It takes far more than a magic wand to make sense of the Holocaust

In “Why Jews at Hogwarts have to be invisible’’ (Ideas, Feb. 18), S.I. Rosenbaum makes a halfhearted attempt to reel the Harry Potter fan base back to reality. She argues that if Jews indeed held magical power, “any at all, would they have actually just sat out the Holocaust?’’ This is a lazy argument, dangerous, and disrespectful to those who survived the Holocaust. Oppression and racism are both multifaceted, incredibly complex issues that are impossible to solve with any single “technology,’’ as Rosenbaum describes magic.

When Rosenbaum goes on to ask, “Was keeping the wizarding world secret . . . actually worth letting Hitler kill their nonmagical relatives,’’ she forgets the many people, including Jews, who held various forms of power (analogous to magic here) and stayed silent because of the crippling fear that the Holocaust held. Does she forget the poem, “First they came . . . ’’?

Rosenbaum tries to take on the magical idealism that accompanies the Harry Potter books but instead forgets history.

Aidan Wertz

Haverhill

We’re reminded that virtue and vice are in all people and nations

In S.I. Rosenbaum’s critique of J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien, she over-attributes New and Old World slaughters to white, European, Christian “genocidaires’’ (“Why Jews at Hogwarts have to be invisible’’).

A more accurate view of man’s inhumanity to man is presented on the very same page by Stephen Kinzer, who provides a long list of atrocities committed by people of all skin colors and religions, in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States (“Nations built on lies’’).

Kinzer adds a useful reminder that people and nations “are combinations of virtue and vice,’’ that “learning about crimes that our forbearers committed may help us behave better in the future,’’ and that “ignoring or denying them can lead entire nations into isolation, anger, and conflict.’’ Easy to imagine this as a bit of wisdom from a middle-aged Harry Potter and Hermione Granger.

Bob Marra

Hyde Park