-This program is made possible through the generous support of these individuals, foundations, and community partners... Benco Family Foundation.

The Friedman Hospitality Group.

Friends from NEPA.

Mercy Ministry Corporation.

The Sister Carol Rittner Holocaust Fund at Misericordia University.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation.

Additional support provided by Friedman Interfaith Endowment Fund at Temple Israel.

Sondra G. And Morey M. Myers Charitable Gift Fund of the Scranton Area Community Foundation.

The Scranton Area Community Foundation.

Andrew J. Sordoni III.

And by the following... ♪♪ -The images are horrendous -- so much hate, such brutal acts people committed against one another.

People trying to live, work and raise their families, our grandfathers and great-grandmothers.

The Holocaust is indeed world history, but it's not ancient history, and it's clear that hate is still alive and well.

But hate doesn't start with a gun or a knife or bombs or tanks.

It starts with words.

-I'm a victim.

I'm a survivor.

I'm a mourner.

-A gunman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle.

-Seven of my congregants were shot dead in my sanctuary.

It starts with speech, words of hate.

-In the next hour, join us as we explore the genesis of hate.

We'll look at spiking rates of antisemitism.

We'll explore civic participation, and whether American democracy is at risk, where and how misinformation and disinformation gets its start, whether it's instructive to look to the past when it comes to the future.

-Isn't there a chance for good?

The answer is yes, there is.

-And perhaps most importantly, what possible solutions are out there for all of us as we look ahead.

-We will rebuild.

Just stop the hate.

Don't say it.

♪♪ -"Holocaust Warnings: American Antisemitism and Extremism."

Welcome to a very special program here at WVIA, during which we intend to magnify an important and often very difficult conversation about the Holocaust, yes, and other parts of world history many people would rather not think of.

About what's happening in today's America, and about what any of us might be able to do in our own communities.

We are honored to welcome four esteemed panelists to the WVIA Studios to help us wade through this, and I would like to introduce them now.

Doctor David Myers is a distinguished professor of history in the UCLA history department.

He's the author or editor of more than 15 books in the field of Jewish history, and he is also a Scranton native.

Sister Carol Rittner, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the author or editor of 21 books and numerous essays about the Holocaust.

She's also a member of the Religious Sisters of Mercy.

Doctor Alex Alvarez is a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

His main areas of study are collective and interpersonal violence.

He's also a published author on the subject who's presented research across the U.S. and Europe, and the founding co-editor of the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention.

And Doctor Kelly McFall is professor of history and director of the Honors Program at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas.

His professional interests lie in the history of violence, especially comparative genocide.

He's also moderator of a podcast, "New Books in Genocide Studies," where he reviews new books and interviews the authors and editors.

Certainly an impressive group, and we welcome you all to WVIA.

We're going to start with David about hate, and why that is so hard to define.

What is it?

-Yeah.

Well, it has vexed and perplexed scholars for a very long time, the precise definitions.

We know of a lot of hate-adjacent notions like prejudice, bias, discrimination.

But what is hate?

And the best that I could offer is that hate is an amalgam of affect or emotion, on one hand.

Belief -- the belief that somebody is something other.

And then the third piece -- action.

And those three pieces work together to really portray someone else as a kind of -- as indefinable and fixed kind of personality, something that can't be changed.

It's not what they do, but who they are that matters when one comes to hate.

And what really becomes dangerous is when that personal view of someone or something becomes interpersonal, becomes shared, becomes imposed on someone else, and what becomes even more dangerous as we sort of ascend the scale of danger, is when the interpersonal becomes societal, and society as a whole castigates, vilifies, and imposes this sensibility of hate on others.

-And we're there, you think?

-I think we're there in many, many ways.

I think we are at a critical point in the history of this country, in terms of the degree of collective hate and extremism.

Hate, I think to a large extent, as I understand it, is learned.

I think hate is, to a great extent a function of nurture, of education or miseducation, of lived experience, of various forms of media and communication.

And that, I think, opens up the possibility of correctability, because it is not innate and intrinsic.

At the same time, I'm very struck by the way in which hate is transmitted almost genetically from generation to generation amongst groups.

And that's something that I think we -- -Unlearned?

-I think it can be unlearned.

-Can you give any examples of the unlearning of hate?

-I think that there are post-conflict situations that we have seen, in our lifetime, perhaps the most important of which are Northern Ireland and South Africa, in which sets of combatants for whom hate was a catalyst to their violent actions towards one another, relearned how to interact with one another in highly imperfect and incomplete form, but yes.

