Remembering With Responsibility: Morgan Blum Schneider on Holocaust Education & Moral Courage | JFCS

Rising hate. Fading memory. And a generation of young people who need to be equipped to recognize the warning signs before it is too late.

In Episode 11, Dorothy Stuehmke speaks with Morgan Blum Schneider, who leads the Jewish Family and Children's Services Holocaust Center, about what it truly takes to teach history in a way that inspires moral courage - and why that work has never felt more urgent than it does right now.

Morgan has led the JFCS Holocaust Center since 2005, building it into one of California's primary resources for Holocaust and genocide education. Her path to this work began in childhood - checking out every Holocaust book from her school library - and took her from Clark University's Holocaust and Genocide Studies program to a master's thesis in Australia on the forced removal of Aboriginal children as a case of genocide, to nearly two decades of leading one of the most innovative Holocaust education institutions in the country.

Together, Dorothy and Morgan explore:

·       Why Holocaust education is not about the past - it's about the moral choices we are all making right now

·       How the JFCS Holocaust Center is reaching more than 167,000 students, teachers, and individuals every year - and what that education actually produces in young people

·       What we lose when the last Holocaust survivors are gone - and what literature, testimony, and education must do to fill that space

·       How patterns of dehumanization repeat across history and across communities - and why combating one form of hate requires understanding them all

This episode connects to the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle, where you can directly support the JFCS Holocaust Center and its mission to inspire moral courage and social responsibility in the next generation.

🤝 Support the JFCS Holocaust Center through the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle: https://www.grapevine.org/giving-circle/LjPhN5M/Do-Good-on-Purpose-Giving-Circle

🔗 Connect with Dorothy Stuehmke:
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorothystuehmke/
  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dorothystuehmke/
  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dorothystuehmke

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Do Good On Purpose podcast, where you can listen to leaders discussing solutions to the most pressing challenges in our world, and where you can also support them by donating through the show's giving circle through the link in the show notes. Think of a giving circle as giving together, combining what each of us can contribute so that we give bigger, we give better, and we make a much greater impact than any one of us could ever make alone. I'm your host, Dorothy Stumke. Folks, we are living in a moment that demands we pay attention. Hate is rising, not just in one community, not just in one form, but across communities, across cultures, across faiths, across identities. Antisemitism is surging, Islamophobia is surging, racism, homophobia, discrimination against immigrants and refugees, all of it is surging simultaneously. And history teaches us that silence in the face of hate against any community, any identity is never neutral. It's a permission. That is why the work of Holocaust education matters to all of us. Not just to the Jewish community, but to every community that has ever been targeted, dehumanized, or told that their lives matter less. Morgan Blumschneider leads the Jewish Family and Children's Services Holocaust Center in San Francisco, one of California's leading resources for Holocaust and genocide education. Morgan's path to this work began in childhood. By fifth grade, she had checked out every Holocaust book from her school library, the same books that introduced so many of us to this history for the first time, books like Anne Frank's Diary and Ellie V Dell's Night. That early calling took her to Clark University's Holocaust and Genocide Studies program, to a master's thesis in Australia on the forced removal of Aboriginal children as a case of genocide, and eventually to the JFCS Holocaust Center, where she has led the organization since 2005. What makes Morgan's commitment to this work particularly remarkable is the depth of her belief that this history belongs to all of us and that allyship against hate across every community and every identity is not optional. It is the only response that history asks of us. On today's episode of the Do Good on Purpose podcast, we explore what it really means to teach history in a way that inspires courage and why the fight against hate in all its forms begins with all of us choosing to stand together. Morgan Blumschneider joins us now. Morgan Blumschneider, thank you so much for being on the Do Good on Purpose podcast with me today. I'm I'm so excited that you're here. This is a topic that I think is so important that we not lose sight of the Holocaust. It's a topic that's sensitive, that I think people in general maybe want to forget about. But your job at the Jewish Family Children's Services Holocaust Center is to make sure that people don't forget. And it's a delicate balance, I think, between remembering something really painful, but also using it as a tool to educate the future and the present. So I'm thrilled that you're here with me today. Thank you for taking the time.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Thank you, Dorothy, for inviting me to join you in conversation today. And I want to say I'm honored to be joining such an esteemed collection of guests that you've had on this show. Um, I'm a historian by trade, and so I always do my research. So I've been listening to your podcast over the past few weeks, and I have learned such a tremendous amount and have been inspired by the people you've been in conversation with. So thank you for the space that you're creating to educate us all, to bring us together and to think about how we repair the world. Thank you so much, one step at a time. Yeah, and I'll say it is a big charge to try to, you know, follow this never forget. It's not a tagline for me. And I actually, as I introduce myself often when I meet a group of students or educators, is I say, it's my honor to help our community remember with responsibility. Because to me, remembrance is not a passive act, it's something that we have to work towards, and we should do so in a way where we're thinking about the people we're interacting with and what comes after us.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Yeah. No, that's that's so well said. Thank you for opening with that. So, you know, I want to actually start with where we are in this moment right now. We are in a moment where there are anti-Semitic incidents that have sort of risen sharply in the US, around the world, in schools, online, and in public life. What are you seeing on the ground? And what does this actually tell us about the moment that we're in from your vantage point?

