Most troubling manifestation of current antisemitism is its 'academization' - Yad Vashem Chairman

Dani Dayan, Chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said that the most troubling manifestation of current antisemitism is its ‘academization,’ which is thinly veiled as anti-Zionism.

In a one-on-one interview with Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Avi Mayer at the Jerusalem Post Second Front Conference, Dayan said, “I have just returned from a visit to Ivy League college campuses in the United States. I am seeing a process that did not start now but is being accelerated.

“In the most prestigious academic institutions in the US and Europe, they are building – stone by stone, piece by piece, article by article, book by book – a pseudo-academic intellectual justification for eliminating the State of Israel as we know it,” he said, adding that building this type of advocacy can eventually lead to concrete action to annihilate Israel.

While acknowledging that the cruelty and barbarism of the Hamas attacks approached, and perhaps equaled that of the Nazis, Dayan explained that there is a significant historical difference between the two. “During the Holocaust, we were at the mercy of our enemies. Here, in spite of the fact that the IDF arrived late, it came, and we will exact a price from the perpetrators.”

During the Holocaust, he continued, Jewish heroes like Mordechai Anielewicz and Pavel Frenkiel, leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, had no chance of victory.

“By making false comparisons between the Holocaust and the actions of Hamas, we are playing into the hands of Hamas,” Dayan said. “They want to traumatize us – and there is no greater terror or trauma than feeling that we are in the midst of the Holocaust.”

While acknowledging that the cruelty and barbarism of the Hamas attacks approached, and perhaps equaled that of the Nazis, Dayan explained that there is a significant historical difference between the two.

“During the Holocaust, we were at the mercy of our enemies. Here, in spite of the fact that the IDF arrived late, it came, and we will exact a price from the perpetrators.” During the Holocaust, he continued, Jewish heroes like Mordechai Anielewicz and Pavel Frenkiel, leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, had no chance of victory.

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