This gestures towards a possibility to recognize the humanity of the other, to climb over those towering psychological and rhetorical walls that permit us to stigmatize the other, to tear them down, or at least knock them down, I think we've seen in our lifetimes some possibilities.

So I remain a glass half full person, and believe that we can and must do all that we can to tear down those walls.

-I saw you being a little thoughtful about that question.

You have another side of that?

-I do have some thoughts.

One thing I think about is we often tend to associate hate with anger.

And I think it's much deeper than that, right?

Anger is emotion, is transient and so forth.

And what we're talking about with this issue is something that is more long-lasting and deeper.

In fact, when we look at how people understand hate and when we try to measure it, we find that it's most connected to things like revulsion and disgust, these kind of things.

And those are really deep-seated kind of things.

The other thing I would say, the real question I think about is how do we suddenly get more hateful?

And what the evidence suggests, I've seen some evidence that seems to hold that we haven't gotten that much more hateful, that these things have been here all along, right?

They've just been underground, if you will, the social desirability effect.

In other words, people have these ideas, they have these beliefs.

They just were not expressing them.

But that what's changed is people's willingness to express and to act on these ideas about other individuals, but especially about other groups.

The acceptance, the legitimation of hate in discourse and in action.

-A lack of inhibition, the disinhibition about hate.

-And that has changed.

-That has changed, yes.

-What do you think removes the inhibition?

-Well, I think there are many reasons for that, but I just want to amplify Alex's point that hate is not new.

Hate is ancient.

Hate is as old as the human condition.

In some sense, hate is daily.

Hate can be relatively benign.

I can say, "I hate the Celtics," and that's not actionable in the same way that, "I hate Jews."

What I think has occurred is a process of acceleration of social inhibitions in our time, through changes in political culture, certainly changes in the social media landscape.

-So I was going to add a couple things.

One is, it is the disinhibition.

It's also the ways in which hate is expressed and the way targets are identified, the way in which people dehumanize and present the other, the people who are not like you, as animals or as somehow fundamentally evil.

That's important, and an important marker in the kinds of dangers society face from hate.

But that also, I think, represents an opportunity.

Because you can change the way ideas are expressed.

You can incentivize people to recognize others as human, to stop talking about people as cockroaches, for instance, in Rwanda.

And that offers some optimism, I think.

-I mean, there is a real irony in the way in which hate operates, because it tends to assert a kind of immutability.

"Your condition cannot be changed."

That's who you are.

It's not what you do.

It's who you are.

-What about the forces that are around someone, societally, the forces that would come in?

What do you see are those forces that would make someone want to suddenly express that hate, where they might have kept it quiet before.

In other words, societally and politically, there has to be the right environment for that to happen, and what are some of those red flag warnings?

-I'm a typical scholar.

There's never a simple answer, right?

Never one answer.

But I think what's changed in many ways is that these values, these ideas have been legitimated, and they've been legitimated, whether through political, religious or celebrities, leaders whose voice has an influence.

I think there's been a coarsening of discourse, and what it does is, when people say these things, it's finding fertile ground with people who feel disenfranchised, who feel left behind, who feel anxious about the changes going on in our society and in our world.

A lot of this comes down to people feeling insecure and scared.

And what we know, there's a lot of criminological research that shows during periods of rapid change, of different kinds of anxiety around jobs and security and so forth, people become more reactive.

People support more punitive kinds of policies, right?

These kinds of things.

And I think what we're seeing is kind of an amalgamation a convergence of a variety of historic, economic, political and social forces that are leaving people feeling really anxious and scared.

And unfortunately, that doesn't always bring out the best in us, and there are people who are willing to exploit that.

-I think what really reveals this is that this is not simply a local or a state or a national challenge, right?

That the intensification or the increasing prevalence of hate speech is global, in many ways.

And it is, I think, at least sparked by the kind of fears and anxieties that are emerging from these transitions that Alex is talking about.

-Yeah.

And those, I would just call attention to one major force, that is indeed global, and that is globalization.

The sort of powerful economic and communications revolution that seeks to make the world one connected village.

Now, there are many benefits to globalization, and there are many anxieties that it induces, like, "My small little community is going to be swept away.

I'm going to lose my job.

The culture that I so love is going to be lost.

My language will be lost as well as English takes over the world."

The anxiety from globalization induced a very powerful backlash, a very powerful, ethnocentric nationalist backlash that we are experiencing.

And we see waves of illiberalism, illiberal authoritarianism really sweeping the world, I think, as a way to address the fear that Alex spoke about, the fear that, my place in the sun is being lost, is being is being destroyed.

And at some level, that's a legitimate fear.

