Jared Moskowitz tells the story of his great-grandparents murdered at Auschwitz in a campaign ad that experts call "powerful but defensible." The more revealing detail lies elsewhere: the only hatred the ad names is that of a shooter with swastikas on his rifle, not that of the Democratic rival he had to beat in August.
Somber music, black-and-white photographs of a concentration camp. "In every generation, they rise up against us," says Jared Moskowitz, the Democratic congressman from South Florida, in his new campaign ad. "My great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz." Then, standing in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: "In our generation, right here, the Parkland shooter had swastikas etched into his weapon." Fourteen students and three teachers were killed there in 2018. The ad closes on three words: "Never again is now."
JTA asked two academics whether a line had been crossed. No, they answer. "Powerful but defensible," rules Stephen Sussman of Barry University, who notes that Moskowitz "is not comparing his opponent to Hitler." "They are shocking images, but it was his family's story," adds Ken Goldstein of the University of San Francisco. His grandmother left Europe on a Kindertransport; his great-grandparents never came back. Nobody gets to lecture the grandson of a survivor on how he uses his own memory, and the opening line, as any reader of the Haggadah will have recognized, says exactly what Jews repeat to one another every Passover.
