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How the Auschwitz Commandant’s Infamous Home Has Been Turned Into a Center Against Antisemitism
British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots
It was the most jarring moment of last year’s Academy Awards: as Jonathan Glazer accepted the Oscar for “The Zone of Interest,” a harrowing film set in the shadow of Auschwitz, instead of using his speech to honor the victims of the Holocaust, he made a political statement that many saw as an astonishing trivialization of the very subject his film had purported to explore.
Rather than acknowledging the unfathomable suffering of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz in particular, and the dangers of pathological antisemitism in general, Glazer chose to equate the Holocaust with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, implicitly drawing a moral equivalence between Nazis and the Jewish state.
The setting made it all the more disturbing — delivered amidst the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, Glazer’s so-called virtue-signaling call for universal resistance to “dehumanization” felt less like a plea for moral clarity and more like a cynical weaponization of the Holocaust to delegitimize Jewish self-defense and undermine the fight against the malignant evil of antisemitism.
“The Zone of Interest” is a film about the chilling banality of evil, loosely based on the novel of the same name, centering on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they go about their daily lives in a picturesque home just beyond the camp’s walls.
The film’s unsettling premise lies in its depiction of the Höss family’s mundane existence — gardening, swimming, and dining — while the machinery of genocide operates just out of sight. It is a study in complicity, yet it deliberately omits the suffering of Jewish victims, leaving their fate largely unseen and unheard.
And yet, somehow, Glazer’s acceptance speech managed to be even more disturbing than this conscious erasure. Instead of honoring those who perished, he co-opted the memory of the Holocaust to push a political agenda against Israel, without once mentioning the horrific evil perpetrated against Jews — fellow Jews! — on Oct. 7, 2023. Not a word about the deliberate murder, torture, and rape of 1,200 Jews, whose only sin was being Jewish in the land of their heritage, Israel.
While Hollywood — even, sadly, some within Jewish Hollywood — may be lost in its own navel-gazing world of self-righteousness, many Jews and Gentiles across the United States and beyond have been utterly shocked by the alarming resurgence of antisemitism in the 16 months since the Oct. 7 massacre.
Enter Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, who founded the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in 2014. Recognizing the urgent need to push back against the normalization of Jew-hatred, he enlisted my good friend Elliott Broidy and fellow philanthropist Dr. Thomas Kaplan. Together they purchased Rudolf Höss’s former home in Oświęcim, just outside the Auschwitz compound, the very setting of “The Zone of Interest” — and created the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, whose goal is not just to remember the victims of the Holocaust but also to find the best ways to combat the spread of antisemitism and advocate for them.
Instead of allowing the Auschwitz commandant’s house to remain a grotesque relic of history, they are turning it into a global center dedicated to combating antisemitism and extremism, ensuring that the lessons of the past are neither distorted nor forgotten — by Hollywood directors or by anyone else.
This week, Elliott was in Poland for the 80th anniversary commemoration of Auschwitz’s liberation. As part of the events, Höss’s house at 88 Legionów Street was opened to visiting dignitaries for the first time since the Holocaust.
Just steps from the site where 1.1 million Jews, along with 20,000 Roma and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were murdered, this house was once home to the man who orchestrated that industrial-scale slaughter: Rudolf Höss. But for nearly eight decades, the Polish family that occupied it since 1945 refused to let anyone inside, despite its profound historical significance.
And the macabre site is just the tip of the spear. A major fundraising campaign has been launched to support ARCHER at House 88’s mission to transform the Höss home into a global center for research, education, and advocacy against extremism and antisemitism. With comprehensive programming designed for college students and educational tools set to be used worldwide, the initiative aims to confront hate where it festers most.
This week, Ambassador Wallace emphasized the center’s crucial role as a global hub for combating hate, while former US Senator Norm Coleman called the project a direct and urgent challenge to antisemitism and extremism.
I spoke to Elliott while he was in Poland. “Rudolf Höss’s house stood untouched for decades, a silent witness to history’s darkest crimes,” he told me. “We refused to let it remain a relic of evil. House 88 will be transformed into a center for fighting antisemitism, extremism, and hate. The lesson of House 88 is so disturbing: a neighbor can be fanatically antisemitic, and the result is the death of millions of Jews — or 1,200 innocent Israelis on the border of Gaza.”
His words carry the weight of history and urgency. This project isn’t only about preserving the past — it’s about ensuring the world understands where unchecked hate leads, and giving future generations the tools to resist it.
One of ARCHER at House 88’s board members is another good friend of mine, George Schaeffer. “I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” he told me, “and I know how important it is for us to never forget what antisemitism can lead to. The more we know about the past — the horrors of the past — the more we can correct the future, and change the future.”
