In response to: Einstein’s Begonia
Current issue
July 2025
On the cover: Wilton Virgo ’00 and his classmates celebrate during the P-rade.
On the cover: Wilton Virgo ’00 and his classmates celebrate during the P-rade.
Einstein left another little-known legacy from his Princeton days. It’s a letter he cosigned with Hannah Arendt and was published in The New York Times on Dec. 4, 1948.
This excerpt is made up of exact quotes from the letter: “Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his [Menachem Begin’s] visit. … A shocking example [of Begin’s party] was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. … [T]errorist bands attacked this peaceful … [and] killed most of its inhabitants. … Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed … . But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, … invited foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc … . [His party has] preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”
As the much-censored Jewish-American investigative journalist George Seldes like to say: “Even the Gods can’t change history.” The Princeton community’s silence and tolerance of, in my view, the very public genocide taking place in Gaza now will leave a stain on the University’s reputation that not even 1,000 years will be able to wash away.