And yes, if someone hates me it’s bad enough. I’m just saying that if that were your standard for naming monuments, you’d have to change most street and building names, and a couple of the Presidents on the currency (Washington was a rich slaveowner, Jackson a genocidal warmonger). Let’s just say that I don’t find the city’s naming buildings after Corbin any more offensive than Columbia’s naming its main library after Butler, who instituted quotas on the number of Jews to be admitted to the university.

By the way, playing Wagner is not illegal in Israel, it’s just almost never done.

Then the article decides that naming a street is an act of deification, and promptly opposes naming anything after anyone who was anti-Semitic (i.e. most important people of that era). It reminds me a lot of the black nationalist opposition to naming anything after anyone who owned slaves – for example, a couple of people wrote several tens of pages’ worth of history explaining why Yale shouldn’t be naming things after Calhoun. For some people, symbolism matters more than substance. It’s the same people that ban Wagner in Israel, for example.

“We pledge ourselves to spare no effort to remand [the Jews] to the condition that they were in the Middle Ages, or to exterminate them utterly,” Corbin and his supporters proclaimed.

Corbin, on the other hand, never altered his views. He may not have “blood on his hands,” hut he did condone the extermination of Jews.