If passed, Minnesota would join twenty-two other states with similar policies, but with two significant differences. First, unlike most states, our proposed mandate would provide funding for educator training. This would ensure teachers from across the state have equitable access to training and resources regardless of where they live. Second, the language in Minnesota’s proposal is more inclusive than other states, listing Black and Indigenous genocides. Specifically, the language includes “Indigenous dispossession, removal, and genocide.” This legislation would be the first state in the country to include Indigenous genocide. 

The Senate has already introduced the bill, having its first hearing on Monday, March 6th in the Education Policy Committee. In addition to written statements from CHGS advisory board members Dr. Sheer Ganor and Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico, I spoke briefly to the committee about the importance of this bill for Minnesota teachers. I was joined by Luda Anastazievsky of the Ukrainian American Community Center and Kristin Thompson, founder of the Humanus Network and former Education Program Coordinator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

My statement is below:

When Dr. Stephen Feinstein created our Center in 1997, it was among the first Centers dedicated to studying the Holocaust and genocides in the country. Dr. Feinstein envisioned a research center that could nurture the needs of faculty and students at the University of Minnesota and respond to the growing number of educators across the state looking for resources for their classrooms. Since then, the Center has been at the forefront of preserving the memory of genocide and raising awareness through the development of teaching materials and workshops.

Throughout my near decade with the Center, I’ve had the privilege of working with numerous communities whose legacies are tainted by the legacies of genocide. A paramount concern for all of these communities is the desire to teach Minnesotans about their histories. As one community leader told me, “Genocide is woven into the fabric of Minnesota.” 

He’s right. Over the last five decades, tens of thousands of foreign-born people have found a safe home in Minnesota after fleeing their homelands in the wake of violence and even genocide. Since the 1970s, Khmer, Hmong, Somali, Bosniak, and most recently, Ukrainians have found sanctuary in our state. These numbers don’t factor in groups like the Armenians, Jews, or earlier waves of Ukrainians who came to Minnesota in the early twentieth century in the face of persecution and violence in their homelands. It also doesn’t include Minnesota’s Indigenous nations, who have routinely been subjected to genocidal policies in the state since the first treaty in 1805. 

Our teachers speak to this need. At one of our workshops, I was asked by an educator, “These students are in my classes. How can I possibly tell them their history?” This question is supported by surveys we’ve done with educators that point to the lack of resources as the primary reason teachers give for not including the Holocaust or other genocides in their curriculum. Nearly every respondent said including these topics was important to them, yet less than half spent time on the Holocaust. That number drops significantly for other genocides. 

Members of the committee, we cannot escape the legacies of genocide, but we can better equip teachers to address it in their classrooms. A policy that ensures Holocaust & genocide are incorporated in middle and high school is an important first step, but providing funding that supports the development of new resources is critical.

Note: SF 2442 is currently advancing through Senate committees. It is expected to be introduced in the House soon. 

Joe Eggers is the Interim Director of the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

I truly take heart in the manner in which our team has upheld the Center’s strong tradition of outreach to educators and the public at large, affirming the legacy of the Center’s founding director Stephen Feinstein. To that end, it was imperative that we expanded the Center’s resources on the Holocaust and other genocides, including those that occurred on North American soil.  

These past ten whirlwind years have been a time of intense learning for me. I have been touched by survivors and descendants who confided in me their stories of loss and pain, but also resilience and hope. I was privileged to learn from artists whose work illuminated the past in powerful new ways, and from teachers seasoned in engaging creatively, learners with the difficult truths of the histories and lasting legacies of mass violence. In my classes, I was heartened by students who shared their deep convictions in ending hatred and embracing humanity’s fullness.

At the Center our goal has been to construct a platform to support and promote this spirit, knowledge, and skills, facilitating bridges between scholars, students, educators, advocates, and interested audiences community-wide. Our conference this July, Education after Genocide: Shifting Approaches to Conflict, Prevention, and Redress, the culmination of a year of careful planning, stands in tribute to the CHGS approach and philosophy.   After this conference, I am proud to hand the reins of our center to Assistant Director Joe Eggers who will serve for one year as the Interim Director of CHGS. I cannot think of a better fit for this transitional period than Joe, whose professionalism and commitment to the Center´s mission have proven pivotal for countless programs and initiatives. In addition to his many roles, Joe will coordinate the Center´s public programs with the counsel of the Advisory Board and continue providing opportunities for students, faculty, and educators.

