I Did Nazi That Coming

Why Animal Advocates Should Not Invoke the Holocaust (And it’s Not Why You Think)

My grandparents were lucky. As a result, I am lucky. All four managed to either be the first of their families born in the U.S. or escaped the shtetls of Europe at young ages. I am alive today because of this stroke of good fortune, because my grandparents and their parents managed to dodge the pogroms in which so many of their extended families were starved to death or slaughtered.

Probably in no small part due to being raised with the understanding instilled in Jewish people of how profoundly unjust and cruel it is to oppress those who are different from us, I am also vegan. I just extended and applied that understanding to other species. In just a few days, on February 1, I will have been vegan for 26 years. I was also 26 when I met my husband and we started our lives and this path together; we consider promoting and building vegan culture and outreach to be our life’s work.

What people do to billions of land and aquatic animals every year in order to eat them is so staggering in scale and shocking in brutality, I can scarcely find the words for it. How do you describe the systemic disconnection of turning living, sensitive beings into burgers, slabs, detached wings and smoked slices? The multiple forcible…