May 16, 2008

Letters They Wouldn't Publish

April 22, 2006

Letters to the Editor
The Washington Post

Dear Editor:

Philip Kennicott (April 23) notes that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Czarist Russian forgery that purports to reveal an international Jewish conspiracy, "describes a world of paranoid fantasies still in wide circulation today."

It is certainly true that many contemporary extremists promote antisemitic allegations that resemble those of the Protocols. But Kennicott's paraphrase of today's antisemites leaves much to be desired. He writes: "Nattering nabobs of negativity sow the seeds of confusion and discord." The "nattering nabobs" phrase, coined by then-speechwriter William Safire for Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970, was intended as criticism of the media and had nothing to do with Jews. Surely Kennicott cannot mean to imply that anyone who regards some of the media as excessively negative is a bigot. And Safire, an eminent and widely-respected author and columnist --and himself a Jew-- does not deserve to be implicitly lumped together with antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

Cordially,

Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holoacust Studies
Melrose Park, PA






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Letters:

Compassion Fatigue on Darfur?
May 14, 2007

Yes, Let's Be Candid About the Mideast
March 19, 2007

Brandeis and the White Paper
November 14, 2006

Iran and Germany
November 13, 2006

Rescue Was Possible
September 25, 2006

The Jews in Iran
September 13, 2006

The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz
September 3, 2006

Mel Gibson's Critics
August 28, 2006

Jo Davidson: Sculptor and Activist
July 31, 2006

Nazi War Criminals in Arab Countries
May 10, 2006

Israel and Auschwitz
May 9, 2006

William Safire and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
April 22, 2006

Suppressing Holocaust News
April 7, 2006

Betty Friedan and the Nazis
March 13, 2006

Civil Liberties, in Nazi Germany and the U.S.
February 17, 2006

Paul McCloskey and the Deniers
February 11, 2006

Holocaust Denial is Bigotry
February 3, 2006

Not Just "Following Orders"
January 30, 2006

Melvin Lasky and the Holocaust
January 23, 2006

Saudi Arabian Holocaust-Denial
December 15, 2005

Iranian Holocaust Denial
December 10, 2005

Anti-Semitism in Jordan
November 13, 2005

Culture of Hatred in Jordan

November 10, 2005

German Jewish Refugee Children

October 24, 2005

An Earlier Black-Jewish Alliance

October 21, 2005

Treatment of Illegal Aliens Not Similar to Holocaust

September 4, 2005

Hollywood and the Nazi Filmmaker

September 4, 2005

Patton's Antisemitism

August 14, 2005

Sudan, Congress, and the Holocaust

July 25, 2005

Harvard and the Nazis

June 29, 2005

The New York Times
and the Holocaust

June 27, 2005

Should the U.S. Have Bombed Auschwitz?

January 29, 2005

Bigotry and Culture

January 26, 2005

Susan Sontag and the Nazi Filmmaker

December 30, 2004

How Moss Hart Alerted America About the Holocaust

November 2, 2004

The Quotas That Kept Out the Refugees

October 22, 2004

Lindbergh and Antisemitism - Then and Now

September 26, 2004

Rationalizing Stalin's Pact with Hitler

September 20, 2004

Turning a Blind Eye to Hitler

September 20, 2004

Truman and the Holocaust
September 1, 2004

FDR and the Warsaw Uprising
August 7, 2004

More on the Nazi Olympics
July 18, 2004

Avery Brundage and the 1936 Olympics
July 07, 2004

Genocide, Then and Now
June 27, 2004

Sudan and the Holocaust

June 22, 2004

Why did the United States turn its back on the Jews of Europe?
June 18, 2004

A Boxer Who Fought for His People
June 17, 2004

A Voice for Rescue
June 11, 2004

Morris Brafman, Soviet Jewry, and the Holocaust

May 28, 2004

An Unsung Hero of the Struggle for Jewish Freedom

May 28, 2004

FDR & the Holocaust: New Evidence
April 23, 2004

Mel Gibson and the Holocaust
April 18, 2004

Was Rescue Possible?

April 11, 2004

A Play That Smashed Racism
April 3, 2004

Hitler's Filmmaker
March 20, 2004

New Biography Wrong About FDR
February 29, 2004

Mel Gibson's Holocaust Problem
February 27, 2004

A Principal Who Stood Up for a Principle
February 8, 2004

Truman's Antisemitism
February 6, 2004

Inappropriate Hitler Analogy
December 18, 2003

George Marshall, Racism, and the Holocaust
November 13, 2003

The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz
December 24, 2002