What is at stake when Holocaust memory fades—or worse, loses its relevance?

This week on Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer speaks with Anita Friedman — daughter of survivors, renowned educator, and executive producer of the new film Among Neighbors — about the future of Holocaust education, the dangers of “Holocaust fatigue,” and how storytelling can help make Holocaust memories relevant for generations to come.

A transcript of this episode is available below.

Listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts. 

Register for the Sapir Debate HERE

Learn more and register for our Winter Leadership Conference HERE

You can now sponsor an episode of Identity/Crisis. Click HERE to learn more. 

Fighting Holocaust Fatigue Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.

I can remember pretty vividly the first time I saw the movie Schindler’s List when it came out early in 1994. In fact, I think my high school took us all to see it. I’m pretty sure I would not have gone to the theater with a bunch of my teenage friends. I had plenty of Holocaust in my Jewish education, formal and informal. To that point though, there were no survivors in my family—all four of my grandparents were born in America—there were annual testimonials that I heard from survivors at our Yom Hashoah commemorations. I read books and memoirs. We performed “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” about the Terezin concentration camp in my school Drama society where I acted and more

I had a close second or third degree connection to the Schindler story itself. My friend Yonit’s grandparents were on Schindler’s List and survived the Shoah as a result, and Yonit’s mother escorted us on our March of Living trip, bringing to life the Schindler story throughout the experience of traveling through Poland.

Still with all of that knowledge, with all that I encountered, there was something so powerful and memorable about seeing that film Schindler’s List on the big screen, seeing the magic and majesty of Hollywood colliding with, and in my opinion, elevating the story of the Holocaust to totally different levels of relatability to audiences who might never have confronted it.

I think now in retrospect that seeing the power of recent Jewish history rendered that way into art blurring the line as the film did between memoir and fiction, that was key to what became one of my scholarly interests in trying to understand the relationship between history and memory. Inspired by the work of Ruth Franklin, Sara Horowitz, Susan Shapiro, and others, I’ve come to believe that any of the tools we can use, poetry fiction film testimonial to unlock both the story of the Shoah for future generations, and the memory of the Showa itself should be considered an equal footing as relates to their very authenticity. Sometimes things can be true without being exactly right.

It was only a few years later then that I first encountered the phrase “Holocaust fatigue,” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I did a Google Ngram search this morning for the term Holocaust fatigue. It emerges first in the literature in the early 2000s, finding expression, especially in the scholarly writings of Simone Schweber, a professor of education, around that time, describing the ways that the proliferation of Holocaust education and its saturation in our culture can lead to the trivialization of the Holocaust among students.

In other words, the same films and books and graphic novels and poems that move us and shape us also lead us or some of us to think less of this thing of great magnitude that we’re trying so hard to remember. There was a 2003 New York Times article around that time that was entitled, quote, “Holocaust Documentaries: Too much of a Bad Thing?” It explored the proliferation of said documentaries in the late 1990s, and it asked the following question. This is actually a quote. “Why do filmmakers have such an abiding interest in the Holocaust?”

I’ve read that sentence over and over again. It’s a staggering question, wild that they put it in print, and you can imagine all the theories that the article would offer, but none of them engaged the real and obvious answer, the Holocaust was a big deal. It was an awesome event. And it was also not an event, it was not a story, but a frame in which millions of tragic and heroic stories have yet to be told. Some of those stories are not film worthy. They offer us no narrative arc. They are the stories of simple lives ended with gunshots in an unnamed eastern European forest.

But even then, even that person sits atop a timeline of their own unique story. Arrested by history, buried amidst a catastrophe that threatens to render invisible, through force of numbers and magnitude, all the narratives and timelines that were once possible and are no longer.

So, scholars started talking about holocaust fatigue 25 years ago, observing a problem. Critics of the Jewish community came along and took it one step further, arguing that the Jews were overplaying our Holocaust hand. At these times, these criticisms cross over into actual Holocaust denial. Claims that there are too many stories about the Holocaust or a resistance to the over performance of its stories can merge with streams of thought that the Holocaust didn’t really happen the way the storytellers claim that they did.

I find it striking that this conversation about Holocaust fatigue began in earnest when it did 25 years ago, when many, many survivors were still alive. I find it overwhelming to think of all the stories that were not told when they could have been, and in turn, I feel grateful when new stories, untold stories can emerge even now when it’s almost only those of us who are not actual witnesses to these events who can put truths into the world.

