A correction is needed to the June 25 op-ed by Gary Michael Tartakov on antisemitism [“The two most important things to know about antisemitism”].  While it is incontestable that the Christian churches were historically antisemitic, it is simply not true that “the people who murdered more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust … were European and Christian, continuing 17 centuries of the European-Christian persecution of Jews.” Nazi ideology was profoundly anti-Christian. According to Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest associates, Hitler himself “hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” That is, “noble” as in vicious, cruel, and full of hatred. Hitler may have wanted to postpone a frontal assault on the churches until the war was won, given that more than 90% of his soldiers were Christians. Christianity was ultimately to be replaced by a “sanitized” state-sanctioned religion that denied its Jewish roots and glorified so-called Aryan supremacy.

John Connolly

Haydenville