Community ·Education · Dialogue
An afternoon with Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt and Brendan Murphy reminded us that history isn’t just something we study — it’s something we’re living through.
When was the last time you thought twice about wearing something that identified you as Jewish? Have you hesitated to hang a mezuzah somewhere visible, or found yourself wondering whether it was really okay to put a kippah on a child? Has someone you know quietly moved a religious symbol from the outside of their door to the inside?
These were the questions posed by Deborah Lipstadt that opened a remarkable afternoon in Atlanta, moderated by Barbara Ellison Rosenblit and featuring also Brendan Murphy*.
These questions weren’t rhetorical. Hands went up around the room. More than they should.
Deborah pointed to something else most of us had probably noticed without fully registering: look at your most recent membership statement from your synagogue or JCC. There may be a new line item on it. A security fee. A safety surcharge. Something that simply didn’t used to be there.
“This is not normal. It’s not normal for a community.” – Deborah Lipstadt
She was right. And that’s exactly why events like this one are important — and why the people who spoke that afternoon have dedicated their lives to doing something about it.
Brendan Murphy and the Bearing Witness Institute
Brendan Murphy has been teaching history at Marist School in Atlanta since 1994. But over the years, what started as a classroom has grown into something much larger. His “History and the Holocaust” seminar — which takes students on international field trips to Munich, Prague, Krakow, and other sites of Holocaust history — became a touchstone for students and families far beyond Marist’s walls. His lectures on antisemitism, delivered at churches, synagogues, and civic organizations across Atlanta and the country, drew audiences that kept growing. People wanted this conversation. They just hadn’t had the right space for it.
That demand eventually led to the founding of the Bearing Witness Institute for Interreligious and Ecumenical Dialogue at Marist School — a national initiative built on the belief that education, dialogue, and friendship across faith communities are not just ideals, but practices that can be taught and scaled.
Murphy’s signature lecture, “Why the Jews?”, has been praised for doing something rare: tracing the deep historical roots of Christian antisemitism with honesty and rigor, in rooms full of Christians, and leaving those rooms more committed to confronting it — not less. He has given the lecture dozens of times in the past year alone, at Catholic parishes, Episcopal cathedrals, Presbyterian churches, United Methodist congregations, and Jewish institutions across Georgia and beyond.
“The Bearing Witness Institute is at its heart an educational initiative. It’s meant to use learning as a way to overcome misunderstandings, to overcome prejudice, to overcome discrimination — and to build allies, to build friends, to build community.” — Brendan Murphy, Founding Director, Bearing Witness Institute
His accolades reflect the breadth of that impact: the Outstanding Educator Award from the Anne Frank Center, the ADL’s Abe Goldstein Human Relations and Unsung Hero Award, twice the Georgia Outstanding Educator of the Year Award from the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, and recognition as Teacher of the Year by the University of Notre Dame. He was recently selected for Leadership Atlanta’s Class of 2025. But what struck the room that afternoon was less the list of awards and more the vision behind them — a vision of Holocaust education not as a lesson about the past, but as a framework for living more justly in the present.
Peace by Piece: from Atlanta to the nation
One of the most powerful initiatives Murphy described is one that began quietly, at the intersection of three Atlanta schools: Marist School (Catholic), The Weber School (Jewish), and Mohammed School of Atlanta (Muslim). The idea was simple and audacious — bring students from these three communities together, not for a debate or a formal dialogue, but just to spend time with one another. To share meals. To sit in each other’s classes. To observe each other’s prayer. To work side by side on a service project and realize they cared about the same things.
They called it Peace by Piece.
The name captures the philosophy. You don’t build understanding between communities in one dramatic gesture. You build it piece by piece — through small, repeated, human encounters that slowly make the unfamiliar feel like family. One student who participated described an afternoon that wasn’t a structured debate but simply a group of teenage girls laughing together, asking questions, connecting through something beautiful and shared.