This is how I felt watching a new film, a recently released documentary from Yoav Potash called Among Neighbors, which bears the tagline: “In a town where history has been silenced, an eyewitness to murder speaks out in search of the boy that she loved.” The film takes as its prompt one of the more horrifying and under-reported dimensions of the war, which is the antisemitism that remained in the aftermath of the Shoah and which threatened, and in the case of this film, took the lives of Jews in Poland when they tried to return to their homes afterwards.

To whatever extent many survivors thought they could pick up the pieces in the places that they had lived, this phase of history sealed the story for them. The film tells the story of the town of Gniewoszów in East Central Poland. There were several thousand Jews living there before the war, around 2000. By its end, there were approximately 10 known survivors. The vast majority concentrated in a ghetto in the town, and then deported to Treblinka where they were murdered.

Now, the film is riveting. It combines normal documentary filmmaking approaches with a kind of animation rooted in a kind of magical realism. But it’s also a reminder, a prompt of what we’ll talk about today of the ways that this kind of storytelling raises for us the stakes of memory in our anxious time. It also seems like a predictor of what the memory of the Holocaust is going to need from us when we are the last remaining storytellers.

My guest today to talk about the film and to talk about a lot of the questions that I’ve raised already and that continue to be of tremendous urgency for a Jewish community amidst a rise of antisemitism is Dr. Anita Friedman. It’s a big bio here. I’m actually gonna say all of it because a lot of it is gonna become relevant.

Dr. Friedman is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. We’ll come back to that. She’s a renowned leader in philanthropy, holocaust education, and nonprofit leadership. She is the executive director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services San Francisco, and oversees the JFCS Holocaust Center, through which she spearheaded the publication of Rywka’s Diary, a book from Harper Collins, a one of a kind Holocaust diary now translated into 15 languages.

She chairs California’s Governor’s Council for Holocaust and Genocide Education. She serves as Vice President on Tel Aviv University’s Board of Governors and founder of its Koret Center for Jewish Civilization. She’s also the president of the Keret Foundation, and I’m proud to say, a member of the board of the Shalom Hartman Institute.

She has earned many prestigious honors, including AJCs Global Light onto the Nation’s Award. Most relevant to today’s show, she’s the executive producer of Among Neighbors and now a movie star. She appears in the film together with her son, Aaron Tartakovsky, because she is a descendant of one of the survivors of Gniewoszów.

Anita, thank you for coming on the show today. I want you to tell me a little bit about how you got into the movie business.

Anita: Thank you. So it’s a really a pleasure to be here with you, Yehuda. Thank you for inviting me. It started off as a very personal story. I come from a survivor family. I grew up in a community of about 600 Holocaust survivors, mostly from Poland and maybe Germany. I didn’t speak English until I was five. I grew up as a survivor of the Holocaust in many ways. I didn’t really have contact with non survivors until I was already in school. So I knew the stories. I knew the stories in a very personal way. I understood almost on an intuitive level as a child that the Holocaust was a turning point. Not in Jewish history only, but it was really a turning point in human history. There was something very big about what happened that we were all a part of.

But when I was growing up, we talked about Gniewoszów. We talked about who was still alive and who died, and how they died and about rebuilding our lives. Although, I will say that in my experience, and for people who know survivors or who are children or grandchildren or survivors, the survivors were not about death. They didn’t focus on revenge. They didn’t focus on hatred. They really focused on life, on rebuilding their lives. They understood the importance of Israel in terms of self-determination for the Jewish people. They focused on community, and most of all, they focused on the children. It was always about the children.

But I understood that there was something profound in the story, so it’s really not difficult to understand why I have spent my life working to rebuild the Jewish community. As is true for many of us, especially those of us who come from Survivor families.

Yehuda: Before you get into the film, can I ask, ask you about something you just said, which I haven’t fully thought about. Do you think that there’s a kind of language that survivors and survivors, children and grandchildren speak or know or have access to that non survivors just don’t understand, kind of using the metaphor of language? Did you feel that?

Anita: Yeah. Yes. Can you say more about that?

Anita: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I feel that there’s a certain sensitivity that you have when you come from a survivor family. When you’re a survivor, you understand things that other people may not understand. You also value things that other people may not value in the same way you understand the importance of living a meaningful life, and so it’s really looking at the world through a little bit of a different lens.

There’s some complications also coming from a survivor family.

