Writing in Commentary’s Contentions blog about the parallels between the Holocaust and the looming threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb Evelyn Gordon observes:
There’s another parallel that’s equally disturbing: the world’s indifference to the relentless incitement to genocide of both Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The [latter] never misses an opportunity to call for “wiping Israel off the map” … a blatant call for mass murder. Yet he has never for instance been declared persona non grata by the EU or investigated for incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Court; indeed he has been feted in many parts of the “enlightened” West …
Gordon goes on to write that “even more troubling is the silence of world Jewry on this issue — a stark contrast to its activism over say Soviet Jews.” But she ended her analysis a bit too soon failing to note one further uncanny parallel between the current predicament and that of the 1940s: The reason for the silence of American Jewry then as now.
In a strikingly honest speech at a national Holocaust conference in 2008 David Ellenson dean of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College acknowledged that leading Reform clergyman Stephen Wise and other American Jewish leaders “failed miserably” in their response to the Holocaust. A report on the conference notes:
Create a free account to keep reading.
