Animal Rights and The Holocaust

Animal Rights And The Holocaust

Several writers, including Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, and animal rights groups have drawn a comparison between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust. The comparison is regarded as controversial, and has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Singer described the treatment of animals by humans as "an eternal Treblinka." J.M. Coetzee, also a Nobel laureate in literature, compared the Nazis' treatment of Jews to methods used by the meat industry to herd and slaughter cattle. The comparison began immediately after the end of World War II, when Jewish writers recounted the lack of resistance by European Jewish victims of the Holocaust, who were led to their death as "sheep to slaughter." The ADL argues, however, that the subsequent use of Holocaust imagery by animal rights activists is a "disturbing development."

Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights, in her essay Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons, argues that, although there is "connective tissue" between animal suffering and the Holocaust, they "fall into different historical frameworks, and comparison between them aborts the ... force of anti-Semitism." She has also written that she "agree with I.B. Singer's statement, that 'every day is Treblinka for the animals'," but concludes that "some agonies are too total to be compared with other agonies."