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah. I mean, there's what we see in the world, what we see on social media, and what I'm experiencing on a daily basis in my inbox and in my voicemail is anti-Semitism was on the rise before October 7th, you know, before the war began between Israel and Hamas. It's come the biggest transition that I've seen in the kind of pre-October 7th world and the post-October 7th world is that prior to anti-Semitism was very anonymous. The hate was there, it was on the rise, but you often saw, you know, graffiti on a school locker, you saw flyers put into people's mailboxes and things like that, where we saw anti-Semitism. But now anti-Semitism has a normalization that we're seeing it in a very public way. And maybe we'll get into this conversation as as we go, but there's one school that we have been working with over the past few months where a group of students laid down on a football field in a shape of a swastika and posted it on social media on Instagram with a quote from Hitler. So you can see just from this one example that that is far as far from anonymous as one can get. They use school property and they put it into a very public space. And we're seeing anti-Semitism very much in the public space. And we're seeing also significant trends of increase in hate as well, beyond anti-Semitism. And I want to say that my expertise lies in the world of countering anti-Semitism. I quote that countering from Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, who's a leader in this field, because we can't ever combat anti-Semitism. We can't make it not exist, but we can think about the actions we go through in the world of how we wish to counter anti-Semitism. So while my expertise lies in that space, I'll say that we are, I personally and our organization is really deeply disturbed and upset by the rise in Islamophobia, the rise in racism, the rise in gender bias in so many different spaces. And I'm honored to have colleagues throughout the state and throughout the country who have expertise in countering those forms of hate so we can work together because it needs to be a unified front in countering hate and anti-Semitism. We should not be in this work alone.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah. No, thank you for calling that out. That, you know, the intolerance, the hate is not just specific to the topic of the Holocaust and and and the experience there. There's a lot happening around the world, regardless of what culture, what religion, what you know, country you represent. There's there's there's hate in all forms that are that are taking place, unfortunately. And so there are, I think, patterns that you can probably call out and that you teach through the education that you that you bring to the education system across California. Um, and we'll get into that in a little bit, these patterns that you see to try and stop and and call out and and get people to recognize, you know, so that history doesn't repeat itself constantly, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Absolutely. And if it's okay with you, um I spend a lot of time in an education setting. I want to define the term anti-Semitism because I think that I don't want to assume everyone who's listening today is working from the same def. There are many definitions of anti-Semitism. And what I'll share today is the definition we use when we're teaching. Um so this is really kind of a secondary grade six through 12 version of the definition, which is the hatred and prejudice against Jewish people. It's it's you know, there are many more involved definitions of anti-Semitism, which I can share always at a later time. But just for the purposes of our conversation today, that's the definition we're working from when we're speaking about public school spaces. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Thank you. So why don't we talk about the center where you work? I want people to understand how it came about. Um, it was born out of an act of courage. So tell us a little bit about that and the mission there and why it's important today. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

