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Rabbi Schacter of the U.S. Third Army delivers a religious service after the liberation of Buchenwald in this image which is on display at Yadvashem and the Buchenwald museum. Stephen Jacobs and his brother George both appear in the image.
Rabbi Schacter of the U.S. Third Army delivers a religious service after the liberation of Buchenwald in this image which is on display at Yadvashem and the Buchenwald museum. Stephen Jacobs and his brother George both appear in the image.
At 79 years old he is among the youngest of the living Holocaust survivors and was born six years after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. But Jacobs can remember life in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald; what the Nazis did to him, his family, his friends.
He worries about what's happening right now in America, where he has lived and prospered since arriving a couple of years after Buchenwald's liberation on April 11, 1945.
The American far-right appears emboldened since the election of President Donald Trump, who led an inflammatory, nationalist campaign. Since then, clashes like the one in Charlottesville are becoming almost commonplace.
Comment: Got any statistics for that? The alt-right is certainly gaining in prominence compared to 20 years ago, but are such clashes really "almost commonplace"? We've noticed more leftist agitation targeting normal conservatives who are simply accused of being alt-right. Conservatives per se are not Nazis. And Antifa seems to have a much bigger street presence.
"Things just go from bad to worse every day," Jacobs, a successful New York architect who designed the Holocaust memorial at Buchenwald, tells Newsweek. "There's a real problem growing."
So much so that Jacobs thinks there's a "direct parallel" with Germany between the two world wars.
Comment: America does seem to be at a crossroads. Political polarization is at an intense level: far-right AND far-left. Right now the far-left actually has the infrastructure in place to make their ascension to power more likely than the far-right. Whatever the future may be, Trump can't be blamed for the current culture war - it has been going on for years and steadily getting worse.