Shortly after the 1967 Israeli-Arab War, civil rights activist Julius Lester wrote that the memory of 6 million murdered Jews should not obscure the view of US war crimes in Vietnam and the oppression of blacks in the United States. American society, he said, was sick — and unable to cope with this racist legacy.

Thirty-six years later, I was a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and reminded Lester, who was teaching there, of his essay. In the meantime, he had converted to Judaism, been trained as a rabbi and religious scholar, and become a professor. He told me that he didn’t have to take back what he had written, but that he had come to understand the universality of the Holocaust: no other crime, not even slavery, is comparable.

Racism in all its forms is a core evil of mankind. But the hatred of the Jews and the enslavement of entire African peoples on the American continent are older than “modern” racism operating with pseudo-biological terms. The latter invoked a supposedly threatened public health to expel the “inferior” people branded as pests. In Nazi Germany, they were exterminated — and the handling of this worst legacy of German history would also define the decades after Hitler’s inglorious end. “Racial legislation” in the United States predated the Nazi empire and persisted long after 1945. “I understand that,” said a black US soldier at liberated Buchenwald, “because I’ve seen people lynched just because they were black.”