Adam Strom and his sister Rachel Fan Stern Strom reflect on their mother’s legacy and actions to help young people preserve democracy. Margot Stern Strom was the founder and leader of Facing History and Ourselves. Adam is Director of Reimagining Migration and a NIOT Board Member.
We are Margot Stern Strom's children. As a revolutionary teacher, and then as co-founder and long time Executive Director of Facing History and Ourselves, she was a moral north star for so many educators, philanthropists, and students. She believed that studying stories of the past – be they looking at the segregated South or the Holocaust – would allow students to examine the everyday moral choices they make. Today, as we witness growing tensions between the president, the courts, and Congress, alongside attacks on immigrants, and the roll back of policies and programs designed to support equal opportunities and viewpoints for all people, we're reminded that while it is all too human to want to sit back and find a place of ease, for a healthy democracy, citizens must make active choices to speak up, even if that puts them in a place of “dis ease”. (Mom would often muse how the word disease sounds like to be in “dis ease” – so no wonder it is hard to speak up).
Our mother never positioned herself as a “moral guide.” She was a teacher, and a learner. As a teacher, she was very clear about maintaining the line between education and advocacy. When asked directly about her position on an issue, she often went into teacher mode. Instead of providing her “answer,” she would return with question after question, probing the questioner to get to their own “answer”. Because, for her, how one thought was oftentimes more important than what one thought. That said, she was very clear that we all have a role to play in standing up for democratic values. She encouraged people to be upstanders, when being a bystander might feel like an easier choice.
This week is the second anniversary of her passing. We keep hearing again and again from people who miss her voice. They want to know, what would Margot do? She warned us that it is arrogant to be too confident in what you would do in a particular situation until you have actually walked “in someone else’s shoes,” which she drew from one of her touchstone texts, To Kill A Mockingbird. Democracy, she warned, is fragile. People often asked what she meant when she said that history is not inevitable. She'd explain that history is made by the choices people make. A former Facing History communications director, Anne Burt, summed it up well when she coined the phrase, "people make choices, choices make history." So, we asked ourselves: What principles would she lean on to inform her choices in this moment:
1. All Children Are Precious. It didn't matter to her if they were Jewish, Palestinian, undocumented, boys, girls, black, white, Asian, Latin, African, or this mix we call American. They were all to be valued. Her emotional response to children's suffering never wavered. Our mother literally cried at the news and failed to understand why we all didn't cry when young people suffered.
2. Education Matters: Our mother felt her teachers betrayed her generation with “silence” – by failing to tell the truth about the past, trivializing the history of the Jim Crow South. Later, in the early days of Facing History, she lost federal funding because grant reviewers, emboldened by Phyllis Schlafly, found the program "Unfair to Nazis" and failed to present the perspectives of the Ku Klux Klan. In one of the last conversations we had about education, she told Adam that she feared that with false accusations about critical race theory and diversity and equity programs, we were returning to that moment. She was prescient.
3. Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport. Our mother loved the Spirit of Liberty Speech, given by Judge Learned Hand in 1944. He explained, "I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it." Democracy, therefore, was not just about voting, it was a spirit that was reflected in everyday encounters, some big and some small. We have choices, difficult ones that come with consequences, but if we fail to uphold the spirit of democracy, we will lose it. This is why she felt that teaching about the Holocaust had to begin by understanding the fall of the democracy in Weimar Germany. She couldn't stand it when people talked about the Nazis overthrowing democracy without first acknowledging that they came to power through democratic means.
4. Antisemitism Does Not Exist in Isolation: Our mother often talked about antisemitism as a bellwether or a canary in a coalmine. For her, the treatment of Jews was deeply connected to discrimination against others, whether they were black, gay, trans, Muslim, Christian, disabled. This is something she learned growing up in the segregated South, where racism against Blacks distorted democracy. We received a lot of hate mail as children, some of it was from Nazis and Klan members. Some of it came from Holocaust deniers. The letters terrified her, but didn't stop her.
Our Passover seders linked antisemitism, and stories of the exodus to African American history and contemporary oppression. Our seders were loud, and we cannot remember one where she did not invite some local college student she met at the grocery store or at a talk she was giving. The conversations during and after the seder were about the uniqueness and universality of antisemitism and all forms of prejudice. From the particularities of antisemitism, we learned how prejudice worked and how it was connected to other forms of hatred. We knew that Dr. King had plans to join his friend, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for a Seder in April 1968, but he never made it. He was slain by an assassin's bullet just a few days before Passover.
Margot would be furious that accusations of antisemitism are being employed, often cynically, by those who themselves embrace anti-semites, as a smokescreen to justify anti-democratic acts. At a time when serious scholars warn that antisemitism is on the rise, this is very dangerous.
One of her favorite poems to teach was The Hangman by Maurice Ogden. a powerful allegory about the dangers of remaining silent in the face of injustice, as it depicts townspeople who fail to speak out when “others” are targeted by a mysterious hangman, only to find that their complacency ultimately leads to their own demise when no one remains to stand up for them. Jewish Poet, Emma Lazarus, the author of the New Colossus, the poem on the Statue of Liberty, wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Dr. King later popularized this sentiment in his powerful letter from Birmingham Jail.
Our mother's warnings that when good people do not stand up and speak out for democratic values, they cede the space to others with mal intent could sometimes feel exhausting, particularly when you just wanted an ice cream. And, we are reluctant to speak for her, but our colleagues and friends are right, we need Margot right now. We are not sure what she'd do, but we know that she would not be silent, and in particular, she would not let antisemitism be used as an excuse to dismiss the spirit of liberty.
As we mark the second anniversary of her passing, perhaps what Margot would do is remind us that our individual actions matter profoundly. The foundation of her work was her core belief that it is dangerous to resolve complex problems by dividing the world into “us” and “them” and then blaming “them” for all of the ills of society. She would challenge each of us to examine the story we are writing with our choices, to ask ourselves if we are upholding that spirit of liberty in our daily encounters.
In a world increasingly divided, Margot would urge us to create spaces where difficult conversations can happen, where multiple perspectives can be heard without surrendering our core democratic values. For in the end, she believed that education was never just about learning history—it was about deciding what role we would play in making it. In her memory, let us choose to be upstanders for democracy, for children everywhere, and for the understanding that our differences need not divide us but can strengthen the tapestry of our shared humanity.