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Hitler, immigration detention centers 
and child separations at the border 
to the separation of families upon 
arriving to the camps, ICE agents to 
the Gestapo, the manipulation of the 
Jewish community into believing that 
the high Palestinian death toll should 
serve as a shameful self-reflection of 
our own casualties in the Holocaust, 
and so much more. 
Contextual and situational analysis 
are both long gone, replaced with the 
chilling normalization of the ugliest 
form of propaganda as a defensive 
tactic for voter pandering. Although I 
have no plans to run for office, if I did, 
I would go the extra mile to establish 
a series of unifying messages attractive 
to potential new voters across the aisle. 

WE NEED TO TAKE ACTION
The language must change and, for our 
country to achieve ideological matura-
tion, we must confront our own trauma 
and provide more educative incentives 
for both public and private schools. 
 According to a Conference on 
Jewish Material Claims Against 
Germany study, more than 22 per-
cent of millennials never heard of the 
Holocaust, 41 percent of U.S. adults 
and 66 percent of millennials had never 

heard of Auschwitz, and 80 percent of 
people surveyed had never been to a 
Holocaust museum. 

A lack of education is a factor that 
enables monsters like Robert Bowers, 
the man accused of murdering my aunt 
and uncle’
s friends at the Tree of Life 
synagogue in Pittsburgh. 
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 
recently appointed anti-terrorism 
expert and military officer Elan Carr 
as the U.S. Envoy to Monitor and 
Combat Anti-Semitism. Special Envoy 
Carr, I propose a fantastic challenge: 
Together, with the assistance of our 
colleagues across the aisle as well as the 
International Holocaust Remembrance 
Alliance, I call on you to adopt legis-
lation that includes the devaluing or 
equating of the Holocaust for political 
gain, regardless of one’
s true intentions, 
as a legally defined form of anti-Sem-
itism. I also call upon the remaining 
survivors to speak out, lobby and con-
demn this custom. Let us do whatever 
it takes to adopt solutions to anti-Sem-
itism, and it all starts with an honest 
conversation. ■

Adar Rubin was a political field organizer for the 
Michigan Republican Party during the 2018 
election. 

delved into Ford’
s anti-Jewish campaign 
and published books and articles, and 
my story seeks to pull together the 
important findings of their research.
We’
ve also provided a guide so read-
ers can do their own reading. It should 
start, ironically, in the excellent Ford 
Collection of Dearborn’
s Henry Ford 
Centennial Library. Among many 
other things, the collection carries a 
number of books and other media that 
contain information on the Dearborn 
Independent and The International Jew, 
the books Ford published that were 
collections of the paper’
s anti-Semitic 
articles.
The Dearborn library approaches 
this dark side of Ford in an honest 
manner. On another sensitive sub-
ject, the city’
s longtime mayor, Orville 
Hubbard, Dearborn in general has 
become more open to dealing with 
his segregationist side in recent years. 
City Hall gradually downgraded the 
prominence of Hubbard’
s statue and the 
Dearborn Historical Commission and 
The Dearborn Historian (under previous 
editor David Good) explored the issue 
forthrightly.
Re-examining dreadful corners 

of institutional histories has become 
a trend over the past two decades. 
Numerous banks, insurance companies, 
Ivy League colleges, media outlets, cit-
ies and religious denominations have 
studied their actions during the eras of 
slavery and Jim Crow, published their 
findings and, in some cases, issued 
apologies. The city of East Lansing apol-
ogized last year for the way it treated 
black citizens for much of the 20th cen-
tury. Proponents of such transparency 
believe it contributes to racial healing.
Henry Ford is legendary in his native 
Dearborn and around the world for 
good reasons, as the article makes clear. 
His legacy continues to loom large in 
the lives of residents of Metro Detroit.
But his anti-Semitism is much more 
than a personal failing. Ford’
s attacks 
on Jews were distributed around the 
world before and after World War II 
and, alarmingly, they influence budding 
neo-Nazis today. It’
s a subject worth 
talking about in Dearborn.
Let the discussion begin. ■

Bill McGraw is a veteran award-winning
journalist who co-founded the news site 
Deadline Detroit. He lives in Dearborn. 

continued from page 5

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