In the immediate aftermath of what came to be called the Shoah or, more generally, the Holocaust, the tribe once known variously as Israelites, Hebrews, people of the Mosaic persuasion, and just plain Jews acquired a new battery of names. They were called “she’erit ha-peletah” (meaning “the surviving remnant”) in Hebrew, or “lebn-geblibene” (meaning “those who remained alive”) in Yiddish; in English, they were referred to by such varied nomenclature as victims, displaced persons, refugees, persecutees, survivors—and, to atone perhaps for America’s foot-dragging in welcoming them, the sobriquet of “delayed pilgrims,” as if these postwar Jewish immigrants fit right into the national origin story. Despite the presence of so many onomastic possibilities, the term “survivor” ultimately won the day—and the hearts of those who lived to tell the tale. And in that, there hangs a second, related tale: the emergence and staying power of this particular classification. At once a description, a source of authority, an injunction, a moral claim, and a legal one, the term “survivor” is now taken for granted, universally deployed as the most appropriate way by which to refer to those individuals who experienced the Shoah through one or another of its multiple manifestations. Its elevation took place at the expense of other taxonomies, bundling together a wide range of wartime experiences, crowding all of them into one linguistic tent. As a result, no one thinks twice these days about the use, much less the history, of this term. That wasn’t always the case. The acceptance and circulation of “survivor” was a long time coming, a consequence of gradual, if profound, changes both on the ground in Europe, Israel, and the United States, and in the ways in which academic discourse, jurisprudence, literature, and popular culture reckoned with the Holocaust. The historians I consulted in the fashioning of this piece date the term’s normalization, its prescriptive popularization, to the 1970s....

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