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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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The post As European nations celebrate their past, a US Holocaust envoy reminds them of its darker corners appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Islamic State Terrorist Attack on Niger Airport Potentially More Deadly Than Government Revealed
Members of the Nigerien army walk near the motorcycles seized from the attackers, following an attack on Niamey International Airport, in Niamey, Niger, Jan. 29, 2026, in this screengrab from a video. Photo: ORTN/Reuters TV/Handout via REUTERSISIS
Islamic State’s attack on the airport in Niger‘s capital Niamey last week may have been more severe than the Nigerien government claimed, according to recent reports and a video released by a media outlet affiliated with the terrorist group.
More than 30 members of the Islamic State branch in the Sahel region targeted the Diori Hamani International Airport and Air Base 101 shortly after midnight on Thursday using guns, drones, and explosives. The jihadist group on Friday took credit for the assault in a short statement released online through its propaganda outlet, Amaq News Agency.
US forces had previously used the air base in Niamey — located six miles from the presidential palace — for maintaining drones until withdrawing in 2024 following the previous year’s coup d’état orchestrated by former Presidential Guard commander General Abdourahamane Tchiani, who now serves as the landlocked country’s 11th president.
Niger’s military and Russia’s Africa Corps mercenary group, which was also stationed at the base, said they combated the attack. Niger has so far reported four of its troops suffered injuries and there was little damage. The government said it killed 20 attackers and captured 11, at least one of whom was a French national, leading Nigerien authorities to blame France and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for the attack.
“We remind the sponsors of those mercenaries, who are Emmanuel Macron [president of France], Patrice Talon [president of Benin], and Alassane Ouattara [president of the Ivory Coast], we have sufficiently heard them bark, and they should now in turn be prepared to hear us roar,” Tchiani said in a statement on national television.
While the government’s reason for ignoring Islamic State was not immediately clear, Niger has previously blamed its neighbors and former colonial ruler France for internal instability.
However, following its initial claim of responsibility, Islamic State published a 90-secoind video of the attack through Amaq News Agency, depicting far more damage than what Nigerien authorities claimed.
The video showed that some attackers came in on motorcycles and attacked aircraft hangars in Air Base 101, burning and shooting the planes. The video also presented a burning helicopter, and an additional statement from the terrorist group claimed the torching of a drone.
Local reports and accounts circulated on social media aligned with Islamic State’s account of greater damage, describing hits on civilian aircraft and a destroyed ammunition depot.
The base is a key military hub in the region, reportedly hosting a contested stockpile of uranium and the headquarters for the Niger-Burkina Faso-Mali Joint Force.
Caleb Weiss, an analyst who focuses on the spread of the Islamic State in Central Africa, reported in the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Long War Journal that unconfirmed social media reports reveal “a much higher death toll for both local Nigerien security forces and men from Russia’s Africa Corps who were also stationed at the airbase” — specifically, at least 24 Nigerien soldiers and three Russian mercenaries.
At the same time as the Niger attack, Islamic State’s West Africa Province perpetrated a similar strike in Nigeria’s Sabon Gari army base in Borno, leaving at least nine dead and more wounded.
The assaults came amid a surge of Islamic State terrorist activity across Africa, including the Sahel region, which stretches from the Horn of Africa to the Atlantic Ocean, just under the Sahara Desert. The Islamic State regional affiliate there has killed more than 120 people in the Tillabéri territory in September and also kidnapped an American in October.
“From Somalia to Nigeria, the problem set is connected. So, we’re trying to take it apart and then provide partners with the information they need,” the deputy commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), Lt. General John Brennan, said in January.
Terrorism in western Africa has exploded in recent years following three coups which have led their military leaders to create a confederacy aligned with Russia. Niger has joined with Burkina Faso and Mali to create the Association of Sahel States (AES), as an alternative to the ECOWAS. Reports have emerged of alleged atrocities committed by Russian mercenaries in Mali.
A November report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point revealed that Africa had become the global hot spot for terrorist killings. Analysts explained that “where once the global terror threat was concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa, today it is centered in the Sahel, specifically in the tri-border region between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.”
The data showed that 86 percent of deaths caused by terrorism happened in 10 countries with 7 in Africa and 5 in the Sahel.
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In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL and investing more in Jewish identity
(JTA) — In a speech that described antisemites as an “axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incurably stupid,” Bret Stephens asserted that supporters of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish defense groups should largely abandon their current strategy for combating antisemitism and instead redirect their resources toward strengthening Jewish life itself.
Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist and founder of the Jewish thought journal Sapir, said antisemitism is largely impervious to appeals to tolerance, reminders of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments, or mandatory Holocaust education.
Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership, arguing that the infrastructure already exists but lacks sufficient scale and coordination.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” Stephens said, delivering the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Sunday. “We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere.”
In an on-stage conversation after the talk, Stephens told Rabbi David Ingber, the Y’s senior director for Jewish life, that if it were up to him, he would “dismantle” the ADL, the leading Jewish group fighting antisemitism.
“That’s not how Jewish money should be spent,” Stephens told Ingber, acknowledging that the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was in the audience. “That’s not helping raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness as something other than the fact that they saw ‘Schindler’s List’ and they visited the Holocaust Museum. That cannot be the locus of Jewish identity. If we’re going to survive, victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity.”
Reached the next day, Greenblatt said he considered Stephens a friend and described his thoughts on Jewish identity as “powerful and provocative,” but found Stephens’ critique of efforts to combat antisemitism “misguided.”
Greenblatt said the ADL’s functions include collecting data on hate crimes, training synagogues and other Jewish institutions in security and a Center on Extremism that gathers intelligence that has been used to “intercept and prevent plots from unfolding that literally could take the lives of people in our community.”
Greenblatt said he agreed on the value of investing in Jewish education and centering identity. “I profoundly agree that the best defense against antisemitism is a good offense, and yet you cannot deny the necessity of defense, that you will not have a strong Jewish community if you don’t have a safe Jewish community,” he told JTA. “You cannot have what Bret called a thriving Jewish people if they’re constantly under threat. So I just don’t agree that it’s a binary choice.”
Stephens’ remarks about the ADL come at a time when the organization has been under fire from the left and right. While many on the left object to its Israel advocacy and accuse it of cozying up to the Trump administration, right-wing critiques have included accusations that it has supported “woke” policies and that its advocacy has been ineffective in countering antisemitism on the far left and far right.
Asked about these critiques, Greenblatt said that the ADL, as one of the oldest anti-hate organizations in the country, has become a convenient target for partisans, inside and outside the Jewish community, who are frustrated by the persistence of bigotry and eager to discredit their ideological opposites. “I think this blame game is bad for America, and I think it’s lethal for our Jewish community,” he said.
The State of World Jewry speech has been a tradition at the influential New York cultural center since 1980, and has been given by, among others, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
For the third year in a row it has been delivered by a prominent center-right pundit. Like Stephens, author and podcaster Dan Senor (2025) and journalist Bari Weiss (2024) suggested that the strongest response to a community reeling from antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks is for Jews to turn inward and invest in their own institutions rather than seeking inclusion or protection within broader coalitions.
Elsewhere, writers on the Jewish left, including Eric Alterman in the Forward and The New Republic and Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, have focused on what they see as a gap between a conservative Jewish establishment and a liberal Jewish majority troubled by the extent of the war in Gaza. While condemning the Hamas attacks and antisemitism on the left and right, they argue that anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism, and Jewish groups should prioritize liberal, democratic values over unconditional defense of Israel.
“I don’t think that we made an ideological choice,” Ingber told JTA, when asked about the recent lineup of speakers. “It’s where the center of gravity is at this moment. Voices like [Stephens’ and] Bari’s and Dan’s are seriously engaging with the complexity of this situation, and in some ways mirror a little bit of what’s happening more broadly in Israel” and beyond.
“I don’t think it means that we endorse their worldview, but it means that the Jewish community is benefitting from their platform,” he continued.
Stephens, who told Ingber that he was a “gadfly” on the typically liberal opinion pages of the New York Times, laid out four arguments in his talk: that the fight against antisemitism is largely ineffective; that antisemitism functions as a perverse compliment rooted in resentment; that Jews should stop trying to disprove hatred through achievement or moral suasion; and that Jewish survival depends on building independent institutions rather than seeking acceptance from broader society.
Stephens questioned whether decades of investment in education, advocacy and monitoring — the core strategies of organizations such as the ADL and campus advocacy groups — have produced measurable results, even as antisemitic beliefs and incidents have increased.
“Does anyone think the fight against antisemitism is working?” he asked.
As evidence, Stephens pointed to polling data showing that “one in five millennials and Gen Zs believe the Jews caused the Holocaust,” as well as the persistence of antisemitic rhetoric in media, politics and academia during a period when Jewish institutions are, he said, more engaged and better funded than ever.
In this, Stephens joined a number of observers who have been questioning the cost and effectiveness of efforts to combat antisemitism, which have surged in recent years.
