In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer is joined by longtime ADL leader and Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman for a raw, intergenerational conversation about fear, leadership, and the dangers of silence. 

When Do We Speak Up? – with Abe Foxman Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Wednesday, May 14th, 2025.

So if you look back on history, what were the trends, the indicators, and the specific historical events that ultimately led to the Nazis implementation of the Final Solution and their attempt to exterminate world Jewry? And how much time do you have?

You could start the clock with the long history of European anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, both the populist kinds and the theological kinds. You could do the political history of European Jewry tracing the precariousness of the alliances that Jews maintained or had to maintain with royals and barons and how that positioned them made them vulnerable to the rest of the people.

Or you could look at the rise of nationalism and the alienation that that created for Jews who were consistently excluded from national stories of the places where they had lived for centuries. You could point to specific aspects of the rise of Nazism, like the economic conditions in Weimar Germany, Hitler’s anti-Jewish writings, and beliefs that interlaced his hatred of the Jews with every aspect of his consolidating of power and the rise of eugenics and race sciences.

And you could look at the specific historical decisions that the Nazis quickly undertook, both in discriminatory laws and the licensing of extra-legal violence against Jews, which normalized state anti-Semitism and paved the way for it to become systematic persecution.

You’d have to explore the rise of authoritarianism in Germany more generally, and how the dismantling of public trusts and key democratic institutions made it possible for the Nazis to consolidate power and crush all the forms of opposition that might have held them back or held them accountable.

And then there’s also the unfolding of the war. American non-interventionism, the invasion of the Soviet Union and the systemization of mass killing, the ruthless Nazi bureaucracy that made it all happen, and then there were the German people themselves and the Ukrainians and the Poles and many more, who not only allowed all of this to happen, but who often opportunistically and gleefully made it possible.

And I probably missed a few other things in there, but the point is, the rise of Nazism was both a complicated phenomenon with many interlacing forces and factors, but was also understandable and visible. A lot of those forces and factors were happening in real time and not just now, but and not just now, in historical retrospect, but then, at the time. And although there may have been little for European Jews to do to withstand this genocidal tidal wave against them, we still hold in our memories with some fear and suspicion that maybe there were things that our leaders could have done then that might have saved more of us.

And I think that the central fear that animates many Jews today, and especially the folks in Jewish communal leadership, the thing that keeps them up at night, is the question of whether they, we, are missing the signs, choosing the right steps to use our voice, our agency, power, access, and resources to avoid what could happen if antisemitism here and now takes on the force and political opportunity that it had there and back then.

That’s the fear and it’s why all of the texts, and it’s why of all the texts in Jewish tradition that are wheeled out to talk about leadership and its burdens, one of the Jewish texts most frequently cited by Jewish leaders and the most evocative is that from the fourth chapter of Esther. When the queen is hemming and hawing about the decree that’s come out from the king and Haman to kill the Jews, and she’s worried about losing her status and she’s worried about her secret identity and she’s claims that she can’t do anything because protocol demands that she has to be summoned in a particular way.

And Mordechai responds to her that if she remains silent in this moment, the Jews will find salvation some other way and she will disappear from history. And who knows, he asks, whether you have found your way to your position of power, if not exactly for this moment?

Now, none of us know the moment for which we are born. Some people, the Talmud says, acquire the meaning of their lives in a single instant. To insist that acting here and now in any particular way is that exact moment for which you were born that’s a tricky claim especially if we keep using that verse at all times in such a way that it dilutes the particular significance of any moment.

But we Jews today have a dual problem. We remember the Shoah, the Holocaust, in our bones and in our souls as if it was recent, and we have this almost debilitating fear that we’re somehow gonna miss the signs again. That fear is always nipping at our heels. And here in America we’re witnessing a rise of anti-Semitism that can’t be accurately or perfectly analogized to the rise of Nazism, so we can’t quite know what the actual indicators or signs would be that would awaken Mordechai’s words properly in our actions and in our politics. We feel the rise of anti-Semitism but whether it’s because of fear of analogy or fear of guessing wrong, we are held back.

