While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, learn how Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied and hear about his vigilance to preserve its truth.

https://fb.watch/3v4Zd0VvZo/

Today, we join together with people from nations around the world to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day by remembering the 6 million Jews, as well as the Roma and Sinti, Slavs, disabled persons, LGBTQ+ individuals, and many others, who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Shoah. We must never forget the truth of what happened across Europe or brush aside the horrors inflicted on our fellow humans because of the doctrines of hatred and division.

I first learned about the horrors of the Holocaust listening to my father at the dinner table. The passion he felt that we should have done more to prevent the Nazi campaign of systematic mass murder has stayed with me my entire life. It’s why I took my children to visit Dachau in Germany, and why I hope to do the same for each of my grandchildren — so they too would see for themselves the millions of futures stolen away by unchecked hatred and understand in their bones what can happen when people turn their heads and fail to act.

We must pass the history of the Holocaust on to our grandchildren and their grandchildren in order to keep real the promise of “never again.” That is how we prevent future genocides. Remembering the victims, heroes, and lessons of the Holocaust is particularly important today as Holocaust deniers and minimizers are growing louder in our public discourse. But the facts are not up for question, and each of us must remain vigilant and speak out against the resurgent tide of anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry and intolerance, here at home and around the world.

The horrors we saw and heard in Charlottesville in 2017, with white nationalists and neo-Nazis spewing the same anti-Semitic bile we heard in the 1930s in Europe, are the reason I ran for president. Today, I recommit to the simple truth that preventing future genocides remains both our moral duty and a matter of national and global importance.

The Holocaust was no accident of history. It occurred because too many governments cold-bloodedly adopted and implemented hate-fueled laws, policies, and practices to vilify and dehumanize entire groups of people, and too many individuals stood by silently. Silence is complicity. As my late friend and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos so frequently reminded us: “The veneer of civilization is paper thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.”

When hatred goes unchecked, and when the checks and balances in government and society that protect fundamental freedoms are lost, violence and mass atrocities can result. The United States will continue to champion justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs. We are committed to helping build a world in which the lessons of the Holocaust are taught and in which all human lives are valued.

Survivors were largely overlooked by post-war officials following the genocide. Unable to go to North America or Israel, Jews spent a few carefree years in idyllic settings

By BERNARD DICHEK January 27, 2021

After my parents passed away, I began to look through a pile of photos showing them when they were refugees in Germany after the Holocaust. The photos are puzzling: My parents’ families have been murdered in Poland by the Germans, dark clouds hang over the future, and yet they look like they are on vacation. They are smiling, lounging in bathing suits, and drinking beer in cafes.

Together with other descendants of survivors, I have been trying to figure out what was going on during this period our parents seldom mentioned.

Between 1946 and 1949 about 250,000 survivors took refuge in American-occupied Germany. Fleeing anti-Semitism and Communism, they hoped the Displaced Persons (DP) camps set up by the American Army would serve as a gateway to the emerging Jewish state or to the West.

As the British blocked their entry to the nascent Jewish homeland and the United States, Canada and other countries refused to let them in, a long waiting period ensued. Bolstered by food and clothing from American Jewish relief organizations, the DPs soon launched a huge baby boom.

Seven decades later, these “babies” are connecting with one another through Facebook groups and reunions — even though most of them last saw each other while lying in a baby carriage.

One thing many of us have in common, oddly enough, is an inheritance of large numbers photos from the DP era, left behind by our parents, whose stories about the Holocaust tended to overshadow reminiscences of the period that followed.

In the last few years the children of Jewish DPs who lived in Bad Reichenhall, Feldafing, Eichstatt, Foehrenwald, St. Ottilien and other Bavarian towns have either met up in Germany or via the internet in order to piece together what life was like during that time. Many of the photos handed down to other descendants convey the same carefree atmosphere that mine do. At the St. Ottilien meeting one participant even quoted his parents as describing those days as the happiest of their lives.

“They were young people who now had a secure place to stay,” said Burt Rochelson, an American physician whose father reached St. Ottilien along with a group of Lithuanian Jews who escaped from a bombed train. “They didn’t dwell on the past. They were human. They finally had the opportunity to have a good time and dammit if they weren’t going to do it.”

