Against the backdrop of the horrific invasion of Ukraine and continuing antisemitic attacks across the United States, state Sen. Anna Kaplan, a leading advocate for increased Holocaust education in New York’s schools, is bringing the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Courage to Remember” exhibition on the Holocaust to the state capitol.

The exhibition (on view March 22-25) opens in Albany days after the NYPD reported a 400 percent spike in antisemitic hate crimes in New York City over the month of February.

This exhibition has additional relevance amid the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin has fabricated, as a pretext for Russia’s invasion and unleashing one of the worst humanitarian crises since World War II, that he must “de-Nazify” the Ukraine (despite the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew and his family are Holocaust survivors). Russian attacks have been directed against the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial honoring some 34,000 Jews massacred at the site and houses of worship, along with hospitals, kindergartens, schools and shelters, even the food warehouses. Some 10 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, whole cities and villages decimated.

The “Courage to Remember” exhibition not only serves as a memorial to the past and all those victims, Kaplan notes, but also re-enforces what could transpire if the evils wrought by tyrants are left unchecked.

But you have to wonder why “remembering” takes “courage.”

America, caught up in the Critical Race Theory controversy (should we teach the facts of American Indian genocide and the enslavement of millions of human beings as foundational to the development our nation?), has seen antisemitism, a perennial facet of American society, brought out of the fringes into the mainstream of American society and politics. This was largely the work of former President Donald Trump, who delighted in support from the KKK, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys.

“There are good people on both sides,” he said of the rightwing demonstration in Charlottesville. “Stand back and stand by” he told the Proud Boys during the 2020 presidential debate. “We love you,” he said, emboldening and legitimizing the Confederate flag-carrying, Auschwitz T-shirt-wearing Jan. 6 insurrectionists seeking to re-install him to office.

The Anti Defamation League finds 100 extremists under the Trump banner running for office in 32 states, a dozen of them outright members of extremist groups and some who are already in Congress, like Marjorie “Jewish Lasers” Taylor Greene (who hails Putin).

The Jewish publication, The Forward, found 1,455 monuments, streets and schools around the world that glorify Nazis and their collaborators – including 26 in the United States (Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin). (See: https://forward.com/news/481224/the-many-monuments-that-still-honor-fascists-nazis-and-murderers-of-jews/)

Antisemitism, a useful tool of both the extreme right and extreme left (anti-Israel), has fueled a horrifying surge in hate crimes against American Jews. Some 63 percent of American Jews say they have experienced or know someone who has experienced an antisemitic attack, while 59 percent of American Jews have said they don’t feel safe, according to the ADL. FBI statistics show that nearly 60 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States are directed at Jews, though they are a mere 2 percent of the population.

“There’s always been a lunatic fringe, but now it is in the forefront, the mainstream,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League and author of “It Can Happen Here,” who participated in a Blank Slate Media town hall on Feb. 17.

It’s not just the right wing. It’s also the progressive left, who have embraced the Palestinian cause to instigate animus to the Jewish state and from that incite attacks on American Jews on the street and on college campuses – Tufts, Duke, USC, Michigan – often violently. A left-leaning, climate-activist group withdrew from a rally for DC statehood because the National Council of Jewish Women was participating.

Antisemitism isn’t just a Jewish problem in America – it is a sign of decay of our society.

By the time of the Holocaust, Jews had lived in Germany for 1,700 years, but it took only 10 years between Hitler’s democratic election as chancellor and the Final Solution.

Greenblatt related how he opens his book by describing the town where his paternal grandfather was born and raised. “When he was a young man – before the rise of the Third Reich and the Nazi death machine – he never could have imagined that. He never could have imagined that the only country he ever knew would turn on him, regard him as an enemy of the state, slaughter his entire family, his network of friends and force him to come to this country.”

Indeed, who could imagine 6 million massacred, including 1.5 million children, whole villages emptied of Jews? Who could have imagined the entire governmental structure, law enforcement being organized and complicit in genocide?

“I don’t think it unthinkable as a Jew that my grandchildren may not be born here, that my country, the only country I have known, loved, would change so that my family might have to flee,” Greenblatt says. “My history as a Jew – not theory, ancient text, my grandfather’s story, my wife’s story – shows it could happen here. The only way to stop it is to roll up our sleeves and get engaged.”

David Harris, chief executive officer of American Jewish Committee and son of Holocaust survivors, writes about why, 77 years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust holds such important lessons today:

The Holocaust did not emerge from thin air. Rather it came after centuries of antisemitism — from blood libels to expulsions, from ghettos to inquisitions, from pogroms to forced conversions — on European soil.

Prior to Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, Germany had experienced 14 years of democracy in a country widely viewed as among the most educated, cultured, and developed. But Harris points out that democracy proved fragile, culture did not stop savagery and education proved no deterrent to brutality. Those sobering lessons mustn’t be forgotten, he cautions.

Appeasement of Nazi Germany, tried by Britain and France in the 1930s, proved a failure. “Not only did it not stop the German juggernaut, but instead encouraged it to become even more predatory towards Jews and, more generally, other European nations,” he says.

“In our pluralistic world, where hate is too often a prominent feature, the Holocaust’s slippery slope serves as a permanent reminder and warning of humankind’s capacity for evil,” Harris writes.

That is why it is all the more chilling to see the same themes, the same patterns repeat.

Now we have 3.5 million Ukrainians – plus millions more internally displaced – who never could have imagined on Feb. 23 what would befall them at the hands of a solitary maniacal despot on Feb. 24. And we have a Putin-wannabe, who stokes hate-mongering extremists, chipping away at American democracy, inclusion and rule of law.

Yes, “it can happen here.”