We shouldn't dismiss the fear and say, this is the a function of a twisted mind.

We need to figure out how to mediate between the benefits of globalization on one hand, and the needs of people to feel they have a safe place, a good job.

-Why do you think antisemitism has been so persistent?

Why is this the longest hate, so to speak?

-We have the expert here, but the one thing I will say is that it's very malleable.

You know, if you actually look at what antisemitism is, the kinds of stereotypes or tropes that make up such a big part of it, you find they're often very contradictory, that they don't make sense, but they're not meant to make sense rationally.

They're meant to be reacted to at an emotional level.

But that means that they can be resurrected.

They can be used in different places and different times to fit local kinds of issues.

And so we see, for example, today with some of the conspiracy theories out there, ideas that actually date back to the Middle Ages or even earlier, they've just been kind of reshaped, repackaged, and they give people a ready source to focus their fear, their anger, their resentment.

And it's an explanation that makes sense, because they're at least familiar with some of those ideas.

-And I think we can't discount the impact of anti-Judaism in Christian theology over the centuries.

I mean, even today, although I personally have never heard what I would consider an antisemitic homily or sermon in a Catholic church in all my years.

But I do hear sermons at daily Mass or a Sunday Mass where the language and scripture is read, and the Jews are always getting it stuck to them, so to speak.

I mean, you cannot help but when you hear the language of the Christian scriptures and the language about Jews -- I mean, who do you think about?

Jews that you know.

Now, you may not think particularly in a terribly negative way, but the repeating, year after year after year after year of Jews being spoken about in a negative way, it has an effect on our psyche.

-We're going to segue a little bit into whether American democracy is at risk.

What we're seeing now, and we have a video to show.

-There was resistance against Hitler, but there was not enough of it.

Too many people supported him, and not enough people cared about his message of hate and the fact that it was unacceptable.

-We're not all good people, far from it.

We have a lot of people that are far from good, and hatred spreads when there's a problem with inflation or there's a problem with unemployment.

-I am not allowed to say what's going to happen today.

Everyone's just going to have to watch.

-Many of us show the worst of us in who we are and what we are, and hatred spreads rather quickly.

We've had government leaders in this country, without naming anybody, who've encouraged that hatred and still do, big-time.

I call them neo-Nazis.

-At what point did you break with the Oath Keepers?

-They were having a conversation where they were talking about how the Holocaust was not real.

-What they did in January here, to attack the government and try to overthrow it, it's the same as what the Germans did in '23 to try to overthrow the government, when Hitler went to jail.

-What I witnessed and experienced on January 6th, 2021 was unlike anything I had ever seen.

-I was an American standing face-to-face with other Americans, asking myself many, many times how we had gotten here.

-As I was swarmed by a violent mob, they ripped off my badge.

They grabbed and stripped me of my radio.

They began to beat me.

I heard chanting from some in the crowd, "Get his gun and kill him with his own gun."

I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room.

-I need support!

-But too many are now telling me that hell doesn't exist, or that hell actually wasn't that bad.

The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.

[ Indistinct shouting ] ♪♪ -So a good segue into American democracy.

I'll come right out and say it.

Do you believe it is at risk?

And if so, why do you think so?

Anyone?

-Okay, I think American democracy is at grave risk, at greater risk than at any point, certainly, in my lifetime.

And probably at the greatest risk since the time of the Civil War.

We see a sort of new cultural principle at work that legitimizes complete disregard for the Constitution and the constitutional order.

stigmatization of one's opponents in the most derogatory terms.

Justification for violence, as we saw in that last piece, all of which begin to tick off the box of early warning signs for the decline of democracy, as scholars of democracy have pointed out.

I think we are very much in that moment.

Perhaps the foremost attestation, as it were, to the dangerous period is that it seems to me you have a political system in which at least one of the teams is no longer playing according to the rules of the game.

And when that happens, democracies really begin to suffer.

-I actually want to get into this with you a little bit, because about democracy in general, whether it be American democracy or other, how are they built and how how do they die?

How how do they collapse?

-Well, so there's -- I also agree, I think we are more fragile than we realize, and we have a feeling or a sense that these things that we read about or from history couldn't happen here.

But I think we're starting to see some of these things unfold.

One of the things I would highlight is that actually, research shows that young Americans are less supportive of the messy business of democracy than they used to be, and they're more supportive of authoritarianism.

And by the way, we've seen internationally, a retreat from democracy, and the United States, by the different measures of functioning democracies has actually lost ground.

We are a backsliding democracy.

In fact, some people have even argued we are now kind of an anocracy or this illiberal democracy.