So I like to speak about our great matriarch, Toba Weiss. She just passed away last year, over a hundred years old. Toba was an incredible woman. She, and many of the survivors that I had the honor and privilege to spend time with, I say are my greatest teachers. And Toba would tell me the story again and again. Sometimes it would alter a little bit, but I'll go to where she started, which was she was a survivor of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. She was raised in Poland and she settled in San Francisco after the war in the Sunset District, which is for those who know San Francisco, out towards the ocean, towards Ocean Beach. And a neo-Nazi bookstore opened up in her neighborhood across the intersection from her synagogue. And this bookstore named itself the Rudolf Gess Bookstore. Rudolf Gess was a commandant of Auschwitz. So you can imagine just the name and the Nazi flags that hung in the window, how disturbing it was for Toba and her family and her community at large. They tried to go through the civic routes to have this bookstore closed and freedom of speech, freedom of press, they were not breaking any laws. And that was not a successful model to go the peaceful approach, we would say. And Toba and a few others from the community took it upon themselves to say, I didn't survive Auschwitz for this, not in my town. And she threw a brook, a brick through the window of this bookstore. It was the evening before the start of the Passover holiday, which falls off in April. That year it was April 1st. And she and the people who were with her said, I will not stand for this hatred in our city. From that, it really served as a wake-up call for our city, for the city of San Francisco, is there became a three-part resolution. So Diane Feinstein, who many people know as a former senator, was at that time supervisor of San Francisco and soon to be mayor of San Francisco. She helped to lead this initiative. There was the establishment of the first Holocaust Memorial in San Francisco, the establishment of an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the establishment of what at that time was called the Holocaust Library and Resource Center, and today is the JFCS Holocaust Center. And so we go back often to think about our founders, our matriarch, take a stand against hate. And it's important to know where we've been to shape where we're going.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Yeah. Thanks for that context. I want to talk a little bit about you now, because this is an important role, and you've been leading uh the work there at the center for 21 years now. How did you get into this? You know, I read a little bit about you that by fifth grade you had checked out every Holocaust book from your school library. So what inspired you or what what drew you to this history at such a young age? Because it is a dark, disturbing history, especially for a young child to be drawn to. So just curious if you can share.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Thank you for asking. So my family history does not go back to Nazi occupied Europe. I'm not a descendant of Holocaust survivors, as many people in the community are. My family, I'm fourth generation San Franciscan. My family came from Aleppo, Syria, after the Spanish Inquisition and had to flee persecution in Spain through Syria to New York and from Russia through Shanghai to San Francisco. So I come from a very different background. I often like to share that. And my mom got this call from the school librarian. They said, We're worried about Morgan. My mom said, What's going on? She said, Well, she's checked out all the books about the Holocaust in the library. It's a little bit strange for a fifth grader. And my mom said, Oh, we know she's read everything in the house. I was always curious about this event in history, about the people, and I kept trying to understand the why. That passion continued through high school. I remember I took a psychology class where I studied post-traumatic stress disorder and Holocaust survivors and taking interviews. I studied Righteous Among the Nations. Those are non-Jewish people who act in the resistance of during the Holocaust. And I interviewed about the role of churches as righteous among the nations and church leaders, and I interviewed different pastors about that work. This was at a high school level. So I kind of took any course I was taking and I created an opportunity to study. I went on to do my undergraduate work at Clark University, which was the first university in the nation where you could get your degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I was in good company. I met some of the most incredible scholars that I'm honored to still have in my community today. We just hosted Professor DeBorge Work, who was my supervisor and continues to be my mentor here at the Holocaust Center a few months ago. And our director of education, Beth Cohen, was with me at Clark. It's a community that continues to give back to me because it brought together those with passionate interest. But at my time at Clark, my world expanded significantly because it was there that I began to study the patterns of genocide. I still remember the first course I took on the Armenian genocide, and I was floored that I was not introduced to it in high school or as a younger person. How did I live my whole life to only learn about the Armenian genocide when I was 19 years old? And it was at that time that I made a pledge to myself that I want other students to have the opportunity to learn about the patterns of genocide and the patterns of this history, and that education can be an incredible tool for genocide prevention. So from that time of my first kind of exposure to the history beyond the Holocaust to today, that continues to be a foundation that is my compass and directs me in the work that I do.