ICYMI: ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Gov. Pritzker’s Interviews with WGN, Christian Science Monitor

SKOKIE- ​ Last week, Governor Pritzker spoke to the Christian Science Monitor and WGN for interviews at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center as new renovations got underway. Governor Pritzker highlighted his recent efforts to stand up to Trump and curb antisemitism and hatred across Illinois, his family immigration story, and leading the development of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

WGN: Exclusive: Pritzker opens up about his faith, the rise of antisemitism, and taking on Trump in interview with WGN

WATCH HERE

Christian Science Monitor: How JB Pritzker’s faith and Holocaust work are powering his dire warnings about Trump

READ HERE

KEY EXCERPT- Christian Science Monitor

“[Pritzker] first got involved with the Illinois Holocaust Museum in 1999, when Sam Harris asked for three minutes of his time.

“Mr. Harris, an irrepressible former insurance executive who survived two concentration camps as a child, was working with other survivors to expand their small storefront museum and make sure their stories lived on after they were gone. He was told by a friend he needed to get ‘the richest guy in town’ to help make it happen, so he reached out to Mr. Pritzker, a billionaire scion of the Hyatt hotel fortune.

“By all accounts, Mr. Pritzker threw himself into building a new museum. For the next decade, he poured countless hours into securing funding and finding staff and experts, meeting with the group nearly every week. In the process, he developed close relationships with many survivors.

“’He gave everything that he had,’ Mr. Harris tells the Monitor, describing Governor Pritzker as family. ‘It definitely shaped his life.’

[…]

“’Anything he says about the Holocaust, he is not just saying it for political purposes,’ Mr. Harris says. ‘You’ve got to give him the credit. And anyone who doesn’t, doesn’t know. Let them talk to me.’”

REMEMBERING HIS ROOTS

Christian Science Monitor: “Governor Pritzker sees the current moment through the lens of his own family history.

“‘My family is only still alive because my grandfather and his father and the rest of the family escaped the pogroms in Ukraine,’ he says.

“The Pritzker family, like many American Jews, escaped the riots and antisemitic violence in the Russian Empire that spiked sharply beginning in the 1880s. He brought to the interview a family history his great-grandfather penned in 1940, a copy of which is given to every child in his family on their bar or bat mitzvahs to let them know where they’d come from, and what they’d survived.”

Pritzker on WGN: “My faith influences me. I think, just like everybody else's upbringing influences them. How you were brought up, what you believe. You know, I happen to believe in social justice. It was part of my religion, and it's part of how I was brought up.”

LEARNING FROM OUR HISTORY

Pritzker to the Christian Science Monitor: “I am in a moment when it is my obligation as a public official, as a Jew, and as somebody who has been engaged in fighting antisemitism my whole life – and who can see the degradation of democracy occurring. Anybody, if they understand what ‘Never again’ meant about the Holocaust, understands that this is a moment when we should be standing up and speaking out.”

Pritzker on WGN: “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. Germany was the most powerful democracy in Central Europe at the time of the Holocaust, 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.”

FIGHTING TRUMP’S AGENDA

Pritzker to the Christian Science Monitor: “People are having to make decisions about whether they’re going to stand up and speak out, or whether they’re going to try to keep their heads down and not be noticed. These are the choices that, in a slightly less dramatic fashion but no less important, that I think people are having to make today.”

Pritzker on WGN: “This is a president who thinks it’s okay to hang out with proud boys and Oath Keepers… 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 [students] are antisemitic and that we should expel them from the country.”

LEADING THE FIGHT AGAINST HATE

Pritzker to the Christian Science Monitor: “What I learned, working so closely with survivors of genocide, is that history loses all meaning if we sanitize it,” he said. “And we are cowards, unworthy of the blessings of our ancestors, if we don’t wear ourselves out fighting every attempt to cast a group of people as less than human, less worthy of fundamental rights, less deserving of basic decency and love and respect.”

Pritzker on WGN: “As governor of the State of Illinois, in part, it is my obligation to stand up for all of the people of our country, but particularly of this state, in protecting their rights, making sure that they know that they're welcome here … no matter who they are.”

The Pritzker administration has a long history of promoting inclusivity and standing up to hate across Illinois. Governor Pritzker has proven himself a fierce ally for marginalized communities, with outspoken support for LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, socioeconomic equity and ending homelessness, protections for religious freedoms, and food and healthcare access. Last year, Governor Pritzker, the Illinois Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes (CDHD) and the Illinois Department of Human Rights (IDHR) launched the Help Stop Hate hotline: a confidential service that provides support and resources to people and communities affected by hate.

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