Now, that model is going national. In collaboration with the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, the Bearing Witness Institute is working to bring Peace by Piece to communities and schools beyond Atlanta across the country. A multi-day national conference for Peace by Piece students and faculty advisors is being developed in partnership with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. The four-day gathering will bring together high school students from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities for the kind of sustained encounter that changes people — not for an afternoon, but for a lifetime.
Holocaust education: before, during, and after
A thread running through the entire afternoon was this: Holocaust education is not about a single event bounded in time. It is about understanding what makes genocide possible — the centuries of dehumanization that precede it, the choices made in the moment, and the ongoing responsibility not to let those conditions take root again. Murphy’s “History and the Holocaust” seminar is built on exactly this premise. Students don’t just learn what happened between 1933 and 1945. They study the long history of antisemitism in Christian Europe — the statues on medieval cathedrals that depicted Judaism as blindfolded and defeated, the theology that cast Jewish people as enemies of the faith — and they wrestle with how those ideas found their most catastrophic expression in the 20th century.
The field trips to Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland are not tourism. They are witness. Students walk the streets of Krakow and Prague. They stand at sites where history happened in specific, irreversible ways. One student wrote that she came home “more open-minded, compassionate, and mature,” and that she had learned that “true understanding comes from listening to others’ stories and trying to see the world through their eyes.”
The Bearing Witness Institute also partners with the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI) to provide teacher training for Catholic school educators — building a nationwide network of teachers equipped to bring this history into their own classrooms. It collaborates with the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, the Breman Museum, and the ADL’s Glass Leadership Institute to extend that reach further still. And as part of global Holocaust remembrance, the Institute has planted 2,000 daffodils at Marist School as part of the international Daffodil Project — a living, annual act of memory.
Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt: a life shaped by witness
If Brendan Murphy represents the work of building understanding community by community, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt represents what it looks like to carry that responsibility to the highest levels of global leadership. As the former U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, she led American diplomatic efforts to confront antisemitism on a worldwide stage. As a historian and professor at Emory University, her scholarship has defined how we understand Holocaust denial — and why truth is not a luxury, but the foundation of any just society.
Asked what had led her to this work, she spoke about formative encounters with history that were not academic — they were felt. Being in Israel in 1974, in the shadow of the Yom Kippur War. Finding herself unexpectedly in Berlin and understanding, in a new way, the weight of that city for Jewish memory. Walking into a synagogue in a small town and feeling, suddenly and with clarity, the full meaning of who she was. These experiences, she suggested, didn’t create her commitment — they revealed it.
The moderator summed up Ambassador Lipstadt’s reach with a phrase that landed simply and perfectly: “Her backyard is the world.” It is not an exaggeration. From international diplomatic negotiations to a landmark courtroom victory over Holocaust denier David Irving, to her books read by hundreds of thousands of people, to her time as Special Envoy — Lipstadt has spent her career insisting that antisemitism is not a Jewish problem. It is a human problem. And confronting it is everyone’s responsibility.
“They expanded who gets to be part of the conversation and who the audience is. They have impacted that conversation itself — and that’s a really important response, globally and authoritatively, to an entire world in flux.” — Moderator Barbara Rosenwood, on Ambassador Lipstadt and Brendan Murphy
Why this moment matters
The afternoon closed with audience questions — questions that had been building throughout the conversation, written down and passed forward by people who had come with a lot on their minds. The room was full of Atlanta community members and what united them was a shared sense that this moment demands something of us.
The security tax on your JCC statement. The mezuzah moved inside the door. The T-shirt left at home. These are not signs of defeat — they are signs that we are paying attention. And paying attention is the first act of bearing witness.
About the moderator and the guest speakers:
- Deborah Lipstadt — historian, U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, and Distinguished University Professor at Emory University.
- Brendan Murphy — educator specializing in antisemitism, the Catholic Church, and Holocaust education.
- Barbara Ellison Rosenblit — award-winning Jewish educator and mentor; 2004 Covenant Award recipient.
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