I feel sympathetic to the struggle that many Jewish leaders have today in navigating this tension. I feel it myself, frequently, in the question of when do I choose to use my voice on any particular moral issue? When do I use my platform? When do I cry out from a place of urgency what it means sometimes to choose to say silent? I think that struggling with those questions is good practice for all of us. If you’re certain of your choices all of the time, I am scared of you.

But even as I identify with that struggle, I gotta say I’m pretty mad that many key Jewish institutional leaders in our community seem to me to be missing some pretty clear signs, to put it generously, or maybe worse, making some bad choices about what they’re cautioning against and what they might be enabling in today’s fraught anti-Semitism moment.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that Mordechai’s comment is right. Maybe it’s not a single moment when we become conscious of our role. Maybe what we need is a deeper awareness by those who hold power of the constant current of choices that they sit atop, and that those folks exhibit both humility and curiosity to pay attention to those choices and the conviction to use their power and agency correctly and definitively. But I gotta say, I don’t feel particularly optimistic.

I’m joined today by Abe Foxman, a Jewish leader who is as close to a household name that we have in our national Jewish community. Abe Foxman served as the head of the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, for nearly 30 years until he stepped down in 2015. During that time, he grew the organization considerably and positioned the ADL as the kind of chief public information organization nationally on anti-Semitism and as a kind of public arbiter of the Jewish community’s views on anti-Semitism.

He himself is a child survivor of the Shoah. And his leadership, I found, always reflected both his own personal narrative, but also a broad sense of responsibility for communal and shared concerns. In recent months, he’s also become outspoken about the Trump administration, especially most recently on Holocaust Remembrance Day. And that stance has set him apart from some other Jewish institutional leaders who have been, let’s say, far more circumspect in how they engage with and criticize the president. Thanks for coming on the show today, Abe.

And I thought I would start just by asking you to paint a little bit of picture of what you think has gone wrong in this rise of antisemitism. I think, you know, obviously throughout your tenure at the ADL, you were chronicling and documenting and talking about antisemitism as an ever-present force, but it does feel like we’re in a different conversation today in 2025 than we were in the eighties and nineties. And what do you think has happened over that period of time that has made this situation become more acute?

Abe: Thank you, Yehuda. Well, first I would say that the other thing that guided me and some of us is another phrase that we say every year, “b’chol dor v’dor, omdim alenu, ve-chalotenu/.” And that is a deep understanding that antisemitism is a yes. It was, it is, and it will be. That it is a disease without an antidote and without a vaccine. And so in my 30, 50 years, I understood that it was always there.

I think all of us, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the ADL, what are called the Jewish Defense Agencies, the legacy agencies, the professionals always knew and understood that it’s here, that it’s deep, that it’s serious, that it will always be here. And recognizing that, we tried to develop a strategy of what I would say containment. You’re not eradicating it, you’re not defeating it, you’re not ending it. But if you can, with all the elements that exist in the society, develop a strategy of containment, we’ll be in a better place. And I would say, you know, maybe somebody else would say, but not me, but I’m here and you’re asking me.

I think we were successful in the last 50 years of using the elements that were out there, civility, truth, memory of the Holocaust, coalitions, legislation, litigation, all the elements that made our society what it was, to keep anti-Semitism in the gutters with the cover on. And it worked. In a sense, if you take a look at the last hundred years in the United States from Leo Frank till Pittsburgh, three Jews were killed in the United States because they were Jews. In a hundred years, well, millions were killed all over the world because they were Jews. And two out of the three were because of the Middle East, Meir Kahane and the young student, Yeshiva student, Ari Halberstam. So it’s really one classic case of anti-Semitism in Crown Heights.

We broke all barriers, political, cultural, economic, you name it, academic, all these things that were barred to Jews because they were Jews, didn’t disappear, but they were not part of the American tradition. So if everything was so wonderful, what happened?

