Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson appointed Dee Simon, an Israeli-born Holocaust educator, to the state’s Human Rights Commission, where the 70-year-old replaces a commissioner, who resigned following backlash over antisemitic remarks.
A former head of Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity, Simon was born in Haifa and moved to the United States at age 5. She told JNS that her experience growing up Jewish and as an immigrant in California will inform her work protecting Washingtonians from discrimination.
“All the things that are both Jewish and immigrant, I think I experienced growing up,” Simon told JNS. “I feel very connected to immigrant populations.”
“People made fun of my mom, because she had an accent,” Simon said.
She told JNS that a friend’s mother referred to her, when talking to the friend, as “your little Jewish friend” rather than using her name.
“With the growing population of Israelis in Seattle, I was really moved by how difficult it was for them to live here,” she told JNS. “It brought up a lot for me—how difficult it was for them to go to school and how their children experienced discrimination.
“Of course, much worse after Oct. 7, but it brought up a lot for me,” she said.
Simon’s term on the commission runs through June 2030.
Washington state has an estimated Jewish population of 88,000. There is no official data recording how many are Israeli immigrants, but a social media group for Israelis living in Seattle has more than 5,000 members.
‘We all have blind spots’
Simon joined the panel months after Luc fils Jasmin resigned on July 1, after JNS reported that he had made antisemitic remarks during a commission meeting, including accusing Jews of complaining too much about antisemitism.
“Getting him to know us would have been a really wonderful thing to have happened before he joined the commission,” Simon told JNS, of her predecessor on the state panel.
“We all have blind spots,” she said. “You always have to learn more and pull yourself into a space where you understand others.”
Simon led the Holocaust Center for Humanity from 2006 to 2024. “We trained 11,000 Washington state police officers,” she told JNS.
“When I look at the trajectory of my career, I spent so much time working really in a way in the human rights arena through education,” Simon said. “But I think that when you talk about human rights, education is just one piece of it.”
“You also have to have laws in place, and they need to be able to enforce those laws,” she said. “Being on the commission is part of the enforcement piece.”
The commission’s resolution condemning Jew-hatred, which it adopted in April 2025, focused mainly on protecting people who are anti-Israel from accusations of Jew-hatred. Simon told JNS the resolution would “absolutely not” have passed if she had been on the panel at the time.
She approaches conflict resolution “in a way that everyone walks away with having been educated about the topic and feeling that the decision was the right decision for everyone,” she told JNS.
The commission has a “big backlog” of claims, according to Simon.
“I think that is an issue that we need to address,” she said. “I have a reputation of getting things done.”
“When things come up, sometimes you need a delicate hand, and I think that’s where I tend to shine,” she told JNS.