Yehuda: Sure.

Anita: Obviously, because you’re coming from people who are traumatized and who came to this country with nothing, having lost everything and everyone. I guess the main lesson for me that I learned and why I’ve devoted my life to this work, including Holocaust education, is that they taught me about the value of community.

They told me about the importance of being able to create a community that’s capable of defending and protecting its members because we came from the experience of a time when we weren’t capable of defending or protecting our members. And there’s a language to all of that as well. So I felt that Holocaust education is important, not just for the Jewish community, but as a real turning point in human history.

And I feel that it is the work of this generation to figure out how to tell the story in a way that’s meaningful. I feel that we’ve made a lot of mistakes in terms of how we tell the story and how we handle Holocaust education. And I feel that we’re now grappling our community. Our world is grappling with how to deal with that experience in human history, much the same way that you deal with slavery. It’s interesting to me that we don’t talk a whole lot about slavery fatigue to which episode on slavery, but we do talk about holocaust fatigue.

On the other hand, all of the data that we have is that. The next generation knows very little about the Holocaust. They don’t know where it is. I was actually asked to be a scholar in residence for a large group of high school kids, and when I asked them what a concentration camp was, some of them said, it’s a place you go to meditate. So we haven’t really done a very good job of Holocaust education, even with all of our talk about fatigue and all the billions of dollars we spent on movies, all of the literature and all of the programs and all the museums and all the centers, still a very large percentage of maybe more than half of young people know nothing about it and haven’t learned anything from what that, what the experience was.

Yehuda: So what do you think we did wrong? I mean, you said we’ve made mistakes in Holocaust education and there has been just unbelievable investment in, as you said, museum building, cultural production, educational strategies, but it’s not just people don’t know what Holocaust was. My experience is, and from what I’ve read, that students oftentimes, even if they do know how to talk about the specific case of the Holocaust, it translates into no real change in their understanding of antisemitism, Jews in the world applicability, except in some kind of broad moral strokes of like, don’t be bad to people.

Anita: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yehuda: So where do you think we went wrong?

Anita: I think we’re trying to find our way forward in a new way, but I will say that at the same time that there’s lack of understanding or knowledge about it. There’s a tremendous amount of interest in it. You talk to any of the organizations that are involved in Holocaust education throughout the world, they’ll say there’s a tremendous amount of interest in some ways increasing interest in the world, in understanding what happened. So that’s the good news, is that there’s an interest.

But right now, because we’re so concerned about the rise of antisemitism, we’re struggling for how to move things in a better direction. And I think that what we’re learning is that there is only one way forward. The only way forward for us, I’ll just talk about the United States, is to change what we teach children. There is no other way forward. Books and literature and political meetings and committees and councils and programs is not going to change how people view Jews, unless we change what we teach children. That we haven’t done. We’ve done it episodically in a school here, in a school there, a special experience here, a field trip there, a movie, a book. It hasn’t been integrated systematically into what children are taught in schools. It doesn’t come up.

And even though Holocaust education is mandated in more than 38 states in the United States, we just finished a major research study, ’cause I’m chairing the Governor’s Council in California, which is the largest school system in the country. Only 26% of school districts in California—there are 2000 school districts in California—six and a half children in schools—only 26% even touch on the subject of the Holocaust as a major event in human history. It’s as if they don’t talk about World War II or they don’t talk about slavery. And it’s mandated, it’s in the education code.

The good news in California—and California often does lead the nation—is that the governor has made it a priority. The legislature has made Holocaust education for teachers a priority, and they’re funding it at a very high level to ensure that we change what we teach children. And all children in every school district, in the state and in the country should learn about what happened, ’cause there are specific lessons about the Holocaust, but there are also universal lessons, ’cause it’s a form of genocide that continues to take place. That’s the one thing I wanna mention.

The other thing is, how we teach it. It can no longer be taught in this generation as what happened in Berlin in 1937. It has to be taught in a different kind of way. It can’t be taught as just sob stories about the terrible things that happen to Jews. It has to be a way to teach about who are the Jews, what do we stand for? What is the arc of Jewish history? Where is the Holocaust in the arc of Jewish history? What does contemporary antisemitism look like and why is in your interest as a non-Jew to care about how minorities are treated in a society?

Antisemitism is its own thing. It’s not racism, light, as we all know. So we have to teach the content differently and we have to teach it systematically and integrate it into the public school systems and not just as a sort of a side show or a special experience. I can be critical in this way because I’ve been doing it for most of my career for more than a quarter century, and I see that if it’s not integrated into the school system. It’s not gonna make a dent.