Well, first of all, I need to say, our warnings, and we issue report every year, and nobody listens. And the people who should have listened, the Jews, the media didn’t listen, they didn’t care. Okay, they had other reasons. But the people who should have listened, the Jews, ignored us, said we were creating these facts because we were fundraising. And the barbs came more from the Jewish community than they came from the anti-Semites on the outside, who didn’t take a warning series.

And every year we said, hey, I’m going through my papers. I wrote about campus anti-Semitism in 1974, in 1979. We’re talking about… it’s a new phenomenon. 20 years ago, I met with the president of Columbia because Jews and Israelis and Jews are being discriminated against in Columbia. It’s not new, but people didn’t listen.

Okay, so aside from that, Yehuda, what happened? What happened is the world changed. The world changed in the last 10 years. Trump is part of it. I would call it Trumpism. It’s not Trump per se. I don’t think he’s such a chacham that he knows what he’s doing. But he broke all taboos. Probably the most significant thing that he did to hurt us, and again, he didn’t do it to hurt us, is destroy truth. Anti-Semitism, racism is the big lie. Can you imagine if Gables were in this position that we were in?

But he destroyed the truth. He destroyed media. These are elements that we used for the last 50, 100 years to fight anti-Semitism, to counteract it, to argue it, et cetera. So you lost civility, you lost all the taboos. The taboos protected us, as everybody else. We lost truth, we lost media, and we have the internet. We have a new phenomenon, which, as I would say here, if Gables had, probably could have conquered the world.

Because now all of a sudden, I remember I went to Palo Alto many, many times. I wrote a book 15 years ago called Viral Hate. People didn’t pay attention. But all of a sudden, the geniuses in Palo Alto created a super highway where misinformation and disinformation were easily, easily transmitted in nanoseconds globally. And what’s the number one hit on misinformation and disinformation? What are the conspiracy theories all about? Jews, Jews, Jews.

I remember Mark Twain, 140, I don’t remember, he wrote an essay about Jews and anti-Semitism. And he said, wherever you went, there was anti-Semitism, rich people, smart people, stupid people, atheists, religious. So part of the problem is that there is no one reason. Anti-Semitism serves the right and the left, fascism and communism. It serves the rich and the poor, it metastasizes. And therefore we come to the realization that since there is no one reason and it serves so many purposes, it will always be with us. And the atmosphere totally, totally changed.

And that brings it to your question, you what’s the role of Jewish leadership? I thought at my time it was tough. Compared to what it is today, it was easy.

Yehuda: Okay, you said a lot of things and I’m very persuaded by a lot of them, so I’m gonna pick up on a few different pieces. One that you didn’t name, that I’ve been laser focused on for years now, and I wrote about this five, six, seven, eight years ago, about how I argued that hyper-partisanship in America was the biggest existential threat to Jews. Because in some ways, what you described as the container that made possible the suppression of remote, radical ideas, conspiracy theories, the rupture of taboos.

One of the other forces that it relied upon was broad consensus politics in America that sidelined marginal viewpoints. And both parties, by the way, have been complicit in this through the process of gerrymandering, where you make districts that are super red and super blue. And there was a powerful example of this recently with the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.

One of the wildest stories that I feel like I’ve seen in a long time where Republican members of Congress, are insisting that an anti-Semitism bill focuses very heavily on anti-Israel activism because they see that as a left problem. Then as part of the process, Marjorie Taylor Greene leads a process by which then they carve out an exception in the prohibitions on speech for Christ killing. Christians should be allowed to believe that without being accused of anti-Semitic.

So I guess this is a long way of asking, I think, a complicated question, which is one of the taboos that I think held for a long time was that anti-Semitism was bad. Nobody wanted to be identified as it. Today, it’s still the case. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t want to be called an anti-Semite. Anti-Israel activists don’t want to be characterized as anti-Semite. But in the landscape of language in which we’re operating, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore.

So in what ways is the terminology of fighting anti-Semitism actually helping us or hurting us right now as opposed to fighting a more generalized Jewish hate which can take all these different kind of forms?

