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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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Israeli Defense Chief Says Hezbollah Will Be Disarmed, Terror Group Vows Continued ‘Resistance’ as Truce Begins
Smoke rises following an airstrike in Lebanon, as seen from Israeli side of the border, April 11, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
As a newly agreed ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect, Israel’s defense minister warned on Friday that Hezbollah will ultimately be disarmed and Israeli forces will not withdraw from Lebanese territory, vowing the campaign will continue until the threat to Israel’s northern communities is fully eliminated.
During a press conference, Israel Katz said the military campaign had entered a temporary “freeze” phase under a 10-day ceasefire framework. However, he stressed that Israel’s operational objectives on the ground remain unfinished and the maneuver is far from complete.
“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will continue to hold all positions it has cleared and taken inside Lebanon,” the Israeli defense chief said. “The ground operation and nationwide strikes against Hezbollah have achieved significant gains, but the mission is not yet complete.”
“Disarming Hezbollah — whether through military force or political pressure — was and remains the central objective of the campaign to which we are committed,” he continued. “Significant political leverage has now also been created, with the direct involvement of US President [Donald Trump] and increased pressure on the Lebanese government to advance that goal.”
Katz’s remarks came shortly after the Iran-back Lebanese terrorist group issued a defiant statement rejecting the ceasefire and any prospect of direct negotiations with Jerusalem, while vowing its forces would continue resisting Israeli troops.
“Our fighters will keep their hands on the trigger, preparing for the enemy’s betrayal and violation of its commitments. We will remain loyal to the alliance until our last breath, and our flag will not fall,” the statement read.
“The presence of Israeli forces on Lebanese territory gives Lebanon and the Lebanese people the right to resist,” it continued.
Meanwhile, residents across southern Lebanon, Beirut, and other parts of the country began making their way back home as the ceasefire took effect, with social media footage showing reconstruction work already underway on infrastructure damaged during the war.
However, Israel has warned Lebanese citizens against returning to their homes at this stage, with officials saying that Hezbollah could try to exploit the situation to reestablish its terrorist infrastructure under civilian cover.
“With the ceasefire agreement taking effect, the IDF will continue to hold its positions in southern Lebanon in light of Hezbollah’s terrorist activity,” Col. Avichai Edraei, the IDF spokesperson in Arabic, said in a statement.
“Until further notice, you are asked not to move south of the Litani River,” he continued. “If the fire resumes, those who return to the security zone will be forced to evacuate in order to allow the mission to be completed.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also signaled that Israel does not intend to withdraw its forces from Lebanese territory, saying the military is establishing what he described as a “thickened security zone” along the border area.
“That’s where we are – and we’re not leaving,” the Israeli leader said in a video statement issued on Thursday.
Netanyahu also said the opportunity for a ceasefire emerged only after what he described as a dramatic shift in Lebanon’s strategic balance of power since the start of the war.
He pointed to major blows to Hezbollah’s military capabilities, including the killing of its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024 and the subsequent destruction of large weapons stockpiles, saying these developments led to calls from Lebanese officials for direct peace talks for the first time in decades.
With negotiations now underway toward a longer-term arrangement, Netanyahu said Israel’s position rests on two core demands: the full disarmament of Hezbollah and a “sustainable” security-based peace framework.
For its part, Hezbollah insisted any agreement must include a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory and adherence to a reciprocal “quiet for quiet”” arrangement — terms Israel has rejected.
Netanyahu also warned that Hezbollah, which openly seeks Israel’s destruction, still retains a significant rocket arsenal, saying neutralizing that threat will remain a central component of the ongoing security and political process.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, nearly half of the roughly 8,000 rockets fired by Hezbollah during the war were launched from the southern Litani River region — an area that, under previous agreements, was supposed to be fully demilitarized.
The newly agreed ceasefire, which took effect Thursday-Friday at midnight, establishes a fixed 10-day window intended “to allow for good-faith negotiations toward a permanent security and peace agreement.”
As part of direct mediation efforts from Washington, Trump invited Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to White House talks aimed at advancing a broader settlement framework.
According to the US Department of State, the Lebanese government pledged to take “significant steps” to prevent Hezbollah from launching further attacks against Israeli targets.
“Both countries recognize the challenge posed by armed groups that violate Lebanon’s sovereignty and threaten regional stability … The only forces authorized to bear arms in Lebanon will be Lebanese government forces,” an official statement from the meeting said.
“Israel will retain its right to take all necessary measures for self-defense, at any time, against planned, immediate or sustained attacks,” it continued.