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Wow, that's that's so interesting. Your journey and just the fact that you said you're fourth generation San Francisco and the way your family immigrated by way of Syria and Shanghai, I think you said too. Yeah. It's fascinating. Thanks for sharing that. I, for me, when I was little, Anne Frank's diary really did it for me. I remember reading that. And, you know, you and I have talked a bit offline uh about, you know, our our sort of journey and our our kind of reference point to the Holocaust. And I've shared with you that I grew up in a neighborhood that um had a lot of Holocaust survivors, including in my building. And, you know, I too was always very curious because you know, I was very young then, seven, eight, nine, ten, and and I remember people talking about that period, and I couldn't understand that something that terrible had happened when you're that young, you know, and I remember sitting at our table in our kitchen, and one of our neighbors had come over and she had a tattoo of numbers on her arm, you know, and and I remember reading Anne Frank, the diary of Aunt Frank. And so I sort of had to piece together, you know, what kind of happened because nobody sat me down and told me about it. So the fact that you're bringing it into schools and you're teaching about it, but teaching it also through a lens of, you know, how do we make sure that something like this doesn't happen again and how do we call out hate, I think is is remarkable because for children it's it's confusing when you hear about that when you're when you're young, you know, that because it it's sort of incomprehensible that something like that actually really truly happened, you know. And I had really close friends in our building who were like grandparents to me, and they lost, they lost their entire families and had to start all over again in this country. But I'll say that these individuals who I was so fortunate to have in my life at a very young age were some of the most resilient people I've ever met in my life, you know, to go through that and then to come here and to have to start all over again without any family. And in one particular case, the family that I was very close with, when they when they both passed away, I was in my teens, uh, they left a lot of their estate to, or I think their entire estate to to charity, to the to the causes that they believed in. And so um yeah, I just have I have very interesting and and fond memories of of growing up around uh people who who went through that part of history. Um and some of the teachings and the values uh that they that they passed on to me, I still I still hold on to as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Thank you for sharing that, Dorothy. It's it's so important that we think about the full life experience of these individuals that survived. To me, we would be doing a disservice if we only remembered the time 1938 to 1945, or whenever the start of the Holocaust began for an individual. I'm so glad that when you had the chance to get to know and spend time and build community with these individuals, that you learned about those other pieces of their life. And I think those are the pieces of their life that that often get left outside of a classroom lesson. And we're really determined to change that. We're not alone. Our partners around the world are doing this work as well, but we're we feel it is a disservice to the survivors of the Holocaust and and to the Jewish people that one should only be remembered for their tragedy and as victims. I often say, you know, people were not born in Auschwitz. I mean there were very few cases of babies that were born and did not survive, but people had full lives beforehand. They had birthday parties, they had relationships, they had, they went to school, they had families, they had incredible ties to the land in which they came from. Many of them were very dedicated citizens of their nations before they were targeted by the Germans and their collaborators. And those conversations often get left behind. So we are dedicated and devoted in our teaching and in our physical space to telling the lessons of who Jewish people are, who these survivors were beforehand. We have these incredible short films on our website that maybe we can link to, where I was dedicated and devoted to tell the story of survivors in a short classroom size, you know, 12 to 15 minute um video, but not only the years of 38 to 45, but who they were as children, who influenced their life, who shaped who they are as individuals, and then what did they become? Like one film about Anita Frank talks a lot about, you know, her passion for education, her love for learning and how she got her PhD in Russian studies and child psychology and you know who she is today and how she speaks all over the country. And I think it's so important that when students remember these survivors who will not be with us forever, that they understand that full picture of who somebody is. And I think that that's what helps also build allyship. When I I brought a student once, I led study tours for many years, and it brought them to Poland, and there was a picture on a wall in the exhibit at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum on the site of the former extermination camp, and it showed a boy skiing, you know, with his skis. And this young man looked at that picture and he said, They skied? I ski. And he saw himself in that photo of that young, of that young boy with his skis and somebody else at their birthday party, and somebody else with their relatives. And that's what's going to make an imprint on somebody's heart. Not the dates, not the facts, not the figures, but the point of connection and the ability for people to also stand up against hate and injustice that they see around them. When they can build true allyship through personal connection, that's where we have a chance in this world to make a difference, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Yeah. That's so well said, and it's a great example. I think that's why you know I talked about Anne Frank, the diary of Anne Frank, really kind of speaking to me because I remember reading it and thinking those things too. She has a diary, she has a crush on this guy, you know. She's just she's a young girl with like hopes and dreams. And when you put it into that context, it makes it so much more real, you know, at least for me at that age, because I was of a similar age as her when she wrote that diary, you know? So I think that connection, you know, that people can sort of look to uh makes it so much more real. So let's talk a little bit about what you're doing at the center exactly. Put into context what you're doing to bring this type of education to scale. I believe you work with hundreds of teachers across the state and almost 200 school districts. How do you bring this education to this population today? And what do you think teachers in particular most need to teach this history well?