I look forward to seeing the Center grow in scope and impact over the next years under new leadership. I am confident that many new opportunities and alliances await. For the upcoming academic year, I was awarded a fellowship to continue my current research in genocide memory studies at the Department of Social Anthropology and the Centro Internacional de Memoria y Derechos Humanos at UNED University in Madrid. Even though I will be based in Europe, I am only an email away and I look forward to advancing the cause of the Center in a different capacity.   The relevance of Holocaust and genocide studies and education to the realities that are unfolding in the US and globally cannot be sufficiently stressed. In the hopeful words of Spanish Buchenwald survivor and acclaimed writer Jorge Semprún:   The world doesn’t have to be unfair or unbearable…we can fix certain things. I still have those illusions, perhaps more than ever.  

Please continue supporting the Center through your engagement, expertise, and material assistance.

Racist anti-Asian and anti-Black attacks and antisemitic assaults are very often perpetrated by the same offenders. Undoubtedly, blind hatred and intolerance are motivators of such heinous acts. The importance of collaboration and solidarity in the face of unabashed hostility cannot be understated and it is heartening when diverse communities unite, rally, and respond with a sense of shared purpose. At the same time, we are aware that antisemitism cannot be fully grasped when merely absorbed and understood as just another form of racism.

In my undergrad course on antisemitism in the Spring semester, students were frequently at a loss when confronted with the complex and contradictory nature of antisemitism. Jews have been despised and attacked for real or imagined religious practices, racialized with other minorities, and put on the bottom of a human hierarchy crafted by pseudoscientific propagandists. They are disliked for their particularism, for embracing Zionism, or for being rootless cosmopolitans. Jews are inferior and corrupted and at the same time resented, perceived as being on top and pulling the strings of power. A flyer posted by Neo-Nazis on our campus not long ago said, “The Jews are destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy.” In this type of delusional hatemongering, Jews are the masterminds of a plot to substitute the White population with people of color. Similarly, the infamous Charlottesville torch-carriers chanted “Jews will not replace us.” 

But the inherent difficulty of the subject matter was not the only source of confusion among my students. Perplexity was heightened by the shortcomings of current anti-racist scholarship and anti-racist initiatives to fully address the multifaceted relation of Jews to White majority society and the pervasive nature of antisemitism. Our colleague James Loeffler couldn’t have put it more clearly in a recent blog post:  “The American reckoning with racism has been painful and necessary; the reckoning with antisemitism has been at best an afterthought.”

We are committed to change this. Together with our colleagues at the Center for Jewish Studies, we will host the virtual symposium “Antisemitism and Racism in a Moment of Reckoning” on November 8th and 9th. How do racism and antisemitism overlap and where do they diverge, and why? What are constructive ways we can better deal with antisemitism in anti-racist scholarship and practice? How have antisemitism and the Jewish experience been included or excluded in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on US campuses?

I am grateful for the dedication and hard work of the Center’s team (Joe Eggers, Meyer Weinshel, Jillian LaBranche, and Sailer) and the support of our affiliated faculty members, without whom we couldn’t bring to you such a breadth of opportunities to learn, grow and engage.

We look forward to seeing you online and on-campus this semester.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

In 2016 we looked carefully at the facts and summarized our concerns about the potential direction of unrestrained incendiary speech and actions. Five years later, despite Trump not being elected President, or maybe precisely because of that, we have now reached the precipice. 

