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HOLOCAUST

COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
My family fled anti-Semitism in the Ukraine about 100 years ago. Jews coming to America at that time were often fleeing the pogroms. Basically, if you were headed to Ellis Island, it was likely someone back home wanted you and your family dead.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
They know what she sees as she peers out that window. She sees into their hearts as only an innocent can see. “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart,” she wrote. “I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Three generations earlier the grandparents of the Germans who affirmed our right to believe had engaged in an attack on a religious minority in their country, one that would culminate in the extermination of millions of German Jews and millions more throughout Europe.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
We sat in front of the rabbi that day in 1977, my wife and I, a bit sheepishly explaining how we had run off and gotten married a year earlier after just a week of dating—and how she wasn’t Jewish at the time, and how she still wasn’t Jewish, and how now she needed to convert so that we could have a Jewish ceremony so that my observant Jewish mom and dad would speak to us.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
On August 3, 2013, Kayla Mueller was kidnapped by ISIS fighters outside of a hospital in Northern Syria. She had traveled from her home in Prescott, Arizona to help Syrians displaced by that country’s civil war.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
Old lies die hard. A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League revealed that 13 percent believe that “Jews are more likely to use shady practices to get what they want,” and 18 percent believe that “Jews have too much power in the business world.” 89 percent of citizens surveyed in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan surveyed had a “very unfavorable opinion of Jews.”
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
I was born April 19, 1945, the same day that, British soldiers in Germany pushed 13,000 decaying bodies into trenches with a bulldozer at a place called Bergen-Belsen. Eleven days later, Adolph Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin, and a week after that the war in Europe was over.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
How many years has it been since a madman, under the guise of ridding the world of “undesirables” created a war that destroyed large portions of our civilization? Was it centuries ago that a fascist dictator caused the death of over six million Jews? Was it many pages back in our history books that
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
Understand, that if one innocent person or group is not safe among us—if one person or group is denied the freedoms that are our basic human rights—none are safe.
TOLERANCE
I agree that hate speech has no place in civil discourse, but when people are afraid to communicate at all about entire subjects because they’re afraid of being labeled as something they aren’t, that climate of fear has its own far-reaching consequences on civil discourse that also tear at the fabric of what it means to live in an open, free society.