Anne Frank Center Hits Back At Trump Over Looming Immigration Orders
Image by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
By Talya Zax January 25, 2017
News broke yesterday that President Donald Trump would, today, sign executive orders that require the construction of a Mexican border wall, halt entry to the country for Syrian refugees, and suspend entry for travelers from majority-Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.
Today, the Anne Frank Center For Mutual Respect, the Otto Frank-founded American affiliate of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, made a powerful public statement against those actions.
“As President Trump prepares orders to wall out Mexicans and shut out refugees from America, today marks one of the most hateful days in our nation’s history,” wrote Steven Goldstein, Executive Director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, in a statement on Facebook.
“Donald Trump is retracting the promise of American freedom to an extent we have not seen from a President since Franklin Roosevelt forced Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. Today the Statue of Liberty weeps over President Trump’s discrimination.”
The Center also voiced its outrage in a series of tweets, attempting to draw the attention of Trump, whose use of Twitter is notorious.
.@POTUS @realDonaldTrump, when you push #fakenews that immigrants voted illegally, you attack immigrants who’ve always made America great.
— AnneFrankCenter(US) (@AnneFrankCenter) January 24, 2017
THE STATUE OF LIBERTY WEEPS AS PRESIDENT TRUMP TARGETS MEXICANS AND MUSLIMS Statement of Steven Goldstein,… https://t.co/ASTe3Y8AHK
— AnneFrankCenter(US) (@AnneFrankCenter) January 25, 2017
Banning Muslims and Mexicans from America is a disgrace our nation’s promise of freedom, @POTUS @realDonaldTrump
— AnneFrankCenter(US) (@AnneFrankCenter) January 25, 2017
As the Forward’s Josh Nathan-Kazis reported, the Center’s vehement response to Trump’s proposed actions arrived as Jewish advocates criticized Trump for choosing the week of Holocaust Remembrance Day as the appropriate time to begin an anti-refugee push.
“Make no mistake, suspending visas for citizens of Middle Eastern and African countries is not called national security. It’s called prejudice,” Goldstein wrote. “President Trump is now exacerbating the largest global refugee crisis in history.”
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Dive In
-
Film & TV How Marlene Dietrich saved me — or maybe my twin sister — and helped inspire me to become a lifelong activist
-
Film & TV In 1913 Vienna, Freud meets Hitler — and the patient of his nightmares
-
Theater The ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ revival has us wondering — where are all the Jewish Shelley Levenes?
-
Books From an Italian Holocaust survivor, a Kafkaesque nightmare of imprisonment under fascism
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
- 4
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion I co-wrote Biden’s antisemitism strategy. Trump is making the threat worse
-
Fast Forward From ‘October 8’ to ‘The Encampments,’ these new documentaries illuminate the post-Oct. 7 American experience
-
Fast Forward Jews at Tufts are furious over ICE seizing a pro-Palestinian grad student. But they’re wary of joining protests for her.
-
Film & TV How Marlene Dietrich saved me — or maybe my twin sister — and helped inspire me to become a lifelong activist
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.