“Through our choice of topics for this year’s lecture, ‘Embracing Diversity and Uncovering Hidden Bias,’ we hope to help ourselves and others in our community learn to recognize and understand both our overt and hidden biases and what we can do about them,” said event co-chair Wendie Forman to an audience of over 350 people at Temple Emanu El.

Religious and secular community members alike packed into the temple’s synagogue in Orange Village on Nov. 17 for the 13th Annual Lois Zaas Memorial Advocacy Lecture. A resource fair featuring organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Equality Ohio and Council on American-Islamic Relations opened an hour prior to the speakers. Chosen organizations aimed to “enhance understanding, protect civil liberties, encourage dialogue, empower women, Muslims, LGBT, African-Americans and other groups,” according to Forman. These organizations represented an effort to confront implicit biases, unconscious stereotypes and judgments that affect one’s behavior and understanding.

By the time the night’s first keynote speaker, attorney Roberta Kaplan, took the makeshift stage at 7 p.m., the temple parking lot was at capacity and the large pile of keys at the valet counter was still growing.

Kaplan, a Cleveland native and out lesbian, represented Edith Windsor in the landmark Supreme Court case that required the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages and led to the ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 which struck down all remaining laws against same-sex marriage in the U.S.

Kaplan described her life growing up and discovering her sexuality, then led into an overview of  her work as an attorney. She also explained the story of her former client, Windsor; a story not unsimilar to her own.

Windsor, a lesbian, entered a domestic partnership with her long-term partner Thea Spyer in 1993. Although the two could not legally marry until 2007 in Canada, Spyer entrusted her estate to Windsor via revocable trust. However, when Spyer died due to a heart condition in 2009, the government required Windsor to pay $363,053 in federal estate taxes because it only recognized heterosexual marriages as qualified for federal estate tax exemption under the Defense of Marriage Act. These were the grounds upon which Windsor sued–and won.

“This is the first time I’m telling this since the election, and it feels very different,” Kaplan said, referring to what she called the “overt, virulent bias directed at all the most vulnerable sections of our population” propagated by the president-elect. “Gay people, like African-Americans, like Jews, like handicapped people, have equal dignity under the law.”

Joseph J. Levin Jr., co-founder of Southern Poverty Law Center, was the second keynote speaker. Before evolving into a civil rights activist, Levin said that he held prejudices growing up in Montgomery, Ala.

“I never knew anything else as a kid other than Jim Crow,” he said. “The atmosphere in Montgomery was poisonous. Racial bias was a just a part of the package we all carried.”

After what he called a “cataclysmic event” in which Donald Trump became president-elect, he said that the current U.S. resembles the environment  in which he grew up.

“We’re a long way from treating implicit bias as our most important issue,” he said. “This kind of overt bigotry has been justified by the president-elect, vice president-elect and various surrogates. The extremist and alt-right elements of our country feel as if their positions regarding white supremacy, anti-Semitism, hate of LGBTQ individuals, xenophobia and misogyny have been fully validated.”

After the lecture, both speakers answered questions from the audience, the majority of which focused on Trump’s presidency and his recent appointment of rumored anti-Semite Steve Bannon as White House chief strategist.

“My greatest fear is that this is normalized,” Kaplan said. “I’m not saying Trump is Hitler, but that sense of complacency is the thing that scares me the most.”

Responding to a similar question, Levin said, “I thought the stories of bigotry and hate were relegated to the fringes of our society. I was wrong; I see, smell and feel the 1950s and 1960s.”

Both speakers and resource providers recommended volunteering, speaking out, finding common ground and visiting websites such as http://www.theinclusionsolution.me/ to promote diversity and overcome bias.