It's a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That's how Tom Stoppard's " Leopoldstadt" and Alfred Uhry's " Last Night of Ballyhoo" begin, and also Ian Buruma's memoir about his grandparents, " Their Promised Land." The idea is, as soon as you show that, you've got the audience's full attention, especially if it's a Jewish audience, because it's so peculiar.
LELAND VITTERT: It's just so offensive! I don't understand how people can compare Nazis, who perpetrated the Holocaust, to anyone. I mean, I remember when I was in high school and you didn't say that because of what we all knew the Nazis did. And now it's just thrown around. You don't think you're cheapening the memory of 8 million people? Who were put into gas chambers?
"Throughout her life, Ruth Weiss drew on the immeasurable suffering of the Holocaust and her experiences under apartheid in South Africa to formulate an enduring educational mission for us all: Do not divide the world into 'us and you,' but stand up for the 'us' of humanity," Wolfram Weimer, Germany's Minister of State for Culture and the Media, said. At the age of 101, the Jewish journalist, writer and human rights activist passed away in Denmark, surrounded by her family.
The higher administrative court in the eastern state of Thuringia on Wednesday rejected a request from a woman to be allowed entry to the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial while wearing a keffiyeh. According to local media reports, the woman was turned away when she attempted to attend a commemorative event marking the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation in April while wearing the scarf.