Jewish community representatives condemned McCormick Prof. Arthur Butz for denying the existence of the Holocaust at a forum Tuesday night hosted by the Fiedler Hillel Center.
Butz, a tenured electrical and computer engineering professor, made statements to Iranian media in December publicly supporting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that the Holocaust never happened. Tuesday’s forum was planned after Butz’s comments were printed in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune.
“This has been a tough day. It’s been a tough couple of days,” said Adam SiMonday, Hillel’s executive director, to an audience of about 120 people at the McCormick Tribune Center Forum.
The comments drew media attention, sparked a student petition and caused University President Henry Bienen to issue a statement calling Butz’s ideas “a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people.”
After short speeches by leaders of Jewish organizations at NU and in Chicago, participants divided into four smaller “breakout discussions” that were closed to the media. Students could discuss what Butz’s comments mean for NU, why the Holocaust matters and how to ensure tragedies like the Holocaust don’t happen again. Faculty, staff and community members attended a discussion about the role of the greater community in the incident at NU. The participants were predominately Jewish, said SESP junior Zach Galin, president of Hillel’s Student Executive Board.
NU and the Chicago community should marginalize Butz like the international community has shunned Ahmadinejad, said Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, at the beginning of the event.
“It’s a free country, and so he gets to say what he wants,” Kotzin said. “By the same token, though, others can and have to stand up – It is not the Jewish students on this campus that should be isolated – it is Arthur Butz.”
Butz’s beliefs have caused controversy since he published his book on the subject, “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” in 1976.
Weinberg junior Andrea Engel attended the forum and said her parents had been upset by Butz’s beliefs when they were students at NU.
Les White, Communication ’78, said he was disappointed by the reaction of NU faculty members in his breakout session who said Butz would soon “go under his rock again.”
An engineering professor should know to trust data, including historical data, he said.
“That they are allowing him the privilege to teach, even if it’s engineering, it’s a joke,” he said.
– Diana Samuels
