[1] A variant is yimakh shemo v'zikhro (Hebrew: יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ וְזִכְרוֹ, romanized: yīmmaḥ šəmō vəzīḵrō, lit.
[21][22][23][24] The phrase can also be applied to anyone perceived as "a great enemy of the Jewish nation"[25] such as Sabbatai Zevi,[26][27] Bohdan Khmelnytsky,[28] Spain,[29] [better source needed] Joseph Stalin,[30] Russians,[31] Poles,[32] Adolf Hitler,[3][33][34] Adolf Eichmann,[35] Josef Mengele,[36] any other Nazi,[37][38] or even in cases of interpersonal relationships, such as in reference to an abusive father,[39] or conversely as the father of Israel Zangwill of his playwright son.
[44] Saul Bellow places the phrase in the mouth of the titular character of his novel Herzog[45] to comically depict his anger.
[46] Leo Haber's The Red Heifer (2001), set in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s, includes the term in a glossary.
[47] In Yiddish a derived noun, formed with the Slavonic -nik nominalizing suffix, is yemakh-shmoynik 'scoundrel' (feminine yemakh-shmoynitse), but this is not used with the strength of the original epithet yemakh-shmoy.