There's
discouraging news from JTA too:
A storm is brewing in the small Bavarian city of Erlangen over a Nazi play being performed for the first time since 1944. The turmoil over the staging of “The Wolves,” by Nazi playwright Hans Rehberg, raises the question of whether it’s acceptable in Germany, 58 years after the end of Holocaust, to present propaganda from the National Socialist movement in a public forum for any purpose...
...But the director of the Erlangen Theater says there is good reason to stage the play.
“The view of the theater is anti-fascist and against war,” Sabina Dhein, the director, said in an interview in an Erlangen cafe on Nov. 8, where opponents of the play, members of the Jewish community and two of the town’s mayors also had gathered to talk to reporters.
Dhein said she originally organized the program as an expression of opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
“This is not about spreading Nazi propaganda. It is about how the war was propagated, about how this thinking cripples people,” she said.
Dhein denied she was comparing the U.S. administration to the Nazis. “It’s about a confrontation with the German past. It’s about a war that we initiated, and how people were instrumentalized for the war,” she said.
“That’s rubbish,” historian Wolfgang Wippermann, of the Free University of Berlin, said in an interview. “Of course in a classroom, or in a document center or as part of research work, it’s necessary to do this kind of study,” he said. “But to quote historian Saul Friedlander, ‘If you repeat propaganda, you double the effect of the propaganda.’ ”
Wippermann said he was “very shocked” and “angry about this kind of anti-Americanism combined with nostalgia about the Third Reich.”
The tide of anti-Semitism is on the rise
world-wide. This news from the Ford Foundation, while welcome, is
not a bellwether of change. Today's news is filled with too many incidents of hate and ignorance to make that assumption. There's still a lot of work to do....
« unless she's gagged