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As European nations celebrate their past, a US Holocaust envoy reminds them of its darker corners
WASHINGTON (JTA) — At a time when some European nations are seeking to revise their Holocaust histories to emphasize victimhood, a senior Biden administration official says the United States should keep reminding them of the dark corners of their past.
Ellen Germain, the State Department’s special envoy on Holocaust issues, said she has spent a lot of time recently engaging with leaders of countries who are seeking to venerate heroes who resisted Soviet oppression. The problem is that many of those figures also worked with the Nazis to persecute Jews.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week, Germain framed her job as ensuring that countries take the totality of that history into account. She has repeatedly made the case for removing or at least modifying plaques, statues and other memorials to people who collaborated with the Nazis.
“I understand why they’re being glorified as national heroes after World War II, but you can’t just erase what they did during the war,” Germain told JTA.
Germain’s office was established in 1999, and she has served in the role since August 2021. The envoy’s role is to persuade countries to give financial restitution to families of Jews who were murdered and exiled during the Holocaust. In the late 1990s, many countries were still coming to terms with their long-overlooked obligations toward Jewish communities that had been persecuted and wiped out. Stuart Eizenstat, the U.S. deputy treasury secretary at the time, pressed the Clinton administration to create the position to show U.S. commitment to seeking restitution.
Since 2017, the office has written reports on how countries are implementing the Terezin Declaration, a 2009 agreement between 47 countries to pay restitution to survivors. The office also works closely with the World Jewish Restitution Organization to push countries to pass laws facilitating restitution. And it works with the State Department’s antisemitism monitor to track antisemitism and campaign against it, to promote education about the Holocaust, to preserve Holocaust-era archives and to organize Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.
Germain, a career diplomat who has served in multiple posts in Europe, the Middle East and the United Nations, said most countries now have advanced restitution mechanisms, lessening the need for U.S. pressure. She added that some countries, including Poland and Croatia, still need to pass legislation to that effect.
Her focus more recently has been on pressing countries to more openly and honestly confront their roles in the Holocaust, a job complicated by states’ natural tendency to create heroic national myths. She would like to see monuments to perpetrators of atrocities removed, or at least modified.
More broadly, a resurgence of the far right has worried Jewish groups and the Biden administration. Poland has passed laws criminalizing accusations that some Poles collaborated with the Nazis, and others restricting restitution. Hungary’s approach to its role in the Holocaust has long been a matter of debate between the government and Jewish community. Far-right parties have made gains in recent elections in Austria, Germany and France, among other countries. Neo-Nazi marches also still make headlines across the continent.
“You get a certain amount of what we call revisionism or rehabilitation, like rehabilitation or glorification of people who are considered national heroes because they fought the communists,” she said. “They fought the Soviets after World War II, but they also participated in acts of Nazi genocide. During World War Two, they collaborated — sometimes they were directly involved in deportations or mass killings. There are figures like that in Lithuania, Ukraine, in Croatia, you’ve got street names named after some of them.”
Germain named Juozas Krikštaponis and Jonas Noreika in Lithuania; Roman Shukhevych in Ukraine; and Miklos Horthy in Hungary as examples of people memorialized for their anti-Soviet campaigns who also collaborated with the Nazis.
Germain has been having conversations about the resurgence of such memorialization in her travels. How receptive her interlocutors are, she said, depends on the country. Late last year, she traveled to Lithuania and Hungary, and in Germany she addressed a course on the Holocaust for diplomatic and security professionals from across Europe. In January, she accompanied Douglas Emhoff, the Jewish second gentleman, on his heritage tour of Poland and Germany.
Lithuanian officials were receptive to her efforts to get them to grapple with their Holocaust history, she said.
“I was really, really pleasantly surprised and impressed by how open everyone was in Lithuania to the discussion of this,” she said. “Everyone from the government to academics to journalists. “I did a panel event there that live-streamed and had 20,000 viewers, and the questions and comments just from the people in the audience about this — they were just much more open to saying, ‘Yeah, you know, we realized this is a problem and we need to figure out how to deal with it.’”
