I am a Holocaust survivor.
While graduates of New York University and their families gathered this month for commencement exercises in Washington Square Park, not far from where I live, they saw a sight that had nothing to do with joy and hard work over the course of four years.
Someone had climbed the night before onto the roof of the Steinhardt Building and raised a flag in the shape of an Israeli one, with the NYU torch inside the Star of David. Flanking it were two swastikas. It flew above the heads of celebrating families for roughly 15 minutes before campus safety took it down.
I am an artist who believes in free expression. But under no circumstance do I believe that symbols of hate can become something normal. As a proud Jewish woman, hate has no place in the Big Apple.
The Steinhardt flag did not appear in a vacuum. It appeared at the end of a year in which on-campus antisemitism at NYU and other colleges across this country has been allowed to go unchecked. No one yet knows who raised it, but every student who walked under it without recognizing what they were seeing is a reason that Holocaust education cannot wait.
With the approach of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, it’s clear that schools in this city—from elementary to institutions of higher learning—must adopt a policy that requires Holocaust education and tolerance training for all students. Unfortunately, young people in this era need to be reminded that the use of a swastika to make a political argument is not OK.
I know how this happens because I have watched it before in slow motion in another century. It doesn’t begin with a flag on a roof. It begins with murmurings on campus. It begins when graffiti gets painted over without accountability, when a stolen mezuzah becomes a campus footnote, when a swastika or other antisemitic symbols scratched into a library wall becomes one more thing to clean up.
Now, a flag with two swastikas has flown over a building named for a Jewish family on the night before graduation. That is not a string of isolated incidents. That is a pattern, and a pattern is a warning.
I saw a few comments from students condemning this incident, which is a relief. But I am asking—no, I am imploring—faculty and student leaders to make sure that this never happens again.
Fortunately, The Blue Card has been there for me, as well as for thousands of other survivors, for as long as we have been in this city. We are often called upon to speak in classrooms to share our stories of survival. But there are fewer of us every year.
Soon, there will be no one left who can stand in a classroom and tell a first-grader or even a college student what that flag actually meant in our lives. The people deciding what to remember and what to allow will be the people who never had to live it.
I survived because strangers refused to be bystanders. The least we owe the next generation is the same refusal. Most of all, I will be continuing to give talks to students and others in my effort to ensure that this new generation can learn such crucial lessons, which seem all the more relevant today.
