Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer was the first Jewish writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1978). Since he lost his entire family in the Holocaust, he is perhaps entitled, as he did, to compare our treatment of animals to how the Jews were treated during the Holocaust. He was an outspoken vegetarian, condemning in the strongest terms the way humans mistreat animals.
“In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. ‘What do they know - all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.’”
“The Letter Writer” from The Seance and Other Stories