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Thank you for asking. And we're really proud of what we're doing in California. We are having the ability to work in partnership with the state. And, you know, that opportunity to kind of braid the efforts between, you know, the state, the funding from the state, legislation, which I can speak about, the, you know, the public school system, and those of us that are scholars, academics, and the private sector. When we can braid all of that together, we create an extremely strong method in order to make change in our society. Because if we work in separate spheres, then we can't amplify our messaging. And I'm incredibly proud and honored to be in a position where we've created a bridge between these sectors. Um, in 2021, I was charged by our executive director, Dr. Nita Friedman. She said, Morgan, see if you can develop a concept, an initiative to reach every school district in the state of California. I said, Okay, I'm on it. Let's see what I can do. And I went to my whiteboard and I flushed out this concept, and it was about relationships. I thought, okay, we're one organization based in San Francisco serving the Bay Area. How can I reach every one of these districts? I need to get on the phone and call my colleagues. And we built a collaborative, and we are now 15 different organizations from around the state. Big organizations that you may be familiar with, the Museum of Tolerance, which is part of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Facing History in Ourselves, Echoes and Reflections, Holocaust Museum LA, I call them the big dogs. Those are our big organizations. And I'm proud that we've also incubated small projects that teach about the Rwandan and the Guatemalan genocide, the Cambodian genocide. You know, I use my network of incredible colleagues. And I, for example, connected with my colleague Sarah Brown, and I said, Sarah, you are an expert in the Rwandan genocide. We don't have an institution in California that's teaching about the Rwandan genocide. Let's make that change. And now she said, I have a great colleague, Holly, who's a professor at Ohio State. Let me call her up. And the Tweegay organization was built. We are just so honored to be in that space where we can incubate these projects. My master's work goes back to lifting up the underrepresented voices of Indigenous peoples in Australia. It was a journey on its own, but it's another conversation. But I had I feel grateful that I identify as Jewish. And if I go to bookstores around the world, you'll see a book about the Holocaust on many different bookstore shelves. But that's not the case for many other cases of genocide. And I spent time in my master's work lifting up the voices of those who were targeted for genocide in Western Australia in the interwar period. But I had to first build trust. And so that's what I've done is I've built trust with these different communities and groups. We just brought in a new organization, Safo Center, about the Assyrian genocide, small population in California, but very passionate. We work closely with the Armenian community. And so we brought these institutions together and we said, we are stronger together, and let us do the work to vet curriculum, to put it into a digital library to make it easy. I worked with a web developer and I said, would it be possible to make it like travelosity for Holocaust and genocide education? Where if you're a teacher, you can say, I'm looking for a lesson about, you know, anti-Semitism and I'm working with the middle school and put it in, and boop, all of a sudden you've got all of these different lessons that all these different institutions and organizations have done that. If you're looking for something about children, if you're looking for something about art, we have all of those in one space in one digital library. So the web developers made it happen. It's incredible. And we've brought together the opportunity to have conferences. I just got back a few weeks ago from our fourth summer institute. We had over a hundred teachers from around the state that came together for three and a half days, and they had a chance to choose from 38 different workshops presented by our collaboratives. So if they wanted to study the Cambodian genocide, they wanted to understand anti-Semitism after the Holocaust, they wanted to understand who Jewish people are before the war, we had workshops for them. And it's not only about the content that they collected, but it's about the community that they built. It's about the relationships. They met other English teachers from other parts of the state of California. They built relationships and it's an incredibly inspiring community. It's what gives me hope in this often very fractured world that we exist in, is to see these educators during their summer vacation make the choice to spend their time with us. But the key part about the state's role is that we can't expect that these educators are going to use their own resources to come and travel to our institute. We can't expect that their school district, which is extremely under-resourced, is going to be able to designate funds for their own professional development of their teachers. So part of my whiteboard concept in 2021 was I want to remove all financial barriers for teachers. If you're a California teacher who's teaching this subject matter, you're involved, you're included, you are welcome, and you're not going to have to pay to do it. So we've removed all the expenses for travel, for hotel, for food, and that's through the support of the state of California. And they have continued to commit and give us grants to further this work. And to date, we've reached more than 5,875 teachers. I'm good at holding on to the data from hundreds and hundreds of school districts around the state. And honored that many other states are looking at what we're doing in California. They see that we've been able to pass legislation. We're now an official program of the Department of Education in California, which goes a long way. When you're trying to knock on the door of a new school district, if you've got the California seal on your flyer and your program, people say, okay, she might be someone we should listen to. And that continued partnership, and they connect with us beyond just the logo that they send to us. They show up. I had the, you know, David Shapira, who's the chief deputy superintendent. I've had the state superintendent, Tony Thurman, participate in our programs. They're there, they're meeting the teachers, they're advocating for this work day after day, week after week. And it's it's truly an honor and a privilege. And it's one of the things I'm I'm most proud of when I say to my daughters, yes, I'm going back to Sacramento today. I have to work with the Senate. I have to do some lobbying. One day I hope they'll understand and appreciate what I'm trying to map out for them and their peers and our future students.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

