Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Anti-Semitic Voicemail Left For Washington U. Librarian

(JTA) — An anti-Semitic voicemail message was left for a librarian at Washington University in St. Louis after the librarian helped organize an exhibit on the Holocaust at a local museum.

The Huffington Post first reported the anti-Semitic incident on Friday, though it occurred on March 15. The librarian, who declined to be named, notified the Huffington Post of the incident through its “Documenting Hate” project in conjunction with the ProPublica nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative journalism.

A university spokeswoman told Huffington Post that the university alerted local and federal authorities, as well as Jewish organizations of the incident.

According to a transcript of the profanity-laced call published by Huffington Post, the caller questioned why the facts of the Holocaust are not “open for debate” and asked “why in many nations in Europe it’s outlawed to even discuss it? If it were the truth then it wouldn’t need laws to support it. ”

The caller also said: ”We need to get these Holocaust studies stopped because they’re … lies, just like Jews ran the slave trade. You said whites ran it but you’re not white, and Jews aren’t white, and you ran the slave trade.”

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $325,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

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.