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Despite Winning New Jersey Special Election, Anti-Israel Candidate Underperforms in Heavily Jewish Town
Analilia Mejia, Democratic candidate for New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, speaks to guests after winning the election in Montclair, New Jersey, US, April 16, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
In Thursday night’s US congressional election in the 11th district of New Jersey, Jewish voters seemed to defect from the Democratic nominee in massive numbers, potentially foreshadowing a significant shift in Jewish voting patterns.
Analilia Mejia, a progressive activist known for her sharp condemnations of Israel, comfortably won the special congressional election in New Jersey in the deep-blue district by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent.
Despite defeating her Republican opponent by 20 points, however, pundits pointed out that Mejia underperformed expectations and that Democrats hemorrhaged support among heavily Jewish communities.
In Livingston, New Jersey, a town with a significant Jewish population, Mejia barely eked out a 51-49 majority over Joe Hathaway, a staggering sea-change from recent elections. The deep-blue town voted for Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by margins of 0.5 and 12 points, respectively. Taking into account party registration, the town has seen a shift to the political right by over 50 percent since 2024.
Though Mejia won Thursday’s race by a comfortable margin, experts pointed out that the progressive insurgent underperformed throughout the affluent suburban district. When taking into account party registration patterns, Mejia underperformed in Millburn by 23 points, North Caldwell by 10 points, South Orange by 7 points, and West Caldwell by 6 points, among others.
Spectators suggested that Mejia’s impressive margin of victory could be attributed to anti-Trump sentiment and massive turnout among Democrats and depressed turnout from Republicans.
Mejia’s positions on Israel, once considered fringe within the party, are increasingly becoming more mainstream, particularly in elections dominated by liberal voters. Her rhetoric on Israel, which critics say is one-sided and inflammatory, has drawn backlash from moderates and pro-Israel Democrats.
The outcome raises fresh questions about the party’s direction heading into national elections. While progressives see momentum, others worry candidates like Mejia could alienate Jewish and moderate voters while complicating efforts to maintain a broad electoral coalition. Her victory is likely to deepen internal party tensions, especially as debates over Israel grow more polarized and politically charged.
Mejia has said Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to “genocide,” a position that put her well to the left of many mainstream Democrats. She has aligned herself with calls for stronger conditions, or outright opposition, to US military support for Israel, reflecting the broader progressive wing’s push to reassess the traditional US-Israel relationship. She has also aimed sharp criticism toward the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the preeminent pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, calling the organization “horrendous” and accusing it of dividing the Democratic Party.
A progressive organizer with a record of criticizing Israeli government actions, Mejia benefited from a coalition of younger voters, activists, and highly engaged ideological blocs. Her win is consistent with recent polling trends showing a generational divide within the party, with younger Democrats expressing more skepticism toward Israel than older cohorts.
Mejia’s struggles in heavily Jewish and moderate areas of the district could forecast a split between the Democratic Party and what has been historically one of its most reliable voting blocs.
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel launched the Gaza war, the Democratic Paty’s rhetoric toward Israel has become increasingly hostile. Progressive Democrats, such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), have accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
This past week, approximately 80 percent of Democratic senators voted to halt military aid transfers to Israel, citing poor humanitarian conditions in Gaza and dismay over the US-Israeli war with Iran.
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Who’s responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer
Twenty Jews outside of the state of Israel were murdered for being Jewish in antisemitic attacks across three continents in 2025, the highest death toll among diaspora Jews in more than 30 years. In every country surveyed, antisemitic incidents of all kinds — including beatings, vandalism, threats and online harassment — remain dozens of percentage points higher than they were in 2022, before the Gaza war began.
This information, released in a report from Tel Aviv University on the eve of Yom HaShoah earlier this week, should haunt everyone, regardless of political affiliation.
Neither left nor right is wholly responsible; instead, the report concludes that “rather than a backlash to a specific geopolitical crisis, high levels of antisemitism have become a normalized feature in societies with large Jewish minorities.”
What the left should hear
There is a strain of progressive opinion, particularly vocal since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that dismisses accusations of antisemitism as, essentially, a political weapon — a tool wielded by pro-Israel voices to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy, shut down protests and conflate opposition to political Zionism with hatred of Jews.
There is some truth to this narrative. But the Tel Aviv University report reveals it has severe limitations, as well.
The Bondi Beach massacre did not happen because a government defined antisemitism too broadly. The synagogue attackers in Manchester, England did not gun down worshippers because someone misapplied the IHRA definition. The victims of attacks in Boulder, Colorado and Washington, D.C. were not statistics manufactured by an advocacy group. Twenty Diaspora Jews died violent deaths because antisemitism remains a lethal force in the world — a truth that the left, across the globe, needs to do a significantly better job addressing.