The shocking assault on the Nation’s Capitol should not make us overlook the rage-filled gathering that unfolded simultaneously outside Minnesota’s State Capitol in Saint Paul, which included several Republican lawmakers. These Trump followers were not only decrying the Biden certification, in support of the insurrection of some members of Congress, validating the mob violence inside the Capitol and threatening the Minnesota Governor and other Democratic local officials. They were openly initiating the threat of war and, yes, genocide. The recording of the speech leaves no room for doubt. An unidentified individual preceded the Republican state representatives and local Republican leaders in the rally with the following call to action:

“We cannot move forward; we cannot evolve as a people because we have been choked off by weeds. Weeds of communism, weeds of socialism, weeds of leftist liberals subjecting us, suffocating us. We are a garden that needs to grow. We cannot grow if we have weeds choking us off.” The audience chimes in, shouting: “Kill the root, kill the weeds!” and the speaker closes his rant with: “We need to pull the weeds!”

Let me put things in an even more clear perspective. This is the Us vs. Them vision in its most dangerous and extreme manifestation. There is no room for both. In Modernity and the Holocaust, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explained that eliminating the adversary is a necessary step needed to be taken to reach the end of the road, which is the desired society. Moreover, Bauman warns about a “gardeners vision,” were those creating the garden identify its “weeds,” those groups of people who spoil their design. “All visions of society-as-a-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society’s boundaries”, writes Bauman. But if all these means prove insufficient, he concludes, “they must be killed.”

Elected state officials endorsed a genocidal playbook with their participation in the Minnesota Capitol rally.

As a Saint Paul resident, as the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, as the director of an academic Center whose mission is to investigate and teach the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides, I was left momentarily speechless. I and so many other colleagues across the country have not ceased to point to the unambiguous historical parallelisms and alarming facts when elected officials engage with authoritarian, fascist and Neo-Nazi ideas. Meanwhile, we witness events nationwide unfolding in their grotesque and dreadful manner. Elie Wiesel captured this sense of helplessness in a stirring way. There is something more frightening than the tragedy of a messenger who cannot deliver his message, he said. And that is when the messenger has delivered his message and nothing has changed.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

When I was a youngster back in high school in Madrid I was deeply moved by a drama I read called Biedermann and the Arsonists, by Max Frisch. It is about a citizen who invites two arsonists into his house, even though they signal from the start that they will set fire to it.  

Penned in the 1950s, Frisch’s play has been read as a parable about the complacency and cowardice of the common man that stood by during the rise of Nazism, ignored the crimes of Stalinism in Europe, or buried his head in the sand during the nuclear arms race. What has this to do with our current crisis? Biedermann is a stand-in for the German average citizen who indulges the good life, a contented member of the middle class detached from the reality that surrounds him. Most of us have a bit of Biedermann housed within us. Our beautiful Twin Cities is one of the most livable places in the country… for White citizens, but that wealth, prosperity, and acceptance have never been fully accessible to African American and indigenous neighbors.

My friend and colleague Joachim Savelsberg wrote these compelling lines in a letter to the New York Times last week:

“Expressions of disgust come easily in response to killings of unarmed black men by police. So does upset about lacking judicial responses. Yet, both are only possible in a context in which society and its political representatives tolerate and promote massive structural inequalities and segregation of the disadvantaged in neighborhoods and prisons, delegating to specialized forces the dirty work of keeping these populations in check. Such conditions generate high rates of killing in poverty neighborhoods, police brutality, and police impunity. We must fight these evils by eliminating the roots.”

In other words, the problem will not simply fizzle out because the fires are momentarily quelled. Max Frisch’s ominous subtitle for his play was also a warning: “A lesson without a lesson”. For us, unless we become more attentive to the needs of our communities and work actively in the fight against discrimination, each from our respective positions, dismantling the visible and invisible barriers that fan the flames of racial inequality, we will continue to be burned like Biedermann.

Medical personnel on the frontlines of this pandemic in my home country Spain are succumbing to illness at an astonishing rate. Currently, Spain is hobbled with the highest COVID19 caseload in all of Europe and reportedly ranks only behind the United States worldwide in terms of sheer numbers of those infected. 

