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The Holocaust as "White on White Crime" and Other Signs of Intellectual Decay
(Washington Post) David Bernstein - In a Facebook post, a recent Oberlin alumna, Isabel Storch Sherrell, clearly a political progressive herself, recounted various anti-Semitic incidents she experienced at the school. I found most remarkable her assertion that multiple students had dismissively referred to the Holocaust as "white on white crime," as if the "progressive" students there found it impossible to conceive of horrific racist violence outside the parameters of paradigmatic examples of racist violence in the U.S. What's remarkable about the incidents recounted, which range from gross insensitivity to blatant anti-Semitism, is not that such attitudes exist, but that, if true, some of the most purportedly progressive students, those who are the most acutely sensitive to and active against other forms of racism, ignore anti-Semitism, belittle it and, in some cases, participate in it. The writer is a professor at the George Mason University School of Law.