There are no halfway measures against bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism. It's got to be rejected totally.
Abraham FoxmanRead
Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer.
Interpretation
We must preserve the memory of the Holocaust before those who experienced it are lost.
Abraham Foxman emphasizes the urgent need to document and share the experiences and memories of Holocaust survivors, as their numbers are dwindling and the risk of historical amnesia increases. He advocates for immediate action to ensure that future generations understand the gravity of this event, highlighting the importance of remembrance as a crucial part of preventing similar atrocities in the future.
In practice
In a speech about Holocaust education, I would quote Foxman to stress the importance of remembering these events.
There are no halfway measures against bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism. It's got to be rejected totally.
As much progress as we think we've made with legislation, litigation and education, anti-Semitism still continues to be the No. 2 hate crime in the United States. You can't eliminate it, but you can try to keep a lid on it.
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact… I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.
If the history of England be ever written by one who has the knowledge and the courage,-and both qualities are equally requisite for the undertaking, - the world will be more astonished than when reading the Roman annals by Niebuhr.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.