DISAPPOINTMENT - Whoopi Goldberg

"What Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks can teach us about antisemitism" PBS NewsHour 2/2/2022

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SUMMARY:  The history of the Holocaust has been part of school curriculums for decades, but how much Americans really know about it has changed.  That was brought to light this week when comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg made race remarks that were widely condemned and led to her suspension from "The View."  Ethan Katz, of the Berkeley Antisemitism Education Initiative, joins Judy Woodruff to discuss.

THE LEGACY - Holocaust Education of New People

"To douse growing anti-Semitism, Germans call for Holocaust education for recent migrants" PBS NewsHour 3/14/2018

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SUMMARY:  With more than a million newcomers to Germany since 2015, there's been a resulting rise in anti-Semitism.  Now there are growing calls to mandate that refugees and Muslim migrants visit concentration camps to help improve their understanding of the country's terrible past and the echoes today.  Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports.

HOLOCAUST - History in Focus

"Seeing Holocaust survivors’ stories in the books they left behind" PBS NewsHour 3/30/2016

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SUMMARY:  In 1942, Jews from then-Czechoslovakia were taken to the Auschwitz death camp.  A window into their lives before the deportation can be found in a new book, "Last Folio," and a traveling exhibition at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.  Jeffrey Brown examines how photographer Yuri Dojc rediscovered their story, and his own.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Finally tonight: Imagine finding a library from the 1940s, a window into the time before the deportation of some 70,000 Jews from what was then Czechoslovakia.

Jeffrey Brown reports on a photographer who learned something about himself in the decades-old bookshelves.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  At first glance, you might wonder:  What is this?  What am I looking at?  Then it hits you:  These are books, fragments of books, in various states of decay.

They were photographed where they’d been left, an abandoned schoolhouse in the town of Bardejov, Slovakia.

Yuri Dojc, a successful art and commercial photographer who’s lived in Canada since 1968, returned to his native country after his father’s death, to learn more about his own Jewish roots.

He came upon the schoolhouse almost by accident, when a man he’d met told Dojc there was something he must see.

YURI DOJC, Photographer:  And then he take us across the square.  He opened this door.  And we were just stunned.

JEFFREY BROWN:  You had no idea what you were walking into?

YURI DOJC:  I had no clue.  But I was stunned by the beauty of decaying books.  I wasn’t thinking about history at that moment.  It’s the visual effect of these old books was so beautiful.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Beautiful, but horrible at the same time, as the sense of history set in, for this was a Jewish schoolhouse, left as it had been in 1942, as Jews were being rounded up and taken by train to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The story is told in a documentary Dojc worked on with another emigre from the former Czechoslovakia, Katya Krausova.

GERMANY - Legacy of the Nazi-Era

aka "Legacy of Satin's Disciple"

"Germany continues to grapple with Nazi-era legacy" PBS Newshour 1/12/2014

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SUMMARY:  Nearly seventy years after the end of World War II, the German government is intensifying its efforts to educate young Germans about Nazi war crimes and continues to pursue prosecution for those who committed them.  William Brangham reports from Ludwigsburg, Germany.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  From the outside, it looks like a beautiful old estate, but this is no private residence.  Inside, investigators for the German Federal Government are poring through decades old records, searching for the last remaining Nazi war criminals who might have escaped justice.

This is part of a much broader national effort underway in Germany to wrestle with the legacy of the holocaust… it includes the construction of memorials and museums at a record pace --- the revamping of the nation’s curriculum so that all German school kids get a fuller understanding of the Nazi era.

But perhaps few are as crucial to this effort as this man.  His name is Kurt Schrimm, and he runs the central office in Germany that’s still trying to bring former Nazis to justice.

IRAN - President Rouhani Comment on the Holocaust

"Iran’s Leader, Denouncing Holocaust, Stirs Dispute" by MARK LANDLER and THOMAS ERDBRINK, New York Times 9/25/2013

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As he conducts a high-profile good-will visit to New York this week, Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, says he is bringing a simple message of peace and friendship.  But on Wednesday, Mr. Rouhani set off a political storm here and in Iran, with an acknowledgment and condemnation of the Holocaust that landed him in precisely the kind of tangled dispute he had hoped to avoid.

Mr. Rouhani, in an interview on Tuesday with CNN, described the Holocaust as a “crime that the Nazis committed towards the Jews” and called it “reprehensible and condemnable.”  It was a groundbreaking statement, given that his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denied the systematic extermination of Jews during World War II.  Mr. Rouhani largely repeated his comments in a meeting with news media executives on Wednesday.

But a semiofficial Iranian news agency accused CNN of fabricating portions of Mr. Rouhani’s interview, saying he had not used the word Holocaust or characterized the Nazi mass murder as “reprehensible.”  Mr. Rouhani spoke in Persian; officials at CNN said they used an interpreter provided by the Iranian government for the interview, which was conducted by Christiane Amanpour.

The dispute over his comments reflects the extreme delicacy of the Holocaust as an issue in Iranian-American relations.  More broadly, it speaks to the political tightrope Mr. Rouhani is walking, trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with the United States that will ease sanctions to please everyday Iranians, without provoking a backlash by hard-liners.

Such careful calculations prompted Mr. Rouhani to eschew a handshake with President Obama at the United Nations General Assembly.  After weeks of conciliatory moves, including Iran’s freeing of political prisoners, Iranian and American officials said they believed Mr. Rouhani needed to placate hard-liners in Tehran, who would have bridled at images of an Iranian leader greeting an American president.

“Shaking hands with Obama would have won Rouhani huge points with the Iranian public, but it would have caused Iran’s hard-liners a conniption,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Mr. Rouhani avoided other land mines at the United Nations.  His comments to the General Assembly, though less inflammatory than those of Mr. Ahmadinejad, touched on similar themes and grievances: the lack of respect for Iran, the West’s refusal to recognize its right to enrich uranium, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

But when Mr. Rouhani sat down later with Ms. Amanpour, he moved into fraught territory.  Asked whether he shared his predecessor’s belief that the Holocaust was a myth, Mr. Rouhani replied, according to CNN’s translation, that he would leave it to historians to judge the “dimensions of the Holocaust.”

But he added, “In general, I can tell you that any crime or — that happens in history against humanity, including the crime that the Nazis committed towards the Jews, as well as non-Jewish people — is reprehensible and condemnable, as far as we are concerned.”