The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that makes us vulnerable.
I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single most consistent policy, has been to foment antisemitism.
And then it was over. yes, he was finally impeached. >>> No, despite his claims to the contrary, he was not exonerated.
Today, we may be facing that same crisis, a different kind of sudden death. I feel both too old, at thirty-four, and not old enough to see history repeat itself.
There was no way I could have known when I went to Germany to interview the descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust for my film Afterward that this journey would take the form of a personal analysis. On the surface, I wanted to rid myself of my hatred for these Germans, who had done nothing wrong but whose ancestors tried to kill my people. I wanted to stop the cycle of hate
and othering before I passed it on to my own sons, to the next generation.