If we want to feel safer, billboards won’t help. We must double down on what makes us special — our loyalty to one another, our fierce sense of identity, our confidence and trust in one another.

The term ‘memory worker’ is not one you are likely to know, but memory workers are all around you. They are voluntary representatives of those victimized by violence or persecution.

Seventy-seven years after the end of the Shoah, the Nazis are long gone, but we were all there to celebrate a new Jewish family being formed. If there was ever an act of revenge, this was it.  

What we are seeing unfolding in Ukraine should be of no surprise. It is an old school extension of the twentieth century. Putin is reprising Stalin’s playbook in Ukraine: occupy it, use its resources, repress its people, make them feel just Russian enough that they don’t fight back.

We celebrate them not for surviving; we celebrate them for their humility, their resilience, and their generosity.

Encountering “Mother Fletcher” and “Mother Randle”—107-year-old Viola Fletcher and 106-year-old Lessie Beddingfiled Randle—this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, gave an entirely new meaning to the word “survivor.”