Yehuda: Most of the time when I see things fail in large bureaucratic systems, but especially in educational systems, I am inclined to treat it as a problem of incompetence more than malice. I’m wondering whether that’s what applies here. The fact that schools are not teaching the Holocaust as a critical event in human history is because, I don’t know, people feel they don’t know it or like they’re devoting time to other things or gym class runs late.

But I would guess that part of what’s also taking place in this particular case is that if you’re gonna do what you’re asking Holocaust education to do, which is to actually be willing to also invest in teaching the story of the Jewish people, the moral consequences of the Holocaust and its implications, that it’s not necessarily malice, but it’s definitely… politics is informing why the Holocaust isn’t being taught the way that it’s supposed to be taught. So where would you attribute that failure in the education system? Is it ignorance and incompetence, or is it malice?

Anita: That’s a good question. The research study that we just completed in California, it’s a two year study, a multimillion dollar study. We hired the preeminent social science and education research firm in the country, I believe, West Ed, to conduct the research. We had 83 researchers studying the situation in the state of California, and we did ask that question, why is it not being taught?

The main reason is that the teachers don’t know how to teach it. They didn’t feel like it was mandated. In other words, in the school system, as in many other systems, people do what you measure. If they’re not measuring in the school system, the degree to which is being taught. It drops off.

Secondly, they don’t feel competent. They don’t know the content. They didn’t feel like they’re getting the resources they need in order to teach the subject matter. So they’re not getting the training to feel like they’re teaching it in a competent way.

And thirdly, they feel like they weren’t being given the time to teach. So if the school systems mandate it, they provide the time and they provide the training, then the teachers want to teach it. And what we are finding is that, as an experiment, the state funded something called the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education, and they’re funding it. It’s a multi multimillion dollar project to provide education to public school teachers.

What we find is that the programs are oversubscribed. We just did a three day training for public school teachers at the University of Southern California. Oversubscribed. Waiting list for all of the programs. They love learning the content. They find it very compelling and moving. And again, with both specific relevance to the Jewish community, but also universal relevance, which is very inspiring to them. And it makes them feel competent. It feels like they’re heroes in the classroom. They’re teaching subject matter that the students love to learn about and it makes them feel good about themselves, but we have to give them the resources.

So in addition to that, they funded one statewide website for the entire state of California that has all of the curricula, information, ability to share information with other teachers. So we have one centralized website that people can go and right now if you want to, and take a look at, it’s teachers collaborative. And it’s actually changing what we teach children. If we care about antisemitism, it’s the only way forward.

One of the reasons I made this film, again, getting back to personal story. Sure, I heard all my life about what happened in Gniewoszów, but I also wanted to create content. I wanted to create a resource for teachers. Now it’s in commercial, it’s in the theatrical release throughout the country. But for me, the heart of it is a resource that can go into high schools, that teachers can bring to the high school to create really beautiful, compelling lessons for students that are really memorable, and that’s exactly what’s happening. We’re already doing that in California high schools, and I hope we’ll be able to do it in high schools throughout the country. So that’s really the reason why I made the film.

Yehuda: Yeah. It is beautiful and it is compelling and I actually, when I had emailed you afterwards to tell you that I liked it, one of the things I said was I was watching it with an eye as someone who also has a seventh grader, my daughter actually has been obsessed with anything she could get on hands-on Holocaust related since the time when it was developmentally not appropriate for her to read. She’s always been kind of nudging that edge.

Anita: Yeah, I suspect that being your child, that she’s probably a little on the mature side.

Yehuda: Well, it’s more like she got very angry at us once ’cause we were like, we don’t think you should read that, and she was like, what?

Anita: Oh, that’ll do it.

Yehuda: And then she was like, and then she goes, why is every book in this house about the Holocaust? I was like, okay, you can start reading whatever you want. But I actually felt, even for middle schoolers, it has dimensions of relatability. It’s still a horror story. I mean, the whole framework is a horror story and it’s a murder story.

I’m curious about the magical realism choice, the animation. I’m particularly interested. You appear in the film going back to Gniewoszów the first time and kind of being kicked out. People didn’t wanna talk to you, didn’t wanna engage in your story, and then ultimately being able to come back and kind of help the town reckon with this tragedy and its complicity in this tragedy in this past. But every time the film takes us back to the events as they took place immediately following the war, throughout the war, and then following the war, it moves into an animation mode.

