Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Congressman Regrets Using the Term ‘Holocaust’ in Health Care Debate

A Florida congressman says he regrets using the term “holocaust” to describe the state of the U.S. health care system.

“I am Jewish and have relatives who died in the Holocaust,” U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, a Democrat, wrote in a letter last Friday to the Florida regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, Andrew Rosenkranz. “In no way did I mean to minimize the Holocaust. I regret the choice of words, and I will not repeat it.”

Grayson was responding to a letter from Rosenkranz, who noted that an earlier Grayson statement using the term Holocaust “may not have been the best choice of words.”

Rosenkranz said the statement was “more than a poor choice of words” and that “using the Holocaust as an analogy for flaws in the current health care system is inappropriate and serves only to trivialize the murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others.

Grayson made the statement that the health care system was a “holocaust in America” on Sept. 30 as a response to criticism of his comments the previous day that the GOP position on health care reform was “Republicans want you to die quickly.”

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 credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link 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.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.