The desire to not look back was a sentiment that Abe Mazliach recalls his father expressing about his time at Feldafing. “When my father was on his way to Feldafing, an American army officer told him to try to forget the past and start a new life,” says Mazliach. “That’s what Feldafing became for him and that’s why you can see many happy moments in those photos.”

Mazliach, an American computer expert, notes that one of the exciting aspects of sharing photos has been discovering his parents in photos provided by other descendants. “Years after he passed away I suddenly saw my father pictured in a music band at Feldafing with fellow Greek survivors from Thessaloniki,” he says.

As numerous marriages and childbirths took place, many photos document those events. Indeed one of the few photos I remember my parents displaying shows them proudly holding in their arms my newly-born sister Dina.

Yet it is the anguish associated with these joyous moments, that were the moments most often recalled in later years.

“In almost every story I heard about a DP wedding, someone would say how they remembered a sad moment when they realized their mother and father weren’t there,” says Atina Grossmann, a historian who notes that it may have been awkward for the survivors to speak about that period later on.

“It was an ambivalent time for them. They were able to jump into a lake and swim in the perversely beautiful German landscape. It was blood-soaked earth, but it was defeated earth,” she says.

Grossmann makes a distinction between the type of photos that appear in public archives and the private photos that the survivors had taken of themselves. She explains that the former, which are the ones most often used to teach the history of the DP era were usually taken by fundraising organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Development Committee.

“The JDC wanted to show surviving Jews as hardworking in workshops as auto mechanics or sewing or learning agriculture. They didn’t want to show young couples flirting in the mountains,” Grossmann says.

She hypothesizes that photos like those of my parents were likely intended as mementos, though they may have had another purpose. “They may have been trying to send a message to distant relatives that they were young and strong and not traumatized — even if they were,” Grossmann says.

In the case of my parents, the photos were sent to relatives in Toronto and New York who were trying to arrange their immigration to Canada or the United States.

Letters accompanying those photos sent by my father make it clear that he and my mother did not want to be seen as a burden. The number of times his letters repeat that claim lead me to believe that those relatives may have required some convincing.

“It may have been easier for North American Jews to donate money than to welcome the survivors into their homes,” suggests Israeli historian Tom Segev when I asked him if the North American Jewish community may have echoed the negative attitude towards the survivors among Israel’s pre-state leaders that Segev has written extensively about.

“The Jewish Agency leaders, starting with [David] Ben-Gurion, were afraid of what the survivors were like. They were suspicious of how they had managed to survive,” says Segev, who noted in his book “The Seventh Million” that an envoy sent to the DP camps claimed that the arrival of the survivors would turn the Jewish state into “one big madhouse.”

“Many people simply didn’t want to live in a building with people who had concentration camp numbers on their arms,” adds Segev.

Regardless of whatever feelings the pre-state leaders may have had, Segev emphasizes, the policy they put into place the day Israel became independent was very clear. “As of May 15, 1948, Israel became the only country on earth that was willing to accept all of the survivors, regardless of their condition,” Segev says.

I continued to try to understand why the DP period was often neglected while on a trip to Germany, where I visited the places my parents stayed in Bad Reichenhall. I soon discovered that the Jewish DPs were not the only ones who seldom spoke about that era.

As Grossmann points out in her book “Jews, Germans and Allies,” the only jobs available for many Germans was working in the DP camps, where the tasks were often quite menial. I could not help but notice a great irony of history: Only a few years after German leaders had described the Jews as vermin, many Germans found themselves washing the clothes of Jews and scrubbing their toilets.

Despite the shame many Germans may have felt about those days, some of their descendants have found it important to reflect on that period. Last May the town of Feldafing planned a memorial event to commemorate 75 years since the founding of the DP camp.

“It was difficult to get local support as people are very reluctant to talk about those days, but in the end we succeeded,” says Claudia Sack, a German sculptor whose father was employed in the Feldafing DP camp and who, along with the local mayor, helped plan the event. “Unfortunately, the coronavirus crisis made us cancel the event, which was to include a delegation of former Feldafing DPs from abroad.”

Finally, one other reason why the DP phenomenon has often faded into the background seems to be related to the relatively late stage in the lives of the survivors when the rest of the world started to take an interest in them.

