. If every tragic event rises to the level of genocide, then nothing does. If everyone’s political opponent is Hitler and their supporters Nazis, then nobody is. When real atrocities happen, and real Nazis emerge, we must be able to talk about them with adequate moral seriousness.

There is no easy fix for this phenomenon. We need to demand better of one another and, especially, of ourselves. It is crucial that we are engaging with moral issues unflinchingly, but without hyperbole. Critically, but without reaching for imprecise comparison. Sensitively, but without disrespecting the victims of past tragedies by lowering or distorting their suffering. Precision is not pedantry, it’s the foundation of moral clarity. Without it, we risk losing the ability to recognize the Worst Thing when it appears again.

Recently, while having what felt like a civilized discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an acquaintance online, my interlocutor suddenly messaged me, “Sorry, I don’t argue with Nazis” and blocked me. Other than one girl at my high school who confided in some friends that I was, “worse than Hitler” (shout-out to you, Chloe), this was the first time I had ever been compared to any of the villains of World War II. Being Jewish myself, it’s quite difficult to take these sorts of comparisons or insults seriously. But they are serious. And they’re reflective of a much broader sociological phenomenon, one that I call, “Worst Thing Theory”.
Here’s the idea: what is the Worst Thing that’s ever happened? Seriously. Give it a go. Chances are, like most Americans, your mind immediately went to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. The two big ‘H’s simply occupy a special part of our collective imagination. They epitomize a sort of comic-book villainy evil, the kind that seeks to take over the world and exterminate the impure. It’s not that far off from reality, but this mental reflex to draw comparisons to Hitler, and the Holocaust in particular, has wide reaching consequences, not just on Holocaust memory, but on our ability to precisely analyze modern events.
The ongoing war in Gaza, for example, has people literally tripping over themselves to protest in the streets against Israel’s “holocaust” of the Palestinians. The term “Holocaust inversion” has become fashionable among Zionist intellectuals and scholars to describe this phenomenon, but I’m not convinced it captures the full absurdity. Holocaust inversion implies that a Harvard or George Washington University student likens Gaza to the Holocaust mainly to insult Jews by weaponizing their history and memory. That may be part of it. But something else is at work here.
This reflex surfaces in American domestic politics too. In 2019, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) compared migrant detention centers at the U.S. border to “concentration camps.” She later doubled down on Twitter, calling it a historically accurate label for “the mass detention of civilians without trial.” Technically, “concentration camp” has been applied to many contexts outside the Holocaust but, in the American imagination, the term is inextricably tied to Nazi death camps. Invoking it willfully conjures the Worst Thing.
And that’s the point. AOC, like the aforementioned college students, wasn’t just aiming to provoke Jews. She was leveraging the Worst Thing to inflate the moral urgency of an issue that had captured her interest. This is Worst Thing Theory in action: when accountability is low and passion is high, people instinctively reach for the Holocaust, not because they’re trying to disrespect its Jewish victims, but because no other comparison seems big enough. To be clear: there is no such thing as, “a holocaust” when it comes to moral comparisons, there is only The Holocaust. Any invocation, in the context of a moral argument, of a lowercase ‘h’ holocaust erases the Jewish specificity of the actual Holocaust. When we offer the Holocaust as a comparison for just about anything, it not only cheapens the memory of six million dead Jews, but it also decreases the moral legitimacy of whatever it is being compared to.
Consider the following two moral catastrophes. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocide in its strictest sense: a systemic effort to eliminate the Tutsi people. The indiscriminate murder of Tutsi men, women, and children over those hundred days in 1994 make calling it a genocide an unquestionably legitimate moral assertion. Now, think about South African Apartheid. Apartheid was discriminatory and dehumanizing, but it was not exterminatory. Calling Apartheid ‘genocide’ would be an inappropriate misapplication of a critical moral term, just like calling the Rwandan Genocide ‘discriminatory’ would be a criminal understatement. To understand either ethical disaster, it is imperative that we have precise moral language to be used appropriately.
Worst Thing Theory, at base, is about the failure to make distinctions and to do the —sometimes quite challenging— moral calculus of every tragedy. If you can label every humanitarian crisis a Holocaust, you can bypass the hard work of ethical reasoning and land directly in the moral stratosphere of absolute evil. This, of course, comes at a tremendous cost: bandying about words like Holocaust and genocide reduces the impact of our moral vocabulary. If every tragic event rises to the level of genocide, then nothing does. If everyone’s political opponent is Hitler and their supporters Nazis, then nobody is. When real atrocities happen, and real Nazis emerge, we must be able to talk about them with adequate moral seriousness.
There is no easy fix for this phenomenon. We need to demand better of one another and, especially, of ourselves. It is crucial that we are engaging with moral issues unflinchingly, but without hyperbole. Critically, but without reaching for imprecise comparison. Sensitively, but without disrespecting the victims of past tragedies by lowering or distorting their suffering. Precision is not pedantry, it’s the foundation of moral clarity. Without it, we risk losing the ability to recognize the Worst Thing when it appears again.