George’s commitment to this project is deeply personal. “What we are constructing next to Auschwitz is an important way of teaching what the real dangers are,” he added. “The commandant and his family lived next door to Auschwitz as if it was normal — we need to make sure that it’s never normal to allow antisemitism to flourish, especially if it is on our own doorstep.”
In synagogues across the Jewish world, we are currently reading the Torah portions that recall the slavery and persecution of the Jews in ancient Egypt. One of the primary directives of Jewish tradition is incorporating the Hebrew phrase Zecher Li’yetziat Mitzrayim — a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt — into our prayers and blessings. But this is not just an exercise in historical memory — it is a directive for vigilance.
A just society can only thrive and survive if persecution and hatred are identified, combated, and rooted out. We must never be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking the danger has passed. Antisemitism may have begun more than three millennia ago in Egypt, but it has reared its ugly head in every era and every location since.
And now, as we face yet another alarming resurgence, ARCHER at House 88 stands as a powerful new initiative to ensure that this latest iteration of Jew-hatred is confronted and defeated — just as Pharaoh was in Egypt, just as Hitler and Höss were in their time, and just as every other vicious antisemite throughout history has ultimately been overcome.
The post How the Auschwitz Commandant’s Infamous Home Has Been Turned Into a Center Against Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Federal Lawmakers Launch Investigation Into Antisemitism at US Medical Schools
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a bullhorn during a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 11, 2025. Photo: Daniel Cole via Reuters Connect
Campus antisemitism at US medical schools is next in line to be examined by the federal government following the announcement on Monday of a major probe to be conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
US lawmakers announced an investigation into three institutions: the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, the University of Illinois College of Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
“This investigation will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitism discrimination, are needed, ” education committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to Steven Dubinett, dean of UCLA’s Geffen School. “The committee has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA Med, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, a Jewish faculty group at UCLA’s medical school, titled Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFrg), first sounded the alarm about antisemitism on the campus in February, issuing an open letter which called attention to a slew of indignities to which they have been subjected since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The primary agent of anti-Jewish hatred identified by JFrg is the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism (AAAR), a university-created body that has allegedly violated its mission to promote pluralism by lodging defaming accusations at the pro-Israel Jewish community in a series of reports, one of which contained what JFrg described as intolerable distortions of fact.
JFRG’s letter went on to enumerate a litany of falsehoods spread by AAAR, including that Jewish faculty have conspired to undermine academic freedom with “coordinated repression, involving university and non-university actors,” aligned itself with conservative groups, and harmed minority students by opposing “racial justice.”
The letter listed nearly a dozen other incidents previously unknown to the public, including a seminar on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” which categorized Jews as white to disparage both groups and displayed images of “‘capitalists’ with long hooked noses”; a medical group engaging in atrocity-denial, issuing a statement charging that Hamas kidnapped no one on Oct. 7; and an administrator attending an event which glorified self-immolation and whose organizers attacked Jewish faculty as “anti-black racists” for criticizing Hamas.
Walberg said that choosing not to respond to such incidents may have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and requested a trove of documents from UCLA “related to reports or complaints of antisemitic acts” filed with administrative officials. He asked the same of the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he said Jewish students conceal their Jewish identities from medical workers for fear of being targeted for intentional malpractice and are denied the chance to hold public events to raise awareness of antisemitism.
Antisemitism in university medical schools is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish health-care professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, a study published by the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department in May found.
Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study contained survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish health-care professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.
The research was not StandWithUs’ first contribution to the study of antisemitism in medicine. In December, its Data & Analytics Department published a study which found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. That study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, fearful of threats to safety.
“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author Alexandra Fishman said in May. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Polish Soccer Fans Display Offensive Banner Saying Poland ‘Regrets Saving Jews’ During Holocaust
Worshipers wrapped in Israeli flags at a prayer service in Warsaw, Poland. Photo: Reuters/Kacper Pempel
Fans of the Polish soccer team Górnik Zabrze displayed a banner that featured a hateful message referencing the Holocaust and a crossed-out Israeli flag at a match on Saturday against fellow Polish club GKS Katowice.
At the beginning of the second half of the game, Górnik fans unfurled a banner that said, “Our ancestors died to save Jews. We are starting to regret it,” according to Polish media. Saturday’s game ended with Górnik winning 3-0.
Górnik- Gks pic.twitter.com/FaplWZpZB6
— Gładki82 (@adki82) August 23, 2025
The messaging may have been in response to a banner that said in English “Murderers since 1939” which was displayed by fans of Maccabi Haifa on Aug. 14 during the Israeli team’s UEFA Conference League qualifying match against Poland’s Raków Częstochowa that took place in Debrecen, Hungary. The banner showcased by Maccabi Haifa fans referenced the year Germany invaded Poland and seemingly criticized Poland’s complicity in the atrocities committed during Nazi occupation. More than 3 million Polish Jews were subsequently killed during the Holocaust, as well as 3 million non-Jewish citizens.
