How many cures for cancer did the world lose in the Holocaust?

One does not have to be super aware or super sensitive to realize that antisemitism is growing in the West in general and in America in particular. This development is particularly shocking to millions of Americans, including me, who grew up in what has been the least antisemitic country in the Western world.

As someone who was born in 1946 and thus grew up in a post-World War II America, I found it difficult to understand how the most educationally, medically and scientifically advanced country in the world (Germany) could have produced the Holocaust, the genocide of at least 6 million Jews. For many of us, the nightmarish reality of the Holocaust was reinforced by meeting and coming to know Jewish victims of the concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms and World War II veterans turned youth league coaches who had liberated death camps as teenagers and had been forever changed by the experience.

Honestly, most of us thought such virulent, unreasoning hatred could never take deep root in America. Shockingly, however, it has. We have witnessed physical and verbal violence against our Jewish citizens increase exponentially in the past decade. Frankly, if I had not witnessed it, I would not have believed what has happened on too many American university campuses and in too many American cities could have happened at the scale it has.

As Americans, we must speak out against this lethal and Satanic prejudice.

I cannot tell you how pleased I was, as a genetically boring WASP American, to see the full-page advertisement in the May 15, 2026, edition of The New York Times. (I have been reading The New York Times on a daily basis since my freshman year in college in 1965.) It is a great exercise in self-discipline for a conservative Baptist.

The title of the advertisement is “Jews Have Saved the Lives of Millions of Muslims and Christians.” The ad’s narrative begins with a discussion about the scourge of polio: “At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio paralyzed or killed more than 500,000 people each year.” Polio epidemics were the nightmare of my childhood. Classmates from my elementary school came down with it and ended up in iron lungs. Childhood friends ended up in heavy, unwieldy braces with metal canes.

Then, in the early 1950s, a vaccine was discovered that would prevent polio. It was like a miracle to this 9-year-old boy, as well as to all of my classmates and all of our parents. Who were the remarkable scientists who made this discovery? Dr. Jonas Salk and then Dr. Albert Sabin — both Jews. Both Dr. Salk and Dr. Sabin, in order to get the vaccines distributed as widely and quickly as possible, waived any personal profits from patents that would have totaled about $7 billion for Dr. Salk and about $20 billion for Dr. Sabin. Dr. Salk “was also instrumental in developing the flu vaccine.”

Of course, this is just the brilliant beginning of this remarkable story. Waldemar Haffkine was the Jewish microbiologist who developed “the vaccines that conquered cholera and the bubonic plague.” Then there was also Stanley Plotkin, who discovered “the vaccines that wiped out rubella and rabies.”

The ad then identifies many others, including Selman Waksman, who “discovered streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic against tuberculosis, saving millions of lives.” Gertrude Elion is also mentioned as the woman who developed drugs to treat “leukemia, autoimmune diseases and infections.”

The ad then makes the following observation:

Sixty-two Jews have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, representing 26 percent of the total. Fifty-six Jews have won the Nobel Prize in physics, representing 24 percent of the total. Yet Jews constitute far less than 2 percent of the world’s population.

After surveying the amazing contributions of Jews, the ad then asks a heartbreaking and provocative question: Had those millions lost in the Holocaust been spared, how many cures for cancer would have been found and diseases eradicated? The ad then issues this challenge: “Think of the brain power that was lost because the victims could not produce children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. How many Einsteins and Salks would the six million have produced?”

How many indeed.

Bret Stephens, in an excellent editorial in The New York Times, “Hatred of Israel and the Degradation of the West”, makes the following prescient observation:

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world,’ observed the philosopher Eric Hoffer in 1968. That remains true today. Hatred of Israel has become the stye in Western eyes that, as it grows larger, risks making too many people blind.

There is yet one more thing for which those of us who are Christians have so much to be grateful to the Jews — the fact that Jesus Christ, a Jew, is the Son of God and our Lord and Savior, who came to earth, died a cross-kind of death, rose on Easter morn and ascended back into Heaven, promising to come again at the end of the age, bringing ultimate redemption for all who have accepted Him as their personal Savior.

It should also be noted that the Jewish people have a powerful ally, more powerful than any other — the Lion of Judah.

Corrie ten Boom, a “righteous Gentile” and Dutch woman who helped conceal Jews, relates the following story:

One day as Father and I were returning from our walk, we found the Grote Markt cordoned off by a double ring of police and soldiers. A truck was parked in front of the fish mart; into the back were climbing men, women, and children, all wearing the yellow star. [...] ‘Father! Those poor people!’ I cried. [...] ‘Those poor people,’ Father echoed. But to my surprise, I saw that he was looking at the soldiers now forming into ranks to march away. ‘I pity the poor Germans, Corrie. They have touched the apple of God’s eye.

— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie ten Boom

God promises to bless those who bless the Jews and to curse those who curse the Jews, and He is a keeper of His promises (Genesis 12).