The Hungarians, by contrast, appeared wary. Hungarian officials have sought to equate the Holocaust with Soviet-era repression and revive the reputations of figures like Horthy. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has unsettled many in the West with his hard-right turn and rhetoric that, at times, appears to cross over into racism and antisemitism.
“Hungary is a more difficult question,” she said. ”I didn’t find the same level of openness. But I did find a willingness to at least talk to me about it.”
She did not mention the opposite democratic trajectories of both countries: Lithuania, along with Estonia and Latvia, have eagerly turned toward Europe and the United States in recent years, particularly as the Russian threat looms directly across the border. Hungary, by contrast, has become more insular and hyper-nationalist.
Germain said she takes a nuanced approach to making the case for confronting the past. Some of the people she wants to see made accountable for their crimes were genuinely at the forefront of their countries’ struggles against the Soviets.
“They don’t have to be written out of history, and in fact, they shouldn’t be because people need to know what they did, both good and bad,” she said. “But the point is, make the history more nuanced and teach the citizens of these countries what the full story is, and if there are statues and memorials to some of these guys… either take it down or add some context to it.”
She cited “a plaque to Jonas Noreika on the National Library in Vilnius, in Lithuania, that just says that he was a great man.” Noreika was a high-ranking police officer who is believed to have personally overseen the murder of Jews. He is venerated in Lithuania as a hero for fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Germans.
Germain said understands the impulse to seek heroes to forge a national identity after the Soviets sought to negate the histories of the countries they dominated — and especially in the face of a resurgent imperialist Russia that has invaded Ukraine.
“I think it took a while for them to start sorting out their history,” she said. “And so, sometimes, there’s only in the last five or 10 years been real attention paid to the fact that some of these figures might not be as 100% heroic as they were initially thought to be.”
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Trump has no vision for what comes next in the Middle East
Buried within the long, maudlin, combative, occasionally moving and never modest verbiage of President Donald Trump’s Tuesday State of the Union address was this uncomfortable truth: Trump has no idea what comes next in the Middle East.
In discussing two conflicts that have drawn intense attention over the past year — those in Gaza and Iran — he offered a downright confusing picture of what the future has to offer.
When the president finally touched on foreign policy, after he had already been speaking for nearly an hour and a half, he credited himself with ending eight wars — a figure that’s worth questioning.
“The war in Gaza, which proceeds at a very low level, it’s just about there,” he said.
The Gaza war is over, maybe
There is no doubt Gaza is closer to peace than it was when Trump took office. The deal he forged between Israel and Hamas is so far the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of his second term.
But “just about there?”
Israel has killed about 600 Palestinians, including many civilians, since the ceasefire. Meanwhile, Hamas has not disarmed, and in fact, according to the Times of Israel, has begun inserting itself in new Trump-backed governing bodies in Gaza.
More than 80% of the structures in the Strip were destroyed in the conflict that began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Rebuilding will take many years, and billions of dollars. Of the 200,000 temporary housing units humanitarian agencies estimate the enclave needs, only 4,000 have been delivered or on their way.
The much-heralded Trump peace plan, in other words, is on shaky ground.
That explains why Trump thanked Hamas, as he has done in previous speeches this month, for helping to find the bodies of dead hostages.
“Believe it or not, Hamas worked along with Israel,” Trump said, “and they dug and they dug and they dug. It’s a tough, tough thing to do, going through bodies all over, passing up 100 bodies, sometimes for each one that they found.”
Why not mention that Hamas wouldn’t have had to do such hard, noble work if it hadn’t attacked and killed Israelis in the first place? Because the odd compliment — thanking murderers for returning their victims’ bodies — was Trump playing to reality. If his signature diplomatic initiative is to succeed, he needs Hamas and its patrons to go along. So far, the group is stalling when it comes to disarmament. If he can’t persuade them to take that step, his signature peace effort is done for.
