What is happening now in Europe is reflective of a tremendous rise in antisemitism, with a rise in blatant public acts of antisemitism. Almost as if the veil was lifted.
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But the antisemitism is not just in Europe. This month, swastikas were drawn outside a freshman dorm at Yale University. At the end of August, at a campus activities fair at Temple University in Philadelphia, an exchange between a Jewish student and members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) led to anti-Semitic name calling. The Jewish student was later punched in the face by an assailant. Increasingly, student groups seeking to isolate and delegitimize Israel falsely claim that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes. Anti-Israel sentiment increasingly crosses the line into antisemitism and the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) campaign is a good example of this. According to Abe Foxman of the ADL, the BDS movement advocates for “the destruction of the Jewish state through demography…so we are talking here about hate, not mere criticism. The BDS movement at its very core is antisemitic.”
These events trouble me deeply, and over the past few years, an increasing number of antisemitic incidents around the world have served as a wake-up call to me and my husband, to try and do something to counter the hate.
In 2011 we formed an educational foundation called Seed the Dream. It was born out of our interest and work in education reform and Holocaust education. We focus on three distinct areas: educational access, providing educational opportunities to underserved populations; educational advocacy, providing opportunities for people to connect to, learn, and be educated about Israel; and educational awareness, promoting Holocaust education and our work with holocaust survivors and others persecuted and in need of refuge.
Our foundation is currently doing much work on college campuses around Israel education, including helping students travel to Israel, and expanding the knowledge base and context around the Israel discussion.
Students need to be educated about what’s happening in the world. We need to talk about the rising bigotry toward Jewish populations across the globe, particularly in Europe but also here, on college campuses in the United States. We need to educate and empower students to speak out against such hatred. Today antisemitism remains an unaddressed topic on most college campuses. This needs to change.
Both my parents are survivors of the Holocaust. My father is from Poland and spent many years in concentration camps including Auschwitz and was liberated from a concentration camp in Germany. My mother is from Czechoslovakia and was a hidden child in the mountains with her mother during the War. Both of my parents lost numerous family members – their parents, aunts, uncles – relatives that I will never know. My parents met after the war in the United States and I grew up hearing their stories, which I hold on to tightly and share often. I see both my parents as teachers and am grateful that they were and are willing to share their stories, and pass on their important message: “Look and see what happens when anti-Semitism goes unchecked, when no one speaks up.” The message in my parents’ USC Shoah testimonies, and many other testimonies in the archive is that “maybe we had a chance to leave, but there was no place to go. No one spoke out, no one opened their doors, no one defended us.” To me that message is very strong and I believe that unchecked antisemitism, whether it’s couched in hatred toward Israel or just plain racism, doesn’t start with the end.
The testimonies and the wonderful work that was inspired by Steven Spielberg – and continues with the USC Shoah Foundation – is about knowing, grappling with, and sharing stories of survival and loss from our past. The USC Shoah Foundation is uniquely and importantly positioned to honor the victims and the survivors – to remember that their lives were lost or changed forever and their loved ones lost for only one reason: they were born Jewish. Each day we are losing more of our survivors. Their testimonies are becoming more important. We cannot lose the message, because we are sadly losing the messengers.
We have a responsibility to continue the voices of those who courageously bore witness. Each day it is becoming increasingly more important to speak out against new forms of antisemitism. We cannot just listen to the voices of our past – we must use them to inform a brighter future. We have a responsibility to and for those voices.
Dr. Marcy Gringlas is a member of the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors and Vice Chair of its Next Generation Council. Dr. Gringlas earned a Bachelor of Music from Indiana University, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD in developmental psychology from Temple University. Dr. Gringlas and her husband, Mr. Joel Greenberg have three children: Sara, Jackson and Ellie. Dr. Gringlas recently retired as faculty in the Pediatrics Department at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Gringlas currently serves on the board of The Baldwin School as a member of the executive committee. She was previously on the board of the Anti-Defamation League, chairing the Bearing Witness Program, Steppingstone Scholars, Inc., chairing the Program Committee and Children’s Crisis Treatment Center.
Marcy is co-founder and President of Seed The Dream Foundation. Seed the Dream Foundation grew out of their family's long-standing commitment to education. Joseph & Reli Gringlas, both of Marcy’s parents, gave testimony for the Visual History Archive.
On January 25, 2010, at the United Nations in New York, USC Shoah Foundation hosted a reception for the opening of Generations: Survival and the Legacy of Hope, a video installation that explores the impact of the Holocaust on four families across three generations. Reli and Joseph Gringlas, Dr. Gringlas and Sara Greenberg all spoke at the reception, and a clip of Sara’s documentary, B-2247: A Granddaughter's Understanding, was shown. The film explores the question of what it means to be a third generation descendant of Holocaust survivors.
Sara is also working with the Shoah Foundation Institute on its 3G Voices project, encouraging other members of the third generation to create similar multimedia projects.
As a Vice Chair of the NGC Marcy will focus her attention on 2G & 3G concerns.
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