http://www.globeandmail.ca/gam/Letters/19990327/

Cheapening the Holocaust 

Strathmore, Alta. -- Re The Holocaust As Kitsch -- March 23:

A decade ago, essayist Phillip Lopate, writing in the Jewish journal Tikkun (Resistance To The Holocaust, May/June 1989), had already deplored kitschy practices associated with Holocaust remembrance: "Sometimes it almost seems that 'the Holocaust' is a corporation headed by Elie Wiesel, who defends his patents with articles in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times."

Yesterday's concentration-camp horrors are commemorated by today's pay-per-view maudlin theme park. Were proof needed that so-called market forces can have corrosive effects on the culture, this is it.

Orest Slepokura,
Strathmore, Alberta, Canada

Our opinion

WE unhesitatingly place this reader's letter, published by the increasingly outspoken Globe & Mail, in our dossier on The Origins of Anti-Semitism.