Vanessa Redgrave, who will portray an Auschwitz survivor in a forthcoming CBS-TV production of “Playing for Time,” has provoked new anger in the Jewish community by proposing a business boycott of Israel and calling Israel “a racist state.” The British actress, who espouses the view of the Palestine Liberation Organization, made that proposal last week.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesen that Center for Holocaust Studies and Yeshiva University of Los Angeles, and a member of the advisory committee to the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, sent a telegram to Gene Jankowski, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, stating that Redgrave’s latest statement exposes her as “an anti-Semite.” Hier said “The only response is for you to permanently shelve ‘Playing for Time’; failure to do so would be a further slap in the face of the Jewish people and add salt to the wounds of those who survived the “Holocaust.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
