(JTA) — Historian Saul Friedlander said he would leave the United States if Donald Trump were elected president.
Friedlander, a Pulitzer Prize-winning international expert on the Holocaust who lives in Los Angeles, told the French news agency AFP in an interview that Trump is a “dangerous crazy” who could pull off a win in the November election because of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s “tendency to lie and hide things.”
Friedlander also warned of the rise of anti-Semitism and of Holocaust denial during the wide-ranging interview with AFP.
“Negationists are, in general, anti-Semites, and I am utterly opposed to debating with them. It gets you nowhere, they will always find a so-called detail showing that all these stories of gas chambers were a joke,” he said. “They are obsessed by the idea that Jews could have invented the story of their extermination.”
Friedlander, 83, was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in France during the Holocaust. His seminal work is a two-volume history of Nazi Germany and the European Jewish community.
He went to Israel after he left France, where he worked as an assistant to Israeli statesman Shimon Peres.
Friedlander told AFP that he was worried about a rising movement that questions Israel’s right to exist. He said Jewish and Palestinian extremism has damaged the chances of peace, though he continues to call himself a supporter of the two-state solution.
