Preserving Historical
Memory and Cultivating
Deep Empathy for
a Collective Future
I am eighteen, and most of what I do comes down to examining the same question from different angles. What makes a person able to listen to someone they have been taught to hate? I engage with this question in a museum being built to prevent violence; in a clinic where I interpret between patients and doctors who do not share a language; and in a school where I helped write policy on equity and inclusion. The Holocaust is the reason I think this problem is urgent rather than merely theoretical.
Projects
Memory
Asa's connection to Holocaust education is personal, not just academic. Through his religious education at Congregation Emanu-El, he had the rare opportunity to hear firsthand testimony from Holocaust survivors — an experience no classroom curriculum can replicate. That education became deeply personal when he learned that his own great-grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, and he has since taken up the responsibility of carrying her story forward, sharing it with others so that her experience, and the lessons within it, live on.
Archival Research Division • Lead Historian • 2024—Present
Courage
The Courage Museum opens in the Presidio as the country's first museum built around a single claim: that violence is a learned behavior, and that anything learned can be unlearned. I sit on its Youth Advisory Council, where our job is to tell the people designing the exhibits when they have got young people wrong. We review installations, argue about the storytelling, and push on the public programming. I joined because I wanted to work on empathy somewhere it was being treated as a skill that can be taught rather than a feeling people either have or lack.
Youth Advisory Council, Courage Museum · 2026 cohort
A program of Futures Without Violence · The Presidio, San Francisco
Common ground
The hardest conversations I have are not with people who disagree with me. They are with people who have stopped believing a conversation is worth having. At my school I helped write the Steering Committee's policy for responding to racist incidents, which meant deciding, in advance and in writing, how a community answers its worst moments. I co-founded our bioethics club because the questions there have no consensus answer and students have to learn to argue without contempt. At RotaCare Free Clinic I interpret between Spanish-speaking patients and English-speaking doctors, which is the most literal version of the same work.
Co-founder, Bioethics Club · Steering Committee, racism response policy
Spanish-English interpreter, RotaCare Free Clinic · Diller Teen Fellows
Hebrew tutor and madrich, Congregation Emanu-El · Camp Newman
Why this is one piece of work and not three
People ask why a Jewish kid interested in the Holocaust spends his time at a museum about domestic violence, or interpreting at a free clinic, or writing school policy. The honest answer is that I do not experience these as three interests. I experience them as one.
What I was taught about the Holocaust, and what I have come to believe, is that the killing was the last step and not the first. Before the camps there were decades of a society slowly losing the ability to see a group of its own people as people. Difference became suspicion, suspicion became threat, threat became permission. By the time the violence arrived, the hardest work had already been done — quietly, legally, and in public.
That is why remembrance alone has never satisfied me as a response. Remembrance looks at the end of the process. The part that can still be interrupted is the beginning, and the beginning looks like ordinary people who have stopped being able to hear each other. It looks like the country I am growing up in.
The Courage Museum's founding claim is that violence is learned and can therefore be unlearned. That is the same claim Holocaust education makes, stated forward instead of backward. If dehumanization is taught, it can be untaught. If empathy is a muscle, it can be trained. The museum treats that as an engineering problem: what do you actually build, what do you put in front of a fifteen-year-old, so that the muscle gets used.
So I interpret at a clinic, where two people who cannot understand each other have to trust each other anyway. I argue about bioethics with people I disagree with, because the practice of arguing without contempt is the thing being practiced, not the conclusion. I helped write down what my school does when someone says something racist, because a community that decides in advance behaves better than one deciding in the moment.
None of this is dramatic and none of it is finished. But I think the people who stopped the worst things in history mostly did not know at the time that they were doing anything. They were just the ones who had not stopped listening.
1 — Yad Vashem, "What is the Holocaust?"
What is the Holocaust? (Yad Vashem, 1 min)
2 — Yad Vashem, "Who are the Righteous Among the Nations?"
Who are the Righteous Among the Nations? (Yad Vashem)
3 — USHMM, "The Path to Nazi Genocide, Chapter 3"