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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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I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken
I’ve heard Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” hundreds of times. But one recent Friday afternoon, returning from the grocery store with food for Shabbat dinner, was the first time I truly listened to the words.
“There’s battle lines being drawn,” Springfield sang. “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong / Young people speaking their minds / Are getting so much resistance from behind.”
Six decades later, those lines felt less like a period artifact than a live transmission.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working in and around Atlanta’s Jewish community, including six years on staff at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, leading community engagement and guest programming. So when the Israeli Consulate General to the Southeastern United States pulled its sponsorship of AJFF mid-festival last month — publicly rebuking the organization over its engagement with a Muslim Morehouse College student who had made social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza — I felt it the way you feel a fracture in your own family.
What followed was even more painful to witness. This juror, by multiple accounts, was thoughtful, respectful, and described his role with the festival as an honor. The naming and public shaming he has been subject to in the past few weeks, as Jewish organizations issued statements of condemnation, have likely undone any understanding and bridge-building that had taken place over the course of his engagement with AJFF.
And AJFF, one of the largest Jewish film festivals in the world, found itself at the center of a communal firestorm — not for screening a controversial film, but for engaging with a young man of a different faith and perspective as part of a three-person jury evaluating human rights documentaries.
Reflecting on this now that this year’s festival has concluded, I’m troubled by what this incident shows about just how far the “battle lines” Springfield mentioned have extended — and how dangerous they are. Sometime between the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 and today, something troubling took hold in parts of our community: the conflation of Jewish identity with unquestioning political loyalty to the current Israeli government.
The Talmud records that the rabbis preserved minority opinions precisely because truth is not always with the majority, and because a dissenting voice might one day be vindicated by circumstance. We are a people who have, for millennia, argued with God. Are we now going to stop arguing respectfully with each other?
And what does it mean for Atlanta — a city that styles itself the cradle of the civil rights movement — when its Jewish community responds to disagreement in this close-minded manner?
AJFF was built to advance a different set of goals. The festival’s mission has always rested on the belief that film is uniquely powerful as a vehicle for human connection — that sitting in the dark together, watching stories unfold, can open us to perspectives we might otherwise never encounter.
AJFF does not screen films as endorsements, nor does it require audiences to agree with what they see. Many screenings are followed by panel discussions designed to surface complexity, not resolve it. The festival’s explicit commitment to “foster intergroup understanding among Atlanta’s diverse cultural, ethnic and religious populations” is not a political statement — it is a pedagogical one.
Art doesn’t ask us to capitulate to another point of view. It asks us to be present with it long enough to recognize our shared humanity. As Robert Redford, honored during Sunday’s Academy Award in memoriam tribute, once said: “The glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it.”
Inviting a young Muslim student to evaluate films about human rights is not a provocation. It is that mission — AJFF’s mission — made real.
Organizations and individuals who are willing to engage in thoughtful, open-hearted dialogue with those whose experiences differ from their own — who resist the pull toward insularity and choose engagement instead — are doing some of the most important work in American civic life. That willingness, that courage, has the capacity to create lasting change for the better.
These are not radical ideas. They are deeply Jewish ones.
Hamas’s terror on October 7, 2023, was a cataclysmic rupture — a massacre that has legitimately shaken every Jewish person I know, including those who hold the most progressive views on Israeli policy. The grief and fear are real. The trauma is real. And antisemitism — actual antisemitism, not mere criticism of a government — is real and rising, and must be confronted without equivocation.
Just last week, a gunman rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in suburban Detroit in what the FBI called a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. It is a reminder, as if we needed one, that the threats facing Jews in America are not hypothetical — they are physical, present, and demand our clear-eyed vigilance.
But vigilance and exclusion are not the same. Nor does the latter reflect the truth of the American Jewish community.
A recent poll from the Jewish Federations of North America found that while 88% of respondents affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state, only 37% identify as Zionists. These numbers do not reflect a collapse of Jewish values. They reflect a community grappling honestly and painfully with a situation that resists easy answers — which is exactly what Jewish communities are supposed to do.
That’s also what Judaism is about, at least the version I was raised in.
That Judaism tells us to welcome the stranger because we were once strangers ourselves. It instructs us that the most important commandment is to love your neighbor. It has, in my experience, made the Atlanta Jewish community one of the most generous, creative and genuinely pluralistic in the country.
The cancellation of individuals and organizations, the public shaming, the erosion of communal institutions that took decades to build — these are not expressions of Jewish strength. They are symptoms of fear. And fear, historically, has never served us well.
I do not have all the answers. My own views on Israel and Gaza have evolved, and I expect they will continue to. What I hold with confidence is this: if we retreat into camps of “Good Jew” and “Bad Jew,” defined not by ethical conduct or spiritual practice but by the volume of one’s political allegiance, we will lose something irreplaceable.
