What is one of your earliest memories of the power of human connection?
My grandfather was a postal worker his whole life, and he never got to go to college. He was a devoted grandparent, and he found really creative ways to connect with us. When I was little, we went to Disney World together and saw the Country Bear Jamboree. One of the stars was Buford the Bear. After we got back from Florida, I got a letter in the mail from Buford with an address to write back — a P.O. box where I kept up my correspondence with Buford over the years.
Eventually, I figured out Buford was my grandfather. By then, there were dozens of letters about the adventures Buford had with his wife, Bertha. They were snowbirds who spent winters in Florida and summers in the forests in Maine. When I went to Germany to study abroad in college, Buford wrote, “Oh, you know, my great-grandfather was a German black forest bear” — a reference to my real-life grandfather’s grandfather, who had come from Germany in the 1860s — and he started peppering little German words into the letters.
He passed away when I was a couple of years out of college. We never talked about the fact that he was Buford, but I have all these letters still. I think about how special it was for him to write these letters to my siblings and me and how he forged this connection with his grandchildren. It was a delightful connection between generations and a way for him to learn about my life over two decades by corresponding with me as Buford.
What values guide your personal life and your work?
I’m a big fan of kindness. I created a Bluesky Starter Pack of scholars of extremism who are all very kind, and I asked them to add others to the group — just to highlight people who go out of their way to champion a younger generation of scholars or do something nice for someone who is having a hard time. I also really like to mail small gifts to friends when they’re struggling or in the hospital. It’s not just about being kind to others; kindness is also about how you feel about yourself.
I also value authenticity. The feedback that I often receive from my students is that I’m relatable and approachable, which means a lot to me. I’ve had students want to drop out of doctoral programs because they feel like it’s impossible, that they were struggling too much. But when I talk honestly about how hard it really is to sustain the commitment to a dissertation, it helps them realize that struggle is normal.
The third value is curiosity. When we advise parents on talking to teenagers about their online lives, we tell them: lead with curiosity, not judgment. Put your kids in the position of an expert and ask them to teach you something about their world: how Instagram works, how to transform a meme, or what apps they use. When you approach from a place of genuine interest instead of criticism or shame about the content they accidentally or purposely see online, kids are much more likely to open up and have a frank conversation with you.
For instance, I spoke to a group of 11th graders about algorithms and how harmful online content comes into their feed, whether they search for it or not. Because I’ve done extensive interviews with boys and men as part of my research on violence and violence prevention, one boy asked me, “What have you learned in all the years of interviewing about boys and men that you think people don’t understand?” That created a big conversation, then I asked him in return, “What do you think people don’t know about what it is to be a boy your age?” He said, right away, without hesitation, “I don’t think people understand what it’s like to suddenly realize the world sees you as dangerous.”
A 16-year-old girl chimed in, “Well, I don’t think boys understand what it’s like to suddenly realize the world sees you as a sexual object.” I encouraged these two students to have a conversation, and now I’m going back to that same school in March to speak at their club.
When did a person or experience change your mind about an idea or belief?
[Editor’s note: This interview was recorded in November 2026, before the mass shootings at Bondi Beach and Brown University.]
This experience didn’t just change my mind; it completely transformed my life. I studied abroad in Germany during my junior year of college. I was a German and sociology major, and like a lot of 19- and 20-year-olds, I was feeling super disillusioned, critical, angry, and hopeless with the country I lived in.
I got to Germany not knowing much, even though I was a German major; I was studying language, poetry, and linguistics, but not German history. In the first two months, as part of our integrative study and language immersion program, Cornell University set up study tours for us to get ready to be at a German university. We went to several concentration camp memorial sites, spoke with a Holocaust survivor, and spoke with ordinary Germans.
I started to realize that every country has a history or set of problems it’s grappling with, some worse than others in terms of abuse of human rights and inequalities. Yet Germany was investing billions of dollars in education and structures. They have a federal agency for civic education to educate the public about the past and make sure that democracy stays strengthened. They spend €300 million on educational efforts to counter and prevent antisemitism and racism. Meanwhile, we in this country still primarily look at the problem as building better fences and investing heavily in security. One colleague often says, “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on school security because of school shootings, like metal detectors and school security officers, but most kids who get shot in school shootings get shot in the parking lot.”