The physical assaults, murders, firebombings, and other acts of concrete violence chronicled in the report cannot be rationalized away as mere criticism of Israel. In Canada, incidents rose from roughly 2,000 in 2022 to 6,800 in 2025. In Australia, the total number of reported antisemitic incidents rose from 472 in 2022 to 1,750 in 2025 — nearly a fourfold increase in three years, including multiple arson attacks on synagogues, in addition to the Bondi Beach shooting.
The tendency among some progressives to dismiss most antisemitism complaints as presumed to be in bad-faith unless proven otherwise has real costs. When allegations of antisemitism are reflexively treated as a political tactic, it becomes easier to ignore actual antisemitism, even when it’s claiming lives and burning down religious buildings.
To be clear, there are real and important questions about how to define antisemitism, and where the line between good faith criticism of Israel as a nation-state and antisemitism against Jews as a people falls. Those questions must continue to be asked.
But when Jewish institutions are targeted and a primary political reflex on the left is to search for Israeli wrongdoing that might have “provoked” the attack, the victims are abandoned.
What the right — and the Israeli government — should hear
The Tel Aviv University report challenges progressive denial. But it challenges the Israeli government and its defenders just as directly.
The report’s authors write that Israeli politicians at the highest levels have “expanded the scope of the term ‘antisemitism,’ including through cynical and hasty declarations, drained it of meaning, and damaged the struggle against Jew-hatred.”
The government, they conclude, “has not contributed in any meaningful way to the cause” of fighting antisemitism against diaspora Jews.
This is not a minor complaint buried in a footnote. It is a central finding of the most authoritative antisemitism report on the planet, published by an Israeli university.
Consider what that behavior looked like in practice. When gunmen massacred 15 Jews at Bondi Beach in December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s immediate political instinct was to blame Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, specifically its decision to recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
“Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire,” Netanyahu declared — a response that made it seem like an act of violence motivated by the Islamic State was somehow part of the legitimate pro-Palestinian movement. As former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pointed out, the vast majority of the world’s nations recognize Palestinian statehood. Were they all complicit in Bondi?
This pattern of using the word “antisemitism” as a cudgel against any policy position that Israel’s government dislikes — whether it is recognizing Palestinian statehood, criticizing settlement expansion or questioning IDF military operations — has a corrosive effect on the fight against actual antisemitism. When the term is deployed reflexively and politically, it trains audiences to be skeptical of the label. It gives ammunition to exactly those who want to dismiss Jewish fear as manufactured. It is, in the deepest possible sense, counterproductive.
The Tel Aviv University report goes further, recommending that Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism be dissolved entirely, with its funding transferred instead to Israeli embassies and consulates. The author’s argument: only professionals embedded in local communities, working alongside law enforcement and educators, can actually make a difference in combatting antisemitism. Grand declarations from politicians in Jerusalem motivated more by their own domestic political considerations than by the safety of the Jewish diaspora cannot.
A need for discipline
What this report ultimately demands, from the left and the right alike, is a discipline that both sides have conspicuously failed to practice: the discipline of treating antisemitism as a separate issue from the issues of Israel, Zionism and Palestinian rights.
These issues do overlap. But they are fundamentally individual. Antisemitism is hatred of Jews as Jews, a prejudice that has existed for millennia, operates independently of any particular government’s behavior, and kills people without asking victims what they think about Israeli settlements.
The contemporary state of Israel is a nation-state which commits specific actions, many of which are worthy of criticism.
Conflating the two, in either direction, produces disaster.
On the right, treating any political position unfavorable to Israel as presumptively antisemitic weaponizes Jewish suffering for political ends and corrupts the language we need to name and fight real hatred. On the left, treating the existence of real Jew-hatred as essentially a cover story for Zionist advocacy abandons Jewish communities to violence, and prevents the kind of serious policy response that could actually reduce harm.
The people killed at Bondi Beach were not symbols in a geopolitical argument. They were not collateral in a debate about international law or protest rights. They were Jews who had gathered to celebrate Hanukkah. Their deaths — and those of the other diaspora Jews killed last year — demand better than either cynical exploitation or willful minimization by either side.
The Tel Aviv University report, to its considerable credit, refuses both postures. It counts the dead honestly. It honestly holds the Israeli government accountable. It refuses to let anti-Jewish violence be erased, and it also refuses to let that violence be used as a political instrument. In doing so, it models the intellectual honesty that this moment desperately requires.
The question is whether anyone on either side of this exhausting divide is willing to listen.
The post Who’s responsible for deadly antisemitism? Everyone will hate the answer appeared first on The Forward.