Peretz in Letter Misrepresents Sack

Veritas, simple veritas, is what we require from the Faculty, so I'm happy to say that there is some truth in the letter from Martin Peretz, lecturer on social studies and editor-in-chief of The New Republic, to The Crimson on March 18.

It's true (it's "easily checked," says Peretz) that TNR published a letter of mine on Feb. 14, 1993. But also it's true and it's easily checked (just look at the letter, please) that the letter isn't the one I referred to in my Crimson editorial. I've faxed all my correspondence with TNR to The Crimson, so now it's easily checked that I referred to another letter entirely, one that TNR suppressed on Feb. 2, 1993, and to a $425 advertisement that TNR suppressed on Feb. 14 1993.

But more truths inhere in Peretz's letter to The Crimson. It's true, as he claims, that Martin Kessler, the publisher of An Eye for and an Eye, my book about the Holocaust and what happened after it, is now deceased. And therefore it's not easily checked that Peretz called up Kessler and ranted against An Eye for an Eye but never, never told him, "I will destroy this book." He can claim this with total confidence that Kessler won't write a letter contradicting him.

"Nor," writes Peretz in The Crimson, "is this a book with which scholars think they need to grapple." This, too, is true, since every single scholar who did his or her homework in the German federal Archives or Polish archives confirmed what I wrote in An Eye for an Eye, confirmed it in three major newspapers and one major newsmagazine. Others who did their lessons and who confirmed what I wrote are the former foreign editor of The New York Times and the many researchers for "60 Minutes", whose "once-over-lightly," as Peretz calls it, took them eight months and cost them $200,000. Was the once-over-lightly in Peretz's magazine heavier than that?

Finally, writes Peretz, "Sack...is still trying to prove that there were two Holocausts, one by the Nazis against the Jews, the other-after the war-by Jews against the Germans." Peretz truly calls this delirious history, but the delirium isn't mine but his, for I've never called what Jews did in 1945 a Holocaust. Indeed, I specifically write on the second page of An Eye for an Eye, "This was no Holocaust or the moral equivalent of the Holocaust." --John B. Sack '51