All this was Wieseltier's decision. But what would entice a Harvard Associate Professor to act as Wieseltier's willing executioner? "The facts are," Goldhagen said in The New Republic, his certitude unencumbered by certainty, "that Jews did not run the Polish Office of State Security."

Oh? A Columbia professor told New York, "The great majority of officers were certainly Jews." A professor in Warsaw found a Who's Who of the 447 top officers from 1944 to 1953, and thirty percent declared they were Jews. (How many Jews didn't declare it? How many deserted in 1945?)

What was the source of Goldhagen's unprofessional fit? His piece in The New Republic had such disregard for his University's motto that he may just have been seeking to immunize his upcoming book from any eyewitness evidence that what we must learn from the Holocaust isn't that all Jews are good and all Germans are bad.

And yet I can't swear that a germ of veritas doesn't lurk in Goldhagen's screed. Let truth and falsehood grapple, said Milton--let former student and present professor debate at some forum in Cambridge what Jews did or didn't do after the Holocaust.

Professor Goldhagen, I challenge you.

Oh, one little update. The speech that I didn't give at the Holocaust Museum, I gave at the National Press Club. But (doubtless to Wieseltier's disappointment) the press didn't see how wrong I was. The press applauded.

John J. Sack '51, a former, Crimson editor, is a freelance writer.

The New Republic wouldn't publish my letter. And when I bought a $425 ad, the editors wouldn't publish that either.

Goldhagen is wrong to understand the Holocaust as teaching that all Jews are good and all Germans are bad.