An awareness of just how treacherous this situation is explains why Trump’s Gaza comments focused largely on his success at negotiating the return of Israel’s hostages, both living and dead.
“And those parents who had a dead son,” Trump said, “they always told me that boy, they wanted him as much as though he were living.”
Trump didn’t offer a vision, as he has in the past, of a prosperous Gaza; of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords; and of Israel at peace with its neighbors. He didn’t even mention his pet initiative, the Board of Peace — surprising, given that the body met for the first time just last week. The Middle East has a way of lowering expectations, and in the State of the Union, Trump wasn’t selling anything but the successful return of the dead.
The Iran war that isn’t, yet
On Iran, Trump was, if possible, even more confusing.
The United States has sent its largest military force in decades to the Middle East, which means we are once again — maybe — on the verge of a Middle East war. But Trump’s case for conflict — and explanation of how things got to this point — was lackluster.
He claimed that Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”
But evidently, a program that was “obliterated” is somehow, less than a year later, an imminent threat. In the very next sentence, Trump said Tehran is now trying to rebuild its nuclear facilities and develop missiles that could reach the United States. (The simpler and more factual explanation: actually, nothing got obliterated in the first place.)
While claiming that the Iranian regime recently killed 32,000 of its own people during nationwide protests — an exact death toll is still elusive — he offered the country a path to survival: give up nuclear weapons.
But what sounds like a clear demand really isn’t. Nuclear diplomacy takes a long time and great delicacy. Trump, who favors swift resolutions, has backed himself into a corner: The military is already there, and the world is waiting with baited breath.
Plus, Americans don’t want to go to war. Some 49% of Americans oppose an attack on Iran, with just 27% in support of one, according to a YouGov poll this month. Independents oppose the idea by 54%, and Republicans support it by only 58%.
What’s a president who has staked his second-term reputation on his ability to win big and make peace supposed to do?
For now, the lack of specificity gives Trump room to waffle on whether or not to go to war — and try to make a case for what specific, achievable aims he would have in doing so.
In a clear sign that he doesn’t yet have answers for those questions, Trump’s language on Tuesday sounded awfully familiar. “I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror to have a nuclear weapon,“ he said. “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.”
Compare that to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union.
“Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” Obama said, “and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better.”
Maybe Trump has a clear idea of what comes next for Gaza and Iran. Or maybe we’ve just gone back to the future.
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Memories of a subway passenger
דערצויגן געוואָרן אין דער שטאָט ניו־יאָרק, בײַ אַ משפּחה וואָס האָט נישט פֿאַרמאָגט קיין אויטאָ, האָב איך אַ גרויסן חלק פֿון מײַן לעבן „אויסגעלעבט“ אויף דער אונטערבאַן („סאָבוויי“). הגם הײַנט פֿאָר איך בדרך־כּלל מיט מיט דער מחוץ־שטאָטישער באַן „מעטראָ־נאָרט“, מוז איך מודה זײַן, אַז מײַנע יאָרן אויף דער אונטערבאַן האָבן זיכער געהאָלפֿן צו אַנטוויקלען בײַ מיר דאָס געפֿיל פֿון אַן עכטן ניו־יאָרקער.
אין עלטער פֿון 11 יאָר, למשל, זענען איך און מײַן 10־יאָריקע שוועסטער, גיטל, יעדע וואָך, נאָך די קלאַסן, געפֿאָרן מיט דער אונטערבאַן פֿינף סטאַנציעס צו אונדזער פּיאַנע־לעקציע. וואָס איז דער חידוש, פֿרעגט איר? איר קענט זיך אויסמאָלן, אַז צוויי אומשולדיקע מיידלעך, טראָגנדיק קליידלעך און צעפּלעך, זאָלן הײַנט פֿאָרן, אָן שום באַגלייטונג פֿון אַ דערוואַקסענעם — אויף דער אונטערבאַן? איך — נישט. פֿונדעסטוועגן, מיין איך, אַז דאָס האָט אונדז געגעבן אַ געוויסן נישט־באַוווּסטזיניקן קוראַזש, וואָס פֿעלט הײַנט די קינדער, וואָס זייערע עלטערן מוזן זיי פֿירן אינעם אויטאָ פֿון איין אָרט צום צווייטן.
