Rachel Maddow, Michael Yarvitz Star at San Diego JACL Gala

San Diego JACL Chapter Co-President Michael Kurima (left) with (from near left) honoree Rachel Maddow, speaker Dale Minami and honoree Michael Yarvitz. (Photo: Scott Norland)

‘Burn Order’ executive producers are feted,
as are Teresa Stivers Liong, Wendy Gillespie.

By George Toshio Johnston, Senior Editor, Digital and Social Media

SAN DIEGO — The award-winning “Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order” received yet another accolade for its trophy shelf on Sept. 12 when the San Diego chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League presented the MS Now podcast’s co-executive producers and writers Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz with its 2026 Civil Rights Leadership Award. The presentation was the highlight of an evening filled with highlights and was the climax of the chapter’s Never Forget Gala that took place inside the San Diego Mission Valley Marriott, preceded by a balmy outdoor reception that epitomized Southern California’s classic climate.

For more on “Burn Order,” see related story at tinyurl.com/2php9uwv.

Yarvitz, who had with MS Now colleague Kelsey Desiderio already accepted an award for “Burn Order” on May 30 in Los Angeles from the Japanese American National Museum (see June 19, 2026, Pacific Citizen, tinyurl.com/46a44kfw) was this time joined in person by his producing and writing partner Maddow.

She felt it was important enough to fly in from the East Coast just for the gala (and return on a 4:30 a.m. return flight), despite admitting to being a “socially awkward” type who doesn’t ever “go to things.” Speaking for the “Burn Order” team, Maddow said, “It just means the world to us.”

Yarvitz told the Pacific Citizen that he had remembered reading the “paragraph in a textbook,” like many American school kids did when learning about Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Noting that MS Now spent more than a year producing the six-episode “Burn Order,” he said, “As we started to dig into the research on this, we started to realize that there are all of these stories embedded in the larger story of Japanese incarceration that certainly are not known by the amount of people that should know it.”

Maddow told the Pacific Citizen that there was no “one thing” that made the MS Now team decide to focus on the Japanese American incarceration experience of WWII and that there were actually a couple of other “worthy ideas that we may yet produce.”

“Part of the reason that we decided that this was the one we would do … ahead of those other two ideas is honestly because of the resonance of this before the 2024 election,” Maddow said. “We could sort of see around the corner and see the way that Trump was campaigning and the way that he was talking about immigrants, and we thought there was going to be domestic mass incarceration.”

The sense of urgency to tell the story relayed in “Burn Order” was apparent. “With everything going on in the country right now, it was a story that we needed to tell right now,” added Yarvitz, who also noted that the series has also won the Radio Television Digital News Assn.’s Edward R. Murrow Award in the Network TV-Podcast category, to be presented on Oct. 12 in New York City.

Maddow, Yarvitz and “Burn Order” were not, of course, the event’s only honorees. San Diego JACL board of directors member Janet Hamada Kelley presented the chapter’s 2026 Community Leadership Award to Walden Family Services CEO Teresa Stivers Liong, whose résumé also includes leading the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation and serving as deputy chief of staff to former San Diego Mayor Susan Golding.

“What stands out most are not these titles and accomplishments. It’s the fact that Teresa shows up,” said Kelley, be it for “families navigating incredibly difficult moments,” young people, colleagues, partners and community leaders or the San Diego JACL.

After “so many years of being told I’m too much, I’m too big, I’m too loud,” Liong told the audience that she was thankful for being recognized by the chapter for “using my voice on behalf of children who don’t have a voice.”

Chapter Co-President Michael Kurima introduced the next awardee, theatrical producer Wendy Gillespie, whose credits include “Allegiance: A New American Musical,” which had its pre-Broadway debut in San Diego in 2012. Before presenting Gillespie with the 2026 Media Arts & Culture Award, Kurima noted that she was the chapter’s “only two-time honoree,” having won its Civil Rights Leadership Award in 2015.

Gillespie recalled how “Allegiance” came into her life in 2009. “I said, ‘If that show is going to play somewhere, it’s going to be in my town.’ She noted how “30,000 people here in San Diego saw that show in 2012 at the Old Globe.” Later, it would be performed on Broadway (see ‘Allegiance’ to Close on Broadway on Feb. 14, Jan. 14, 2016, Pacific Citizen, tinyurl.com/3rvcdv2p). “We did the show in Japan. We did the show in London in 2023,” she said. “Hard to believe 20,000 people saw it in London.”

Closing on a serious note, Gillespie said, “We’re living in a time where people are trying to erase history. We’re trying to pretend that terrible things didn’t happen, and any great society will recognize that we’ve made mistakes. And how do we move on and create a better world? So, I just want to reiterate: Never forget.”

Another highlight of the evening was a speech by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author of “Love in the Library.” Her 2022 children’s book tells the story of how her maternal grandparents met while incarcerated at Idaho’s Minidoka War Relocation Center. When a major children’s book publisher offered her a licensing deal for it but insisted she remove the word “racism” from her remarks about the book, she refused, finding the mandate “deeply offensive.”

“Because of the whole Scholastic incident, there was a brief window when my full-time job was speaking about it all around the country, including Idaho,” Tokuda-Hall said. “I was invited there to keynote the Idaho Library Assn.’s conference and speak to donors of Friends of Minidoka. It was there, not two hours from where my grandparents had been wrongfully incarcerated, that I first came face-to-face with the violence of book bans.