The legendary Nobel laureate Albert Camus had extensively researched the “Black Death” and other diseases that had ravaged nations and empires throughout history. He looked at examples in Europe and China. However, his research was also intimately informed by the typhus outbreaks in his own Algeria. His masterpiece The Plague, in his biographer Alice Kaplan’s words, “was inspired by the 1940s—i.e., by the Nazi Occupation. The Plague used the story of a city beset by disease to express a vision beyond the absurd: the possibility of solidarity in the struggle against evil, the power of friendship and community.”

The text serves as a reminder of what is at stake and how our democracies might be altered when we emerge from this crisis. Camus’ novel was above all a response to how European societies reacted when suddenly faced with such a seemingly unstoppable force at their doorstep. The story has been read as an allegory about the reactions of the French people during WWII, ranging from those who collaborated with the Nazi regime to those that courageously decided to resist.

Camus’ underlying message is always relevant but even more so at a time of a global emergency when populations’ fears and anxieties are exploited by leaders who seize the opportunity to weaken democratic institutions that serve as a check to their power. That liberty violations occur in the face of security threats (whether real or imagined) is not new and the German Reichstag (Parliament) fire of 1933 should serve as an unmistakable lesson drawn from the past. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, is now governing by decree, without a predictable deadline to the state’s declared state of emergency. Orban’s party was also able to get a law approved in the Parliament under the guise of combating misinformation, opening the door to the persecution of dissenting journalists. Over the last few weeks, Vladimir Putin has planted Russian cities with thousands of new surveillance cameras. Will these be removed once the pandemic is defeated?  

It goes without saying that not only fragile and emerging democracies, such as those in Eastern Europe, are destabilized by the added threat of an authoritarian drift in the wake of the COVID19 crisis. A recent survey showed that a sizable number of US citizens are willing to consider truncating core civil liberties if it serves to fight this health emergency. For instance, more than 85% polled would consent to ban noncitizens from entering the country and 78% to conscripting health-care professionals to work despite risks to their health.  

Camus understood that unchecked, unquestioned power would spiral out of control like a vicious plague leaving people with no defenses to fight against it. Reading Camus in the times of the present global pandemic teaches us a precious lesson: to be alert and prepared to stand with and up for scientists looking for a cure, for our medical professionals treating the sick, and for the well-being of every person. We should also not lose sight of our support for democratic principles based on compassion and reason over narrow national divisions, xenophobia, and the temptation of authoritarian solutions.

In Spain, a popular tune from the 80s is being revived by confined residents who sing it from apartment balconies and windows: Resistiré (I will resist). It captures the mood of a nation besieged.

Please stay healthy, informed, and engaged.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

This broader initiative of reflecting on the cataclysmic implications of this singular historical event and the lessons that can be applied for a global audience has generated extraordinary interest. Still, it also poses significant challenges in how this tragedy is recounted. There is both faithfulness to preserving the historical specificity of the Shoah (the destruction that befell European Jewry) and a need to broaden how this tragedy is defined to encompass and acknowledge non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. Moreover, the commemorations are sometimes organized to pay respect to all those who have suffered genocides or crimes against humanity. 

We often hear that the only proper and “good” use of the past is for purposes that transcend ethnic, religious, or national barriers. It is the “exemplary memory,” which author Tzvetan Todorov wrote about, which is different from a recollection that does not lead beyond itself, of the affected group. While the January 27th commemorations aim to render the Holocaust or its lessons easily relatable to all people, it ignores an irrefutable sociological axiom. Namely, that all collective memory is essentially group-based since the remembered events happened to individuals in specific groups, and those groups endow that past with a particular meaning. The need to package exemplary and abstract memory to appeal to everyone risks diluting facts that are complex, sometimes uncomfortable, and often resist emotional uplift. 

Historian Enzo Traverso pointed out recently that in the 21st century, the Holocaust is presented as a secular theodicy, a grand moral tale that pits almost pure goodness versus absolute evil. Traverso’s critique is somewhat overblown. Still, he pushes us to look beyond the slogans and the hashtags and to rethink the ways to remember the Holocaust meaningfully.