איך האָב ליב געהאַט צו לייענען די רעקלאַמעס אין וואַגאָן. איך געדענק, למשל, די מעלדונגען וועגן דעם יערלעכן שיינקייט־קאָנקורס, „מיס סאָבווייס“. עטלעכע וואָכן פֿאַרן קאָנקורס, איז אין יעדן וואַגאָן געהאָנגען אַ בילד פֿון די זעקס פֿינאַליסטקעס. פֿלעג איך מיט גיטלען איבערלייענען זייערע קליינע ביאָגראַפֿיעס — בדרך־כּלל, סטודענטקעס, סעקרעטאַרשעס, זינגערינס, און טענצערינס — און דיסקוטירן מיט איר, ווער ס׳וואָלט געדאַרפֿט געווינען די „אונטערערדישע קרוין“. איך פֿלעג זיך אָפֿט מאָל חידושן, ווי אַזוי איינע מיט אַ גרויסער נאָז אָדער געדיכטע ברעמען האָט דערגרייכט אַזאַ מדרגה, אַז איר פּנים זאָל באַצירן יעדן וואַגאָן פֿון דער ניו־יאָרקער באַן־סיסטעם.
איך האָב זיך אויך געלערנט מײַנע ערשטע שפּאַנישע זאַצן אויף דער אונטערבאַן. אין יעדן וואַגאָן איז געהאָנגען אַ וואָרענונג אויף ענגליש און אויף שפּאַניש: „די רעלסן פֿון דער אונטערבאַן זענען געפֿערלעך. אויב די באַן שטעלט זיך אָפּ צווישן די סטאַנציעס, בלײַבט אינעווייניק. גייט נישט אַרויס. וואַרט אויף די אינסטרוקציעס פֿון די קאָנדוקטאָרן אָדער דער פּאָליציי“. גיטל און איך האָבן זיך אויסגעלערנט אויף אויסנווייניק די שפּאַנישע שורות, און זיי איבערגעחזרט אַזוי פֿיל מאָל, ביז די ווערטער האָבן זיך בײַ אונדז אַראָפּגעקײַקלט פֿון דער צונג ווי בײַ אמתע פּוערטאָ־ריקאַנער. און ס׳איז אונדז צו ניץ געקומען: אַז מיר זענען געשטאַנען ערגעץ צווישן מענטשן, און געוואָלט אויסזען ווי אמתע שפּאַניש־רעדער, האָבן מיר אויסגעשאָסן די שפּאַנישע שורות מיט אַזאַ טראַסק, אַז אַ נישט־שפּאַניש רעדער וואָלט געקענט מיינען, מיר טיילן זיך מיט עפּעס אַ זאַפֿטיקער פּליאָטקע.
מײַנע דרײַ בנים האָבן שטאַרק ליב געהאַט צו פֿאָרן אויף דער אונטערבאַן. קינדווײַז פֿלעגן זיי צודריקן די פּנימלעך צו די פֿענצטער, סײַ ווען די באַן איז געפֿאָרן אין דרויסן, סײַ אינעם פֿינצטערן טונעל. מײַן עלטסטער, יאַנקל, האָט צוויי מאָל געפּרוּווט צו פֿאַרווירקלעכן זײַנס אַ חלום: צו פֿאָרן, במשך פֿון איין טאָג, אויף יעדער ליניע פֿון דער גאַנצער סיסטעם, פֿון דער #1 ביז דער #7; פֿון דער A־באַן ביז דער Z. (מע דאַרף האָבן אַ מאַטעמאַטישן קאָפּ דאָס אויסצופּלאָנטערן.) ביידע מאָל האָט יאַנקל באַוויזן צו פֿאָרן אויף אַלע ליניעס… אַחוץ איינער. נישט קיין חידוש, אַז בײַ אונדז אין דער היים איז יאָרן לאַנג געהאָנגען אינעם שפּריץ אַ פֿירהאַנג מיט אַ ריזיקע מאַפּע פֿון דער אונטערבאַן.
