Holocaust Historian Saul Friedlander Vows To Leave U.S. If Donald Trump Wins
Image by Wikipedia
— Historian Saul Friedlander said he would leave the United States if Donald Trump were elected president.
Friedlander, a Pulitzer Prize winning international expert on the Holocaust who lives in Los Angeles, told the French news agency AFP in an interview that Trump is a “dangerous crazy” who could pull off a win in the November election because of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s “tendency to lie and hide things.”
Friedlander also warned of the rise of anti-Semitism and of Holocaust denial during the wide ranging interview with AFP.
“Negationists are, in general, anti-Semites, and I am utterly opposed to debating with them. It gets you nowhere, they will always find a so-called detail showing that all these stories of gas chambers were a joke,” he said. “They are obsessed by the idea that Jews could have invented the story of their extermination.”
Friedlander, 83, was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in France during the Holocaust. His seminal work is a two-volume history of Nazi Germany and the European Jewish community.
He went to Israel after he left France, where he worked as an assistant to Israeli statesman Shimon Peres.
He told AFP he was worried about a rising movement that questions Israel’s right to exist. He said Jewish and Palestinian extremism has damaged the chances of peace, though he continues to call himself a supporter of the two-state solution.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
