Continuing down that highway…
We previously reported on that whole neo-Nazis/Heschel highway situation in Missouri. The NYTimes follows up with a second piece about it, with input from Susannah Heschel:
Missouri officials, thwarted in the past on free-speech grounds when they tried to keep the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway, took another tack after the National Socialist Movement adopted the half-mile stretch of road, on the outskirts of Springfield. The legislature voted to name it for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled the Nazis’ advance in Europe and became a prominent theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States before his death in 1972.
Lawmakers said they hoped the new name would send a message that the area valued inclusiveness, not anti-Semitism and racism. But Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, said Monday that while she appreciated their intentions, attaching her father’s name to a road cleaned by neo-Nazis would be “vulgar” and would “dishonor” him.
Read the full article here.
