Kahn is a coward
I am an old man and certainly have much better things to do in the remaining days of my life than write letters to the editor, but Gabe Kahn’s Garden State of Mind “The gun problem’s plain to see” (March 15) keeps bothering me and I have to ask a couple of questions: If you were a member of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, would you like a person like Kahn at your side? If you were one of the Jewish partisans fighting in the Russian forest, would you trust a person like Kahn to keep you safe? If you were a member of the Hagana or the Stern Gang fighting to liberate Israel, would you like to have a person like Kahn on your team?
NJJN’s editor is one of those Jews who for centuries accepted all kinds of persecutions without any resistance and then meekly walked into the gas chambers. Since when do we consider cowardice a proof of moral superiority? This is not the way I see the world and the place of Jews in it. I am a Holocaust survivor and I have a totally different view when it comes to assessing a man’s character and value to society.
The purpose of this letter is not to get into the controversy about gun control, but if you use personal cowardice as the best argument in the political debate then there is something fundamentally wrong with the presentation, the presenter, or both.
I believe the job of an editor in a Jewish weekly requires more talent and objectivity than Kahn has to offer. He seems to have stopped growing the day he could not fire his rifle. Maybe he should try some other profession, a different venue, or at least another audience.
Leon Sztybel
Livingston
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