SKOKIE, Ill. – In a television exclusive interview, Governor JB Pritzker sat down with WGN’s Paul Lisnek inside the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
Before becoming Governor of Illinois, Pritzker was instrumental in building the museum, alongside Holocaust survivors living in Skokie and the surrounding area.
The wide-ranging conversation centered around the rise of antisemitism in America, and Pritzker’s continued warning about what he calls the use of an authoritarian playbook in today’s politics.
Pritzker’s fight against antisemitism
Governor JB Pritzker often references his own family heritage in public speeches, detailing how his great-grandfather escaped pogroms in Ukraine in the 1880’s. Pritzker says the story of his Jewish ancestors, passed down through a book written by his great-grandfather and given to him at 13-years-old, has driven his understanding of the world and his mission to fight antisemitism.
In working with Holocaust survivors to curate the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Pritzker says it was important to him to highlight similar events throughout history, and their origins.
On how to root out the seeds of hatred, before it turns into action: “It’s got to be done with education. It’s got to be done with an understanding of history,” Pritzker said.
“…It’s very easy for someone else to ignite the hate that might exist in somebody, and that it’s almost it’s a surprise in many ways to the survivors, what happened, their neighbors, their friends, people that they that they knew, all of a sudden, became enemies of theirs and willing to collaborate in the effort to arrest Jews…it’s something that you know, If you’re certainly a survivor, you know they’re they have been conveying these things to the next generations, so that we make sure to fight bigotry and hatred and antisemitism whenever we see it cropping up.”
War in Gaza and the rise in antisemitic attacks
A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League detailed a 68 percent increase in antisemitic incidents across the Midwest.
The level of antisemitic incidents and public attacks have remained elevated since October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians. The attack ignited war in the Gaza Strip and a worldwide debate over how to solve the conflict.
In recent months, multiple high-profile attacks on Jews have been carried out by suspects invoking the ongoing war, including a man from Chicago who is now charged with the murder of two young Israeli Embassy staff members in Washington, D.C. before allegedly yelling, “Free Palestine.”
“Unfortunately, there’s a history of conflating other disputes with a dispute against Jews,” said Governor JB Pritzker.
“People make this jump to if you believe in the right of Israel to be secure and free and free from terrorism, that you must therefore be against Palestinians, or you must agree somehow with everything that Israel does,” he added.
On the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, Pritzker said: “I think about what’s happened in Gaza, and I think about the challenges of trying to root out terrorism while also protecting the innocent people who live in Gaza, I don’t think that Israel has handled this as well as it should have, and indeed, there have been some things that have occurred that I would describe as atrocities. But that doesn’t change my view that Israel has a right to exist, and indeed, there should be a Palestinian state at some point that gets created.”
But in dealing with an increase in antisemitism across the globe, Governor Pritzker asserts that having hateful thoughts is different than carrying out an attack. “Violent antisemites, people who literally…the attack in Boulder, the attack in Washington, DC, the attack on Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, those people should be held fully accountable for their violent actions,” said Pritzker.
“Protesting and having views about things that happened in the Middle East, or even having terrible thoughts about other people, is not in itself, a crime.”
Governor Pritzker says he and his family have faced many threats of violence both prior to and during his time in office, but he considers it fortunate that none have come to fruition.
Pritzker’s warning about President Donald Trump
Governor JB Pritzker garnered national attention last February during an address to state lawmakers in Springfield, after drawing comparisons of the Trump administration’s actions in Washington to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Nearly four months later, Pritzker says that America is now closer than ever to the “five-alarm fire” he previously warned about.
Standing in a museum exhibit detailing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1930’s Germany, Pritzker said of Trump: “I happen to think that if you’re not standing up and speaking out today about the authoritarian tendencies of this President, that you are not realizing the moment that we are in.”
Following campus protests over the war in Gaza, President Trump has used the cause of antisemitism to attack universities like Harvard, cutting more than $2 billion in grant funding that the school receives from the federal government.
“He’s lying. He doesn’t give a wit about fighting antisemitism. He just doesn’t,” Pritzker said of President Trump’s executive actions.
“This is a president who thinks it’s okay to hang out with proud boys and Oath Keepers,” Pritzker continued. “These are people who have as their fundamental principle that they’re racist and antisemitic. So, I don’t believe anything that he’s saying about antisemitism…[Trump] wants to take down people who have immigrated to this country, and he’s basically thrown a whole bunch of people into a group that he hates, and then says these people are antisemitic and that we should expel them from the country.”
Pritzker also points out that under Hitler’s rule in Nazi Germany, Jews also became known as immigrants: “They were attacked as if they were outsiders.”
It’s that way of governance that has heightened Pritzker’s concern about what he sees happening today: “…It was a democracy before Hitler took power. It took 53 days to rub out a constitutional republic in Germany and to turn it into a dictatorship that can happen anywhere, and it can happen here in the United States.”
In seeking to understand how history can inform action in the modern era, Pritzker is urging people to think about their role in society: “…You have to make that choice in your life, about what kind of a person are you? I believe that most people want to choose to be upstanders.”
“I believe, though, that until you’re really faced with those choices, real choices, that you don’t really know. But you hope about yourself that you’ll make the right decisions,” Pritzker added.
Pritzker’s faith and future political ambitions
As speculation grows around whether the two-term Illinois Governor will run for President in 2028, JB Pritzker says despite a rise in hateful attacks across the country, America can elect a Jewish man to the White House.
“We’ve never had a Black president before, and we elected a Black president. We can do this in this country,” Pritzker said.
“I am as patriotic and American as anybody else, as any patriot you can name, and believe wholeheartedly in the importance of the strength of this country.”
When talking about his Jewish faith, Governor Pritzker said his heritage has largely influenced his view of the world, and his commitment to serving in public office.
“I happen to believe in social justice. It was part of my religion, it’s part of how I was brought up,” the Governor said as he recalled how his family members who first came to America as refugees used social services to find housing and public schools to get an education.
“It is my obligation to stand up for all of the people of our country, but particularly of the state, in protecting their rights, making sure that they know that they’re welcome here…None of the founders were Jewish, and yet the founders had in mind the idea that you could escape a country that was discriminating against you because of your religion, to come to this country where you would be free.”
In his work building the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Governor Pritzker became close with many Holocaust survivors, including Fritzie Fritzshall. Their mission was largely inspired by the attempt by modern day Nazis to march the streets of Skokie in 1977.
The lasting message from Fritszhall’s story of survival and reckoning with her own faith, according to Pritzker: “We are challenged, I think, by God, to stand up for tolerance, you know, and against bigotry and hatred. And that’s our mission. That’s the thing that we’ve been left with. And I think maybe that’s what God’s message to future generations is.”