Exhibit nothing more than a whitewash
A recent article extends the evasiveness by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to display the truth of the abysmal behavior by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rescue European Jews before and during the Holocaust (“New exhibit tackles American inaction in face of Holocaust,” Aug. 9). The exhibit itself displays a view that many historians are calling a whitewash of historical truth.
The Roosevelt administration knew of the Nazi genocide early enough to have taken meaningful steps to save lives, such as not turning away the MS St. Louis with 900 Jews aboard. The exhibit omits mention of American diplomats in Europe pleading with Roosevelt to help, to admit more Jews, to destroy Hitler’s death camps and to take charge of a State Department trying to ignore hideous reports coming out of Europe
Polls indicate that the horrid memory of the Holocaust is fading. This exhibit contributes to this fading by failing to address Roosevelt’s inactions leading people to believe the situation was not that serious.
WARREN MANISON
Potomac
Democrats following path of British Labour
The hijacking of the British Labour Party by elements of the radical anti-Israel left mirrors the meltdown of the Democratic Party in the United States (“The hypocrisy of intersectionality and the Jewish question,” Aug. 2).
The meltdown accelerated in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama as president. Blinded by the smokescreen of intersectionality and identity politics, the liberal mainstays of the party —particularly liberal Jews, the liberal news media and impressionable youth vulnerable to left-wing propaganda — were oblivious to the fact that Obama was a product of the far-left.
His long-standing connections with the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky, Louis Farrakhan and George Soros were completely ignored.
“Fake news” is not a figment of President Donald Trump’s imagination. Rather, it is stark reality born of the liberal news media’s infatuation with America’s first African-American president and its irrational fear that Trump will somehow catapult marginalized far-right fringe groups into the mainstream of American politics.
Like it or not, today’s Democratic Party is no longer the Democratic Party of our parents and grandparents. It is no longer the party of Roosevelt or Harry Truman, of Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. Unlike their peers in the British Labour Party, the liberal Jewish establishment in the United States remains oblivious to the clear and present danger of the Democratic Party falling into the hands of radical anti-Israel activists. The need to confront that danger is urgent.
MARC CAROFF
Virginia Beach, Va.
Coverage of Open Orthodox needs to be skeptical
I am deeply concerned over articles regarding the “Open” Orthodox community that ignore the reality of Jewish life in the Diaspora and the view of scholars who have summarily denounced this movement’s use of the word “Orthodox” (“Fruchter not fazed by uncertain future,” Aug. 9).
If every rabbi throughout each generation made his own decisions on changes to our religious practices, there would be no Judaism today. Jewish law does not change in response to constant changes in society.
When you fail to report on such movements without balance and acknowledgement of the reality of the millenniums of Jewish practice and the voices of our forefathers, we all suffer.
HOWARD WEINBERG
Mount Airy
With language like that, op-ed not winning converts
Without taking sides, I’m puzzled by Barry Shaw’s recent op-ed (“The hypocrisy of intersectionality and the Jewish question,” Aug. 2). He uses language so insulting to people he disagrees with, it’s hard to imagine it changing anyone’s mind.
“Soft vacant minds,” “wrong,” “illiberal, closed-minded and intolerant,” “delusion,” “deception,” and “seduced and sucked into the swill of this dangerous nonsense” are words hardly likely to win converts. The article seems like little more than preaching to the choir, while simultaneously being likely to annoy and alienate anyone not already of like mind.
This is too much like current national politics, which amounts to unproductive fury and scorn.
GABRIEL GOLDBERG
Falls Church, Va.
Rabbi Jack Moline (“Rediscovering trust in a future,” WJW, Sept. 8, 2011 ) zogt emes (told the truth) when he asserted that “While our community has always had its extremists, over the past 10 years those people have attempted to define the middle. …
“Israel has become the surrogate for this culture clash among American Jews. It is safe to say that most of the combatants have no intention of making aliyah, thereby making the consequences of their certainty someone else’s problem.”
A parade example of this is the bellowing boilerplate regularly to be found in the recent letters to the editor of this publication by the likes of Melvin Farber (July 26), Nelson Marans and Claire Windsor (Aug 9) and Warren Manison (Aug 16). Why does the WJW see fit to publish the cliched, wholly predictable, ZOA-driven blather of one of these FDR-hating, settler-loving, hard-line Bibi/LIKUD groupies who have nothing to add to what they have already disgorged countless times before?
The latest addition to this baleful “axis of narrishkeit” : the Aug 16 letter of Marc Caroff, former head of the Washington chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (an affiliation suspiciously omitted from his entry; why the lack of full disclosure?). E.g., there is his catawumpus comment disingenuously dismissing as “irrational” the “fear that Trump will somehow catapult marginalized far-right fringe groups into the mainstream of American politics.”
Sad! Bogus. Confefe.
Proof: In the primary current go-around, 9 – count ‘em nine- candidates for office have ties to white nationalists or Nazis, and they are all Republicans (FORWARD, https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/405237/these-9-republicans-have-ties-to-white-nationalists-or-nazis/).