Last year, while I was on sabbatical in Madrid, I attended the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony that took place in the Spanish Senate. Foreign Minister Josep Borrel recalled in his address that as a child, every Good Friday, he and his friends used to run down the streets of his village in the Catalan Pyrenees with torches and rattles. And they were shouting “a matar jueus!” (kill the Jews). That Easter tradition was nothing other than the theatrical re-enactment of a pogrom. 

Borrel had boldly chosen to bypass the standard watchwords and warnings that typically allows those in attendance to put themselves above it all, at a significant and safe distance from one of the 20th century’s defining tragedies. Instead, he shared his personal memory of a moment where he was closer to the perpetrators than the victims. That lesson cut deep in the audience.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

In Spain, the far-right were also-rans, effectively discredited and shunned in mainstream circles and government affairs since the end of the Francoist period in the mid-1970s. Those days are long gone.

Vox, which promotes itself as the “patriotic alternative,” burst onto the national scene late last year in the elections in the southern region of Andalucía, sending shockwaves through Spanish politics. In the wake of this political upheaval came the general election in April, where the ultranationalist party received just over 10% of votes and won 24 seats in the 350-seat Parliament. That election resulted in no clear majority and plunged the country into another round of voting. In the Nov. 10 election, Vox more than doubled its previous results. Now 52 seats strong, Vox has become the third-largest political force in the country.

Rise is primarily tethered to the Catalan question

What does Vox stand for? And what explains this seismic shift in the Spanish political landscape? Vox shares many ideological traits with other right-wing populist parties in Europe that have gained traction in Austria, Italy, Germany or France — nationalism, anti-immigration, and Islamophobia — but the situation in Spain has its own peculiarities. Whereas most European far-right parties flourished in the wake of the financial crisis or the influx of refugees, Vox’s rapid rise is primarily tethered to the Catalan question. Seizing on growing agitation with regard to these political developments, Vox proposes to abolish regional autonomy and parliaments. This hard-line centralism has resonated strongly among voters after the separatist push in Catalonia and ongoing deadlock and instability in the region. Vox has anointed itself as the true savior of the country’s unity.

While reining in Catalonia is a core element in Vox’s political platform, its anti-migrant rhetoric is also unambiguous. They champion the idea of “Españoles primero” (Spaniards first), and spread falsehoods about a government bent on prioritizing migrants and discriminating against Spanish nationals. Their leaders traffic in familiar conspiracy theories. For instance, Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, likes to attribute Spain’s woes to the Hungarian Jewish philanthropist George Soros. On Twitter, he accused Soros of bankrolling illegal mass immigration (mirroring the myth propagated by populist leaders in Europe and by President Trump in the U.S.). Moreover, Vox points a finger at Soros as a driving force behind Catalan separatism.

Fixation with Muslim immigrants

The arrival of Muslim immigrants in the country is portrayed by Vox as an invasion. This fixation with Muslim immigrants dredges up age-old prejudices, which Vox resurrects for its own warped purposes. The party understands its political quest as a “reconquista” (reconquest), and in an act suffused with symbolism kicked off its April election campaign in Covadonga, in the northern region of Asturias, where the Christian King Don Pelayo defeated Muslim troops in the year 722. “We will not ask for forgiveness for our symbols, even if others are ashamed of them,” Abascal declared on that occasion. Vox’s populist politics call for an emboldened, unapologetic embrace of Spanish and Catholic identity. This identity is also under threat, they claim, due to “gender ideology” and “the dictatorship of progressive politics.”

While some of the elements noted above echo the Franco regime’s (1939-1975) National-Catholic precepts, Vox is neither openly nostalgic about the Franco dictatorship nor cut-and-dried fascist. Also taking its cues from other far-right parties in Europe, Vox is gaining popular support thanks to a strategic facelift that renounces or downplays some of its less socially acceptable ideas. For example, signs of explicit antisemitism and Holocaust denial are monitored closely and addressed by the party’s leadership. For the April elections, Vox nominated as a congressional candidate Fernando Paz, a journalist and right-wing historian who questioned the scope of the Shoah. After this became public, Vox backed down and replaced the candidate. ​

Vox also supports the state of Israel, and here as well the Spanish party falls in line with others in this new wave of European far-right parties (the German AfD, for instance, recently brought forward a motion calling for a complete ban of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, the campaign promoting a boycott of Israel). They see Israel as an ethno-national project to follow, hyping Israel as an implacable stronghold of civilization against the Islamic world.

