Raphael Lemkin gave the modern world its most terrifying word: “genocide.” A Polish-Jewish lawyer who fled the Nazis, he spent his life forcing governments to recognize that the deliberate destruction of a people was a unique crime — not just “war” or “atrocity,” but something worse. He helped drive the 1948 Genocide Convention, and he did it as a committed Zionist who believed the Jewish people needed a state after the Holocaust.
In recent years, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization has been (seemingly) hijacking Lemkin’s name to accuse that Jewish state of the very crime he fought to define — and some of the most powerful politicians in America, from both parties, are saying: enough.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has turned Israel into a permanent target, branding it a genocidal regime while Hamas openly vows to repeat Oct. 7, 2023–style attacks. It fundraises and builds its profile under Lemkin’s name, wrapping its politics in the moral authority of the man who tried to give murdered Jews a legal shield. Lemkin’s family says they never gave permission — and that this rhetoric doesn’t just abuse his legacy. It flips it on its head.
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For months, the Lemkin heirs tried to handle this quietly. They raised objections, shared documentation, and urged the institute to stop trading on Lemkin’s name. Those avenues went nowhere. What began as a moral plea has now escalated into a full-blown political and legal pressure campaign.
On June 24, more than 100 letters landed on the desks of Pennsylvania and federal officials, asking regulators to investigate whether the Lemkin Institute is exploiting a stolen brand to raise money and wage campaigns. The signatures read like a bipartisan fever dream: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Republican Leader John Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), and Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Dave McCormick (R-PA), among others. In a town that can’t agree on the most basic issues, these rivals are suddenly on the same page when it comes to one very specific demand: stop politicizing Lemkin’s name, and enforce the law.
This isn’t an attempt to gag critics of Israel or outlaw harsh language about Gaza. The coalition is urging Pennsylvania regulators to do something simple: verify whether the institute has legal authorization to use Lemkin’s name and likeness for fundraising and branding, and if not, force a name change. If you want to call Israel a genocidal state, say it under your own banner, not while draping yourself in the purloined mantle of the man who coined the term.
But that narrow legal question sits on top of a much bigger moral one. “Genocide” is not just an angry synonym for “war crime” or “policy I dislike.” Lemkin fought to convince the world that the systematic effort to destroy a people demanded unique recognition and punishment. He spent his career lobbying governments, drafting language, and pushing the United Nations to embed that concept in international law. He saw Zionism not as some abstract ideology, but as the answer to centuries of persecution: a Jewish refuge in a world that had shown it was willing to look away. To now wield Lemkin’s name as a branding tool for campaigns that single out that refuge as uniquely genocidal is more than just irony — it’s a brutal form of historical revision.
The institute’s defenders may claim that invoking “genocide” is a moral alarm bell, that only the harshest language can rouse the world to Palestinian suffering. But moral urgency doesn’t give you the right to grab someone else’s legacy off the shelf and slap it on your fundraising materials. If Lemkin’s heirs are correct that the institute is using the name without authorization, donors are being misled about what they’re actually supporting. The organization is cashing in on a family’s grief and a murdered people’s history, while turning the one Jewish state into the villain in the very story Lemkin tried to tell.
And then there’s the damage to the word itself. Over the past year, “genocide” has become a campus chant, a protest slogan, a hashtag tossed around with little regard for the legal standard it implies. If every brutal war becomes genocide by social media decree, then the term stops meaning anything. If Israel’s actions, however controversial or contested, are casually branded as an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people of Gaza, then genuine genocidaires elsewhere gain rhetorical cover: After all, if “everyone” is a genocidaire, no one really is. That’s precisely the moral fog Lemkin was trying to cut through.
That’s why this bipartisan pile-on should worry the institute more than a thousand angry op-eds. It’s because they see a line being crossed: the line between fierce debate over Israel, and the hijacking of Holocaust language and legacy for partisan ends.
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If Pennsylvania’s officials care about what Raphael Lemkin actually did — about the word he gave us, and the people he hoped it would protect — they should tell the Institute to stop using him as a prop.
Call Israel what you like. Just leave Lemkin’s name out of it.
Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and has written for dozens of publications in Canada, the United States, and globally.