Student Organ Criticizes Warsaw Ghetto Exhibition at Chicago University

An editorial written by a Jewish student in the Roosevelt University student newspaper has criticized a Warsaw Ghetto Revolt exhibition at the university as “performing no useful function” for the students.

The editorial asserted that it was nearly 20 years since the end of World War II and that it was time “to direct our energies to building a meaningful present that future generations may read of as a new rise of humanism instead of to the re-creation of a reality that no longer exists. ” The exhibit was assembled by the YIVO Institute.

The editorial proposed to the Institute sponsors of “all other similar projects that they utilize their energies to eradicate such crimes against mankind as apartheid in South Africa, fascism in American-supported Spain and Portugal, American-supported dictatorship of the right in the Americas and Asia and–most important–the plight of the Negro, the migrant Mexican worker, the Puerto Rican American, the Appalachian white and the poverty stricken throughout this land. “

The Sentinel of Chicago, local English-Jewish weekly, commented editorially that if such an editorial were to appear in a German paper, “we would be up in arms, angrily pointing to it as proof that they were not properly educating their youth as to the meaning of the crime perpetrated by their fore bearers. What are we to say when it happens to be our own young people, brought up in free America?”