The founder of the group, Dan Brooks, said the organization began with six people and has grown to about 1,000. The mission is to educate people about the Holocaust by telling the stories of their families, to provide a forum where the grandchildren of survivors can connect, and to fight intolerance and ethnic violence wherever it exists. They have had speakers from Darfur and Rwanda address the group in the past. The meeting with Davis, Brooks said, was exhilarating.

“The fact that he would take the time to meet with us and share his story was great,” Brooks said. “It really means a lot that he’s willing to do this.”

One member, Leora Klein, said she was the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors and mentioned to the group how important it was that Davis was willing to identify himself with this cause because he was “young, successful and hot.”

– David Waldstein, N.Y. Times.

Excellent feature from Waldstein in the Times about Davis taking time out to share the story of his great aunt, a Holocaust survivor, with a group dedicated to Holocaust awareness.

Davis also told the group how his paternal grandfather, as a member of the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, helped liberate a concentration camp, and how it warmed him up to the idea of Davis’ father bringing home a Jewish girlfriend.

For what it’s worth, my own grandfather helped liberate a concentration camp, too, and I’m pretty sure was one of the contingent of American troops ordered to march the citizens of Dachau through that camp to show them the atrocious things their government had done. I think. I get his stories jumbled up in my head with a lot of the books I’ve read, since there’s plenty of overlap, and since he really only shared war stories when we had to beg them out of him for school projects. He always preferred to talk about baseball, which I totally respect.

Speaking of: Davis’ strong finish has pulled his OPS+ up to 116, just shy of the Major League average 120 for first basemen, and an impressive mark for a 23-year-old with only 55 games above A-ball before the season started. Factor in Davis’ Gold Glove-caliber defense, the likelihood that he’ll improve at the plate as he develops, and the fact that he’s still a couple years away from even hitting arbitration and he looks like a keeper for the Mets.

Someone asked me earlier this season if I’d trade Davis in an offseason package for the Brewers’ Prince Fielder, an excellent young hitter a year away from free agency. At the time Davis was slumping badly, but even then I was uncertain — reminding the person that a trade for Fielder would be, in truth, a trade for the right to sign Fielder at market rate.

Now, it seems like a no-brainer: No. Sure, there’s a lot more evidence to prove that Fielder can hit like a Major League first baseman than there is for Davis, and it seems unlikely Davis will ever be the same type of offensive force as Fielder, but when you consider Davis’ superior defense and especially the difference in contracts, Davis looks like a more valuable commodity.

Plus Leora Klein thinks he’s hot.