Holocaust Historian Saul Friedlander Vows To Leave U.S. If Donald Trump Wins
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
— Historian Saul Friedlander said he would leave the United States if Donald Trump were elected president.
Friedlander, a Pulitzer Prize winning international expert on the Holocaust who lives in Los Angeles, told the French news agency AFP in an interview that Trump is a “dangerous crazy” who could pull off a win in the November election because of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s “tendency to lie and hide things.”
Friedlander also warned of the rise of anti-Semitism and of Holocaust denial during the wide ranging interview with AFP.
“Negationists are, in general, anti-Semites, and I am utterly opposed to debating with them. It gets you nowhere, they will always find a so-called detail showing that all these stories of gas chambers were a joke,” he said. “They are obsessed by the idea that Jews could have invented the story of their extermination.”
Friedlander, 83, was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in France during the Holocaust. His seminal work is a two-volume history of Nazi Germany and the European Jewish community.
He went to Israel after he left France, where he worked as an assistant to Israeli statesman Shimon Peres.
He told AFP he was worried about a rising movement that questions Israel’s right to exist. He said Jewish and Palestinian extremism has damaged the chances of peace, though he continues to call himself a supporter of the two-state solution.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