“It wasn’t until I got to know the librarians in Idaho that I realized these book bans and the accompanying right-wing frenzy that surrounded them were ruining people’s lives,” Tokuda-Hall added, relating how librarians she spoke with were faced with harassment, doxxing and death threats. “After that, I told myself, ‘I’d be damned if I let them fight alone.’” She co-founded and was the first president of AABB — Authors Against Book Bans.

Tokuda-Hall described it as a “coalition of over 5,000 creators all across the country, united under a single guiding principle that it is not the government’s place to tell us what we are allowed to read.”

The gala’s other speaker, who introduced Maddow and Yarvitz, was attorney Dale Minami. He led one of the three coram nobis legal teams that in the 1980s revisited and overturned WWII-era Supreme Court cases originally brought — and lost — by Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui.

Hearkening back to what Japanese Americans faced in 1942, Minami spoke of the ill-intentioned influencers of that era, newspaper opinionists like Walter Winchell and Walter Lippman who advocated that Japanese Americans “be banished from the West Coast and incarcerated.” Lippman went further, Minami said, claiming that Japanese Americans were “prepared to commit sabotage.”

“He made this brilliant argument that the very fact that no sabotage has yet occurred is disturbing evidence that it will imminently occur. . . . In other words, the fact that you didn’t commit a crime means that you’re surely going to.”

Minami also noted how, with the exception of the Quakers and a group of socialists led by Norman Thomas, Japanese Americans in 1942 had no allies. “Nobody stood up for us, and we had a civil rights disaster. So, we hear those echoes of history today,” he said.

Before bringing Maddow and Yarvitz up to the stage to receive their awards, Minami called on someone in the audience to be recognized: “Peter Irons, would you stand up?”

Irons not only was one of the prominent voices heard in “Burn Order,” as a law professor and legal historian who had researched what had happened to Japanese Americans during WWII, but he also knew the importance of the document Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig stumbled across at the National Archives: the one mislabeled, damning copy of the original “Final Report on Japanese Evacuation From the West Coast” that had been ordered to be incinerated yet had somehow escaped being burned. Minami also related how Irons generously insisted that Japanese American lawyers lead the effort to relitigate the three WWII Supreme Court cases.

On the stage, Yarvitz said, “On behalf of Rachel and myself and our colleagues, Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulreany Donovan, we’re just so incredibly grateful for your decision to recognize ‘Burn Order.’ We made this series to try to understand how exactly a country can go down the darkest of dark paths, how we can allow the mass targeting and the mass incarceration of a minority group strictly on the basis of their race.

“What the Japanese American community suffered more than 80 years ago remains a stain on this country that can never be forgotten,” Yarvitz continued. “It can’t be rewritten or sanitized or whitewashed by history or scrubbed from textbooks or taken off of plaques at national monuments. We can’t let any of that happen. It’s a history. It’s a history that needs to be understood by every new generation of Americans, so that it’s never repeated.”

During her turn at the mic, Maddow said, “The whole reason we wrote ‘Burn Order’ was so more Americans will understand what our government did, what Karl Bendetsen and John DeWitt cooked up and why they did it, but also the fight that they had on their hands at the time to get it done, how it might have been stopped, the lies they had to tell, the evidence that yes, they indeed had to burn in order to get away with it.”

In her closing, Maddow said, “The persecution of immigrants today by our government is not the same as the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942, but at MS Now, previously known as MSNBC, today when we cover the protests and the legal challenges and arrests . . . and the venom of our government in deploying a lawless and totally uncontained force against them, as we cover the protests of Americans of every stripe against that abuse, I think every day of the mass protests that never broke out in the spring of 1942, and the hell that might have been avoided if we had had those protests then.

“It is up to us right now in 2026 to learn from what was done right in 1942 and to learn from what was done wrong to make sure we are not going to live through it again,” Maddow concluded. “The work that you do here at JACL helps ensure that Americans know that we can’t take anything for granted. It helps ensure that we never forget.”

The gala was emceed by KABC-TV news anchor David Ono and actress Tamlyn Tomita. During the course of the evening, they not only announced that the Pledge of Allegiance would be led by Aiden Yamashiro and that the taiko performances were by UCSD Asa­yake Taiko, but they also recognized special guests in the audience: San Diego County Supervisors Monica Montgomery Steppe and Joel Anderson; San Diego City Council President Joe LaCava and City Council members Henry L. Foster III, Marni von Wilpert, and Kent Lee; Oceanside Mayor Esther Sanchez; Honorary Consul of Japan in San Diego Kate Leonard; San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ai Mori; San Diego County Superior Court Judge Selena Epley; Catherine Carr-Lynch, the granddaughter of Colorado Gov. Ralph Carr; National JACL Executive Director Lilly Simmering; National JACL President Sheldon Arakaki; National JACL VP of Planning and Development Carol Kawamoto; former JACL National Presidents Ken Inouye and David Kawamoto; San Diego Deputy Chief of Police Shawn Takeuchi; San Diego Police Capt. Carissa Doherty Edwards; actor Derek Mio; and director Paul Daisuke Goodman.

The evening ended with words from the event’s co-chair and executive producer, Lane Nishikawa, who showed some footage of his documentary about JACL, “League of Dreams.”

“Burn Order’s” Yarvitz may have best encapsulated why both he and Maddow prioritized attending the gala. “I think the things that are almost more meaningful to us are events like this, where the Japanese American community has embraced us and this series. An honor like this means the world.”