Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

British University Censors Holocaust Survivor’s Talk Comparing Israel To Nazis

(JTA) — A Holocaust survivor’s speech that compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazis treatment of Jews was censored by a British university.

Manchester University censored the title of a talk in March by Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood, The Guardian reported on Friday. The original talk was titled: “A Holocaust survivor’s story and the Balfour declaration: You’re doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me.”

The talk was part of Israeli Apartheid Week, a series of events organized by the university’s student committee of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS campaign.

The subhead of the title was dropped and the university said it would record the speech after a visit to the university by Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, and his civil affairs attaché, Michael Freeman, the newspaper reported.

Following the February 22 visit, Freeman sent an email to Manchester University’s head of student experience, Tim Westlake, which thanked him for discussing the “difficult issues that we face,” including the “offensively titled” Israeli Apartheid Week. Freeman also said in the email that the title of Sherwood’s talk violates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and criticized another speaker as anti-Semitic.

The Sherwood speech went forward as planned. “I was just speaking of my experience of what the Nazis were doing to me as a Jewish child. I had to move away from where I was living, because Jews couldn’t live there. I couldn’t go to school. I would have died were it not for the Christians who baptized us and shared papers with us to save us,” Sherwood told The Guardian. “I can’t say I’m a Palestinian, but my experiences as a child are not dissimilar to what Palestinian children are experiencing now.”

 

 

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

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 editorial@forward.com, 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.

Exit mobile version