What Hatred Failed to Destroy
By Glenn Fishkin
Recently, The Charlotte Jewish News asked me why I created Voices Against Hate. At the time, I explained in detail why storytelling matters. However, preserving stories raises yet another question: What are we supposed to do with them?
If memory only reminds us of what went wrong, it can leave us frightened. But it can also give us perspective, teaching us what to watch for, when to speak and, equally important, why despair is not the only possible response. As another anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, approaches, this very distinction is especially important.
The brutality of the attack horrified me. What also stays with me is what followed: the speed with which denial, distortion, justification, conspiracy theories and overt antisemitism appeared. Ideas and language that once seemed confined to society’ s margins moved rapidly through social media, public demonstrations, classrooms, campuses, city streets and everyday conversations. Like many, I felt each disturbing incident viscerally.
Eventually, I understood that reaction alone was not enough. I returned repeatedly to one question: What could I do? The answer arrived in the work that has defined my career: listening to
people and telling their stories.
From that realization, Voices Against Hate took shape. My initial objective was to preserve firsthand Holocaust testimony while it can still be recorded from eyewitnesses. Yet the scope soon widened. We needed to bring those memories into conversation with contemporary experiences of antisemitism. Namely, to teach how hatred takes root and spreads, and how individuals as well as communities resist it to rebuild.
The need for awareness is real. Jewish history does not permit us to dismiss warning signs simply because we would prefer not to see them. Hatred rarely arrives fully formed or announces where it intends to lead. It advances through lies, scapegoating and dehumanization, then gains ground as what once seemed unacceptable becomes familiar. It grows when people excuse it, rationalize it or remain silent.
But vigilance is not the only lesson Jewish history offers. The more survivor testimony we record, the more I understand that every interview contains two stories: what hatred destroyed, and what hatred failed to destroy. The first paints a picture of utter devastation: families separated, communities erased,
The Charlotte Jewish News- October 2026- Page 25
childhoods stolen, millions of lives taken, and countless others changed forever. It is defined by those details the survivors carry with them: a parent’ s face, a final conversation, a sound, a smell, a room, a journey or a goodbye they did not know would be their last.
We have an obligation to hear that story without softening it. Memory loses its meaning if we turn suffering into something abstract or comforting for comfort’ s sake. But there is another story present in those interviews. It is there in the very fact that a survivor is sitting in front of our camera decades later, speaking in a voice hatred was meant to silence. It is present in the families many survivors built, the communities they helped create and the children and grandchildren who now carry their memories forward. It is present in every classroom they visit, every audience they address and every person who learns what happened by looking into the eyes of someone who was there.
That does not undo what was lost. Nothing can. Nor does survival prove that everything eventually works out. Jewish history offers no such reassurance. Too many people were murdered. Too many others looked away. Too many families and communities never had the opportunity to rebuild. Hope is not the same as reassurance, which tells us that everything will be fine. Hope makes no such promise. Hope is the conviction that the outcome is not predetermined and that human choices still matter.
People resisted. People rescued others at enormous personal risk. Survivors began again in unfamiliar countries. They built families, synagogues, schools, businesses and communities. They became teachers and witnesses. They told their stories even when doing so required them to reopen memories they had spent years trying to contain. They did not do this because history had given them reason to believe life would be easy but instead because hatred had already taken enough. And that is one of the perspectives survivor testimony can offer us now.
It would be easy to look at the current rise in antisemitism and conclude we are heading somewhere very dark. We should not minimize those dangers but neither should we surrender to the belief that catastrophe is unavoidable. History is a warning, not a verdict. That is why memory must lead to participation, which does not always require a grand gesture. It can mean challenging a conspiracy theory rather than allowing it to pass uncorrected. It can mean refusing to accept dehumanizing language simply because it is directed at a group other than our own. It can mean checking information before sharing it, listening to someone’ s experience before judging it or speaking when silence would be more comfortable. It can also mean helping people understand history was shaped by human decisions and that the present is, too.
All this is what Voices Against Hate is ultimately trying to achieve. As we mark the third October 7th anniversary, let us do more than remember. Together, let’ s act.
Voices Against Hate uses film and storytelling to preserve Holocaust testimony, document contemporary lived experience, and help future generations recognize antisemitism before it becomes normalized.
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