Abe: I didn’t mention the word Israel.

Yehuda: Yeah, we’ll come to Israel for sure.

Abe: And neither did you. And yet, when it comes to issues of definition, issues of bipartisanship, cetera, Israel, pro-Israel, plays a major, major, major role in terms of how we used to define anti-Semitism, we define it now, whether it becomes an issue of conflict. And what I would say, the Israelis become the Jew amongst the nations. And so, you know, whatever nation is allowed, the Jew is not allowed, etc. And then it becomes…

But I believe that in my years, the most sacred possession we thought we developed was bipartisanship. Bipartisanship on race, on anti-Semitism, on Israel. I remember many, many years ago, we took missions to Israel of congressmen, Democrats and Republicans. Together, they discovered the Holy Land. They discovered Jesus on our shoulders in Israel. And they came back and for the first time worked with each other because they knew each other and liked each other. Okay.

Then comes a period in our time and, you know, Sheldon Adelson’s Zichronah L’ivracha, and he decides no, we’re not going to have joint missions bipartisan. We’ll only take Republicans. So the Democrats started taking Democrats and Republicans. We, you know, ourselves destroyed bipartisanship. Israel made a decision, somewheres along the line, and looked to a large extent in the last 20, since Israel became part and parcel of our Jewishness and who we are and our role in America and our advocacy and our identity and everything else. You know, the Tzion that came out of Tzion was not always for all of Tzion.

And so the message that’s coming out is that Israel started becoming partisan. We are today in a partisan situation where there are no coalitions and every issue is being used against the others and we are being used. Jews are being used on Israel, anti-Semitism, for other purposes. And that puts us in a dilemma. If it was Jews qua Jews, it’s one thing to stand up. But now, when Jews are being used on immigration issues, on woke issues, makes it a lot more difficult when to say something or not say something.

Yehuda: One of the forces that you just described in terms of Israel forcing this bipartisan divide is, I’m going to say honestly, this was a choice by the Netanyahu administration as well over the past 15, 20 years. There’s good evidence that they became convinced that liberal Jews were disappearing. They became convinced that liberal Jews represent an infinitesimally small percentage of the population compared to evangelicals. If you don’t really care about Jewish peoplehood and you care about the long-term survival of Israel on the basis of the choices of the right, then that’s it.

Why has that position, which is so obvious, why has that never been publicly articulated by leaderships of the major Jewish organizations who are constantly running protection for the Netanyahu administration because that, because of the perception that that’s the way that you are pro-Israel.

Couldn’t it have made a difference over the last 20 years for the AJC, for the ADL, for the federations to not just privately nudge against Netanyahu, but publicly say, we as representatives of the American Jewish community do not accept that this is an approach that attempts to speak in our name? Have we enabled this to happen?

Abe: Because they really did not speak in our name. They represented their interests. What you’re seeing is, again, you can dislike Bibi or like Bibi, it doesn’t matter, but Bibi still articulates, first and foremost, what he believes as a democratically elected leader, what is in his mind, in his understanding, in the best interests of the people of Israel.

So for us to second-guess that, and you want us to second guess if you support Israel. And Israel is not at peace. And Messiah hasn’t come. And we haven’t resolved. So the only issues that we ever, that I remember we have at the con is the internal issues of respect amongst Jews. I’ve always said that support for Israel will not disappear on the issue of settlements, but it will disappear if Israel does not respect other Jews,, how it starts defining Jews in one way. And so why should my children and grandchildren care about Israel in the future if half of them or 80% of them don’t think they’re Jews? So this is the only issue, Yehuda, that the Jewish community spoke out about because who is a Jew and who’s a rabbi determined in Israel impacted on us.

The other issues, how to carry on diplomacy, foreign policy, it would really be chutzpadik for us to substitute our wisdom to his wisdom. Now, the option that we had is not to follow. That means we didn’t, you know, he went into the Trump camp. American Jewry is not following him into the Trump camp. Elements of American Jewry are, but they were there for other reasons as well. But again, it would be really chutzpah for me to substitute my opinion, my view of what is in the best interest of the lives and safety of Israeli citizens.

