The chair of the Democratic National Committee expressed outrage that Marco Rubio was attending a fundraiser at the home of Harlan Crow, who according to Salon.com is a "Hitler art collector."
The image conjures up the worst images of Neo-Nazis, secret basements filled with WW II regalia, drooling paranoia, The Triumph of The Will on tape loop, and much more disturbing lunacy.
Debbie Wasserman Schulz went all out slamming this $2,000-per-couple event in the GOP Dallas suburb of Highland Park.
An event at a home with items like these is appalling at any time of the year. Adding insult to injury, Rubio is holding this event on the eve of the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur...
Holding an event in a house featuring the artwork and signed autobiography of a man who dedicated his life to extinguishing the Jewish people is the height of insensitivity and indifference. There's really no excuse for such a gross act of disrespect.
She's totally off base. First of all, it was a private fundraiser, not a public one, so it's not as if a Jewish audience was invited to a civic event where they'd be confronted by Hitler memorabilia. But that word "featured" is dead wrong anyway. The DNC chair should have done a few minutes of basic research (and so should the Salon writer). The Dallas fundraiser is not some maniac Hitler art collector.
Over the past 40 years, Crow has collected thousands of documents, manuscripts and works of art that span centuries. "Many people have their own hobbies and have vocations," he said. "American history is mine."
Among his favorites, Crow counts an Abraham Lincoln syllogism about the evils of slavery, a copy of Poor Richard's Almanac and a letter written in 1493 by Christopher Columbus, after his first trip to the New World. The collection has paintings by Renoir and Monet and by Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And if she (or a staffer) had bothered to spend another minute or two on Google, they would have discovered that "Crow's mother was almost killed by a Nazi U-boat attack on the S.S. Athenia. Crow also owns items from that British ship." She owed it to her constituents and to herself to learn about the range of his fascinating collection before thinking about smearing him.
I'm a Democrat and Jewish and ashamed of what she did. Debbie Wasserman Schultz should apologize for issuing a statement with no basis in fact. For wasting her time on a totally wrong-headed, insulting attack. And for invoking the holiest day of the Jewish year to score some bogus points.
Lev Raphael is the author of the memoir/travelogue My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.