During the 1950s and ’60s, those survivors who did talk about their experiences usually only found listening ears in their families or limited Jewish circles. This was certainly the case for my parents and their survivor friends in Canada, where they lived after immigrating there in 1949.

Consequently, when the day of recognition for the survivors did come, it was the stories of the Holocaust that people wanted to hear. The days of the DP camps were seldom asked about, and the topsy-turvy events of a period when the tables were turned on victims and perpetrators didn’t fit the narrative of the genocide.

As I look once again at the photos, even after all the explanations and speculations, in some ways the truth of what those days were really like continues to elude me. Yet, as Mazliach pointed out: “Now that our parents are no longer here to tell their stories, it’s up to our generation to pass on whatever we can.”

So far, 37 Republican representatives, I’m aware of, and eleven senators, led by Ted Cruz (R-TX), see list below, have indicated they will challenge some of the state electoral votes for Biden when Congress counts them on Wednesday, January 6. There may be a total of 140 Republican representatives challenging the electoral votes.

They are alleging the need for an investigation into irregularities in the 2020 election, although they have failed repeatedly to produce any evidence of such irregularities in court. An investigation would simply convince people that the election results are questionable. The attempt of these Trump Republicans to launch yet another baseless investigation is in keeping with their use of investigations to discredit Democrats since at least 2012.

Trump Republicans are trying to undermine the election, and Biden’s administration, with a disinformation campaign. These Republicans are jockeying for the 2024 presidential nomination and want to make sure they can pick up Trump’s voters. They are a faction, “Sedition Caucus,” of the Republican Party which refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president, no matter how big the victory.

Biden won by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The Trump campaign has either lost or had dismissed 60 of the 61 cases it has brought over the election. Democracy depends on a willingness to transfer power peacefully from one group of leaders to another.

Senators:

Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)Mike Braun (R-IN)Roger Marshall (R-KS)John Kennedy (R-LA)Sen. Josh Hawley (MO)Steve Daines (R-MT)James Lankford (R-OK)Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)Bill Hagerty (R-TN)Ron Johnson (R-WI)Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (R-WY)

Representatives:

Rep.-elect Jerry Carl (Ala.)Rep.-elect Barry Moore (Ala.)Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.)Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.)Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.)Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (Colo.)Rep.-elect Byron Donalds (Fla.)Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.)Rep.-elect Andrew Clyde (Ga.)Rep. Jody Hice (Ga.)Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.)Rep. Clay Higgins (La.)Rep. Ted Budd (N.C.)Rep.-elect Madison Cawthorn (N.C.)Rep. Jefferson Van Drew (N.J.)Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell (N.M.)Rep. Jim Jordan (OH)Rep. John Joyce (Pa.)Rep. Fred Keller (Pa.)Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.)Rep. Dan Meuser (Pa.)Rep. Scott Perry (Pa.)Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (Pa.)Rep. Lloyd Smucker (Pa.)Rep. GT Thompson (Pa.) Rep. Jeff Duncan (S.C.)Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.)Rep. Mark Green (Tenn.)Rep.-elect Diana Harshbarger (Tenn.)Rep. Brian Babin (Texas)Rep. Louie Gohmert (Texas)Rep. Lance Gooden (Texas)Rep.-elect Ronny Jackson (Texas)Rep. Randy Weber (Texas)Rep.-elect Burgess Owens (Utah)Rep.-elect Bob Good (Va.)

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Auschwitz survivor Irene Fogel-Weiss grew increasingly despondent.

“I had worried so much before the election. I was happy to find out that maybe I was wrong and that I had overreacted, but now I can’t help but feel alarmed,” said Fogel-Weiss, a survivor from the Czech town of Botragy, now in Ukraine. “Everyday reminds me and others like me of the history we thought we left behind. It’s not an easy time for survivors or immigrants who get how easily it can happen here.”

She is far from alone. In post-election interviews, numerous Holocaust survivors report feeling both relieved at the results, and nervous about President Donald Trump’s continued unwillingness to concede defeat.

Manfred “Manny” Lindenbaum, 88, is one of them. The past four years had been tough ones for the New Jersey resident.

“I was actually going into a deep depression,” he said. “I was functioning, but I couldn’t sleep at night, my mind was going back and hearing rhetoric that wasn’t much different than what was going on in the beginning of the Nazi era.”

