Essentially, the German financial conglomerate Allianz was offering to pay a lot of money for naming rights to the NY Giants’ football stadium. That proposal has been shot down by Jewish groups outraged over Allianz’s dealings with the Nazis.
In and of itself, this incident doesn’t bother me, and I don’t blame any Holocaust survivor who holds a grudge against Allianz. But I have to wonder… since NOBODY running Allianz today was involved in the Holocaust, since hardly anybody working at Allianz today was even ALIVE during the Holocaust, just how long is Allianz supposed to remain anathema?
How long is it valid to hold any company liable for immoral actions in the past?
At the very least, until there are no Holocaust survivors still living. Probably not until most of their kids have died, too.
Note that I’m not saying that’s how long they should have to wait, just that’s how long it’s going to take before no one cares about this sort of thing any more.
Weren’t there reparation claims in recent years against US companies whose corporate forebears did business with slaveholders’ plantations? So it might easily still be a century from now.
As I understand it, some Jews refuse to do business with Spanish companies, because of the Inquisition.
The Inquisition officially ended in 1834, though the really nasty stuff happened centuries before that. Spain has been through several governments since then.