DECEMBER 2025—It was in November of 1938 that the Nazis unleashed their fury against Germany’s Jews. In a two-day pogrom, they destroyed 200 synagogues, ransacked 7,500 Jewish-owned shops and sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. To add insult to the injury, the Nazi regime in December of 1938 then ordered Jews to pay fines totaling a billion marks for the destruction visited upon them on what came to be called “Kristallnacht”—the night of broken glass.

Eighty-seven Decembers later, attacks on Jewish people are on the rise all around the world.

Scourge
In Britain, there have been 1,521 antisemitic incidents this year. A synagogue attack this year in Manchester killed two worshippers. The atmosphere is so poisonous in Britain that fans of an Israeli soccer team were not allowed to attend a match in Birmingham due to what authorities called “safety concerns.” In other words, authorities in Britain, a supposedly liberal democracy, are unable or unwilling to do what’s necessary to ensure the safety of law-abiding people who happen to be Jewish.

In France, there were 1,570 antisemitic acts in 2024. A Holocaust museum was desecrated this year. Sixty-five percent of all attacks related to religion in France target Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum.

Even in Germany, where citizens and government are the most vigilant against the scourge of antisemitism, there has been a surge in anti-Jewish incidents. There were 5,000 antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2023, more than 6,230 incidents in 2024, and at least 1,900 in the first half of 2025, according to German officials.

Sadly, America is not immune to the scourge. Nearly 20 percent of American Jews were victims of assault, threat or harassment due to their Jewish identity over the last year. The situation is so dire that 14 percent of American Jews have developed a plan to flee the country.

A 2024 study found that 43 percent of Jewish college students in America avoid expressing their views about Israel on campus due to fears of antisemitism; 35 percent report having experienced antisemitism during their time on campus; and 32 percent report that faculty have promoted antisemitism and/or fueled a learning environment that is hostile to Jews.

Indeed, the hostility to, and outright hatred of, Jews on America’s campuses exploded after the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel in 2023: A UC-Irvine professor called the Hamas attack “a gift from Allah.” A UC-Davis professor urged her Twitter followers to target Jewish journalists and their “kids in school.” A Mudd College professor described the Hamas savagery as “real heroism.” A lecturer at City University of New York used the attacks as an opportunity to tell Jews to flee Israel and “Go back to Yiddish land.” A Cornell professor called the latter-day pogrom “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Two University of Arizona professors actually questioned whether Hamas—which, in its charter, calls for Israel to be “obliterated”—is antisemitic.

Add it all up, and it seems that America, the West, indeed much of the civilized world has forgotten the lessons of Kristallnacht, when, as President Ronald Reagan once recounted, “The streets of Germany were covered in a film of crystals, created by the broken glass of Jewish synagogues, schools, homes, and stores, marking the headlong rush of Europe toward the abyss which led to the darkest years of the eclipse of civilization. In those nightmare years, one third of the Jewish people were destroyed in the most terrifying Holocaust ever seen in the history of mankind.”

Reagan and his generation understood from firsthand experience that hate-fueled words and ideas can lead to hate-fueled actions. And if left unchecked and unanswered, those ideas and actions can lead to the most awful of destinations.

“It’s incumbent upon us all,” Reagan intoned, “to remember the tragedy of Nazi Germany, to recall how a fascist regime conceived in hatred brought a reign of terror and atrocity on the Jewish people and on the world, and to pledge that never again will the decent people of the world permit such a thing to occur. Never again can people of conscience overlook the rise of antisemitism in silence.”

Responsibility
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated,” Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson declared at the outset of the Nuremberg trials, which sought to expose the Nazi regime’s crimes, to mete out some measure of justice and to set a standard for future generations to follow.

It was a worthy and necessary effort, but today’s generations are clearly failing to live up to that standard.

Incredibly, 63 percent of Americans in Generation Y (born between 1981 and 1996) and Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) don’t know that 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime. More than 10 percent of those generational cohorts say they’ve never heard about the Holocaust.

As history and humanity move ever further from the Holocaust, as the generation that ended it passes away, the responsibility and obligation of remembering what happened on Kristallnacht and in the death camps falls to you and me.

I try to meet that obligation, I use the word “try” because I know my contributions are meager compared to the heroic efforts of others, in the courses I teach as an adjunct professor and in the articles I write. I am motivated not only by the enormity and evil of the Holocaust itself, but by the words and example of an American general and one of his soldiers.

Before he became president, General Dwight Eisenhower was commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. In his memoirs, Eisenhower recalled seeing his “first horror camp” on April 12, 1945. He noted that some of his subordinates “were unable to get through the ordeal.” But Eisenhower forced himself to see “every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’…I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures.”

Eisenhower wanted to “leave no room for cynical doubt” about what the Nazi regime had done.

On April 25, 1945, less than two weeks after his first encounter with the horror camps, Eisenhower issued a charge to a group of subordinate officers, U.S. lawmakers and journalists: “Your responsibilities, I believe, extend into a great field, and informing the people at home of things like these atrocities is one of them…The barbarous treatment these people received in the German concentration camps is almost unbelievable. I want you to see for yourself and be spokesmen for the United States.”

With an exquisite sense of human nature, Eisenhower knew it was easy to discount or dismiss what some stranger or historian reported; it was quite another thing to hear a son, sweetheart, husband, father—or in my case, a grandfather—describe the camps and the bodies, the walking skeletons and the awful smell, the death and the nightmare.

My grandfather helped liberate the death camp at Dachau. Here’s what he said about it: “We moved in with the 101st, and we occupied that area. I saw firsthand the trenches with people laid out…the furnaces and all that. There were some mentions in the Stars and Stripes. But I personally didn’t know anything about it until we liberated Munich and Dachau,” he soberly recalled before his death in 2002. “This was an attempt to absolutely wipe out a people.”

The Holocaust, thus, was brought home and made real for the American people by American GIs like my grandfather.

But his generation is all but gone, replaced by an age of selfie narcissism and historical amnesia. Given the awful enormity of what Hitler did, given the sacrifice Eisenhower’s men made to close the murder mills, given what Hamas and Hezbollah have tried to do, given the Hitlerite designs of the regime in control of Iran, given the nightmares my Grandpa Eason and Grandpa Dowd had to live with in their time, the least you and I can do in our time is speak the truth about this dark chapter in human history. As Reagan said, “It’s incumbent upon us all.”