Re “Marijuana and memorial” (April 20). Micah Fredman argues that it is ethnocentric for some Jews to spend Holocaust Remembrance Day mourning the loss of six million of their own while neglecting the memory of the millions of others who perished in Nazi death camps.
He further argues that merely reciting the names of the dead seems like a hollow way of honoring human dignity when third-world hunger continues to take innocent lives on a scale comparable to that of the Holocaust.
Fair enough. But his proposed solution to these problems — that we combine Holocaust Remembrance Day and 4/20 by smoking marijuana to remember the victims of Hitler and Eichmann — solves nothing. It is a disgusting joke that belittles not just the Shoah itself but also all those, living and dead, who suffered in it.
Sam Jacobson
April 20
The writer is a freshman in Saybrook College.