When Laleh Ispahani, a globally-renowned human rights activist and lawyer, was a young teenager in the United Kingdom, the United States seemed to her the ideal of an open, stable and free place.
“It was a place where all people were believed, in the founding documents…to be equal, where everyone was endowed with unalienable rights, where free speech and government accountability were etched into the bedrock,” said Ms. Ispahani, who spoke at the Summer Institute’s first event of the season on Thursday.
The Summer Institute speaker series is held on Thursday evenings at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, and features weekly discussions on topics ranging from politics and the arts, to media and democracy.
Ms. Ispahani is the managing director of Open Society Foundation's U.S. programs. She stepped in Thursday evening for Binaifer Nowrojee, the president of Open Society Foundations, who was originally slated to speak.
Ms. Ispahani talked about the work of the Open Society, and reflected on her own journey. She spent her childhood in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iran during times of revolution and war before eventually moving to the UK, where she lived through race riots and rising tensions between white, Black and South Asian communities.
“I watched governments come apart with terrifying speed, and I saw neighbors turn against neighbors in order to protect themselves,” she recalled. “What I took from these experiences…was a very visceral understanding of how fragile a government can be. I saw how quickly an open society could snap shut.”
The term “open society,” Ms. Ispahani explained, comes from the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper’s book, which he wrote during the rise of Nazism. Mr. Popper was a teacher of George Soros, the Hungarian-born founder of the Open Society Foundations.
An open society is one where freedom of expression is protected, where institutions can be questioned and reformed without violence, and where those in power can be peacefully challenged without consequence.
As a prospective university student, Ms. Ispahani imagined the US to be an open society.
“Over time, of course, I recognized — as you all do — that the U.S. democracy has never fully lived up to its promise,” said Ms. Ispahani. “Equality under the law is being tested like never before. Rights are seen as negotiable, and free speech and accountability are under threat.”
Last year, a senior Justice Department official directed more than half a dozen US attorneys’ offices to investigate the Open Society Foundations, said Ms. Ispahani. The allegations range from “arson to material support of terrorism,” she said.
“This is because the President doesn’t like the founder and his or his politics, and his team dislikes the causes we fund,” said Ms. Ispahani.
The official who initiated the investigations, Todd Blanche, has a confirmation hearing this week to be the next attorney general of the United States.
“What we’re seeing is a systematic expansion of government overreach, and it is dangerous,” said Ms. Ispahani. “We’re watching patterns that once defined distant regimes surfacing here, at home.”
The Open Society Foundations are responding by litigating the current administration’s actions, such as Donald Trump’s $2 billion fund to support his political allies, said Ms. Ispahani. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided Minneapolis in the winter, thousands of residents had already been trained on their fourth amendment rights, thanks in part to the foundations’ grantees and their partners.
“This is how we push back on the encroachment and the erosion as it’s happening,” said Ms. Ispahani. “You throw sand at the gears of this oppression, both at home and abroad.”
But the rapid responses to attacks on the country’s open society are only one piece of the puzzle. There is also the slow, long-term work of building coalitions, strengthening institutions and investing in communities, said Ms. Ispahani.
“The things that look sometimes like victories are only ever part of the story,” she said. “Elections that are won can be lost. Executive actions can be rescinded. Laws that are passed can be repealed. But what endures and what moves us forward is the community we build, the culture we create, and the cooperation we foster among people who were not working together before.”
In response to the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, the foundations’ partners in South Carolina answered with an integrated campaign that included voter education, litigation and community organizing.
“We’re investing in this new generation of civic life,” said Ms. Ispahani. “It includes young people who weren’t part of these conversations before because they’ve got to care about the world they’re going to inherit, and they’ve got to build it jointly.”
“Progress is not a place we arrive at,” she added. “It’s an action. It’s the work of doing. It’s the work that we do, all of us, as citizens, to keep this society as open as we can.”
One audience member asked Ms. Ispahani to reflect on national efforts to make the US government more democratic.
“The Democratic party needs to really align in a big way,” she said. “It can’t just be Bernie Sanders, progressives and the Democratic Socialists platform. It has to be Senator Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, the entire party. Right now it’s really not all of the party, and I do think that is a huge part of the problem.”
What gives Ms. Ispahani hope, she said, are current and former government officials who are trying to re-envision agencies sucha as the Justice Department and USAID to make them less susceptible to corrupt administrations.
“We’re going to keep trying,” she said. “We can’t give up. We’re not closing the society yet.”
For a list of upcoming speakers, visit mvsummerinstitute.org/summer-institute
This article appears in July 17, 2026.