Never Again is Now

A Message for Holocaust Remembrance Day

This Oped originally appeared in the Portland Press Herald and was co-written by my colleagues Professor Abraham Peck and Barbara Shaw, an attorney.

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Yom Hashoah (in Hebrew the Day of Holocaust Remembrance), which Jewish communities across the globe commemorate this year on April 24, is a somber occasion to remember and honor the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered during the Holocaust years of the Hitler regime between 1939-1945.

We spend this day hearing from survivors and their descendants. We repeat the stories of those who perished and those who miraculously survived — whether through partisan resistance, unimaginable resilience or sheer luck. We recognize the righteous Gentiles who hid Jews at great personal risk. The call of “Never again” reverberates throughout the day. Part of telling the story of the victims of the Holocaust is reminding ourselves that we must never let such atrocities happen again to Jews or to any other group targeted for wholesale slaughter by government decree.

We Jews are a people of memory. We do not forget the Exodus from Egypt and our journey from slavery to freedom. We do not forget the martyrs of the Crusades, the Inquisition or the pogroms in Eastern Europe. We do not forget the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich and recall each of the incremental tragic steps like Kristallnacht, and the hundreds of decrees between 1933-1938 issued by the German government that led to the nearly total destruction of European Jewry. And on Yom Hashoah, we do not forget the use of the machinery of the German state, the Nazi Party and willing collaborators in the European countries that were complicit in the mass murder of European Jewry.

On this Yom Hashoah in 2025, we bear witness to the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and internationally, already on the rise before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and that has since only intensified. But because one critical lesson of Yom Hashoah is “Never again,” we also bear witness to the increase in hate crimes and violent rhetoric directed at our neighbors who are Muslim, immigrants, trans people — essentially anyone who is “different,” “nonwhite” and “non-Christian.” These are not separate or isolated problems, but instead the same toxic brew that brought to power the fascist Third Reich in the 1930s and ultimately led to the Holocaust.

A perverse twist in the very real and dangerous rise of antisemitism in the U.S. is that the Trump administration claims to be “fighting antisemitism” when it is actually stoking hatred toward Jews. This is an administration with white Christian nationalists in the cabinet and that has hosted known antisemites in the Oval Office and at Mar-a-Lago. Every day we are witnessing the hallmarks of a fascist regime. Book banning, including books about the Holocaust, eliminating the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion as if they were dirty words, attempting to rewrite American history to distort an accurate depiction of such events as the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the sacrifices made by generations in order to establish constitutional guarantees of “liberty and justice for all” in America.

Most alarmingly, President Trump is now openly defying the orders of the Supreme Court of the United States to illegally round up, jail and deport, without due process, legal residents, whether they had the temerity to express unpopular political views or were wrongfully accused of being gang members.

We Jews believe Donald Trump is using antisemitism as an excuse to disregard the law in order to divide Americans rather than actually protect us. This is the same man who claimed there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville, admires Hitler’s generals and has empowered the unelected Elon Musk, who openly mocks the fears of Jews and others by giving Nazi salutes and supporting far-right political parties in European elections. Trump’s version of fighting antisemitism is an obscene exploitation of the real problem of antisemitism in the world today.

Rather than making Jews safer, Trump’s authoritarian actions taken as “protecting Jews” make Jews targets for further antisemitism. It is a profoundly false choice to believe that confronting antisemitism involves destroying democracy.

In the name of our ancestors who died at the hands of a fascist regime, we must speak forcefully to fight antisemitism without abandoning democratic values that have allowed Jews, and all other vulnerable minorities, to thrive.