הײַנט האָב איך אַ ספּעציעלע הנאה צו פֿאָרן אויף דער אונטערבאַן מיט מײַנע אייניקלעך. פּונקט ווי עס האָבן קינדווײַז געטאָן זייערע טאַטעס, קוקן זיי אויך אַרויס פֿון פֿענצטער און קאָמענטירן וועגן אַלץ וואָס פֿליט פֿאַרבײַ. ווער ווייסט? אפֿשר וועלן זיי אויך מיט דער צײַט זיך אויסלערנען די ציפֿערן און אותיות פֿון יעדער באַנליניע און דערבײַ אַליין פֿאַרוואַנדלט ווערן אין עכטע ניו־יאָרקער.
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Trump administration files lawsuit against UCLA, saying it failed to protect Jewish and Israeli employees
(JTA) — The Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing the leadership of UCLA of allowing an antisemitic work environment on campus, intensifying the Trump administration’s long-running scrutiny of the Los Angeles campus.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Central District of California, alleges UCLA failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff from harassment following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the protests that spread across American universities afterward.
The complaint was filed the same day President Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term, in which he is expected to cite the administration’s broader confrontations with higher education institutions as evidence of its successes. It also comes roughly three months after nine Justice Department attorneys resigned from the government’s University of California antisemitism investigation, telling the Los Angeles Times they believed the probe had become politicized.
The lawsuit says that antisemitic conduct at UCLA became widespread after Oct. 7 and persisted through the 2023-24 academic year. According to the lawsuit, Jewish and Israeli employees were subjected to threats, classroom disruptions, antisemitic graffiti and, at times, were blocked from parts of campus during protests.
The government places particular emphasis on the spring 2024 Royce Quad encampment, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators established a tent protest in the center of campus. The Justice Department alleges UCLA failed to enforce its own campus rules, allowing protests that disrupted university operations and contributed to what it describes as a hostile workplace.
“Based on our investigation, UCLA administrators allegedly allowed virulent anti-Semitism to flourish on campus,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a DOJ press release announcing the lawsuit. Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, described the alleged incidents as “a mark of shame” if proven true.
UCLA officials rejected the government’s characterization, pointing instead to changes made under Chancellor Julio Frenk.
“As Chancellor Frenk has made clear: Antisemitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere,” vice chancellor of strategic communications Mary Osako said in a statement. She cited investments in campus safety, the launch of UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, the reorganization of the university’s civil rights office, the hiring of a dedicated Title VI and Title VII officer and strengthened protest policies.
“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” Osako said.
Frenk, who is Jewish, has spoken publicly about antisemitism in higher education. In an essay published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last year, he invoked the history of German universities under Nazism, warning that those institutions “never recovered after driving Jews out” and urging American colleges to confront antisemitism while preserving academic freedom and open debate.
The new lawsuit follows earlier legal battles over campus protests at UCLA. In July 2025, the university agreed to pay $6.13 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a Jewish professor who said demonstrators had blocked access to parts of campus. Under that agreement, UCLA said it would ensure protesters could not restrict movement or access to university spaces.
Campus tensions over speech and security have continued more recently. Bari Weiss, the journalist and founder of The Free Press, withdrew this month from a scheduled appearance at UCLA as part of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture series. Weiss had been invited to speak on “The Future of Journalism” but canceled the event, citing security concerns ahead of the lecture.
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