We've got the trappings, but not necessarily all of the functioning of a healthy democracy.

I would also highlight that Americans' perceptions of the legitimacy of our institutions is at record lows.

All of these things are warnings in and of themselves.

And then when you throw in, you know, this example of the ways in which rhetoric and language inciting people to violence took place on January 6th, I think it is a very clear wakeup call for us that we need to do more to protect our country and our democratic processes.

-Both what David said and what Alex said, it all gets amplified, particularly on some television stations.

And so the the message is spread more widely today than... You know, we're talking about Holocaust warnings, what do we hear from the past?

And so the propaganda about calling elections into question, the way that one team talks about the other team, one political party talks about members of the other political party -- I mean, all of that is amplified on television, on social media.

We talked about how so many people don't get their news anymore from newspapers.

They get it on their iPhones or their smartphones.

-Kelly, I was -- Go ahead.

I was going to ask you why young people are that way?

But go ahead and say what you want to say first.

-Yes, so let me start with a couple points, and then come to that.

So without disagreeing with the points that have been made where I agree, our democracy is at risk, I would remind us of a couple things.

One is, this is not the first time it has been at risk.

It is arguable whether the 1960s were as serious as they are now.

I think you can make a case either way, but I think there is certainly as much or more violence, certainly more political assassinations in the '60s than there are now.

There's danger to democracy in the 1890s and early 1900s.

There's obviously danger to representative government in the period before the Civil War.

So recognizing the seriousness of the world that we are in and the challenges we face, we need to remember that it is not the only time we've faced those, and we can learn lessons from times where we have persisted.

The second thing that I would remind us is that, in some important ways, we were not a democracy until the '60s.

And so we are facing a somewhat new situation where a wide number, a large number of people who were not included in our representative society and in our vision for what it means to be an American, are now included.

And we are having to think through what that means and how to respond to those new stresses.

-One of the striking features of the decline of democracy in the United States, to the extent that we see that, is the disengagement of young people.

But remember that in 2008, there was a huge uptick in the engagement of young people in the political process, so this has all been very rapid.

And that's a very helpful reminder, Kelly, that what we're seeing are very recent developments, and we're also recognizing that things change, that there's contingency in history.

And just as, you know, 15 years ago, there was a degree of of participation of young people in the political process that was unimaginable, now we see the opposite of that.

And it seems to me that owes a no small part to the sense of limited or no economic opportunity, to the vast gap between rich and poor in our country today.

And this is what surveying shows, that young people feel like there's no tangible benefit to be gained from participating in the political game, because they can't sort of make their way out of the hole that they live in, that they've been placed in.

Literally.

-I'd add that one of the things that we know is that in civil violence, in the kind of unrest, social instability and the violence that we see in places, that one of the biggest triggers for that is a sense of hopelessness.

When people feel left out, people will suffer a lot.

But it's when they lose hope that they can affect their lives, that they can have agency, that they have opportunity, that's when violence becomes much more likely.

-Yeah, and I would just add one thing about that, which is it's -- it's hopelessness, but it's also an inability to predict the future.

None of us can predict the future, but what we hope for is a life in which we, our actions have consequences that are predictable, where we can figure out -- if you're parents, how to help your children grow up in a way that's going to make their lives better than ours, or if you're children, that you can plan an educational path, or you can figure out what career is going to be there 10 or 15 or 20 years from now.

And this is not simply about young people, but it is particularly about young people, because they have grown up in a world in which things are changing so rapidly, it's really hard to make those predictions.

And so how do you know how to control your life?

And when you don't know how to control your life, you often look for some place in society where you can control.

-Right, and one place you can find where you can control the environment is the social media silo in which you dwell.

And I can't emphasize enough what I think is so important in our understanding of where we are today, which is to say, the fragmentation of the media landscape.

Once upon a time, there were three networks, right?

Now they reflected a certain power establishment, decidedly White power establishment.

But there was largely a shared narrative about what had taken place.

The fragmentation of the media landscape into so many discrete silos or echo chambers amplifies the political disintegration and provides a sense of comfort.

I would say, a dangerous sense of comfort.

-Reinforces certain ideas -And reinforce certain ideas.

-People really aren't into democracy as much anymore.

What do they believe?

If you all work with young people, so to speak, what are you hearing?

What do they believe?

-That's a great question.

I think they have a lot on their minds.

I think it's very difficult being young today.

I think there is so much uncertainty and there are these existential kinds of things going on out there that consume a lot of their attention.

Climate change, for example, right?

When I talk with young people, this is a huge concern about not what the future's going to look like, but even, is there a future?

Those kind of things.