That's incredible. Congratulations to you on that. I mean, you've removed financial barriers for teachers to be able to come and learn and bring this curriculum to their students. Other states are looking at you as an example and how can they follow suit. You've embedded the your curriculum into the Department of Education. You have their blessing, and you've got, you know, a lens of allyship, right? Which I think is incredible. You know, so this is this is really remarkable work. Thank you. I want to talk now a little bit about courage because you have talked about the need to inspire young people to be morally courageous and socially responsible citizens. So on the topic of education and how you're bringing, you know, your body of work and education to students across California, how do you actually teach courage? And how do you actually teach responsibility?

SPEAKER_01 30:56

It's a good question. And I can't say it's the same for every setting and every person. For me, I practice what I preach, which is I lead with curiosity. So if I'm talking to a superintendent who's going through challenges in their community from antisemitism or hate, I start by asking, tell me about your community. Tell me what's working with your community, tell me who they are, what else is happening in this world, what other forms of hate, what have been your successes. So to me, I first want to learn about who we who we're working with, and that helps me think about where the points of connection are. I can't assume the same points of connection work for one school district or one classroom versus another, but something that continues to be a consistent, which is primary sources, which is the voice of those who experience it. Because at the end of the day, whether a student remembers that you know Poland was invaded on September 1st, 1939, is not what's important. What's important is that there's a fingerprint on their heart, something that they're going to carry away with. I visited one of our wonderful um survivors a few weeks ago, George, and he was telling me how he was able to travel to Seattle recently to visit his son. And his wife said, Yeah, the funniest thing happened. We were coming off the plane, and I reached for my suitcase, and a young man in front of me said, Oh, let me get that for you, and turned around and said to George, You don't remember me, but I was a student that you shared your testimony with several years ago, and you changed my life. Your story changed my life. Now, the coincidence that they happened to be on the same plane and he was in front of them and he could help, you know, bring down their suitcase was a coincidence, but it's not a coincidence that George changed this young man's life because I see it time and again, and I could flood your inbox with the incredible feedback from the students. But what makes a fingerprint on their heart are the personal stories. And we we know that, but we're faced with the great challenge that the survivor generation, as you know, is sunsetting. They will not be with us forever. And we have, you know, we're working with their children and their grandchildren to share their stories, have video recordings, audio recordings, we've all digitized their things. We have to think about all the different ways in which we can continue to leave fingerprints on the hearts of the young people because that's what inspires empathy and that's what inspires courage, whether it's to take down someone's suitcase from the overhead bin to help somebody out, but it's really about how to stand up for someone next to you, how to make space for somebody who has a different opinion than you and to find common ground. That's one of the most challenging things in life. But I'll say the next generation is watching us, and it's our responsibility to set an example that we can move through different opinions. We can move through those moments and say, we might need to agree to disagree, but what do we have in common? We have to find ways to share empathy. You know, you might not agree with someone, but perhaps on one topic, but if you can find a point of connection of spaces that you do agree on, you can perhaps make great progress in this world. The school I mentioned before, where there was the human solastic on the football field, and we continue to do work, and I worked with the principal and the superintendent. How can we do jeep work in this school? And one of the pieces I recommend often with districts I work with, which is in addition to working on with the teachers and making sure that they're supportive with the lessons they're bringing into the classroom, is also to work with the families, the parents and guardians. Because hate and antisemitism don't have boundaries within the four walls of a classroom. It bleeds out onto the playground, it bleeds out into the cafeteria, it bleeds out all over the spaces. And so we need to be in partnership with parents and guardians when there's incidents of hate and antisemitism, because the courage needs to come both from home and from the classroom. So we take a holistic approach. I believe in kind of the full-body medicine approach, which is we need to work with the administrators to give them the courage to first say the words, we had an anti-Semitic incident in our school. That one phrase does not always come naturally to an administrator. And I often challenge them to say, you have to say it, and you have to say it again. You have to have the courage to say it, and you have to share with your community how you're going to address it. Don't just solve this problem in the in the walls of your administrative office. Communicate with your community because they're hurting. You need to build trust. There's a Jewish tradition called chuva, which is you can't just say you're sorry to someone and that you've moved forward. You have to build back the trust from someone when you've had a transgression. And I often bring that value into my conversations. I'm not proselytizing and trying to convert people into a Jewish tradition, but I'm I'm honored to be able to use some Jewish values. That's what it means to work at Jewish Family and Children's Services, to use some of these Jewish values into our work. And I often say this with administrators is how can we build back what's been broken in your community and trust? And that takes time, not just about moving the needle, it's about keeping it there. So in the case with this one school we were working with, we invited the parents and guardians to also hear Holocaust survivor testimony. And I said to the administration, we want to open this up and invite these students to come together with their parents and guardians. And the superintendent really heard me and he came and he brought his family and his child. And I said, he's getting it, right? That's a message to his community that this is important to me. And I'm bringing my partner and my child into this space as well. And it's one example of how we inspire courage, but it has to come from the highest levels to be for the for the students to take it seriously.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Yeah. No, those are great examples. I think courage and responsibility, it's it's hard to teach that, but I think you've outlined a way that you can exemplify uh the spirit of that, right? And bringing your values there and talking about finding common ground and bringing families along too into the conversation and along on that journey of understanding the testimony to to feel connection, as we talked about a little earlier as well. I mean, I think that is so important. And talk a little bit about how you are preserving testimony because you know they are they're passing away Holocaust survivors. I am reminded of, have you heard of the tenement museum in New York City?

SPEAKER_01 37:45

One of my favorites, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Yeah. And they've got this, you know, you you can go into this this building from the 1920s and they've they've set everything up the the way it was, and um, they have recordings of families who actually live there and take you back to what it was like in the 1920s living in on the Lower East Side. So talk a little bit about how you're preserving the storytelling.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