Lindenbaum was five when he was “literally chased out” of his childhood home in Unna, Germany in October, 1938, along with 17,000 German Jews of “Eastern” origin in an event known as PolenAktion. Stripped of their citizenship, his family became homeless and stateless overnight. A year later, when the Nazi invasion was imminent, his parents made the bold decision to put their three children on a train bound for the port town of Gdansk, where the last Kindertransport boat to England was departing. Only Lindenbaum and his brother were allowed to board. His sister, 14 at the time, was deemed too old. He would never see her or his parents again.

“When I see images of refugees at the borders, well, I know what happens to kids when they’re separated from their parents,” said Lindenbaum, who toured shelters in Mexico last year after the Trump administration ousted asylum-seekers as part of its Remain in Mexico policy.

“It was particularly moving and difficult for him given his own border experience,” said Mark Hetfield, president and chief executive officer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) who accompanied him.

HIAS, which had once help Lindenbaum immigrate to the United States, arranged the visit to the border. There, Lindenbaum saw refugees forced to remain in limbo in a no-man’s land similar to the one he experienced in Zbąszyń.

For Lindenbaum, voting for Joe Biden was more than supporting a particular candidate. It was a moral imperative. “It’s beyond comprehension that we did that,” he said, speaking of what he saw at the US-Mexico border. “I still get nightmares.”

On Saturday morning, Nov. 7, with Biden still undeclared, Lindenbaum went on a 10-mile bike ride instead of spinning his wheels indoors, waiting for the votes to be counted.

“By the time I returned, Biden was the declared winner,” he said. “It felt like a giant weight had been lifted off my back.”

He wasn’t the only survivor to finally exhale. a video of Holocaust survivor grandparents tearing up at the news went viral. Survivors in Zoom support groups, who had reported feeling tense and fearful under Trump, and increasingly isolated under the pandemic, expressed relief.

“After months of suffering from insomnia and anxiety, many Holocaust survivors were elated that Trump, whom they associated with Hitler, did not win a second term,” said New York clinical psychologist Dr. Eva Fogelman, an expert on Holocaust PTSD.

In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Cordula Hahn, who had been a hidden child in Holland during World War II, rejoiced at the news, banging a pot, getting showered with glitter outside the Barclay Center with her two daughters and son-in-law, enjoying their first hug since March.

“The outburst of emotions was huge,” she said. “I had a flashback from Liberation Day in May 1945 in the Netherlands, where my parents, older brother and I were in a parade.”

“It felt like the end of the war,” said Natalie Scharf, who felt the stress of the last four years dissipating as she delighted in the news that her adopted city of Philadelphia played such a pivotal role in flipping the country blue. “I felt a real obligation to vote for Biden. I don’t have to imagine how much worse it can get under Trump. I lived through it.”

Born in the Polish town of Jaworzno, Scharf was 15 when the Gestapo raided her home one night, arrested her along with scores of other Jewish teenage girls in her town and loaded them on a train bound for Sudetenland, where she was imprisoned at Gabersdorf women’s forced labor camp, only to emerge as one of the sole survivors of her family.

“When I saw them marching with the torches in Charlottesville, I had terrible heart palpitations,” she said. “They looked just like the Nazis of my childhood, and hearing them scream, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ‘blood and soil,’ it was exactly as I remembered it. And this president said they were fine people? Good riddance. It feels like liberation. We made it!”

For Aviva Slesin, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and adjunct professor at NYU-Tisch, who was smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto in Siaulia, Lithuania in 1943 when she was nine months old and spent the war in hiding, Biden’s victory took her back to the moment she first laid eyes on her new country.

“I thought of being on that boat as we entered New York harbor. Everyone started to weep. Here we were refugees from Europe, coming to the shore of a place of hope,” she said. “And then I thought, had this man [Trump] been president at the time, he would not have welcomed us. He would not have offered us the hope we needed to create a new life.”

“I was playing in the garden across the street from our house, when suddenly the police began to chase us out because we were Jews. I guess I was a good runner, but behind me was a two-year-old girl who wasn’t,” she said. “I saw this very elegant Nazi pick her up by her legs, throw her against the tree and kill her. I ran home and told my mother. She said, ‘That’s it. It’s time to leave.’”

