New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind opposes remembering murdered gentiles in a newly approved Brooklyn Holocaust memorial. While admitting that millions of non-Jews were murdered in the Nazi death camps, he seems to think that pain is a commodity, and acknowledging that of others somehow diminishes one’s own. He could not be more wrong.

“To include these other groups diminishes their memory. These people are not in the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust,” Hikind said following a press conference at the memorial. “It is so vastly different. You cannot compare political prisoners with Jewish victims.”

Why can they not be compared? They were equally murdered!
I appreciate the importance of acknowledging the unique way in which Jews were targeted for total liquidation by the Nazis, but to imagine that honoring that unique situation demands closing our eyes to the suffering of others, or that we own the words “Holocaust victims” is deeply insensitive, deeply foolish, or both.
New York’s Mayor, Mike Bllomberg has been quick and decisive in his rejection of Hikind’s position. But Hikind’s response is interesting: “I don’t know how many people in his family died in the gas chambers. My grandparents, my uncles, my aunts [did].”
Does Hikind actually believe that suffering is a badge of honor? Must one have a certain number of relatives who were gassed and burned in order to have a valid opinion? If the Mayor can find someone whose family lost more members than did Hikind’s, will that end the debate?
At worst, Hikind’s comments reflect a perverse fetishizing of suffering and victimhood. At best they refelect a genuine and deeply personal pain with which he continues to wrestle. We should all be able to appreciate that, and he should acknowledge that it renders him unfit to act as a good public servant on this issue.
I won’t even address now, the many reasons that if we can not memorialize the Holocaust as a human tragedy, admittedly one in which Jews had a unique experience (though I imagine that each case of suffering is unique to the sufferer), it will ulitimately be as insignificant even to most Jews, as the Crusades. So ironically, it is precisely because I want the Holocaust remembered by as many people for as long as possible that I know Hikind is wrong and Bloomberg is right.