NEW YORK — Emeritus Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Abe Foxman said two things keep him up at night these days.
“The deteriorating relationship between Israel and its one-and-only most important ally, the United States, and how the Jewish people will react to this explosion of antisemitism at the end of the day,” Foxman told The Times of Israel.
“We’re fine now, but what happens if it continues? How will it end, and how will we survive?” he wondered on the eve of the centerpiece events of the ADL’s “Never is Now” conference in New York this week.
Having survived the Holocaust as a child and then worked in the Jewish world for over five decades, Foxman is now the organization’s emeritus director, after being the national director for 27 years. In an in-depth conversation, he gave The Times of Israel a look into his perceptions of the post-October 7 world and the international climate of antisemitism.
Everyone (including this reporter) asks Foxman if he is surprised by the torrent of antisemitism that has seemingly engulfed the globe since thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed the border with Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 253 more to the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians.
But Foxman differentiates between “surprised” and “shocked.”
“After 50 years of dealing with this subject, the answer is no, I’m not surprised — because those of us dealing with the subject professionally understood a long time ago that antisemitism is a disease without an antidote and without a vaccine. We reported on it, we monitored it, we recorded it… we knew that it was there, that it was deep, and that it was serious.
“The organized Jewish community developed a containment strategy — if we can’t eliminate antisemitism, at least let’s contain it,” Foxman said. “Keep it in the sewers with the cover on. [This means] using every means available: media, coalitions, memory of the Shoah, the truth, threats of litigation.”
He pointed out that in the over 100 years between the death of Leo Frank in 1915 to the massacre of the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, only three people were killed in the United States because they were Jewish.
“So that’s pretty good in terms of maintaining the community and safety…but it wasn’t surprising that a trigger mechanism blew the covers off the sewers,” Foxman said.
This “containment” strategy, Foxman contends, fell apart because of two major factors: the internet and an endorsement of the end of civility in American discourse. Foxman called the internet “probably the most significant instrument that has given legitimacy to antisemitism — it’s given it a superhighway, and a level of anonymity more than we ever could have imagined.”
When it comes to civility in America, Foxman isn’t afraid to use the “T” word — “Trump.”
‘The lack of civility in America came as a result of Trumpism — Trump legitimized it’
“The lack of civility in America came as a result of Trumpism — Trump legitimized it,” Foxman said. “Once he broke all the taboos of what’s acceptable and what’s not, we [the Jews] were the first to go.”
“[The Unite the Right rally of white supremacists that resulted in two deaths in 2017 in] Charlottesville, he didn’t create, but he gave them the hechsher,” Foxman said, using the word for a kosher imprimatur of good standing. “They felt, it’s okay to go out there and publicly be an antisemite.”
And skipping ahead to October 7, 2023, Foxman feels, there was fertile ground for antisemites.
“So yes, I’m not surprised, but I am shocked” by the outpouring of antisemitism post-October 7, he said.
“I’m shocked by the intensity of the hate,” Foxman said. “We studied it, we knew it was coming from left and right, but what surprised me was the intensity of the hate and the intensity of the silence. I’m shocked that you cannot find 10 organizations that we, the Jewish community, have stood within the last 50 years who stood up clearly with us in this moment.”
In discussing the current climate of antisemitism at American elite institutions of higher education, Foxman noted the role of university Middle East centers set up by Arab institutions and donors decades ago.
‘What surprised me was the intensity of the hate and the intensity of the silence’
“On the face of it, it was benign,” Foxman said, noting that even then, some universities approached the ADL asking for nondiscriminatory agreements with Arab countries so that these centers didn’t discriminate against Jews. “But we didn’t prevent that, and the Middle East centers became Judenrein,” with donations in some cases explicitly precluding Israel studies and faculty.
Today’s academic climate, Foxman contended, “is the result of a very deep investment of two generations of scholarship” and inadequate parallel measures by the Jewish community.
“I’d hear of a Jewish person donating $20 billion to a university and ask them, ‘What condition did you put on it?’ and they’d say, ‘None,’” Foxman said. “’You didn’t ask for Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, Israel studies?’ ‘No.’ So that’s our failure, but we should understand that this is a result of 20, 30, 40 years of investment by the Arabs.”
Foxman attributes current antisemitism on campus to “a failure of administrative guts” on the part of university administrations.
“It’s not about freedom of speech — we know what’s permitted to say and what’s not,” Foxman said. “No one is going to protect the ‘n-word’ under the auspices of freedom of speech, so no one should protect ‘Gas the Jews.’ It’s not about speech — it’s about behavior.”
