The Crime of Ignorance

By Symi Rom-Rymer Last week, The Desert Sun, the local newspaper of Palm Springs, CA, ran an article about teenagers from La Quinta High School playing a game they called, “Beat the Jew.”    It involved one set of kids (the Nazis) in cars chasing another kid (the Jew) on foot down the street.  The article had no interviews with the participants themselves, so I couldn’t get any sense of who they were, what their motivations were, their understanding of the Holocaust or how they came to invent the game in the first place. However, the official response from the school district was surprisingly blasé.  The school district superintendent, Sharon McGehee, was quoted as saying, “there was no threat; there was no crime.  They just played a game that had an ugly, insensitive stupid game.”  Moreover, McGehee and...

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