Politics is something that they don't really pay much attention to.

There's an incredible amount, I think, of cynicism, of a sense that, "they don't care about us.

They're all corrupt," all these kind of things.

And I think truly, if we are going to come back from the situation we're in now, we need to work much harder to engage young people and to strengthen the sense of legitimacy in our way of life, in our structures and processes.

-And civic engagement.

-And civic engagement.

Exactly.

-It seems almost laughable to younger people.

And that sense of detachment from civic engagement was certainly enhanced by the pandemic.

It sort of placed everybody in their own little cell, in their own little bubble.

And part of the challenge today is to sort of reconstitute a serious, meaningful notion of common space, common good, common good citizenship, civic engagement, just public space.

I mean, it takes place -- the challenges on our own campuses to get people, students to come back... -But there's no quick answers here.

I mean, this took 50 years to get here, and it's accelerated dramatically, but it's -- it'll take a while, I think to do these things.

-I would just tie these two conversations together, because one of the statistics that troubles me more than any others is the rising number of young people who say that they will not marry somebody of the opposing political party.

And that ties back to this idea that rather than imagining ourselves as Americans with legitimate disagreements and spaces of contestation, we are now imagining ourselves as people on two different teams or two different sides, and those sides are us and them.

And what you know -- you may not really know them, but you know who you are to be with, right?

-This is becoming not what you do, but who you are in a profound, ontological way.

Like that's who you are as a matter of your core being.

And we have to, even at the university, recapture the capacity to engage in dialogue across difference.

It's a major effort.

-We spoke with some young people in preparation for this.

It's a wonderful way to lead us right into this.

Some very bright students from Scranton High School.

I'd love to share that with you.

-The younger people are more important, and that's because now we are two, three, four generations removed, the reality is that many people don't really know what the history of World War II really was and what the Holocaust was.

-You know, millions of people literally were just killed.

-You read about it in history, you learn about it, but you're thinking, oh, well, that was, you know, forever ago.

The world's changed now.

But has it really?

-I think it connects directly to present day.

-The Holocaust should be a warning to what happened when you had hate crime and you had all of these issues in someone who was very, very powerful.

-'Cause people in Germany, sadly, clung to what he said.

They listened to everything he said, and they went with it.

He basically pitted people against each other.

-It's terrifying.

-I remember watching the insurrection, like, live on TV.

"Oh, my God, I can't believe this is happening in our country."

-Some people are Republicans, some people are Democrats.

-You're looking at the world.

It used to be so much more unified.

-But that doesn't mean people can't work together.

-You can't even talk to people anymore.

-These philosophies, a lot of them are the same in nature, but they're said different.

-Then you get to social media, which can either be a really great thing or a really bad thing.

-And I feel like politicians today, they they use Twitter as a weapon.

-Social media influencers, you have politicians, you have very powerful people that can spread a message very quickly.

-And misinformation, it spreads really quickly across social media platforms like Snapchat or Instagram, Facebook, Twitter -- Twitter especially.

-But there's no way to stop misinformation.

It will always be there.

-When misinformation and disinformation is repeated over and over.

-And it's almost like, if you appreciate America, then you hate everyone else, and that's a terrible message to bring across.

-Anger.

-He basically said that the Jewish people are to blame for World War I, they're to blame for all the economic problems in the country.

-Being angry about one topic or one thing and hating someone else because of it, because people don't know how to channel anger.

-Life's too short to be spending so much time on hatred.

You could be spending so much more time on love.

So why spend time on hate?

-Weren't they fantastic?

We had a great, we had a wonderful time speaking with those students, very eloquent.

But they brought up a lot of great points.

And we talked about social media a little bit, but they brought up a lot of great points about social media, how much of that is their world, and how much of this message they see on social media.

So let's start there about communication and public education.

We talked a lot at lunch today, actually, about how important public education was.

What do you think the role in social media is here?

We'll start with you, Kelly.

-So I think that I'm a historian, and so the first thing I would say is that looking at the past, we can view periods where the technology of communications has changed.

And these are almost always times of turmoil, right?

As we try and understand what it means to have the printing press, to understand what it means to have daily papers that ordinary people can read, to understand what it means to have podcasts and social media.

And so we are in a period, I think, where we are trying to work out how this new technology can be used in ways that are responsible and respectful and amplifying, as opposed to irresponsible and dehumanizing and destructive.

And it shouldn't surprise us.

We should -- That doesn't mean we should dismiss it, but it does mean we should recognize that it's likely and will likely continue.

-You know, those young people must have excellent teachers to get them thinking about and asking questions and reflecting on what they're experiencing.