And as long as there is democracy, somebody—I said a while back during the judicial crisis reform, I was asked, I remember by the Jerusalem Post, you, Abe, you’ve always said your support of Israel is unconditional. And I said, yeah, unconditional as long as Israel continues to be a democracy. And as long as Israel continues to be a democracy, whether I like Bibi or not, he’s going to determine how to carry on his foreign policy. To what extent I support it publicly, again, Israel is at war, Israel is still under threat.

So these are not decisions that we’re talking about in an abstract. And October 7th changed a lot of it. If we were moving in your direction, where the American Jewish community was becoming more comfortable being critical. And it was, and it was. And then came October 7th. you know what? Criticism is a luxury that Jews feel at this moment they don’t have or have less of.

Yehuda: But I think I’m asking a slightly different question, which is not about some kind of omnibus criticism of Israel, Israel’s policies. And there, your mileage may vary. I’m more comfortable with it. You’re less comfortable with it. I’m focusing on something more specific, which is public criticism of the decision by the Netanyahu government to participate in the partisan polarization in America, which is actually existentially damaging to American Jews.

So the state of Israel makes as part of its core claim. It makes this part of its core claim that it is both a state for its citizens, like any normal state, but it also sees a responsibility to protect and defend the integrity of Jews around the world and not just when they arrive. when I, my observation is that if you and I agree that this partisanship held together around a certain type of support for Israel and that the Israeli government helped to pull that apart, we should actually be resisting that, which is not an internal Israel issue, it’s an internal American Jewish issue.

Abe: Yeah, Yehuda, you know, “shvetz anti ayit,” you know, it’s good to be Jewish, but it’s tough to be Jewish. It’s a great intellectual conversation, but I’m sorry. I know Israel talks on behalf of safety and wellbeing of Jews, but I know that first and foremost, it’s the safety and security of the citizens of Israel. And in the last 50 years, Israel and I have privately disagreed and I saw them taking positions which would be not positive for diaspora Jews.

And again, I understood it because if I had the responsibility for my citizens, I would take first and foremost. It’s, know, lehavdil, in my area to me was always, you know, the Hillel concept, if ein ani li, mi li? You know, but it was always number one. It was always clearly number one. And when you come to current leadership, Jewish leadership, it isn’t always number one. They’re a little bit fuddled where it should be, et cetera. But I always understood that for Israel and Israelis, their safety, their security, their relationship is number one. And I don’t like Bibi’s embrace of Trump. Trump saying he’s the greatest president for Israel in history and then Bibi saying yes, but you know what? I understand.

And again, and again here, a lot of people don’t like Bibi. The fact is October 7th, Hamas didn’t attack Bibi, it attacked Israel. And it’s easy to say I don’t like Bibi, so therefore this and therefore that. That’s a luxury that I don’t think we have because the attack, you know, they weren’t going to destroy Bibi, they were going to destroy Israel. And so, again, we have certain luxuries here to discuss what could be and what should be. There’s still a reality out there.

Now, I will say to you this. People used to ask me, what keeps me up at night? And my answer used to be Iran, existential threat. Well, no, it doesn’t keep me up anymore because Israel today has a deterrent. It’s destroyed Hamas, Hezbollah, you know, etc. And Iran is not an existential threat.

What is an existential threat? God forbid, deterioration of the relationship between Israel and America and Israel and diaspora Jewry. That keeps me up because we’re in a situation where Israel is so dependent, so dependent on the United States, and being so dependent on the United States is dependent on the American Jewish community. But Yehuda, what we saw this week, you have it dated in the program, all the efforts at lobbying, all the efforts at advocacy, all the relationships that be built within 24 hours are down to drain. And it really doesn’t matter because the world has, America has changed so dramatically.

