The word Shoah carries nationalist political weight that Holocaust does not

Evidence

Shoah does not seem, therefore, any more-or any less-appropriate, except that invoking it in English might run the risk of erasing (successfully or not) the added weight of the word’s participation in the appropriation of the Holocaust by a national project, Political Zionism (see Arendt, Eichmann, Segev, Seventh Million, Massad, “Palestinians,” Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry). This chapter addresses such an erasure, the difficult sedimentation and contamination of history in and as language, the very possibility of a historical rupture in language. Hence, it hardly seems necessary (if perhaps nonetheless unavoidable), while writing in English, to take on without ambivalence the not yet fully globalized term Shoah, the added weight of what thus remains a Hebrew and, by now, Israeli word. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1200

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how language/terminology encodes political projects — parallels the book’s framing of enemy categories but extends to naming the unnameable.
• DEFINE: Explains the etymology and ideological freight of Shoah vs Holocaust as competing terms.