2025 has been a year in which celebrating personal joys and coping with private losses or disappointments has been completely overshadowed for us by the mess this country is in and the firehose of disastrous actions and decisions by the current administration that has preoccupied us all year. But we don’t want to boycott the annual holiday letter! It’s still important to wish each other well and to rejoice and commiserate with each other. So in that spirit, we wish you joyful and peaceful moments this holiday season, even when they are hard to come by.
But we’ll take a step back from the family news, because what’s front and center this year in our lives is that in the US and around the globe, democracy is endangered as authoritarianism is gaining traction, and that human beings around the world are affected by the cruelty of powerful regimes that have forgotten the humanity of their own people and of their neighbors near and far, willing to let fellow humans suffer and die because they are immigrants, refugees, members of minority groups, disabled, poor, and time and again “not worthy.”
We are trying to keep a balance. We do believe that there is resistance in insisting on carving out small spaces for joy and hope and not let the dismal state of the nation drag us down. But that is, of course, not enough. We’re the first to admit that our impact is minimal (our activism has historically been the slightly pathetic kind with a “small a” and that’s sometimes ridiculed as virtue signaling). But we’ve donated, we’ve called our representatives, and gone to our share of local protests to try to make our voices heard. We try to keep ourselves informed and support a handful of the tsunami causes worth fighting for. We continue to do the research, teaching, and mentoring that we think is important even if funding for it is cut and academia in the US–our life’s work–is under threat. And we thank you for whatever large and small things you have done!
We will leave you with a speech that Antje had the opportunity to give earlier this fall, as one small window onto what this year has been about.
Love, Peace, Joy
and a GOOD New Year 2026
from Antje and Mark
The “No Kings” rally in Lincoln, NE–one of over 2,500 protests in cities, towns, and villages all over the US and beyond on October 18–was the biggest demonstration at the Capitol all year, with estimates in the local paper of over a thousand protesters (over 7 million estimated worldwide). The turnout gave us such hope for change!
Thanks to friends of mine who are involved with the long-standing pacifist organization Nebraskans for Peace, I was invited by the protest organizers to be one of the speakers. I was honored to be in a line-up that included Kevin Abourezk of the Niskìthe Prayer Camp; Pat Shepard, a retired Lincoln teacher who spoke movingly of her Black heritage; a former student of mine, who now works for the Veteran’s Administration (currently furloughed and possibly about to be “terminated” by the Trump administration); and many others.
(Mark took this video, but you will also find the text as written below it, just in case there is too much background noise, and so that our German friends can run it through a translator if they wish.)
Antje’s “No Kings” Speech, Oct 18, 2025
I may not look like an immigrant, but that is who I am, and I speak to you today as an immigrant. I came to this country well over 30 years ago. Let me tell you about three things that that has made me think about.
Thing Number One. I am an immigrant. To me, that means that I care about other immigrants, no matter why they came or which border they crossed. I came for an education and for love, and that meant a student visa and later a green card when I got married. How is this more “legitimate” than coming because you are politically persecuted or simply desperately poor and cannot feed your family? I will never understand that, and I will never forget that I myself came here as an immigrant. But I also won’t forget that virtually everyone else’s ancestors did. (As you heard from Kevin earlier, the Indigenous people who actually have a case to make against newcomers who stole their land are not big supporters of ICE raids and deportations.) If we are, for the most part, a country of immigrants, how can we mistreat and deport immigrants today? How can we stand by and not raise our voices as workplaces are raided, prisons are built, and people are taken from their homes by ICE agents in the middle of the night, their children zip tied, their property trashed? It saddens and enrages me, but above all will always surprise me that the same people who proudly talk about their ancestors coming here on this or that boat want to shut the door behind them, nail it shut, and put barbed wire and armed guards in front of it. That is not what I want. I stand with immigrants and want to defend their rights.
Thing Number Two. Before I came here at age 25, I was born and raised in Germany. That means that I know a thing or two about totalitarian governments destroying democracy. In school and at home, I learned about the history of the holocaust, of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists (the Nazis), and of the special responsibility of Germans to ensure that this would never happen again and that we would never forget it did. I have taken that responsibility very seriously, but the past year has made me understand something I never did quite grasp: how millions of Germans in the 1930s could just passively look on as people they knew—Jewish neighbors, family members with disabilities, colleagues who were in the “wrong” political party—disappeared, sometimes whisked away in front of their own eyes. I understand better now how that could have happened. Because that kind of indifference is what we are experiencing now, as people increasingly normalize ICE raids, arrests of students, deportations without due process, and the removal of protection for huge groups of asylum seekers, Dreamers, and immigrants who used to have temporary protected status. We need to stand up and stand by the people living in our midst, not be bystanders.
Thing Number Three. I am a US citizen now, but I did not become one until 2018. I had been a green card holder for over twenty years by then, and like many others with that status, always thought that being a “resident alien” was good enough for me. But when President Trump began his first term in January 2017, I decided to jump the bureaucratic hoops needed to become a citizen. But I made that choice not because of the anti-immigration policies that were immediately enacted (remember the failed “Muslim ban”?). I knew full well that the privilege of my white skin and my European background protect me from the kind of racial profiling that others endure. Even now, when much, much worse immigration policies of even more dubious legal standing are being enforced more aggressively than in 2017, it’s very unlikely that I’ll be detained or have my rights revoked. I think about the discrimination that underlies this privilege every day. But my reason to apply for citizenship was that I wanted to vote. The 2016 election had been a wake-up call. I realized I could no longer stand on the sidelines of democracy—it is not a spectator sport! I got to participate in my fist US election in the 2018 midterms, and I will never miss another election as long as I live. I also learned to pay close attention to what is happening to our voting rights and our election procedures, as the bedrock of our democracy. And I see the attacks on immigrants and their rights to due process, to free speech, and to their human rights as bellwethers that show that this democracy is in deep trouble. We need to be vigilant if we want to protect it from crumbling under the pressure of increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.
I am going to leave you with a well-known poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, written shortly after the end of World War II. I leave it to you to replace the groups he mentions with the groups that are on your mind, here and now, in the US in 2025:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the union members
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a union member
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
We cannot be complicit. We must raise our voices and stand by those who are having their rights violated. Otherwise, we will lose what We the People stand for above all—our democracy, our continuing attempts to make it better, fairer, more just, more encompassing. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here.