So again, the questions that you ask, my successor, my successors in the Jewish community, the decisions where they stand and where they don’t stand is so…there’s no precedent for it. And the precedents that we look at in a world that really doesn’t fit.

I have, Yehudah, always intellectually, and I don’t compare, chas ve-khalila, Trump to Hitler or Hitler, okay? I don’t. There are all kinds of elements that people like to. But I intellectually never understood Hitler coming to power. Now I really understand it for the first time. I couldn’t understand lawyers and doctors and jurists in the 30s. These were people, people who saved lives. And I now see it. I now understand how you can rationalize anything and everything. I’m a lawyer. My daughter’s a lawyer. I don’t understand the lawyers, you know, coming down on a knee and saying, we’re guilty. How do we settle this? I could never understand it then and now I understand. That’s what’s very frightening.

I will tell you something else. I spoke out at the Holocaust Museum on Yom HaShoah. The museum is there for one thing, to show, never be silent, stand up. So if you don’t do it there. But I have to tell you, not many people thanked me for my courage. You know how people have said to me, thank you for speaking up? If this is courage, oy va-voy lanu. But there is an intimidation, there is a fear here, very, very deep. And that to me is very scary because I look at my fellow Jews and Jewish institutions and all of a sudden the cheshbon nefesh is about them, not about Am Yisrael. It’s are they going to be… they’re to be targeted. Okay? So maybe we should be quiet, we shouldn’t be targeted. And I’ve said to people, you know, if he decides to target you, it really doesn’t matter what you say or don’t say. So you might as well stand up and say what you believe.

But it’s easier for me because I don’t have a constituency. I don’t speak for anybody. But I will also tell you, my wife and my kids said to me, we understand you’re going to go to the Holocaust Museum and you’re going to be you. But you know what? You know what? Just… Okay, so I try to do it delicately. I try to do it a little. I try to do it with a context, but I understand the fear out there. I understand the anxiety out there. Whether it’s you know, a Holocaust institution or tax deductibility, all of a sudden, if tax deductibility goes out the drain, most of the support for Jewish education disappears. So, I understand, but still, still, we have responsibility.

Yehuda: I, yeah, I, so look, I agree with you and we’ve had, you know, we’re on nobody’s radar, for better or worse, I guess, but we’ve had internal conversations about like, what our commitments are and what we’ll be willing to do at the cost of donors, of tax status, all those things. And those are not small calculuses. You know, we employ people, you know, it’s like a big deal to say we are willing to put it at risk because we believe that we have to say what we need to say.

What scares me a little bit is not that people are holding their tongue because of fear. I get that. What scares me is that people are holding their tongue claiming that it’s about fear, but it’s actually about self-interest and claiming that they think that by holding where they are, they keep access. I mean, that’s been such a big narrative for so long for American Jewish leaders. Well, I need to have access, but I feel like, well, what’s the access for?

Like you have access, say something now have and the fear of jeopardizing that access feels like well, what’s the point of having it if it’s not for this kind of rise of authoritarianism? So how do we get people to move beyond that? And it can’t be that people wait till they retire. It’s not good.

Abe: I’ll share with you when Trump ran for office the first time, I went to a mentor. I went to see Henry Kissinger. And I said, Henry, what do we do? And he said to me, you know what you do. I protect democracy. You protect the Jews. So he worked with them and I worked with them, you know, and I believed, I think he’s always felt you need to deal with the power to be, not the power to want to be. But it is, listen, how relationships, sometimes holding our nose, save Jews, Jewish lives and prevent the Jewish suffering?

Listen, I went to see, I went to see the junta in Argentina. Hello, okay, you know, was this something I wanted to do? No, because most of the students arrested were from social sciences and they were Jews, happened to be Jews. And Timmerman was suffering as a Jew, whether I liked his philosophy or not. So yeah, I worked with Mengistu. I went to see Arafat. So we made these very uncomfortable decisions because that doesn’t mean I was right all the time. I worried about credibility. worried, you know, I worried, to me it was…

The cheshbon nefesh I had to give to myself. I think what was lucky for me is from whence I came. People say to me, oh you survived so you can do this. That’s the height of arrogance in Chutzpah. Everybody is like, God knows why. But it was simple for me because my focus was always clear. It was always clear. It’s what serves best the Jews and the Jewish people in Israel. The answer isn’t always clear. The answer is not always clear.