“Young people speaking their minds,” to quote Springfield, are already showing signs of disengagement from Jewish institutional life. They will not be won back by litmus tests and boycotts. They will be won back, if at all, by communities that demonstrate the capacity to hold complexity without cruelty.
The post I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken appeared first on The Forward.
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German antisemitism commissioner quits far‑left party over anti-Israel resolution
(JTA) — BERLIN – The antisemitism commissioner for the German state of Brandenburg has resigned from his far-left party over a resolution passed Sunday condemning Israel.
After 11 years in Die Linke (The Left), Andreas Büttner has quit its ranks over the position taken by members in Lower Saxony, in former West Germany. But it’s also personal: Büttner said he’s had enough of what he has described as harassment from within his party.
“It’s no longer possible. And I can’t go on … without betraying my own convictions,” Büttner wrote in a statement to party leaders. The letter was shared with the dpa, the German press association.
Die Linke is the successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling communist party of former East Germany, and has a platform that is critical of capitalism and of NATO. Die Linke notched a better-than-expected finish in last year’s national elections, drawing 9% of the vote despite internal tensions over Israel and Germany’s handling of antisemitism.
According to news reports about Büttner’s resignation, Brandenburg’s party leaders expressed “great regret and respect,” and promised to continue fighting antisemitism with him.
“This is not a question of party affiliation,” wrote Stefan Wollenberg, the party’s managing director in Brandenburg.
The trigger for Büttner’s move was a resolution condemning current forms of Zionism, put forward by the party’s youth delegation in Lower Saxony. They insisted that the resolution — passed at their convention in Hanover last weekend — was not against Zionism per se, only against “existing political manifestations of Zionism.”
But Büttner, who has long stood up for Israel in defiance to his party, and has openly criticized antisemitism from all corners, said the message was unmistakable.
Resolutions that condemn Israel as a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state” are “no longer acceptable to me,” he wrote in his resignation. He criticized the Lower Saxony party for coming perilously close to questioning Israel’s right to exist.
The fight against antisemitism should transcend party lines, he added. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to experience within my own party for years,” he wrote, as cited in the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Büttner, a former police officer who was elected in 2024 to his position as Brandenburg’s first commissioner for combating antisemitism, has had his differences with his party for some time over its views on Israel. Departing from his party’s official stance, Büttner supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, known as IHRA, which labels some criticism of Israel as eliminationist and thus antisemitic.
In 2025, members of his party tried and failed to have him expelled over his solidarity with Israel.
Büttner also has been targeted by unknown perpetrators, who in 2024 vandalized his car with swastikas and other Nazi symbols, and in January set fire to a building on his property, leaving a Hamas symbol as their calling card.
The new resolution, which condemns Hamas as well as Israel, characterizes terrorism as a result of “occupation, disenfranchisement, and a lack of prospects.”
It rejects “the Zionism that actually exists today” and recognizes “ethnonationalism and political Zionism as a major obstacle to a peaceful future for all people in the region.”
It says that both Israel and Hamas “harbor fantasies of annihilation” against one another.
The resolution refers to “two years of genocide” in Gaza, calls for an “end to apartheid in Israel and the occupied territories” and criticizes the alleged instrumentalization of antisemitism “to delegitimize criticism of actually existing political Zionism.” It presents a list of demands on Israel, but none on the Palestinian leadership or Hamas.
Die Linke has a long history of anti-Israel activism: In 2010, prominent party members took part in the ill-fated Gaza Freedom Flotilla, aboard the Mavi Marmara, which the Israeli military intercepted in an operation that killed 10 activists. The German politicians were among those arrested and deported home.
The post German antisemitism commissioner quits far‑left party over anti-Israel resolution appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war
Israelis have once again been asked to live under the shadow of war. Sirens and missiles punctuate sleepless nights. Families sleep beside safe rooms. Children measure their days between alarms.
People will endure that, when they believe there is a purpose behind the sacrifice.
Yet three weeks into the current confrontation with Iran, Israel’s government hasn’t offered anything resembling such clarity. Nor has that of the United States. And as the costs of war accrue in both countries — with Americans worrying about forces deployed across the region, and paying the price of the conflict at the gas pump — citizens of both countries deserve something basic from their leaders: a direct, compelling explanation of what this war is supposed to achieve.
In a democracy, citizens who are sending their children to shelters and their soldiers to the front absolutely have the right to know the objectives of a war. Yes, you cannot reveal operational details that could endanger pilots, intelligence sources, or soldiers in the field.
But explaining the purpose of a war is not the same thing as revealing tactics. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump aren’t exhibiting prudence by keeping things, as the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “incoherent.” Instead, they’re showing contempt for those they govern.
