Arab and Muslim readers wishing to learn more about the Holocaust no longer have to depend on contraband copies in foreign languages: thanks to a new initiative called Project Aladdin, Primo Levi’s memoir Survival in Auschwitz, along with Anne Frank’s diary and two other Holocaust-themed works, are available in Arabic as a free download, alongside editions in Turkish and Farsi, reports Liel Liebovitz for Tablet.
The project, according to its founder, Abraham Radkin, was conceived in response to a steep rise in the volume of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying literature distributed in the Arab and Muslim world—and the rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With hundreds of hateful tracts published each year, Radkin thought, the most effective response would be to provide reliable, informative, and evocative alternatives. The executive director of the British nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, Radkin had the necessary connections to attract high-level patrons to his project, putting together an advisory board that includes the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade; Princess Haya al-Khalifa of Bahrain; Prince Hassan bin-Talal of Jordan; former French president Jacques Chirac; and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. With some help from the United Nations and other international organization, the project was ready to launch.
Learn more about the project or visit the library.
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