So we are upon an incredible project to expand the footprint of the Holocaust Center into a 40,000 square foot facility. So you may not know this, but San Francisco, Northern California, the Bay Area does not have a physical space which tells the story of the Holocaust, other than our very small library, which I can fit 30 students in on a good day if I take the furniture out. And we are upon this expansion. But with this expansion, we're building for the future, right? And we have this opportunity to work in partnership with our colleagues at the USC Shoah Foundation. Some people may know the history of this organization. You know, Steven Spielberg, after Schindler's Lisp, was inspired to capture the testimonies and stories of Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and allied armed forces and rescuers. And it's expanded to capture testimony of Cambodian genocide survivors and Armenian. They've digitized all of those testimonies, Rwanda and so on. It's it's absolutely incredible archive. And in our new space, we will have the opportunity to showcase these testimonies in a really dynamic way. So if you've ever seen this feature, it's called Dimensions and Testimony. So using AI, which I know feels scary, but these are real survivors who gave their testimony. None of the content has been generated by AI. It's just the tool of AI is that you can interact. So if Dorothy, you and I, it's like having a conversation where you can interact with the testimony to say, what was it like when you were a child and the Nazis came into your town? And the survivor will respond with that story. Or when was the last time that you saw your mother? What was what was did you ride a bike when you were little? Like so the big questions, right? Of when was the last time you saw your mother? So the smaller questions of like, did you ride a bike when you were younger? Or what was the last birthday party that you remember in your home? Or do you have any grandchildren today? So it had these survivors were asked hundreds and hundreds of questions. And so we will have this technology through this interactive dimension and testimony. And in some cases, it can be like a hologram where you can have conversations. So I think that's what I was gonna ask.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Is it gonna be like a hologram? That's so good.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

It's gonna be like a hologram, right? Yeah, there's a whole technology behind it. And we're not trying to say that that is a survivor, of course. We will be very clear on what the technology is. But for anyone who's watched oral history testimony, it's so important. And our collection that we recorded, the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, was actually the first to do video testimony before the Show of Foundation. It's one of our great stories. And we have over 1,400 uh testimonies that we collected and then became digitized. And those are so important for researchers, and we have researchers from all over the world come and access our testimonies. And but if you're a 10th grade student, you're not gonna watch four hours of unedited film. And even a documentary film can be done with all the bells and whistles, but the opportunity to interact. So that's one form of technology. There's other creative ways to tell a story. So we're just honored to be working in partnership with an incredible filmmaker, Joao Potash, who came out with a film called Among Neighbors, and our executive director was uh uh uh executive producer on the film, Anita Friedman. And this uses um an incredible way to take testimony as well as animation to help tell the story of one town in Poland before the war, during the war, and after the war, and the power of allyship, relationship, and neighbors. I won't tell how it ends, you'll have to watch the film yourself. But we have to be creative in the way we're telling these stories. That's that's my point, is that we can't just pop in a VHS like you and I watched when we were younger and just hope that the students are gonna walk away and say, Great, my life has changed, I'm gonna be a better person, I'm gonna take a stand against hate and anti-Semitism. We have to find different opportunities. So whether it's through Dimensions and Testimony, through other films, but also through the primary sources. So we have incredible, like one of the my favorite, and I don't have favorites, but I do have favorites, one of my favorite artifacts that we have in our collection is this Torah jewelry. It's um so the Torah is the Old Testament of the Bible that in the Jewish tradition people read it um on a weekly basis with the stories of the Bible, and it's often dressed with ornate jewelry on the outside. And we have some of this jewelry, little silver bells and a and a little eagle, that um came and were donated by a survivor. He went back to his town where he was from as a child. He escaped after Kristalma in 1938 and came as a refugee to the United States. But he went back to the town where he was from when the mayor was honoring the Jewish community that was killed and lived in the town. And an old woman came up to him and said, You probably don't remember me, but we were school children together. And she said, I've been holding on to something that I have kept for decades. And it was a little box, and he opened it up and it was this Torah jewelry, these ornaments. And he said, Where did you get these? She said, Well, the night after Kristalnoch, the next morning, I went into the ashes where they took, they had taken everything out of the synagogue, the Torah, all of the prayer books and everything, and burned it in the town square. She went in and rescued this Torah jewelry, and she held on to it for decades. She put herself, her life at risk, and then she held on to it. So when I show students the Torah jewelry, it's an opportunity to engage with them in a conversation of what does resistance look like? What do acts of courage look like? And how do we remember with responsibility? Kind of going back to my tagline of remembering with responsibility. And So these artifacts and our center will have these incredible artifacts on display. And we have difficult items as well, like a Hitler youth jacket, probably for a five-year-old child. And I'll bring that out in a classroom visit. And I'll have a conversation and say, how old do you think the child was that wore this jacket? Do you think they knew what these symbols meant? They know the world around them. And we have really interesting conversations. And I'll say, does anyone here have a younger brother or sister or cousin who's this age? And it gives an opportunity, I don't believe in simulation at all, but it gives an opportunity for these young students to think about it's real. And there were real decisions that were made by people who were adults and by people who were children. And what is our role today with a person being bullied and harassed next to you? How do you want to be involved? What do you want? How do you want history to remember? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Yeah. Wow. That's um, thank you for that overview. I think uh I can't wait to come out to San Francisco and see when the center opens.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

When when are you aiming to we're gonna open in 2029? So come out, we'll invite you to the Riving Tent.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

2029, a couple more years.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

I really do want to go see it.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Yeah. We would love to have you. We would love to have you. And the opportunity that many students around the country who may have taken field trips to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, taken field trips to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, they'll now have the opportunity in Northern California to visit us.

