Eighty-eight years ago, the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of antisemitic violence in Germany.
They arrested hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and killed nearly 100. They also destroyed synagogues and vandalized thousands of Jewish homes and businesses.
The riot on the night of Nov. 9, 1938, became known as Kristallnacht or "Night of Broken Glass."
It's a reference to shattered glass from store windows that littered streets.
On Nov. 9, the Jewish Federation of Sarasota will present a lecture with noted Holocaust educator Brendan Murphy of the Bearing Witness Institute at Marist College.
He said confronting antisemitism requires more than telling people it's wrong.
"We have to, for example, ask questions like, 'Where does antisemitism come from,'" he said. "How did these ideas develop? How were they passed from one person to the next or one generation to another?"
Murphy’s presentation explores the ideologies that fueled Jewish persecution.
He said that to understand the Holocaust, people must first understand its historical roots.
"What was central to the Holocaust is this collapse of democracy, the rise of the dictatorship, and you have this complete Nazi control of education, the media, the police, the courts. It had a kind of radicalizing effect," he continued.
Murphy is Catholic and works to build bonds between Jewish and Christian communities.
"When we better begin to understand another person's religious traditions, then something really transformative happens," he said.
Over time, Murphy said he came to believe Holocaust education is incomplete without confronting centuries of Christian anti-Jewish teaching and the transformation in Catholic teaching ushered in by Nostra Aetate, the landmark 1965 Vatican declaration that repudiated antisemitism and affirmed a new relationship with Jews.
Murphy's lecture, "Dark Centuries, New Beginnings," is at The Ora in Sarasota at 6:30 p.m. on Monday.
Meanwhile, The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg also hosts its annual Kristallnacht Commemoration on Monday to honor victims.
