Let’s start with “appropriation,” which means, roughly, “claiming ownership.” To whom does the Holocaust “belong?” We are so accustomed to thinking of it as a Jewish experience that we sometimes also forget that it was a human experience, an historical event that affected everyone of us as humans and that might have happened to any group of humans in other places and times. If we allow only Jews to talk about the Holocaust authoritatively, to draw lessons from it, or to create metaphors around it, then the power of that historical experience will have been lost for all but a select group. Having read the works of Elie Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors, I do not believe this is what they would have wanted.

She writes, “Gay activists have sought to revise the historical record to reflect the extent of gay victimhood during the Nazi period.” She offers no particulars, so her claim is hard to refute. All I know is that as many as ten thousand homosexuals wearing the pink triangle may have died in the camps, and many more thousands were interned there. Surely this is not revisionism. Is she referring to some inflated claims of victimhood? Or does she believe ten thousand is an inflated number? This is unclear, but I do hope she does not intend to discredit our legitimate claims of victimhood. We were victims, and on a very large scale, and there can be no doubt of that.

I also found the following sentence very puzzling: “Lesbians and gay men engaged in a form of revisionism, adjusting the historical record to reflect the historical oppression of homosexuals during the Nazi reign of terror.” If she had used the verb “exaggerate” rather than “reflect,” she might have a point, but not a strong one. Ten thousand dead homosexuals hardly needs exaggerating for effect. But with the verb “reflect,” she seems to be denying that we were victimized. And yet she acknowledges in her previous paragraph that homosexual men were caught in the frenzy of purification and that tens of thousands of them were sent to the camps. Is this inconsistency, or lack of clarity?

With reference to metaphor creation, she complains that lesbians and gay men “draw parallels between contemporary homosexuals and the victims of Nazism fifty years earlier.” I expected her to explain why this was inappropriate, but she did not. She seemed to think that her reasons were self-evident, and I imagine she is building both the “revisionism” case and the “metaphor” case on her presupposition that the Holocaust “belongs” to the Jews rather than to humanity.

“Gay and lesbian activists invoked the memory of the Holocaust to suggest that government inaction is tantamount to genocide.” The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. Even before the Holocaust, Lemkin was interested in the Armenian genocide and the Simele massacre of 1933 in Iraq. So “genocide” is clearly a universal term available for anyone’s use. If gay and lesbian activists were persuaded that the U.S. government was turning its back on them so that they would die and thus unburden American society of their presence, maybe they had a point. If they wanted to invoke the Holocaust, I see no reason why Stein should consider that inappropriate. Again, the Holocaust does not “belong” only to the Jews.

Doughlas Remy