Wednesday, August 19, 2015

The Banality of Hate: Caught on Local Video



As the school starts at UIUC, our Jewish house of worship is shown being vandalized here. These photos show how hate manifests itself as "normal."  When I teach grade school children about my Dad’s Holocaust experience, I minimize details about his concentration camps. I emphasize, instead, the precursor steps that led to isolation and destruction of a people—for example, the day his best friend, a Catholic boy, tearfully said he could not play soccer anymore with my Dad because the police threatened to arrest his family for conspiring with Jews. Hatred ends in horror … but it begins with quiet forms of vandalism and boycotts. To our local teachers who teach the Holocaust: Thank you. It’s the best antidote for this.
 

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