So to me, it says an awful lot about how important good teachers are, great teachers are.

-What about teachers in all of this?

What is the role of an educator in this topic?

-Now, I'm many years removed from high school teaching, but I think one of the roles of teachers is, of course, to teach critical thinking, to get students to be able to reflect on what they're experiencing, what they're seeing, what they're hearing, and helping them to articulate.

Those young people that we just heard -- very articulate, very bright young people.

And it's not just teachers.

I'm sure, in their families, there must be some discussion and some encouragement.

But I think they're -- I have this sense, and it's a sense rather than fact, that our education doesn't teach in our schools, we don't teach enough about civic education, about civics, about what it means to live in a democratic society.

You know, one of the persons that is a great hero to me, Really, Sondra Myers, David's mother, from here in Scranton.

She often talks about how a good citizen in a democratic society is an informed citizen and engaged citizen.

And I think that we have to find ways to engage our young people through internships, through experiences, through bringing people, politicians, perhaps other elected officials into the classroom where they can engage with young people so young people can ask questions.

-Yeah, I want to just amplify what Sister Carol said, of course, about my mother.

[ Laughter ] -Well done, well done.

-But really, about the point.

I feel myself to be somewhat, not just older, but old-school in the wake of January 6th, when I realized that what was so evident there was the lack of any meaningful notion of a common good in the United States.

There's such radically divergent views of what America should be.

And it really made clear to me the absolute importance of reintroducing subjects like civics and placing them at the center of what we educate our children in.

It is absolutely indispensable to getting our way past this very difficult moment in the history of American democracy.

-But we're not moving in that direction.

I mean, when you look at the current state of education today and the attempts to limit what teachers can do in the classroom and exclude certain groups, we're not moving in that way.

And I think we need to find a way to make sure that not only do we teach civics, but we teach it warts and all, right?

I think when you teach history devoid of some of the more unpleasant realities, that's not history, that's just propaganda.

We need to be aware of what we truly are, about where we come from, good and bad, and to help young people really feel they have a stake in the future of this great experiment, as they refer to it.

-And I also want to say that teaching alone can't overcome the crisis.

We need to really pull back the curtain that's sort of concealing the way in which social media are constructed.

I have a colleague at UCLA named Safiya Noble who wrote a book called "Algorithms of Oppression," which really investigated the ways in which algorithms used in all forms of social media guide us to certain very conventional, normative, and often gender-biased and racist assumptions.

We need to look more carefully at the way in which social media operate.

In fact, we need much more regulation.

We need to make sure that the people who are selling us our social media are not the people who are regulating it.

That, I think, is absolutely indispensable in sort of pushing that boulder up the hill that Alex just mentioned.

Really changing a culture in which we can recapture a textured sense of what it means to be American.

-That's education about civics.

I'd like to bring it back to the Holocaust, actually.

What about when it comes to education about the Holocaust?

I have heard so many arguments about this.

Is it instructive?

Is it even worth teaching?

Or what should we be teaching?

I would love to know your thoughts about teaching that particular time in history.

-Well, let me jump in and say, of course, I'm for teaching about the Holocaust.

I spent 45 years of my life teaching about the Holocaust.

But I think we have to prepare teachers to teach about the Holocaust.

Teacher preparation for teaching about the Holocaust, or other genocides, or other issues of racism.

Teachers are not well-prepared, and so the teaching is very uneven that happens in in classrooms, whether it's in middle school or high school.

You know, in some places, Holocaust and genocide education is mandated.

In the state of new Jersey, for example, which I have some familiarity with, because I taught at Stockton University, and so taught teachers how to teach about the Holocaust.

But schools had -- in some schools, they spent a day, and other schools, a week.

In some schools, they had a whole semester course on Holocaust and other genocides.

And teachers, by and large, are -- they need help, and we need to help them.

This is a place where our colleges and universities in teacher education, for example, could perhaps, if not have a whole course in states where Holocaust and genocide education is mandated, to help pre-school teachers to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides, they could at least have workshops or a workshop to help teachers.

-I couldn't agree more.

I think it's a huge job, trying to teach this very complicated, difficult subject, and it's getting harder every year.

As the Holocaust continues to recede into the past, getting young people to see the relevance the connection to their current-day lives, is increasingly difficult for teachers.

Because students have a hard time seeing how this thing that happened way, way, way back when connects to their own lives in the here and now.

And so I think it is a very, very difficult job.

And the more resources, the more assistance we can give educators, the better, right?

-Yeah, and it's important to note that, of course, we're losing, by the day, some of the most important -- experienced history.

-Right.

-Learning from lived experience.

