Debating the Holocaust

By LEON JAROFF

David Turner was under siege last week. A junior at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and editor in chief of the weekly Justice, the student newspaper, he had become a pariah on campus. His phone rang around the clock with irate calls from students and alumni denouncing him as a "monster" and an "anti-Semite." His car was defaced and he was threatened with bodily harm. Some 2,000 copies of Justice were stolen and presumably destroyed, and when the issue was reprinted, 200 students rallied in protest and a guard had to be assigned to ensure the paper's safe distribution.

The turmoil was prompted by an advertisement in Justice that attacked the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as a "false and manipulative" representation; as well, it questioned whether the Nazi gas chambers ever existed and whether the genocide of European Jews ever really occurred. The outcry on the largely Jewish Brandeis campus was understandable but somewhat misdirected; the decision to run the ad had been made by the Justice editorial board, on which the editor in chief has no vote.

Brandeis was not alone. Although campus newspapers at such schools as Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and Wisconsin have rejected Holocaust-denial ads and commentaries, they appeared this fall in student publications at Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Notre Dame and Georgetown, among others. Everywhere, they provoked angry letters to the editors and heated campus debates.

These ads -- and others that have appeared in the collegiate press since the 1991-92 school year -- were placed by the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, which is headed by Bradley R. Smith, 63, a Visalia, California, pamphleteer. Smith, who spends most of his waking hours in Holocaust denial, wants open debate, he says, because the possibility that the Holocaust was a hoax goes unreported. Much of the material on which Smith bases his claims comes from the pseudointellectual journal of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denial group in Costa Mesa, California, and the writings of Mark Weber, a former member of the neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance. Says Smith: "I think that journalists feel their career is threatened if they treat revisionist research in an objective way."

Why do college editors and advertising staffs publish Smith's writings? "Hiding the ideas of Holocaust revisionists won't make them go away," says Josh Dubow, editor in chief of the University of Michigan's Daily. "The best way to make them go away is to bring them out in the open and explain why they're wrong." That, he says, was why the Daily, in publishing a letter from Smith this fall, accompanied it with an explanation, as well as an editorial and an op-ed piece disputing Smith's arguments. While publication of the letter stirred anger on the Michigan campus, it was muted compared with the reaction in 1991 when the Daily published a full-page Smith ad and the next day, in an editorial, naively supported its decision on First Amendment grounds. While that amendment guarantees Smith the right to disseminate his views, it does not obligate editors -- or anyone else -- to publish them.

Student editors may be misled by the approach of Smith and other Holocaust ! revisionists, says Lawrence Jeffries of Atlanta's Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR) which monitors extremist groups. "They don't present themselves in a Heil Hitler sort of way," he explains. "They seek to be very intellectual in their presentation of these arguments." The CDR's goal, says Jeffries, "is to rip the sheets off these people and expose them for what they are -- anti-Semitic extremists trying to redefine what actually happened 50 years ago."

Smith, who solicits donations in his ads, says he targets campus publications because he cannot afford the rates of major newspapers. But Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University religion professor, suggests other reasons. In the atmosphere of academic freedom on most U.S. campuses, she says, students support the principle of free expression and are more likely to publish views that are repugnant or blatantly false. Also, says Lipstadt, "there may be a lot of young people who don't know about the Holocaust. They may wonder if there isn't something to these arguments." Indeed, a 1992 Roper survey found that 39% of U.S. high school students -- and 28% of adults -- didn't know what the Holocaust was.

Georgetown University's media board may well have had those statistics in mind when it censured the Voice, the school's weekly newsmagazine, for running the Smith ad. It not only required the publication to print an apology and donate the $200 received for the ad to the Holocaust Museum but, to further their education, ordered the three top editors to tour the museum with a Georgetown theology professor.

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York and Dan Cray/Los Angeles