I’m kind of curious for your feelings about that, because if you’re involved in the work of memoir, you need things to look a certain way, and once it shifts to animation, it takes on a fiction quality that I know some survivors have really struggled with, on the boundary between, are you trying to get the story exactly right or are you trying to tell it in the story that has relatability?

Anita: Yeah. I wanted to make a film that was not just your standard important, but garden variety, holocaust story of the beginning and the middle and the end. We wanted to make a film that was a love story, that was a mystery, that was an adventure. The first iterations of the film I felt were a little bit standard and we thought maybe we should try animation, and I was a little concerned that it would come across kind of cartoonish.

But we ended up, first of all, we went to Hollywood and we ended up with 30 different animators all over the world creating the animation for that film, and from the feedback that we’re getting, which is very gratifying, I think it works. We wanted it to be different and engaging and that’s why we used animation and also why we created this story to be more like a mystery and a love story than just this is what happened and this sort of sad story and very predictable kind of a plot. We are getting, fortunately, good feedback about it.

It’s in New York actually. The Quad Cinema, I think, October 10th to the 16th. It’s in major cities throughout the country. It’s actually been all over the world. In Israel it sold out. If you, if you don’t get a good response to a film like this in Israel, you might as well pack it up, right.

But what we still did, we did, and we kept extending the screenings for weeks and weeks, which is great, but it’s also been all over in Europe and got a really beautiful response in Poland, which is what I was really concerned about, because it was very important to me that the film be the truth: that it not deify the Polish people, but that it not demonize the Polish people either. That the trends are, either you want to glorify the Polish people and diminish their collaboration with the Nazis. On the other hand, sometimes people just demonize them, all bad. I wanted especially for young people to take a look at what kind of choices, and this is a story about young people, the choices that you have to make and the complexity of the situation of how it truly unfolded before, during, and after the war.

And we wanted to create something that people would have to grapple with and that would stay with you and not just be a really interesting experience, but you forget about it as soon as you leave the theater. And I was actually surprised. I was really glad that you wanted to show it at Hartman. Because I haven’t seen Hartman be so interested in Holocaust related issues. We have this Sinai-Auschwitz issue going on, which I’m hoping is somehow becoming integrated now.

Yehuda: Well actually, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you, but to our listeners, you know, David Hartman wrote this really important essay, Auschwitz or Sinai, during the Lebanon War in 1982, arguing that Holocaust consciousness in Israeli society was becoming an obstacle for Israelis to talk about the agency and power that they hold at their disposal. And a Sinai consciousness, which thinks in terms of covenant rather than in terms of this inherited trauma, was what Israeli society needed to do. It is reported, I wasn’t in the room, but Hartman near the end of his life, sitting with his students, said to them, I really couldn’t wrestle with the magnitude of the Shoah, it wasn’t useful to my project in that way, but I probably should have.

So I think it is true that the reason we don’t want to talk about Holocaust often is because we didn’t do it. I don’t wanna give so much oxygen to antisemitism because Jews didn’t create antisemitism. And in some ways I feel it’s not our problem to solve. It’s like antisemites’ problems to solve. And I want the Hartman Institute to work on the things where we have agency. And at the same time, you’re right, like to basically segment off Antisemitism and Holocaust as like, well, we can’t talk about that, or we have no Torah to share on. It will also leave us high and dry, especially in moments like this one that we’re in.

Anita: I understand that, and I’m concerned about that same issue because the Holocaust is our tragedy. It’s not our rationale, and for many people, the Holocaust became a rationale, which is a mistake, and so we want people to understand—Who are Jews? What is our story? What do we stand for? What have we contributed? What? Why the Holocaust? What does contemporary antisemitism look like?

All of those questions are the new way to teach about the Holocaust. It can’t be your grandma’s Holocaust education anymore, right? That’s over. And I think in the business of Holocaust education, hundreds of Holocaust educational institutions of various kinds are grappling with how to change, how we teach the subject matter in such a way that the Holocaust becomes relevant. Not our rationale, but our tragedy with both particulars, but also universals.

