Twitter is coming after Vice President Mike Pence for a tweet he fired off on Holocaust Remembrance Day this Saturday. Everyone knows that Pence believes God decides matters of real estate when it comes to Israel, but many people are offended that he’d voice that sentiment openly.

On Saturday morning, Pence tweeted a video of himself and his wife Karen laying a wreath and taking a tour of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem last week. The tweet included a caption that paid tribute to what he referred to as the “6 million Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust who 3 years after walking beneath the shadow of death, rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future.”

A few days ago, Karen & I paid our respects at Yad Vashem to honor the 6 million Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust who 3 years after walking beneath the shadow of death, rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future. #HolocaustRemembranceDay #NeverAgain pic.twitter.com/67UuC1cYI2 — Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) January 27, 2018

The comment thread beneath Pence’s tweet filled up with people angry at his use of “Christ imagery” when referring to victims of the Holocaust. Other tweets slammed him for being “tone deaf” and “shameful.”

It’s Judaism; and no. — Phil Kalina: like, really, smart (@pkalina) January 27, 2018

They were not martyrs. My family was brutally killed without thought or choice. Just for being Jews. There was no resurrection. The dead remained dead. And the survivors tried to figure out how to go on with all they had experienced and lost. — MEE 🌊 (@Memmons13) January 27, 2018

“Are you referring to my Jewish relatives who died or survived in the Holocaust or did we become embroiled into some sort of Jesus analogy?” wrote one person.

“Mike Pence Jesused all of us Jews without our consent,” wrote another. “What a smug, condescending fraud.”

One person who really crystallized problem with Pence’s tweet was University of Nebraska political theory professor Ari Cohen, who had a few thoughts about the VP’s use of the “Christian rhetoric of resurrection that Jews don’t buy into at all.”

This is really a perfect encapsulation of Pence’s unique (and, to me, kinda gross) evangelical worldview. What he’s trying to say is some variant of “עם ישראל חי” but he can’t figure out how to do it without the Christian rhetoric of resurrection that Jews don’t buy into at all. https://t.co/AAVp8t4gH1 — Ari Kohen, First of His Name (@kohenari) January 28, 2018

A huge percentage of my family was murdered by the Nazis. And the few survivors who went to Israel didn’t thereby resurrect their dead relatives. For my grandfather’s *entire life* there was a hole in his heart from the moment he was torn away from his mother at Auschwitz. — Ari Kohen, First of His Name (@kohenari) January 28, 2018

In an interview he did in 1997, when I was *in college*, he *still* couldn’t talk about the last time he saw his mother, after they got out of the cattle car, couldn’t describe her or what she was like. Resurrected? Bullshit. Entire families destroyed. Survivors broken. — Ari Kohen, First of His Name (@kohenari) January 28, 2018

I get what Pence wants to say, the sentiment of it. But he’s SO bad at this because his feelings about Jews are so transparently disingenuous. For him, Jews are either a political prop or a kind of transit point on the way to paradise for him. So it just grates on me. — Ari Kohen, First of His Name (@kohenari) January 28, 2018

You can make some nice statement about “Never Forget” and just leave it at that. I wouldn’t say anything if he did that. But the state of Israel didn’t resurrect the murdered Jews of Europe. Nothing can do that, at least not from the Jewish perspective. — Ari Kohen, First of His Name (@kohenari) January 28, 2018

It’s from *Pence’s* religious perspective that my murdered family members might be resurrected. But they—and I—forcefully reject that cosmology. We don’t believe what he believes. Believe what you want, man, but I’d appreciate it if you could leave 6 million dead Jews out of it. — Ari Kohen, First of His Name (@kohenari) January 28, 2018

According to Haaretz’s Allison Kaplan Sommer, Pence’s choice of words are actually quite common in Israel.

The word “resurrection,” which has strong Christian connotations in English, is also a legitimate translation of the Hebrew word tekuma, which also can be translated as “rebirth,” “recovery” or “revival.” It is frequently used to describe the establishment of the State of Israel following the Holocaust in the phrase “Shoah v’tekuma.” Some on Twitter objected to the use of the word “martyr” as implying that the victims of the Holocaust sacrificed themselves willingly rather than being murdered. However, the word “martyr” is translated into Hebrew as kedoshim, which is the term most frequently used to memorialize Holocaust victims in Israel. The official name of Israel’s Holocaust memorial day is, in fact, Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day.

Featured image via James McNellis/Flickr