Where does someone begin to tell the story of Tanya Gersh?
“I’m just a soccer mom from Montana,” she Gersh. “I never imagined going through what I went through.”
Indeed, she grew up in Idaho and settled in Whitefish, Montana. But at the height of her real-life drama, social media was filled with comments like, "Death to Tanya. Death to Tanya. Death to Tanya. Death to Tanya,” and that was repeated thirty more times in one single post.
Between her settling in northwest Montana and that hatred is the subject of the award-winning documentary, “Troll Storm,” a chronicle of how Neo-Nazis unleashed a storm of hate against her and her family.
“Antisemitism tends to be the canary in the coal mine,” said Kali Cusimano, co-founder and executive director of the Council for Holocaust Awareness in Idaho and communications director and adult learning coordinator at Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel in Boise. “And so, when it starts to become more visible, that’s when we’ll also start to notice an increase in other types of hate and bias incidents across the board.”
And it’s important, Cusimano says, to note that the issue becomes very local very quickly.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had just over this last year quite a few incidents of antisemitism reported in Boise,” said Cusimano. “We’ve had harassment. And then, there are things not reported, like most of the time when an anti-Semitic incident happens in school, it’s not reported. My own son has experienced things when he was in sixth grade. The public is not necessarily aware of the level of frequency it’s happening. So, people ten to think, ‘Oh, it’s not that big of an issue. We don’t have a problem here.’ Or may they think, ‘There are only a couple of things reported.’ But in reality, there are so many more than that go undocumented.”
Cusimano and Gersh will join Morning Edition host George Prentice for a special screening of “Troll Storm” on May 21 at The Flicks, which will include a post-screening conversation. Cusimano visited with Prentice to preview the event.
Find reporter George Prentice @georgepren
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