And with this film, we really want it to be attractive to a non-Jewish audience. Jews will see it. I want Jews to see it, obviously, but we’re really trying to screen the film all over the world in non-Jewish places with non-Jewish audiences, because we feel that this is a way for us to get into every school and every community in the country to tell the Jewish story. There is no other way, but to change how we teach children. And we have a lot of adversaries now, alot of detractors, who are teaching a really different narrative. This is our opportunity because there’s interest to teach the Jewish story in a different way and through the Holocaust education door.

Yehuda: Yeah, there’s a pretty significant political overtone, especially at the outset of the film, around the climate in Poland over the past couple of decades attempting to, I would say combination of suppress the story of the Shoah, but also to retell the role of Poles, to portray Poles entirely as victims of the Nazi Holocaust, take out their role as perpetrators, and the film focuses on laws passed in Poland around, you know, effectively not embarrassing the Poles.

And I guess it felt like, to me there were two political risks that this film is taking, which I know are probably very sensitive to you in particular. One is—this is one of the most complicated parts of the fight against antisemitism right now—Poland and other semi or fully autocratic regimes in Europe are Israel’s allies. And so it was like this weird thing of like, well, what do I do about that?

And the second hand is watching it. I couldn’t help think, you talked about how we don’t have slavery fatigue in this country, but we do. In the last couple of years, especially in this Trump administration, we’re seeing in the Smithsonian and other places the rewriting of American responsibility, culpability, and the story of slavery. President Trump has said explicitly, we don’t want to tell those bad stories anymore.

I wonder if you thought about the kind of implications of the film as pertaining to those two conversations. A little bit of a… I don’t know, rebuke to Israel in this, around what it’s permitting in its allies, vis-a-vis the narration of the Holocaust in exchange for being pro-Israel, and what it says about the American moment and the attempt that America seems to be doing, like the Poles, of whitewashing ssome of its own history.

Anita: That is a theme that you bring up in the film, which, it brings up the universal story, the big question about how does society deal with its difficult past, with its painful past, with its ugly past, and we talk about that explicitly in the film as you recall, about how did the French deal with Algeria, or how does America deal with its history of racism, or how does Poland deal with its history of antisemitism?

We talk in the film about the fact that there are no societies and are no countries that don’t have an ugly past. Then the question is, how do they grapple with it? How do they deal with it? Germany, for example, dealt with their difficult past in a very, very productive way. They didn’t try to romanticize—There’s an element in that in Germany too, of romanticizing what happened with the Nazis, but they’ve tried to grapple with it.

I remember—I’ve been very involved in rebuilding Jewish life in Poland, as, you mentioned that I’m the President of the Foundation, which is a large foundation that’s devoted to, to strengthening the Jewish people. And we have been the major funders of rebuilding of Jewish life in Poland, of all institutions, building the JCCs and the Hillels, and we built the Polin Museum, which I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s a world-class extraordinary museum that we built, tells the 1000 year history of the Jews of Poland.

We started to build it in cooperation with the Polish government after Perestroika, with Kaczyński, the president, who, he wanted reconciliation with Jews and Poles and he said, if you, the United States, will help us to raise money, we will give you the land on the side of the Warsaw ghetto and we will, we will take on responsibility for building this museum. And we said, we will help you. If you also agree that every Polish school child will go to the Polin Museum to learn the history of the Jews of Poland once during their school years. It’s been extraordinarily successful. If some of your audience have been there, I think that they understand why it’s really an exceptional museum.

Speaking to the issue of, how does a society or a country deal with its ugly history? I went to the groundbreaking for this museum and the chief rabbi of Israel was there and the chancellor of Germany was there, the president of Poland was there and the archbishop of the Catholic church was there.

So the German government got up, the chancellor got up and he said, if you never forgive us for what we did to you, we will understand.The Polish president got up and said, oh, how our two people have suffered. The chief rabbi of Israel got up and said, here, we died; there we live. And the Archbishop got up and he said nothing. He said nothing, nothing. That kind of captures how all those societies are grappling with our history.

But Poland has two strains. They have one strain, which is to really accept and grapple with what happened, to be honest about it. And then there’s another, this nationalist side which says Poles are noble people and let’s not demonize them. And that’s… the grappling with that issue is similar to what’s happening, actually, in this country, or even in Israel.

Israel has also a very difficult history that it doesn’t know how to grapple with, right? And so we make that clear. If you take a look at all the different flags in that section of the film, you’ll see that all of those different struggles are captured in the film. But that is the issue. How do we deal with these really painful, difficult pasts? Now we have an administration in our country, like you said, that’s going in and doing a cleanup, changing it. And that’s true in Poland.

