Letters to the editor
Readers respond
Increasing immigration serves more than humanitarian purposes
There is an immigration crisis in the U.S. No, not illegal immigration, but a lack of immigrants. In “Dozens of Jewish groups protest Trump’s plans for mass deportation” (online, Jan. 28), it’s noted how Jewish groups are pushing back against Trump’s cruel policies. Increasing the number of legal immigrants allowed into the U.S. is not just a humanitarian gesture, it’s an act of national self-preservation.
In the 1920 U.S. census one in 20 Americans was over the age of 65, around 5 million people. In the 2020 census, one in six Americans was over 65, around 60 million people. In 1920 there was zero cost in the U.S. budget for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because those programs didn’t exist. Today these programs are in crisis. There’s been talk for years about these programs running out of money. People reject solutions such as increasing taxes or raising the retirement age. What to do?
The most common sense answer is to increase the number of people paying into the system. Yes, there are criminals coming in to the U.S. illegally, but the vast majority of the people coming in are young, strong individuals (they had the strength to walk through jungles to get here) that are fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries — the same reason our ancestors came here. They, and their descendants, will infuse our country with increased energy, and also an increased tax base.
Mitchell Nyer
Squirrel Hill
Comparing Hamas attack to Nazi genocide is ‘absurd’
I found Sarah Kendis’s column “Approaching never again, again” (Jan. 31) to be guilty of the very sins she accuses her political opponents of committing. To call the Oct. 7 attack an “attempted genocide” as a rationale for Israel’s conduct in Gaza is to diminish the singularity of the Holocaust in Jewish history.
The problem with this right-wing rationale is one of proportionality. Hamas has always been completely outgunned by Israel so that any comparisons to the Nazi’s genocide are rendered absurd. Israel’s relationship to Gaza isn’t like Britain’s to Germany in World War II. It’s more like Britain’s to Papua New Guinea, with its opponents using pop guns, sticks and stones while Israel drops 2000-pound bombs.
The casualty numbers reveal how dishonest Kendis’ argument is. Some 1,200 Israeli Jews died on Oct. 7 while over 47,000 Palestinians have died since the war began. While Israel has a right to defend itself against terrorism, about half the population of Gaza are children under the age of 18. Moreover, before the war began, the Israel Defense Forces estimated the total number of armed Hamas militants at 30,000. That’s out of 2.2 million Gazans — about 2% of the population.
While many Jews and other nations might agree with Kendis that their “well-being would depend on the utter eradication of all terrorists,” they might also find it unacceptable to conduct a war in a fashion which puts 98% of the population who are not terrorists at risk. Israel has dropped thousands of one-ton bombs, which do not discriminate between terrorists or non-terrorists, on a densely-populated region about the size of Manhattan.
Perhaps most disingenuous of all is Kendis’ failure to mention that many of the critics accusing Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing are Jewish themselves. The comparison, which she calls antisemitic, of Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto was made by none other than Masha Gessen in the New Yorker. Gessen, whose family survived the Holocaust, is a widely renowned Jewish scholar and a recent winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.
One can disagree with Gessen’s conclusions, but to call her antisemitic for criticizing the Netanyahu administration’s brutal war is antisemitic itself. It presumes that all Jews support the conflict when they don’t.
Lewis Braham
Pittsburgh
Resolving to thrive
Kudos to Sarah Kendis for her cogent, thoughtful piece (“Approaching never again, again,” Jan. 31) on the deeply troubling situation in which we Jews once again find ourselves.
As she noted, even the official observation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day is “not without its own issues” — among them that the day was initiated 56 years after the events it commemorates. Maybe better late than never we may say, but what happened to Yom HaShoah? Why was that longstanding date of remembrance not adopted by the larger global community when it belatedly decided to officially declare a day dedicated to recalling that unspeakable event?
Consider the difference in what the two days commemorate. Yom HaShoah is the date of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, when Jews arose in their own defense against their evil oppressors. International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the other hand, is the date when the Jews in Auschwitz were “liberated.” (Ironically, they were liberated by the army of the Soviet Union, itself a great oppressor of Jews). Which is to say that, when the world would deign to note Jewish suffering, it would do so only with others as the heroes — the Jews as passive victims.
That has become so much of a certain mindset that the same must be said of “Schindler’s List,” which has become the sine qua non of Holocaust films. Steven Spielberg could have created his movie from any number of stories of Jewish resistance. Instead, he chose a non-Jewish man of dubious character to be the “savior” of the passive Jews.
All the more reason for us to resolve, as Sarah Kendis concludes, that we Jews must continue “to not only survive, but absolutely thrive.”
Ann Sheckter Powell
Squirrel Hill
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