Hello. My name is Jacob Rosenberg, an articles editor here at Mother Jones.
For our print magazine, I edited a column called Mother Tongue. It's a chance for writers to take a look at the history of a word or phrase and unpack how it slipped its way into our lives. For the last issue, Noah Lanard—a reporter here who has taken on reporting about Israel’s war on Gaza, with a particular focus on the history of President Joe Biden—wrote about the history of "genocide."
Yesterday, we published his incisive piece. I hope you’ll give it a read. “Genocide” was the coinage of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who hoped to create a crime to ensure an internationally policed peace in a new, supposedly civil world. As Noah writes:
Lemkin was a lawyer, not a sociologist. By birthing the term "genocide," he was not trying to taxonomize the horrors of war. Instead, Lemkin—who lost 49 family members in the Holocaust—hoped that he could identify a crime to stop it. Nazi terror could not simply be Germany's "internal problem." With genocide, Lemkin hoped to give legal and moral weight to international intervention.
As debates of genocide have become common since October 7, and as Israel stands accused by South Africa before the International Court of Justice for its methods in the war on Gaza, it is worth revisiting the wider history of the charge. Are we failing the promises “genocide” offered? And if so, how?
Give the full, probing article a read here.
—Jacob Rosenberg