The hubris would be troubling even if either government in question enjoyed broad public trust. But neither Netanyahu nor Trump are leaders who command such confidence. And the arrogance that has infected even officials under them reflects a deeper pattern that has long defined both men’s leadership: an extraordinary sense of entitlement to power.
An Israel defined by hubris
Many Israelis believe that Netanyahu bends the truth routinely and will do almost anything to remain in power. Under those circumstances, demanding blind faith in this war is insulting.
Consider the extraordinary elasticity of the government’s claims. In June, after the earlier 12-day confrontation with Iran, Netanyahu declared that Israel had pushed back Iran’s missile and nuclear threats “for generations.”
If anyone made the mistake of believing him at the time, it is now obvious that he was lying. Iran still possesses missiles, which we know, because they have rained down on Israel throughout this war. If this conflict is now necessary to confront the very same dangers, the public deserves an explanation of what exactly happened to the supposed “generations” of security their leader had promised.
Yet instead of engaging with tough questions from the press about why Israel engaged in this war, what its goals are, and when it will end, Netanyahu has opted to exclusively discuss the war on friendly platforms. There are social media videos produced by his team, which are pure propaganda; the rare stage-managed “news conference,” usually with the few questioners selected in advance; and a studious avoidance of interviews with the Israeli media — with the sole exception of the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14.
Incredibly, when asked by a reporter from Haaretz a few days ago what the goals of the war were — and why no explanation has been offered to the citizens of the country — Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs actually had the temerity to respond that, in his eyes, citizens don’t need to know about those goals. Some have been set, he said, but they are confidential.
This posture invites, of course, even more suspicion.
Muddled American messaging
If Netanyahu says too little, Trump, on the American side, possibly says too much.
He speaks constantly about the war, yet always seems to struggle with precision or coherence.
One day he suggests the conflict could last a long time. The next he says he thinks it may end soon. When asked about terrorism that could follow escalation, he shrugs that “some people will die.”
This is not surprising; Trump’s rhetoric on these things has always been belated, confused and focused on spectacle. Within hours of the bizarre American seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a reprehensible figure but still the head of a sovereign state — Trump appeared on television explaining that the U.S. needed access to Venezuelan oil.
With short-term operations like that in Venezuela, Trump’s inability to explain why the U.S. needed to engage, and outline what Americans can expect going forward, was less glaring. Now, as he waffles between demanding NATO allies come to aid the war and insisting their help isn’t needed; bizarrely declares the war will end “when I feel it in my bones”; and makes clear that the war was initiated with no strategic foresight, it’s impossible to ignore
So Americans, like Israelis, are left struggling to understand what exactly their government is trying to accomplish. And while in Israel the war is still broadly supported — so great is the anger at the Iranian regime, and so effective has been Israel’s missile defense — that is hardly the case in the U.S.
The blame game
The risks of a war defined by ever-moving goalposts and a deliberately obscure timeframe are obvious and terrifying. Just look at the war in Gaza.
That conflict dragged on for nearly two years, accompanied by repeated declarations that Hamas would soon be eliminated. Today, Hamas still exists. Yet the government has offered no serious accounting of that reality. On the way to this endgame, in which the status quo has ended up preserved but with Gaza in ruins, Netanyahu repeatedly blocked off-ramps. He was clearly indifferent to the widespread perception that he was using the continuation of the war to avoid accountability: he explicitly and shamelessly argued that spectacular breakdown on Oct. 7 could not be investigated while the war continued.
In fact, he is using the exact same playbook in this new war, arguing last week — with Trump’s support — that Israeli President Isaac Herzog should issue him a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial so that he can focus on the war.
Some Israelis now genuinely fear that prolonged emergency conditions could become politically convenient. Netanyahu’s critics openly speculate that a monumental national crisis might provide justification to delay or manipulate elections — as Netanyahu is obsessed with remaining in power and is badly behind in the polls.
In the U.S., this fumbling has opened the door to an alarming new reality: one in which Israel and its international supporters are blamed for dragging the U.S. into war. On Tuesday, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the war with a public letter making unproven allegations that Trump fell prey to an Israeli “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform.” There is a clear risk that such rhetoric, fueled by the sense of directionlessness in this war, will increase already surging antisemitism.
The paradox of justification
Netanyahu and Trump’s failure to clearly justify the war does not mean that the Iranian regime deserves indulgence.
Tehran has brutalized its own citizens for decades and exported violence throughout the Middle East. Through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq, it has helped fuel conflicts that have cost countless lives. The regime has given the world many reasons to wish for its disappearance.
For the past month I have been arguing relentlessly that the Iranian regime has forfeited any claim to sympathy and that its actions have justified the Israeli and U.S. attack.
A long war determined to bring the regime to its knees may not be fundamentally unjustified. But requiring blind faith in the leaders prosecuting that war is.
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