Insult to survivors
To bill the Jan. 29 program at Rutgers as “honoring the victims of the Nazi Holocaust” is a travesty and an insult to survivors. It assaults the memory of all who perished.
As a child of survivors, I find it impossible to understand what motivated those survivors who spoke to equate Nazism with Zionism. There is no commonality whatsoever and such statements can only add fuel to the increasing climate of anti-Semitism. Perhaps they forgot that it was anti-Semitism that caused their own victimization during the Holocaust. They may justify their words by stating that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, but the two are inextricably linked.
During an appearance at Harvard University shortly before his death, a student stood up and asked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to address himself to the issue of Zionism. The question was clearly hostile. King responded, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism.”
This is obviously a lesson the organizers of this event have not learned.
Dina Cohen
Clifton
The writer is chair of Generations of the Shoah-NJ and an executive board member of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest
comments