“The mistake we make is this: We think that antisemitism stems fundamentally from missing or inaccurate information. We think that if people only had greater knowledge of the history of Jewish persecution, a fuller grasp of the facts of the Israeli-Arab conflict, a finer understanding of all the ways antisemitism manifests itself, a deeper appreciation of the Jewish contribution to America’s success and to human flourishing worldwide, that the hatred of us might dissipate or never start in the first place,” he said. “That thesis is wrong.”
Stephens framed antisemitism as a response to Jewish distinctiveness, which acts as a counterculture in authoritarian or conformist societies, and resentment, especially when Jewish communities flourish.
“They do not hate us because of our faults and failures,” Stephens said. “They hate us because of our virtues and successes.”
Stephens criticized what he described as a persistent Jewish impulse to seek validation through their contributions to the wider society — citing Jewish participation in progressive movements and Israeli peace initiatives as examples that failed to reduce hostility.
“Constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy in order to win the world’s love is a fool’s errand,” he said.
That argument led to Stephens’ fourth and final point: that Jews should invest in building and expanding their own institutions rather than seeking inclusion or protection within broader coalitions.
Quoting composer Philip Glass, Stephens said, “If there’s no room at the table, build your own table.”
“We have superb Jewish day schools, but we need many more of them,” he said. “We have astounding and vibrant cultural institutions… We have extraordinary Jewish philanthropies, but they need to become a primary locus of Jewish giving.”
Just as Senor did in his 2025 talk at the Y, Stephens framed the current moment — marked by rising antisemitism and social alienation — as an opportunity for Jewish renewal and not merely a period of crisis. Referring to “Oct. 8 Jews,” a term he popularized after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Stephens said he had come to rethink his own definition of traumatized Jews in more positive terms.
“What I should have said was that the ‘Oct. 8 Jew’ was the one who woke up trying to remember who he or she truly is,” he said.
Stephens’ conversation with Ingber was twice interrupted by hecklers, who were promptly escorted out by security. Before the talk, a group of demonstrators outside the venue waved Palestinian flags and chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” Ingber said demonstrators taunted him and others who attended the talk as they exited the building.
The post In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL and investing more in Jewish identity appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Primary School in Paris Vandalized Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks
Nearly 200,000 people took to the streets of Paris to protest rising antisemitism. Photo: Reuters/Claire Serie
A Jewish primary school in eastern Paris was vandalized over the weekend, with windows smashed and security equipment damaged, prompting a criminal investigation and renewed outrage among local Jewish leaders as targeted antisemitic attacks continue to escalate.
On Sunday night, a group of unknown individuals attacked the Beth Loubavitch–Beth Hannah primary school in Paris’s 20th arrondissement (district/borough), located on Passage des Saint-Simoniens, French media reported.
According to local authorities, the perpetrators did not enter the school building, but they did manage to smash windows, damage security equipment, and deface the school’s plaque and Jewish symbols.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office has now opened an investigation into the outrage, treating it as “aggravated damage” committed by a group with religious motives.
Éric Pliez, mayor of Paris’s 20th arrondissement, strongly condemned this latest antisemitic attack, promising swift action to ensure the safety of the local Jewish community.
“These acts are unacceptable and run counter to our values,” Pliez said in a statement. “The safety of our students is our highest priority. Alongside the municipal team, I reaffirm my unwavering opposition to all forms of antisemitism.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo also denounced the incident, reaffirming her full solidarity with the local Jewish community.
“I reiterate that these acts of antisemitic hatred, which I condemn with the utmost firmness, have no place in our city or in our Republic,” Hidalgo said in a statement.
Meanwhile, southeast of Paris, French authorities in Lyon are preparing for the trial of a 55-year-old man accused of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, with the court set to determine whether antisemitism was a motivating factor.
Starting Monday, defendant Rachid Kheniche is facing trial after being charged with aggravated murder on religious grounds, even as he denies an antisemitic motive.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated.
At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
However, after two psychiatric evaluations, Kheniche was deemed criminally responsible.
Ten days after the murder, the Lyon prosecutor’s office launched a broader investigation to determine whether the act had an antisemitic motive.
With this new trial, only the alleged antisemitic motive is being contested, while the murder itself has already been established.
The National Bureau of Vigilance against Antisemitism and the Jewish Observatory of France have filed a civil suit, with the International League Against Racism and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France also participating in the case.
“The anti-Jewish nature of the act is fully established, both materially and morally,” Franck Serfati, legal counsel for the groups involved in the suit, said in a statement.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, France has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the French Interior Ministry, the first six months of 2025 saw more than 640 antisemitic incidents, a 27.5 percent decline from the same period in 2024, but a 112.5 percent increase compared to the first half of 2023, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.