One Place News
(RNS) — I knew it would happen, and it finally did. Someone called me a name no Jew should ever be called.
I somehow wound up in a political conversation on Facebook about anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests happening around the country. I made the apparent mistake of suggesting that speaking out in favor of immigrants was, in fact, a Jewish value as old as the Torah itself.
That was too liberal for one person. So, he reached back into the darkest corners of Jewish history and hurled the ugliest epithet in the Jewish lexicon directly at me. He called me a kapo.
Let us be precise about what that word actually means.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia, kapos were concentration camp prisoners whom the Nazi SS units selected to oversee other prisoners on forced labor details. They often whipped, beat and even killed the prisoners under their command.
The moral situation of the kapos was complex. In his essay “The Grey Zone,” from his book “The Drowned and the Saved,” the late Primo Levi, drawing on his experience surviving the Holocaust, wrote that the Nazis turned victims into accomplices. The kapos were themselves prisoners. Many did what they had to do to survive for one more day. Before we judge them, we should practice the delicate art of treading with moral humility.
That is why it is beyond offensive, and beneath contempt, to casually fling that word around.
Calling someone a kapo today carries with it a freight of assumptions — every one of them both false and dangerous.
If you use the term as an accusation today, the first assumption you are making is that we are living through another Holocaust — that America in 2026 is a concentration camp, and that Jews who disagree with you are collaborating in their own people’s genocide.
We are living through an unprecedented and genuinely alarming surge of antisemitism in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. In America alone, the Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — a record high in its tracking history since 1979. It reported another 6,274 such incidents in 2025.
When we see and hear the hatred, we must name it — loudly. But modern attacks on Jews, however grievous, do not an Auschwitz make. They are not the cattle cars, the selections, the crematoria. And when you imply that they are the same, you are desecrating the memory of the 6 million killed in the Holocaust.
The second assumption is that the person with whom you disagree is not merely wrong, but they are evil. You are saying that they are morally equivalent to a collaborator in mass murder.
Jews disagree with one another, and we have always done so. It is our favorite aerobic activity. The Talmud is, among other things, an anthology of disagreements — many of them unresolved.
You will encounter someone whom you are sure is wrong-headed on some position, and most likely, a position you hold sacred. That person might even be someone in your own family.
You will believe them to be wrong, or even deluded. You may offer facts, not just feelings. You can argue fiercely and passionately because there are real issues at stake here.
But to use a word soaked in the blood and suffering of our martyrs and then to Velcro it onto a living Jew, whose worst crime is disagreeing with you, is not argument. It is moral violence.
Calling someone a kapo trivializes the Holocaust and turns its worst details into a taunt. It coarsens our communal discourse beyond repair. And it dishonors the memory of those who actually lived and died inside the universe that word came from.
Those who use it should be ashamed of themselves.
