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Good Lord!
The University of Toronto is being criticized by Jewish groups, a prominent historian and Holocaust survivors for accepting a master’s thesis that calls two Holocaust education programs “racist.”
The thesis, titled “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education,” was written by Jenny Peto, a Jewish activist with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid. It denounces the March of Remembrance and Hope, for which young adults of diverse backgrounds travel with Holocaust survivors to sites of Nazi atrocities in Poland, and March of the Living Canada, which takes young Jews with survivors to Poland and Israel.
Peto argues that the two programs cause Jews to falsely believe they are innocent victims. In reality, she writes, they are privileged white people who “cannot see their own racism.” The “construction of a victimized Jewish identity,” she argues, is intentional: It produces “effects that are extremely beneficial to the organized Jewish community” and to “apartheid” Israel.
It should not surprise that this woman is a student at OISE.
I don't suppose it's ever occurred to this moron that the Holocaust education programs she denounces are valuable simply because it is a good idea for people to a) learn history and b) develop a humane and empathetic way of viewing the world.
The most tragic thing about this, from a personal standpoint, is that I am closely related to people who routinely send me articles simliar to Jenny Peto's thesis. And not because they think they are laughable, but because they think I need to be enlightened. (These people are academics...sigh...)
Update: Jon Kay takes Peto on here.
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