We saw that in D.C. this past year — two young Jewish professionals, one a former American University student, tragically shot right outside the Jewish Museum, where there was tremendous security at the entrance. How far out do you move those fences?
Now I spend a lot of time going back and forth between Germany and the U.S., sharing strategies for how we tackle common problems of antisemitism, racism, and other forms of hate, as well as modeling and testing strategies Germany has built out with 2,500 prevention programs at the educational level. We may have two or three dozen in this country.
My study abroad experience created a gradual reckoning that shocked me into grappling with the Holocaust and its history and impact. When I came back to the States, I felt much more committed to trying to create change instead of feeling so hopeless.
What are you working on right now?
I created PERIL six years ago because things were ramping up in a much more visible way in the States. For 15 years, I thought of myself as a comparative education professor teaching about German educational approaches to combat antisemitism, racism, and Neo-Nazism, but I didn’t think it was super relevant in concrete ways to the U.S. until Charlottesville happened. That was a wake-up moment.
I had just turned in a book called The Extreme Gone Mainstream about the mainstreaming of extremism and youth culture in Germany, specifically the transition from racist skinhead aesthetics to modern coded clothing and symbols.
I created PERIL to think about whether we could create a nationally scalable, empirically tested intervention to prevent young people from radicalizing to white supremacist extremism in the U.S. Our lab now has two substantive divisions: one on preventing antisemitism and the other on preventing gendered violence, in part because we see these two areas as having the most common intersection at this time. There is a massively rising misogyny and number of misogynistic influencers online, many of whom carry scientific racism and antisemitism into the mainstream.
Someone like Andrew Tate, who at one point had a 20% approval rating among teenage boys, also says really antisemitic things. You can’t just build walls around one form of hate if something like misogyny tunnels underneath those walls and carries a Trojan horse right into the center.
We have a short-form video division called “prebunking” that teaches directly how to recognize a manipulative tactic. Then you get a micro dose of the propaganda. When you do that, people reject the propaganda to a really great extent. We’ve had great results on prebunking antisemitism this year.
We also have a Tools Division for communities — parents, mental health counselors, teachers, coaches, faith leaders — to better recognize and intervene more effectively into what’s happening in young people’s lives.
We have a regional approach that replicates a German model called mobile advisory centers, which act like mobile eating disorder clinics or addiction clinics. If a kid in school is showing signs of mass violence or mass shooter fandom or expressing racist and antisemitic things leaning toward violence, there’s someone to call. We’ve been testing it in Michigan and Georgia, and we’re now expanding to several other states in the next year. We call them Care Corps members, like AmeriCorps or Teach for America. One of the things that Einhorn Collaborative is helping us with is the scale-up of our model, so that every community has access to these trained experts on the ground.
We’ve almost doubled in size since the election. I now have a seasoned leadership team that comes from really different backgrounds. One is a rabbi, one came out of the military, one was a school principal, one was a mental health counselor and youth social worker, along with our researchers who design and test tools. It’s the most rewarding part of my career to see this sail forward. Most of what I spend my time doing now is telling people about our work and writing about it to generate optimism and hope that there is a way to engage and combat hate that’s evidence-based and effective.
What is giving you hope or what positive visions do you have for our future?
What gives me hope is the people I work with every day. They’re so committed. We all landed at the same set of ideas and solutions from such radically different backgrounds. To see us come together as a group, to see us grow, to see multiple generations work together every day — that gives me hope.
Plus, we have evidence. Last year, we tested four prebunking videos on antisemitism with 5,000 college youths. We found that one video got a 24% increase in people’s willingness to say something when somebody else said something antisemitic and a 12% reduction in antisemitic beliefs. We’ve never seen positive results like that before.
On the other hand, one of the videos backfired. For people who came into the study with high conspiratorial beliefs, this video made them ever so slightly more likely to be antisemitic or feel more strongly in their antisemitic beliefs. That video never sees the light of day. This is why we heavily emphasize the testing side of our work. When you’re trying to tackle conspiracy theories, it’s so important that you have evidence, so that you don’t do any harm and pursue the most effective strategy as we scale up.
But really in the end, it’s the people. The people in audiences who ask me questions about their families and loved ones, the people I work with who come up with creative ideas like interventions through gaming or eSports. I think we could get so many different levels of communities involved in preventing hate and building cohesion. It’s not just preventing the bad, it’s also building the good.
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