And sometimes, you know, after the Iran revolution, I went to see Ramsey Clark in the Iranian embassy in Washington. Ramsey Clark and people said to me, what are you doing? And Ramsey Clark saved 15 Jews from hanging, because I went to see him. Now, and all kinds of people said, what are you doing? You know, so it’s not always simple. You say, you know, it’s not fear, it’s self-interest. Well, it’s fear of what? It’s fear that you’re going to lose your position. You may lose whatever. So it’s very mixed.

What scares me is, we can rationalize everything. It’s so easy to rationalize, and that’s the scary part. At one moment you stop rationalizing and say, this is way beyond the rational reason why I could or shouldn’t do it. It takes a higher plane. I don’t know the answer. I am worried because I don’t see things changing for the better. I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t see it in Israel. I don’t see it here. And again, we’re so tied to each other. All of a sudden, Bibi is now talking about we have to be independent. Okay, a little late.

But, you know, because all of a sudden, this relationship is souring. We don’t always have the wisdom. And if we have the wisdom, then we need the courage. We don’t always have the courage. And I always worried about credibility. Credibility was the most important element in my possession on behalf of the Jewish people. Doesn’t mean I didn’t make mistakes, but if the cheshbon hanefesh is not losing tax exemption, then I don’t know. But on the other hand, if your institution disappears, you’re not there to help or do.

Yehuda: I felt that the piece that I felt was particularly courageous was speaking about the universities because that feels like, to a lot of Jews right now, the situation at universities feels like red meat fight against anti-Semitism, the perception that these places, which I think is not fully accurate, that these places which have deep anti-Semitic ideas embedded in certain departments and certain culture around Israel, but are not, it’s not… even next, even like at the campus that we’re next door to, there are Jewish students who are thriving on campus. So that narrative is serving a particular set of ideas that are actually not about anti-Semitism. It’s actually also about dismantling universities. And you have tried to stand up against that and said like,

Abe: I think we have an obligation. I’ll say it almost colloquially. Jews have to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. And I don’t understand why. Thank you, Mr. President, for Jerusalem. No thank you for banning Arabs. Thank you for what you’re doing here, but no thank you for immigration. Immigration is the soul of Jews. Many Jews died because there was no immigration to the United States. So we need to understand it. So we’re not able to do this.

Somehow we feel that if he does us a favor or somebody does us a favor, we have to close our eyes and mouth to everything else. And I think we need to be strong enough and mature enough to say thank you and no thank you. And we’re not doing it. I don’t understand why. Because, well, because we’re dealing with a persona who’s vindictive who took him four years to talk to Bibi because he congratulated Biden.

So you’re dealing with a persona which breaks all the rules in terms of what we understood is behavior, civility, how do you protect your interests, how do you act, how do you behave. But still, code is still our code and our code is, yes, thank you. We should thank for what’s good, but we shouldn’t have the ability, the strength to say, no, no, no, this is not about immigration. I mean, you know, immigration is what America is about. Due process is what America is about.

But look, whatever you want, his message on anti-Semitism is a good message. The trouble in this country is there are no consequences to anti-Semitism. That’s what’s happened. People used to say to me, what’s the difference between anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Israel and Europe? I would say in Europe there are laws against anti-Semitism, but they’re not enforced. In the United States, First Amendment won’t let us have laws against anti-Semitism, but there are consequences. If you’re an anti-Semite, it’s un-American, it’s immoral, it’s a Christian, you’re to pay a price, not because the law says so.

