A term for death-camp survivors was re-deployed against oriental Jewish immigrants.

Evidence

The term human dust was originally applied to the survivors of Nazi death camps; indeed, the term is redolent of, and may originate in, the Stalinist phrase “camp dust” to describe the wretched inhabitants of the gulag. After 1949, it fell out of fashion as a descriptive term for survivors, who integrated into veteran Israeli society, but the term became a common sobriquet for newly arrived oriental Jews. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 689

Categorization

• XREF: This is a striking case of the transfer of dehumanizing language from one marginalized group to another—parallels how derogatory terms migrate across groups in other national projects.
• SEED: An essay on how dehumanizing vocabulary migrates between populations—how ‘camp dust’ moved from gulag to death camps to oriental Jews within a decade.
• DEEPTHINKING: The migration of this dehumanizing epithet from Holocaust survivors to Mizrahi Jews reveals how victimhood itself can be weaponized into exclusionary hierarchy.