Most universities, Foxman points out, have behavioral codes: “You can protest and speak, but you can’t stop someone else from going to class. They have the means to act, and they’re not acting, and that’s what’s so frustrating. We don’t need task forces on antisemitism — we need task forces on how universities can implement their own codes of behavior. The task forces, what are you going to do — tell us what’s going on? We all know what’s going on. They have to develop consequences.
“There needs to be accountability and consequences,” Foxman said. “Task forces on antisemitism aren’t giving anyone the responsibility to have accountability and consequences. They need to fulfill their responsibilities under all the tools they have already.”
So how does the world put out the wildfires of hate — or at least put the cover back on the flames to keep them from spreading?
“I think we need to come together and build a new containment strategy,” Foxman said. “I’m not sure I know what it is, because many of the elements that worked for us before no longer exist. The most important of those is truth — antisemitism is the big lie, and you answer the big lie with the truth. But Trumpism destroyed truth.”
‘We need to come together and build a new containment strategy’
Foxman added that the disintegration of the media and civility also stripped those who would combat antisemitism of two important previous avenues of redress.
“Coalitions are gone because we’re tribalistic. Civility is gone,” he said. “To build a new strategy will take an awful lot of creativity and putting back some of the things that we’ve lost.”
“The question to me, in this new onslaught against the Jews, is that it’s not about them — it’s about us,” Foxman said. “How will we respond? Will we put on mezuzahs on our doorposts, or take them off?”
So far, Jewish pride has blossomed in the wake of October 7.
“The community around the world has stood up and said, ‘I am a Jew. I want to be a Jew,’” Foxman said. “That’s the test of the future: How proud will we be of our Jewishness, and to what extent will we stand up. It’s not about what ‘they’ do. It’s terrible, it’s frightening, it’s debilitating, but you know what? We can overcome it. It’s more about us than about them, and the signs now are very positive.”
What Foxman fears, he confides, is Israel losing the United States as its ally.
“We’re in a propaganda war, and to an extent, we’re losing the propaganda war, and I worry about losing America,” Foxman said. “It’s scary, looking at the polls, the Sunday television shows, the major newspapers — there is so much out there that is anti-Israel. It’s misinformation and disinformation in ways you never could have imagined.”
“I don’t worry about ‘the world,’ I worry about the US,” Foxman said of the future. “The US is Israel’s most important ally, whether it’s politically, economically, militarily — there is no one else. What worries me is that we’re losing it.”
No matter where a person stands politically, Foxman states, on October 7, we were “very lucky” that Joe Biden was president of the United States.
“Biden said to the world that America will not permit to happen to the Jews what it permitted to happen during World War II,” Foxman said. “He had a moral compass and stood up in a magnificent way, defending Israel and giving money — but as the war goes on, it’s deteriorating.”
Now, Foxman said, “the president is weak and has been politicized.”
Constituents in Michigan and elsewhere whose support for Biden is wavering due to the president’s backing of Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza is “really taking a toll,” Foxman said. “Look, to hear the vice president of the United States use ‘ceasefire’ as the number one condition scared me. The word ‘ceasefire’ is a code word for the victory of Hamas… It’s scary, and I’m very worried.”
‘The word ‘ceasefire’ is a code word for the victory of Hamas’
Foxman said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being “used to legitimate anti-Israelism.”
“The irony is that while Bibi Netanyahu has, for years, been a major asset in the US-Israel relationship based on his leadership, articulation and many other factors, today he’s become a liability, especially in the US, and people who are criticizing Israel equate the state with Netanyahu and the right-wing government, and that’s a very serious problem for us,” Foxman said.
Foxman noted that before October 7, Biden had stated that Israel’s existence made Jews safe.
“Zionism was our safe haven — we need to be like all the other nations, and therefore we will be safe and secure,” Foxman said. “Ironically, what has happened is that Israel has become the Jew among the nations. We entered the community of nations, which was the dream of Zionism and Herzl, with a flag and anthem, et cetera — and yet we’re being treated differently than any other nation.”
‘What other nation in the world has no right to determine its own capital and has to defend its right to defend itself?’
“What other nation in the world has no right to determine its own capital and has to defend its right to defend itself?” Foxman asked rhetorically. “Who is telling Ukraine where to send its missiles, or that it’s too many innocent victims? Nobody. We are still the Jew among the nations.”
Despite all this, Foxman is quick to point out that he’s an optimist.
“Jews don’t have the luxury to be pessimists,” Foxman smiled, quoting the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. “I survived. I have no right to be a pessimist, and I’m not one. It’s tough and gets tougher, and I worry more, but okay. We’re allowed to be worried. We also believe that out of tragedy, good can come. After destruction, we survive, then we rebuild.
“The sense of hope, determination, continuum… yes, that’s all part of the secret of our survival,” Foxman said. “I wish the world wouldn’t test us so often. We’ve proven that we can be positive without the negative.”
The Times of Israel Community.
