The Bystander Effect: Epstein, AI, Minneapolis, and the Holocaust

Published on: Feb 23, 2026

The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (MCHE) in Overland Park, Kansas, was founded in 1993 by two Holocaust survivors – Jack Mandelbaum and Isak Federman – who arrived as refugees in Kansas City in 1946. Jack survived four forced labor and 12 concentration camps. Isak survived 11 camps before being liberated by the British Army. Neither Jack nor Isak ever saw their families again.

In 1994, newly appointed MCHE Executive Director Jean Zeldin asked me to write a case statement in support of MCHE’s $1.5 million capital and endowment campaign. I have served since then as editor of the MCHE Newsletter. In 2000, I wrote the stories of 52 Holocaust survivors and refugees who rebuilt their lives in Kansas City. Kansas City Star Books published the stories along with their photographs in From the Heart – Life Before and After the Holocaust: A Mosaic of Memories in 2001.

All this to say I have been steeped for three decades in Holocaust history and testimony, including the catastrophic failure of medical ethics in Nazi Germany. Today I am drawing connections between what I’ve learned about bystanders then and what I see unfolding now. I am wondering what, if anything, we have learned about taking a stand and what difference that can still make.

Choosing Passive

AI tools define bystanders as people who witnesses a situation where someone needs help but are not directly involved, leaving them to choose between passivity and intervention. The Bystander Effect suggests the more bystanders, the less likely any one person will act due to diffusion of responsibility and fear of judgment.

Take the Epstein scandal. We know that Jeffrey Epstein, aided by Ghislaine Maxwell, abused thousands of underage girls. Is it possible that no one else who spent time in his homes or on his private island had no inkling of what was going on? As NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg explains, they had something to gain as bystanders more valuable to them than their integrity:

Epstein emerges as a broker of money, introductions, information — and human beings. He has a talent for sniffing out what his correspondents want most. The rich want to be taken seriously, the not-so-rich want the trappings of wealth, many of the men wanted sex and everyone wanted connections. To read the files is to watch Epstein calibrating his correspondents’ desires in real time.

Now consider the present moment in artificial intelligence. On February 9, 2026, Matt Shumer, tech CEO and co-founder of OthersideAI, published an essay on the implications of staggeringly rapid advances in AI entitled “Something Big Is Happening,” that went viral.

The upside, if we get it right is staggering…The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real…The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon.

Choosing Action

Bystanders enabled Epstein’s abuse to continue for years and for the perpetrators of those abuses to avoid accountability. Bystanders in the AI ecosystem – engineers, investors, policymakers – recognize the existential danger posed by their creation but choose to remain passive and not intervene.

There were bystanders, too, in Minneapolis when ICE agents were grabbing people off the street, knocking down people’s doors, infiltrating healthcare spaces, and cosplaying a military occupation of the city.

But in Minneapolis there were also thousands who chose to show up, speak out, and stand together for neighbors and strangers. Weeks after a second protestor, Alex Pretti, was killed by ICE agents, the government announced a “drawdown” of immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis.

The whole thing reminded me of Kent State University in 1970, where Ohio National Guardsmen fired 67 shots into a crowd protesting the Vietnam War killing four students and wounding nine others. Nothing changed right away. The Paris Peace Accords ending direct US military involvement in Vietnam weren’t signed until January 1973 – and ICE still patrols major American cities.

Slow Then All at Once

There’s a famous quote from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, describing how change happens slowly and then all at once.

There will always be bystanders. But history suggests something equally enduring: those who refuse to remain passive. We call them upstanders, witnesses, allies, resisters – people who decide that the cost of action is finally lower than the cost of silence.

The question is whether, when the moment comes, we will recognize ourselves as one of them – and act before “all at once” arrives too late.

Written by Trudi Galblum, MPS