The family fled at night, crossing the Bug River to the east, staying with an uncle in Bialystok until the Russians packed all the Jews on a train bound further east. She was just 13 years old when she arrived at a gulag, a Soviet work camp. Her younger brother died of disease shortly after arrival. Over the next four years, they moved from Siberia to Kazakhstan, where she spent her days gathering tinder wood and struggling to find food.

“You’re hungry all the time. You’re not clean and the most horrible people are taking care of you,” Ores said. “When I saw how Trump took breastfeeding mothers away from their babies, that children died at the border, I saw Americans behaving like Nazis. Who can put children in cages? I was a pediatrician for 50 years at Columbia University Medical Center. Whoever heard of such a thing happening here?”

When she heard that Joe Biden was the declared president-elect on Saturday morning, Ores called her grandson to come over and help her pop the bubbly. “It felt like Victory Day!” she said.

But her bubble began to burst with news of Trump challenging the election results.

“A predator is most dangerous when wounded,” said Björn Krondorfer, director of the Martin Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University, and one of five German-born Holocaust scholars who co-wrote an Op Ed titled, “It’s Not Too Late for American Democracy-Yet,” that ran in the Forward ahead of the election, warning of the threat of totalitarianism should Trump win a second term. “And that’s the situation we find ourselves in. It is scary (again) to see his political maneuvering to get into a position in which he can call on the Insurrection Act.”

Last week Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century,” declared Trump’s tactics of rejecting the election results no joke, writing in The Boston Globe, “a claim that an election was illegitimate is a claim to remaining in power. A coup is under way, and the number of participants is not shrinking but growing.”

And that’s what’s so frightening to the people who lived through the rise of European fascism and the Holocaust.

“More than 70 million Americans voted for Trump,” said Fogel-Weiss. “After four years of challenging the rule of law, peddling lies and propaganda, anti-Semitism, scapegoating immigrants, and denying science -all of it has been such a tremendous blow to democracy — they all follow their leader.”

Fogel-Weiss said she is cautiously optimistic that democracy will prevail if there is a peaceful transition to a new president. Others say they won’t sleep soundly until President-Elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Dr. Fogelman reports similar fears reemerging among survivors in her practice. “They wonder what havoc will Trump wreck before the inauguration and will Biden, with his good negotiating skills, be able to work across the aisle to bring the nation together?”

Meet the Jewish Woman Suing Neo-Nazis For a Living By Lior Zaltzman

What do you do when you get a call from an iconic human rights lawyer, asking you to help her sue some Nazis? Well, if you’re Amy Spitalnick, you say yes, of course.

Spitalnick, 34, is the executive director of Integrity First for America, the nonprofit group that’s taking on the neo-Nazis who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.  On behalf of community members of that Virginia city, her organization is suing two dozen individuals and groups connected to the rally — the one where protestors were shouting, “Jews will not replace us” — back in August 2017.  The main defendant of the case, Jason Kessler, was a member of the Proud Boys, the white nationalist hate group president Trump told to “stand back and stand by” at the first presidential debate this week. Another, Andrew Anglin who runs the Daily Stormer, construed Trump’s debate comment as a call for a race war.

This case, which The New York Times called “the most sweeping lawsuit against the promoters of the Charlottesville white power rally,” is slated to stand trial in April of 2021.

Back in 2017, Spitalnick was the communications director and senior policy adviser to the New York Attorney General. She was at her sister’s wedding shower when she learned that a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, injuring 28 people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. It was a terrifying and memorable moment for Spitalnick.

“I’m the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and we had surrounded the shower with photos of our family, including all the photos of my grandparents,” Spitalnick tells me in a telephone interview. “And I remember sitting on one of the folding chairs, as people were leaving, on the phone with the Attorney General, writing the statement that we put out, and thinking how horrifying and baffling it was, that in America in 2017, neo-Nazis were so emboldened that they could murder someone on the streets of an American city.”

In the course of her work for the Attorney General, Spitalnick had met Roberta Kaplan — one of the lead attorneys of the Edie Windsor case, which paved the way for marriage equality in 2013. It was Kaplan who first called Spitalnick, asking if she wanted to help her sue Nazis. Kaplan had put together a case on behalf of community members in Charlottesville to hold accountable some of the individuals and groups that brought terror to that town. Thinking of how Nazis murdered almost all of her grandparents’ families, Spitalnick joined IFA as its executive director.