We had the generation of survivors who were, in some sense, the most compelling educators about the Holocaust, and we are losing them.

Not for long, and we need to find new tools, new pedagogical methods to really make this understandable.

On one hand, it's receding memory.

On the other hand, it's only 78 years ago that the Holocaust came to an end.

Less than a century, right?

We saw the most civilized nation in the world undertake an extermination campaign against an element of its population and beyond it, the country.

So we need to understand how recent it was as well as we understand how -- how distant it is.

It was just within a century that this occurred.

And as we see, subsequent to the Holocaust.

there are many instances in which what seemed to be hospitable neighbors turn against one another in murderous assaults.

It can happen.

It can be triggered with the slightest of ease.

-Yeah, I would agree with that, with all of these thoughts, I would say in one way in which Holocaust education is critically important is helping people understand the assumptions in the lessons they've learned about the Holocaust that are actually not correct or are misleading.

There is a lot of that.

And just give you one example that ties maybe some of these things together.

One of the things I've heard some students talk about the Holocaust is the way in which only people who were true believers in Nazism participated in the oppression.

And that is an attractive lesson, because that means that people like us were not participants.

And in fact, what we learn is that hate is a necessary aspect of many oppressive societies, but that people can be inspired or can be forced to do things from fear, do bad things, to participate in everything from seizing property to killing people -- from peer pressure, from greed, from fear of arrest or social disapproval.

There are lots of reasons that motivate people to action, and it's important for us to help young people, but adults as well understand that some of the lessons they take from their education need to be rethought.

-I just want to say what we all know, that we often distinguish those involved in the Second World War into at least three groups -- perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.

And we now know that bystanders, with increasing precision, we know they knew more about what was going on than we ever had imagined previously.

A major goal of education, especially about the Holocaust, is to transform our understanding of what it means to be a bystander into what we call "an upstander," somebody who will stand up and not simply watch passively and say, "I don't harbor hate in my heart.

That's not my thing."

-"Had nothing to do with me or mine or ours.

That's all about them."

I think one of the things that, when we're teaching about the Holocaust or other genocides is the power of silence.

If you say nothing... "Well, okay, I wasn't a concentration camp guard."

I didn't take all those people out of Phnom Penh and put them out in the fields in Cambodia, in the killing fields.

I didn't do any of that."

But if you're silent -- This is why I think leaders, whether they're political leaders or business leaders or educational leaders, religious leaders, we have to speak up.

We have to condemn when we hear language -- We started our conversation this evening talking about language and the power of words.

And we saw the pictures of Hitler as he's giving a speech.

Our leaders have to stand up and speak out and be heard.

I mean, just like hate speech can be amplified, good speech can be amplified as well.

-I'll just make this very brief.

I found the young woman in the package that we showed, her comment, insightful and moving, that we just can't talk to each other anymore.

And one of the things that teachers and educators have to do is not simply -- while I support civics education entirely, we need to help young people understand how to talk to people, how to empathize with people, how to disagree respectfully and appropriately.

Because without those conversations, we end up in these silos.

-But we do it not just by teaching them, but by exemplifying it ourselves, showing how we do it.

I wish I could say I'm great at talking to people who disagree with me.

I'm not.

I have to learn, too.

But we have to exemplify it also for young people.

-We have -- Oh, go ahead.

-One last thing.

The other thing I would highlight is we need to make sure that people understand, this is not a Jewish issue, right?

That this is something deeper.

It's about how we other people, othering, and the way we treat people who are different around many, many different kinds of characteristics.

That the Holocaust should be of concern to all of us.

These are things that are not just about any one particular group.

-Even more so, it's not Jews who are chiefly responsible for fighting antisemitism.

-Right.

-And it's not -- -Non-Jews.

-That's a great point.

-Blacks who were chiefly responsible for fighting anti-Black racism.

-Right.

-We need to remember who is.

-And that's about speaking up and being active.

-We've been looking back all this time, and I think it's time to take a look forward.

We have one final video to show you.

-The history of Germany is paramount.

They lost the First World War, and after the war, they faced depression conditions, great unemployment, and they needed somebody to blame for it.

-The oldest hatred is Judaism.

People have hated Jews for 5,000 years, because we believed in one God.

-Civil engagement is really what can stop, in the future, something like what happened in Germany during the Holocaust.

Because the reality is, is that Hitler and his party were elected.

A few years ago, I actually went to Germany and I met with descendants of Nazis, and there was one girl there, she was 17 years old.

Her grandparents voted for Hitler.

They didn't murder anyone.

They were not in the military.

They were just civilians, but they voted for Hitler.