But I will say this, I premiered the film in Warsaw, and I was afraid about what kind of response we’re gonna get because there’s some very painful stories about what Poles did to Jews. And at the end of the film we got a standing ovation and Poland Public Television gave us the prize for the best documentary in the entire film festival, cash prize. And they have just contacted us to basically license the film because they want to show the film on national public television in Poland.

I’m sure there are some people who hate the film, but there’s a whole dimension of Polish society that really want to grapple with it in an honest kind of way. That’s what we’re trying to do. Now, depending on who’s in power in the government, will I be welcome in Poland? I don’t know. Maybe not. Depends.

Yehuda: Let me ask you one last question. It’s a very heavy one.

Anita: Sure.

Yehuda: We’ve covered two out of the three major threats to the memory of the Shoah. One was forgetting. A second is, as we just talked about, suppression, right? State actors, governments seeking to not allow that story to be told the way it’s supposed to be told. And the third is repurposing. And I think the biggest threat that we face right now around the memory of the Holocaust is basically manifest in the genocide debate right now about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Which… there’s like a certain possible lane for it, which is a dispassionate analysis of what Israel is doing in Gaza. I think it’s actually a pretty narrow lane. And there’s another lane, which is, how do I take the power of this story of what happened to the Jews and use that as a means of talking about what Israel is doing? I think sometimes by, actually, well-intentioned Jews who are themselves the descendants of survivors, and sometimes by people who are by no means friends of the Jewish people who are trying to use this as kind of a means of closing off the Jewish people’s access to that story.

It’s—part of what makes me skittish about the campaign to do more Holocaust education in America right now is that it winds up paving the way for the tremendous misuse of the story of the Holocaust and genocide to become basically a battering ram for the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

I’m wondering how you’re thinking about this in the work that you’re doing both around Holocaust education and even as you’re promoting this film.

Anita: I will say that you raise a really important point because people use genocide in a very loose way just to supercharge an issue. If you wanna say something is like evil beyond evil, say it’s genocide and evoke that kind of Holocaust, genocide language. But our experience is, and again, we’re in California, so it’s… politically, you would think that we’d have a big issue with this, but we don’t.

We’re very clear actually. We use the United Nations definition of genocide, but we don’t get into a legalistic argument. It’s not genocide, it doesn’t qualify for genocide. We’re not having a big issue with that, but it gives us the opportunity to talk about what’s the difference between genocide and war crimes? What’s the difference between genocide and the pain and suffering of civilian casualties?

We haven’t had a big problem with people trying to basically kidnap the whole idea of genocide, and it’s an opportunity for us to grapple with that issue and talk about qualitative difference. What is genocide? And we actually find a lot of allies in this because there are many other communities that have a genocide story. This is a way in which we’ve actually developed allies that we didn’t have before. We work with Uyghurs, we work with Cambodians, we work with Bosnians, we work with Armenians, we work with Native Americans. We work with lots of different ethnic groups who truly have a genocide story in their past, which is different than a war in their past. And it’s been a real asset, not a liability to elevate the issue of Holocaust and genocide on the agenda.

Yehuda: If we, Hartman, did a Poland trip, could we do it together?

Anita: Oh, I would love to take you, I would love to take you on a journey to all the beautiful hotspots in Poland and take you to my hometown. It’s interesting, ’cause you saw in the movie what happened in the hometown, but one of the things that wasn’t in the movie is I decided, because I was trying to work with the town to hold an essay contest in the town high school. And so we did an essay contest, and go to the elders in your town and find out your town story. ’cause this used to be a Jewish place.

And so all these kids fanned out and they interviewed elderly in their community. They came up with essays, and then we held a contest, and the school teachers, they just decided who were the top winners, 15-year-old kids, and we gave a computer to the school as an award. These children, you know, in a little shtetl, little little, there’s 650 people in this town. They wrote the most beautiful, compelling, inspiring, thoughtful essays about the history of the Jews and Poles in their town that you could imagine. It’s actually very encouraging to see how many communities, including in Poland, are moving in in the right direction with the opportunity to really grapple with this history.

And I will be delighted to lead a group to Poland. It’ll be memorable, and I know that a lot of people are afraid to go to Poland, but actually you leave stronger as a result of having been there. You cry, but you also leave stronger.

Yehuda: Anita, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Anita: Thank you for inviting me.