On September 8, the community of Harvard University opened their newspaper with a unanimous sense of horror. Within The Crimson, Harvard’s daily newspaper, was an advertisement for the Committee for the Open Debate on the Holocaust, a group that questions the existence of the Holocaust.

In said advertisement, faculty and students are asked, “can you provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz?”

After the ad appeared, The Crimson received emails from community members, students and a petition signed by numerous editors of The Crimson. The Harvard Hillel requested that the newspaper print an apology letter. President Jason Child published “A Letter to Crimson Readers”. The letter addresses the sensitivity of this particular issue. Child also said in the letter that the newspaper does not support such views. Despite The Crimson printing this article to apologize, never is an apology directly stated, rather the newspaper blamed the advertisement being printed as a miscommunication amongst the newspaper’s staff members.

The Crimson has stated that this was an accident, a communication error which occurred during a three-week break allowing this advertisement to print. After a discussion among editors, it was decided that the ad would not be published.

Child cites the reason as to why this advertisement was printed as a failure to communicate to the entire staff the decision not to run the ad. Yet with the hours spent on layout, editing and formatting a newspaper it is hard to believe that no one would catch an anti-Semitic advertisement on page 7.

When asked for comment on the apology letter, James E. Young the chair of the Department of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at University of Massachusetts stated, “The editor should not be apologizing for an “accident” but for his own incompetence as an editor, whose job is to know the difference between informed observation and propaganda.”

Michelle Williams can be reached at [email protected].