SPEAKER_00 45:30

Yeah. I went to um have you seen the Holocaust uh memorial in Berlin? Have you visited that? Yes, there's many, but the one with the pillars. Yeah, the one with the pillars, and you feel super disoriented walking through this space. All the pillars are different heights, different sizes, and the the floor, your the sidewalk that that you're walking on is uneven and it's supposed to give you this sense of just being totally disoriented. I thought that was I thought that was really moving and in an interesting way to try to put people in a position of feeling disoriented by the whole experience. So the experience of being in a center as the one you've described, where you're taking the center in in 2029 and the different artifacts and points of reference. Uh, you know, I look forward to seeing how that continues to tell the story and and um, you know, commemorate, you know, pay tribute to the people who who went through that experience, but also to remind people that, you know, they were people, it really happened, and we don't want to see anything like that happen again. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:43

And it's a point for us to also expand the way we're telling the story. As we talked about at the beginning of our conversation, our message won't end in 1945. We will be talking about, you know, what became of these survivors in their lives and how they contributed to our society and who are Jewish people today, and that Jews are not a monolith, and that people are very diverse, and we don't know that much about the people who sit next to us on the school bus. But we should lead with curiosity and find our points of connection. So we're excited and inspired to help expand the way we're telling that story. It's not the way that you and I learned about the Holocaust when we were in elementary and middle school. Yeah, for sure. Things have developed and changed, and we're we're proud to be helping to lead the way and to also find those patterns of history to help us understand that this is, I don't believe in a hierarchy of suffering. I believe deeply that each story has a purpose and should have a voice. And that is that's the way we teach, whether we have 30 minutes with someone or we have three weeks with someone. That message comes through on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

So, what gives you hope?

SPEAKER_01 47:53

What gives me hope? What gives me hope are the, you know, the hundred plus teachers that join me during their summer vacation to learn, challenge themselves, and bring the lessons back to their classroom. What gives me hope are the survivors that have the courage to go to their darkest place and to open up and share testimony with the students that will remember it for years and maybe they'll meet them again on an airplane in the future. What gives me hope are the young people? Um, I'll tell you one last story about um a young man, his name is Jaden, and he was a university student and studied with us in a fellowship over the course of an academic year. And Jaden revealed so much about himself and what this work did for him over the course of his work with us. He talked a lot, he's a he's a man of color and talked a lot about the racism that his grandmother endured and how he found so many points of connection about the strength and wisdom of the survivors he worked with at the Holocaust Center and his own grandmother's story that he could see the points of connection. He's a young man that has been studying Mandarin, and he was able to help translate some of the documents of the Jews that fled through Shanghai, and he revealed so much that we didn't know about some of the items in our artifacts. And he's an incredible young man, and I continue to stay in touch and hear from him from time to time, and the other students that have just continued to make an imprint on my heart. Listen, my work involves often writing grants late into the night and you know, trying to balance our budget and all of the different aspects of my role that are not that exciting to the outside world, but it's the students, their courage to face a very challenging history and to create opportunities to bring light into the world. That's what gives me help.

SPEAKER_00 49:46

So I want to bring us to the end of the discussion and ask you if people feel moved to donate to the giving circle here on the Do Good on Purpose podcast. What would their donation support at your center?

SPEAKER_01 49:59

Thank you for asking. I feel extremely honored to be in a position where I don't say no to schools. We have the opportunity to say yes to schools, to teachers, to families in crisis when they reach out to us for support and help. We don't pull things off the shelf in order to respond to a request quickly. And it's through the donations of individuals who wish to write a check for $36, $360, $36,000, whatever is in their capacity that allows us to say yes and not say no, so that we can continue to support our schools and our districts and to help us, you know, build this new center brick by brick and create a space for the future because we all need to remember with responsibility. That's not just me. I mean, it was me as the fifth grader who read everything in the library and was able to follow a passion that I had into a career. But I'm building this space for my own children. I'm building this space for my great great grandchildren that have not yet come. And to think about all the students and school districts in California that I have not yet had a chance to connect with. We want to reach them. We want to be able to continue to say yes and without pause, meet their needs and support their challenges as best we can.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Morgan Blumschneider, thank you so much for joining me today. I've learned so much. Can't wait to see the center in 2029. Everything you're doing to not forget what happened and use it as a way to remind people that hate shouldn't exist in any form, no matter where you're from, no matter what you believe in, I think is incredibly inspirational and needed in this moment. So thank you so much for being with me.

SPEAKER_01 51:47

Thank you, Dorothy. I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode on the Do Good on Purpose podcast. And if today's conversation inspired you, please consider supporting the work through the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle, which is linked in the show notes. And if you really enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. Share it with someone who believes in building a better world because change rarely happens by accident. It happens when people decide to do good on purpose.