Until last month, University of Southern California cornerback Prophet Brown had never left the country. He didn’t even have a passport. 

The Sacramento native, whose father is from Panama, certainly did not anticipate his first international trip being to Poland — let alone Auschwitz. 

Brown traveled to Eastern Europe in July as part of the USC Student Leadership Summit, a program, run by the Shoah Foundation, that brings athletes from the sports powerhouse to Washington, D.C., and then Poland to learn about Judaism, antisemitism and the Holocaust. (It helps that the program offers athletes a rare opportunity to spend time abroad without missing practice.)

“That’s always something that I’ve been interested in, doing study abroad. But as an athlete, that’s not always available to us,” Brown told Jewish Insider in an interview in July, soon after returning from Poland. (For a group of elite athletes, it didn’t hurt that their trip took place during the Euros, allowing the USC students a firsthand view of the soccer competition among European nations that takes place every four years.)

“Before this program, I had, I would say, a very surface-level understanding and knowledge about antisemitism, and the history behind everything,” Brown added.

Twenty athletes from USC’s football, track and field, women’s soccer and women’s beach volleyball teams took part in the summit. In Washington, they visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and they heard from speakers including Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss and  Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. (Lipstadt won the crowd over when she booed along with them after describing a stint early in her career spent at the University of California Los Angeles, USC’s biggest rival.) 

For most of the students, it was their first time thinking in-depth about antisemitism, and why they should act to call it out.

“I believe I was put on this earth for a reason, and that’s to help others, make people happy, put a smile on their face, be a voice if need be,” Brown said. “So going on this leadership summer program, one of the last things they said to us is, ‘Don’t make this trip pointless.’ Basically, don’t click through all this, learn about all this and then just keep it for yourself.” Back on campus, Brown and the other athletes who traveled with him are now expected to be ambassadors, students with clout among their classmates who feel empowered to speak out against antisemitism.

At a time when Middle Eastern politics have sown deep division on American college campuses, the idea of bringing a diverse group of students together to learn about antisemitism — and how it intersects with other forms of hate, particularly racism — offers a refreshing antidote to otherwise disheartening headlines from elite universities like USC. 

The students all sought out the program on their own after hearing about it from teammates or coaches who traveled to Poland in its first iteration in 2023. They came in with an open mind, despite the early meetings of the program taking place against the backdrop of campus protests about the war in Gaza. 

“It shows that the protests that we saw, the vitriol that was coming from students and way too many faculty across the country, really was a minority phenomenon,” said Robert Williams, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, which was founded by Steven Spielberg 30 years ago to preserve survivors’ testimony. “Most kids, they’re either apathetic or they want to know more, and everybody who participated in this program definitely wanted to know more.” 

Brown, a communications major, has identified the pitfalls of social media — and said the trip helped him consider the values of taking a step back before speaking, or posting.

“We live in a time with a lot of social media, a lot of the internet and everything going on. And sometimes people don’t learn before they carry on with things,” Brown said. “I would tell a lot more people, ‘Don’t be afraid to learn.’ I feel like sometimes we jump into topics we’re not so knowledgeable about — in sports, we call it a bandwagon, jump onto bandwagons and just go with the flow, but there’s a lot of information out there that can be learned, whether it’s books, whether it’s going to museums, whether it’s talking to others. People have stories that you could learn from. I feel like not being afraid to learn, and vocalize what you’ve learned, can help a lot.”

The idea for the program, and the focus on teaching athletes about the Holocaust, came well before the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel touched off a wave of antisemitism in the United States and abroad. It was sparked by NBA star Kyrie Irving making a series of antisemitic remarks and social media posts in late 2022, which prompted an eight-game suspension for Irving from the Brooklyn Nets. 

“We were trying to figure out a way that we can reach up-and-coming leaders in society, to teach them more about the relevance of the Holocaust, the history of the Holocaust and how they can identify contemporary forms of antisemitism,” Williams told JI. “It made sense to go after [and] to work with the athletics department, to see if we could train kids on those sets of issues. USC Athletics was very, very eager to do that.”

The trip to Poland included a requisite visit to Auschwitz, but it also featured stops at synagogues in Krakow and the city’s historic Jewish quarter. The athletes’ education about the Holocaust also taught them about Jewish life in the country before the Nazis sought to destroy it — and after, as Krakow has seen a revival in modern Jewish life. It was Brown’s first time at a synagogue. But it was the visit to Auschwitz that cemented a deep bond among the participants.

“It was an emotional, almost spiritual feeling, being there and in the presence of, basically, history,” Brown said. “After our tour, our group did do a debriefing, and that’s where we kind of tied in the importance of antisemitism, and calling it out, and being vocal leaders about it.” 

He thought about the connections between anti-Black racism and antisemitism, and learned just how persistent antisemitism has been throughout history. Seeing the historical evidence of those horrors up close, first in museums and then in the remnants of a Nazi death camp, taught him lessons he hadn’t considered at school. 

“As an African American myself, I’ve learned about African American history, but going to the African American museum and seeing this stuff that we’re not really taught in school or growing up or throughout time, it really was crazy,” Brown said. “Then when we were learning about antisemitism and things going on there, you’re like, well, these things are hand in hand.”

For Brown, the lesson was simple, less a new conclusion than a doubling down on a deeply held belief.

“Certain things such as racism and antisemitism, there’s really no right or wrong. You’re just wrong when you’re doing it,” he explained. “​​I feel like there’s a lot of stuff being downplayed, in a sense, or justified that shouldn’t be justified. And more people need to speak out about it.”

Back on campus, Brown is again training with his teammates for a big season. It’s the first year USC is in the Big 10, one of the most iconic conferences in the NCAA. For Brown, that means gearing up to take on the defending national champions, the Michigan Wolverines, in a late September away game in Ann Arbor.

For Williams and the Shoah Foundation, that means an opportunity to consider bringing their unique antisemitism education ambitions to America’s best collegiate athletes. 

“Our ambition was and remains to expand this not just to other student athlete groupsֹ — USC is now part of the Big 10, so perhaps is something we work with our Big 10 partners on — but also to use the framework of this program to teach other leadership quadrants, whether those are policymakers, Hill staffers, lawyers or business leaders to use this as a framework for teaching about Holocaust relevance and contemporary forms of antisemitism for a wider range of audiences,” said Williams. “We’re really only just getting started with this program.”