And the granddaughter asked her grandma, "Why did you vote for Hitler?"

And the grandmother says, "Because he was strong.

He was a strong leader.

He was going to save Germany.

He was going to make our country better."

-And Hitler promised them, you're going to have jobs, and we're going to be the strongest country.

The antisemites started brewing up the story that they lost the war because of the Jews.

-Don't believe the lies.

Don't believe the conspiracy theories, anything that is being perpetuated right now.

-I would like for them to think about this as a cautionary tale of, this is what can happen if we let hate and hateful people become acceptable.

-Hate never wins.

-We're all human beings.

We're not black or brown or red or orange.

We're just human beings, we're people trying to live and make a living, have a family, love each other, and there is no such thing as "never again."

♪♪ -So how do we take what happened there and move forward?

Is it even instructive to do so?

Your thoughts?

-It's necessary to do so.

And I'm afraid I would modify something that we just heard.

Hate, alas, sometimes wins.

And we need to do all within our power.

First of all, I think of the power of personal example.

Sister Carol mentioned my mother and her commitment to civic education.

I remember very well the example of my father, who was a lawyer in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in his early 30s, picked up and moved to Mississippi and then Florida and then Mississippi to fight on behalf of Civil Rights.

Closed his practice, had no discernible means, had to live on the Black side of town.

The power of personal example is really important.

We need to engage in far more sophisticated ways of educating our kids.

We need university-based research to help us understand better and with more precision what hate is.

And the final thing I'd say is, we need to understand that the fight against hate will require a new way of allying ourselves -- not only allying ourselves with government agencies.

We need to bring together Jews and Blacks and Asian Americans and Muslim-Americans who have been victims of hate in this country, and build new, horizontal alliances of solidarity that resist the reservations and stigmas of the past, and understand that together, we need to make change ourselves.

-What are some actionable steps, then?

What are some actionable steps?

If everyone who watches this, or sees this or hears this think, "What can I do now?"

-Well, I think one major thing we can do now is inform ourselves about people who are running for public office, whether it's for the school board or for the State Senate or House of Representatives.

And we can vote, we can register and we can vote.

That's something that every one of us can do.

We can help people, young people, to to get registered, and to vote.

-You know, this is a question I get asked a lot.

"What can I do?

This is just so big and overwhelming."

And as always, there's no one answer.

There are lots of ways to get involved.

Organizations that do great work promoting the kinds of values and the kinds of civility that we've been talking about.

But at the end of the day, I think it also comes down to our own lives, and how do we treat the people in our own communities?

Do we turn a blind eye to those around us, in our neighborhoods and our cities and our states who are being persecuted or vilified or dehumanized?

These kinds of things.

And, you know, we were talking just a few minutes ago about not being silent.

And I think we are often very silent, because it's not us, or because we're scared or we're worried.

We have to, I think, move past that.

We have to find ways to stand up and speak up for those in our communities, in our country, in our world, who are at the receiving end of the kind of prejudice and intolerance that, in its worst forms, leads to the Holocaust.

-So I'll agree with everything that's been said, and take it in a slightly direction.

In a very practical step, go meet somebody that you don't know, who doesn't believe what you believe.

Now, there's -- I don't want to be naive about this, right?

You are not going to change people's opinions in one conversation, and you are not going to change the world in 20 minutes.

But we have become startlingly separated in the communities in which we live, and it is often true -- We were just talking before this about how you find commonalities in encounters that happen in spaces that are not politicized.

And those commonalities do not necessarily mean you will agree on the same thing.

And I do not mean to say that you should accept everything that someone else says, or you should endorse an opinion that someone else has.

But I do think that what happens when we live separate lives is that we tend to assume the worst about other people, and to miss chances to engage them and and to create spaces where our identity as Americans matter more than our identities as Republicans or Democrats or so on or so on.

-And with that, we are going to wrap up this special hour of discussion with generous thanks to our wonderful panelists and, of course, to the live studio audience who watched the show.

For more information about this project, go to our website, WVIA.org.

Thank you for joining us.

[ Applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program was made possible through the generous support of these individuals, foundations, and community partners... Benco Family Foundation.

The Friedman Hospitality Group.

Friends from NEPA.

Mercy Ministry Corporation.

The Sister Carol Rittner Holocaust Fund at Misericordia University.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation.

Additional support provided by Friedman Interfaith Endowment Fund at Temple Israel.

Sondra G. And Morey M. Myers Charitable Gift Fund of the Scranton Area Community Foundation.

The Scranton Area Community Foundation.

Andrew J. Sordoni III.

And by the following...