An aura of legitimacy

Many Spaniards thought that the Franco regime’s demise had immunized the country against the scourge of the far right. This was wishful thinking. Vox can now flex its power in the Parliament, and the party’s positions are being granted an aura of legitimacy. Given the elections outcome, with the win of Socialists, the party will likely have no say in the next government’s formation. Vox, however, already has leverage in influencing policies in Madrid and Andalucía, where the party’s votes were instrumental for the formation of new conservative regional governments led by the center-right People’s Party and Ciudadanos (Citizens). The ball is now in the conservatives’ hands. Will they continue to sugarcoat Vox’s noxious ideas to obtain their support? What price will Spanish society pay for this Faustian bargain?

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.

In keeping with its founding goals, the Center has kept busy over these last six years.  We have welcomed new graduate students, hosted captivating scholars, developed new outreach initiatives, and built a robust intellectual agenda around the vital theme of responses to, remembrance and prevention of genocide and other atrocity crimes. Through lectures, symposiums, courses, exhibits, and teacher workshops we have been privileged to learn, teach, disseminate research findings and expand the community of engaged students, researchers and genocide educators. We have built new partnerships – at the U of M, nationally, and internationally — and nurtured fruitful relationships with community organizations, schools, and cultural institutions in the Twin Cities.

I have immensely enjoyed being part of the exceptional CHGS team, comprised currently of its terrific Program Coordinator, Jennifer Hammer, Outreach Coordinator Joe Eggers, Research Fellow Artyom Tonoyan, and graduate students Miray Philips (Sociology), Brooke Chambers (Sociology) and George Dalbo (School of Education). The team also includes an outstanding board of affiliate faculty members, whose continuous input and collaboration is instrumental in making CHGS a major academic center in the country, distinguished both by its international scope and local sensitivity.

This newsletter celebrates the achievements of the Center in this academic year. I look forward to following the continuation of outstanding work of the Center next year from afar, and to rejoin my colleagues in the fall of 2019.

We are fortunate and grateful that Dr. Klaas van der Sanden, Program Director of the Institute of Global Studies, will serve as CHGS’s interim director during the academic year 2018/2019.

Thank you for the many ways you support the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Alejandro Baer is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.

These fields of dispute are not restricted to the debates over removal of Confederate monuments in the US South. Minnesota recently reverted Lake Calhoun to its original Dakota name Bde Maka Ska, opting for a name that honors the first inhabitants that settled along its shores instead of the former Vice President infamous for his support of slavery. A story from last Friday’s Star Tribune highlights the important changes taking place at the Minnesota Historical Society. Once deeply rooted in telling the white colonial story, it now embraces a fuller, and thus also more unsettling, picture of the state’s history.

Here on campus, the Minnesota Student Association, the official undergraduate student government, is working on a resolution calling for a change to Coffman Memorial Union’s name after it was revealed that Lotus Coffman, a former University President, had supported anti-Semitic and racist segregation policies on campus. This dark side of the University of Minnesota’s history was a focal point of last year’s A Campus Divided exhibit, co-curated by Prof. Riv-Ellen Prell.

The US, the State of Minnesota and our University can no longer look back to their pasts and tell a heroic, one-sided or self-congratulatory story. Its constituents –citizens, students-, include those who were for long invisibilized in such accounts, and they demand representation. As a result, institutions must confront their misdeeds and shameful incidents in order to establish or maintain legitimacy. Dealing with a damaged self-image is not “erasing history,” but it is rather an opportunity to honestly facing and meaningfully engaging with it. Especially, when such revisiting of the past goes beyond purely symbolic gestures and marks the beginning of new negotiations about present conditions. Robert Katz, an employee of the University of Minnesota libraries, stated this clearly in an October 2017 Star Tribune op-ed: “the true value of history is not what it teaches us about the past, but how it informs our judgments in the present.”

Alejandro Baer is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.