“Even before we go to trial, we’ve seen very real financial and legal and operational consequences for these groups and leaders,” Spitalnick says. “Richard Spencer, who’s one of our defendants, said the case is ‘financially crippling’. Groups like League of the South have said they can’t open a new building because of our case. Two defendants have had bench warrants issued for their arrest. Others have faced tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions and so they’re already facing very real financial, legal, and operational consequences even before trial.”

“And when we go to trial and win very large civil judgments against them, this case really has the potential to totally undercut, bankrupt, and dismantle these groups, which is not only about their own ability to operate, but the deterrent effect it will have on the broader movement,” Spitalnick explains.

Of course, the main goal of the case is to get justice for the injured residents of Charlottesville. But there’s also another, more lofty goal: “This is something that our lead counsel Robbie Kaplan often talks about… Every decade or so there’s a trial in this country that is about more than the trial itself, and serves as the sort of public reckoning [and] public education on a critical issue,” Spitalnick says.

She continues, “We believe that this case can be that case; that moment to really help sharpen and focus the public’s understanding of the crisis of violent white supremacy.”

This crisis, Spitalnick says, is not political. She sees it as “a fundamental question of security and democracy. And what we’re talking about here is one of the most dire threats to our communities… And they’re only becoming more and more emboldened.”

Spitalnick says there’s a “clear line” that connects the Charlottesville rally to the other white supremacist, racist, and anti-Semitic violence that’s occurred in recent years, including the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand who targeted Muslims and mosques.

Social media, she says, plays a crucial role: “The Charlottesville violence was planned extensively online, and the basis for our lawsuit are these online chats, in which they discuss every detail down to hitting protesters with cars,” she says. “Even again, last night, the Proud Boys were immediately online, gleefully celebrating the President’s comments, and turning it into their new slogan.”

“It’s important to point out this isn’t happening in a vacuum,” Spitalnick adds. “There have been active disinvestments from the federal government in the types of policies and work that is meant to combat extremists.”

This has nothing to do with free speech, she cautions. “If these individuals and groups had simply gone to Charlottesville, and stood on the street corner with their vile, racist, anti-Semitic signs and their swastikas and chanted the awful things that they did, they would have had every right to do so,” she says. “But that’s not what they did. They, after planning for months in advance on social media and elsewhere, went to Charlottesville with the intent to bring racist violence to that community, and target people based on their race, their religion, and their willingness to defend the rights of others. That is not something that’s protected by free speech.”

As dark as it all sounds, fortunately, there’s something we can all do about it. “Broadly, it’s so important that the issue of violent white supremacy and violent extremism not fall off people’s radars…” Spitalnick says. “And it’s so important that we hold our officials accountable on the federal, state, and local level.”

“There’s also a lot we can do as consumers,” she adds. “We should be holding social media accountable. There is no obligation by any social media company to give a platform to violent extremism. The First Amendment does not require private companies to give a platform to extremism — no matter what they might say… And as consumers, we should use our voices and the power that we have to hold the private sector accountable.”

Of course, there’s a real danger to the work Spitalnick does. She and her colleagues get a lot of violent and hateful threats, many connected to the Jewish identity of many of their team members. “Security is our biggest priority, the biggest line item in IFA’s budget,” she says. “It’s fairly rare for a civil case to require this level of security, or, frankly, any real security. But most of the cases don’t involve neo-Nazi defendants.”

“It’s so easy and understandable to feel hopeless and helpless, and scared and angry in this moment — and I certainly do at times,” Spitalnick tells me when I ask how she keeps herself motivated. “But I think a lot about my grandparents’ generation and the fact that, unlike their generation, we live in a country that is supposed to be governed by the rule of law, that has a justice system that has laws, like the ones we’re using to fight back and hold accountable those who threaten justice who seek to undermine justice and civil rights.”

“We have been, knock on wood, or, you know, not to give it kinehora as my grandmother would say, successful at doing that so far in this case, if you look at the impact it’s had,” Spitalnick says. “And so we are going to keep fighting to use that rule of law and use that justice system and to protect that rule of law and to protect our justice system, which is even more urgent over the last few weeks.”