Holocaust Historian Saul Friedlander Vows To Leave U.S. If Donald Trump Wins
Image by Wikipedia
— 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.
A message from our CEO & publisher 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.
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. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