UEFA launched disciplinary proceedings against Maccabi Haifa because of the anti-Polish banner and fined Raków more than $11,000 “for transmitting a message unfit for a sports event” at the same match. The Polish team was also fined close to $35,000 and banned from selling tickets to its fans for the next UEFA competition match after supporters lit fireworks at the Aug. 14 game.
A week before the Maccabi Haifa game, Rakow Częstochowa fans displayed a banner that said in Polish: “Israel Murders and the World Is Silent.” It was featured at a match on Aug. 7 between Maccabi Haifa and Rakow Częstochowa in Czestochowa, Poland.
Earlier this month, the UEFA invited two refugee children from the Gaza Strip to participate in the medal ceremony at the UEFA Super Cup final in Udine, Italy, and had several refugee children display a banner on the pitch that read: “Stop killing children – Stop killing civilians.”
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Hundreds of Film Industry Professionals Pressure Venice Film Festival to Condemn ‘Genocide’ in Gaza
Workers set up the red carpet a day before the start of the 82nd Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, Aug. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yara Nardi
Hundreds of professionals in the Italian and international film industry signed an open letter on Saturday that calls on organizers of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival to take a “clear and unambiguous” stand and condemn what they describe as a genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in the Gaza Strip.
Actor Toni Servillo – star of this year’s Venice opening film “La Grazia” – director siblings Alba and Alice Rohrwacher, director Marco Bellocchio, and filmmaker Matteo Garrone are among the Italians who have gathered under the banner V4P (Venice4Palestine) to publish the open letter. They call on the Venice Film Festival, its parent body the Biennale di Venezia, and the festival’s independent parallel sections Venice Days and the International Critics’ Week “to be more courageous and clear in condemning the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing across Palestine carried out by the Israeli government and army.”
“Stop the clocks, turn off the stars,” reads the first line of the open letter, which is written in Italian. “The burden is too much to carry on living as before. For almost two years now, we have been seeing images of unmistakable clarity from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Incredulous and powerless, we keep witnessing the torment of a genocide carried out live by the State of Israel in Palestine. No one will ever be able to say: ‘I couldn’t know, I couldn’t imagine, I couldn’t believe.’”
“It is time not only for empathy but also for responsibility,” they added. “Semantics, language, words, and images are not accessories, especially for those who believe in art: they are a form of fundamental and necessary resistance. Otherwise we should surrender to the evidence that being a filmmaker or journalist today no longer makes any sense.”
Members of the film industry outside of Italy who signed the letter include French Venice Golden Lion-winning director of “The Happening” Audrey Diwan, fellow French director Céline Sciamm, Iranian-French filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, and French-Swiss director-actor Laetitia Dosch.
Others who signed the open letter are British filmmaker Ken Loach, French actor Swann Arlaud, Bulgarian director Kostantin Bojanov, British actor Charles Dance, and Palestinian brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser. The duo from Gaza together won Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival this year for their film “Once Upon a Time in Gaza.”
Saturday’s letter also includes accusations that Israel has been persecuting Palestinians even before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, and that it is time for members of the film industry to take a stand “to uphold the truth about ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, colonialism, and all the crimes against humanity committed by Israel for decades.”
“As the spotlight turns on the Venice Film Festival, we’re in danger of going through yet another major event that remains indifferent to this human, civil, and political tragedy. ‘The show must go on,’ we are told, as we’re urged to look away — as if the ‘film world’ had nothing to do with the ‘real world,’” the letter states. “The Biennale and the Venice International Film Festival should celebrate the power of art as a means of transformation, testimony, representation of humanity, and development of critical consciousness. And it is precisely this that makes art an extraordinary means for reflection, active participation and resistance.” The letter concludes with the proclamation “Free Palestine!”
The 82nd Venice Film Festival starts on Aug. 27, almost six weeks to the second anniversary of the deadly Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 2023, in which 1,200 people were murdered and 251 hostages were kidnapped to Gaza.
The Biennale released a statement in response to the open letter earlier this week, according to Variety. The cultural organization said it and the festival “have always been, throughout their history, places of open discussion and sensitivity to all the most pressing issues facing society and the world.”
“The evidence of this is, first and foremost, the works that are being presented [at the festival],” the Biennale noted, before giving as an example the film “The Voice of Hind Rajab” by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania. The political drama, which is in competition this year at the festival, is about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl, who was trapped in a car that had allegedly come under fire by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024. The Biennale further noted in its statement that last year’s Venice Film Festival featured “Of Dogs and Men” by Israeli director Dani Rosenberg. The film is about a 16-year-old named Dar who returns to her kibbutz in Israel to look for the dog she lost during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
“The Biennale is, as always, open to dialogue,” the organization said in conclusion.