Now, we’ve lost that in the last 10 years. There are no consequences to it. You, as I don’t tell you, you can go out and you can march with a Palestinian flag from today to tomorrow. God bless you. That’s fine. But if you use that flag to stop a Jewish students to go to class or beat them up, that’s not freedom of speech. It needs to be consequences. And we all know, we all know that if students use the N word in a public square of a university, they would be suspended, but to say gas the Jews today is okay. So there needs to be consequences.

The irony is Biden wrote the book, he did the initiative on anti-Semitism, which is historic. In 50 years we would knock on the door of the government and say, hey, anti-Semitism is your responsibility, we finally have it. But they didn’t act. They didn’t act because of elections, because of Michigan, because of Israel.

Trump is saying all the right things. And he may even be doing the right things, but for the wrong reasons. So it’s a dilemma for us, but I think we still have to stand up for the institutions, for due process, even if the wrong things that he’s doing help us in the long term.

Yehuda: I just don’t see how they help us at all because I think in the long run…

Abe: The consequences. Yehuda, there need to be consequences.

Yehuda: Yes, for sure. No, I felt this way all along at the universities that the issue was time, place, and manner. If you violate the rules, prosecute the rules.

Abe: Right. They are there. No, but how do you get them to… The codes were always there. If they applied the codes, there would be consequence. The problem is they didn’t apply the codes to us.

Yehuda: I agree. But that could have easily happened through actual intelligent mobilizing of the Jewish community. But when you connect it to cutting $850 million from Johns Hopkins from cancer research and then pretend that that’s what’s happening at Harvard or Columbia, that that’s making them enforce the rules, doesn’t make any sense. That’s actually dismantling higher education.

Abe: But I don’t think, I think the minority of Jews support that. I think the minority of Jews support that. I don’t think that the overwhelming community of Jews support it. They’re happy to hear the language. They’re happy that there’s going to be a price to be paid, but that’s not the price because that’s going to destroy.

Listen, I also worry we’re putting out these reports on anti-Semitism, ABC for university. I want kids to go to Columbia. I want Jewish kids to go to Harvard. We worked for 50 years to break the quotas for us because that’s where the future of America will continue to be. I don’t want them not to go. You know, I will tell you, I’m very careful about being critical of my successors, because what happens is it becomes a very personal type of thing. You know, my generation, the current generation. But I do think there is something missing.

In my day, and I remember even when I was at tsutsik growing up, I would go, my ADL American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, NJCRC, anywhere from five to 10 organizations would meet at Leo’s Restaurant on East 70th. Once a month. We hated each other’s guts. We competed for the same dollar, but we sat once a month and we struggled about the priority. And then we would say, you know what? Arab boycott is an issue for the next year. We need legislation. You ADL and the American Jewish Congress take the lead. Immigration. Immigration is going to be an issue. You, the American Jewish community, and you, Hadassah, and you, Hillel, you take the lead.

And we all did the same things. We all fought for Israel, better or worse. We all fought anti-Semitism. We all did interreligious. But we did set priorities. And when there was a time to set up an organization on Soviet Jewry, we did. And there was a time to set up an organization for the Ethiopian Jewry, we did. And there was a time to deal with the Catholic Church as a community.

So we did operate. I don’t see it now. I don’t feel it now. I don’t see this effort of coming together seriously because how many reports on anti-Semitism do we need? Does it really matter whether it’s 62% or 67%? So for the guy, hey, take a look, everybody hates the Jews. And for the Jews, what does that do? Does that reinforce our strength? So nobody’s sitting there and saying, you know what? ADL, you’re good at this, you did this. Committee, you’re not doing it.

Plus, I will tell you, we need to have a Jewish position in immigration. We need to have a Jewish position on higher education. We need to have a Jewish position. 20 years from now, this will be a Latino-Hispanic country. We need a strategy to interact with the future Latinos and Hispanic leadership together. We need to be there on their way up. So there are things we can do. This will pass. Look, I think it will be better. It will never be the same. It will never be the same.

But Yehuda, I’m an optimist. Golda Meir once said, Jews don’t have the luxury to be pessimists. I don’t think survivors, a million and a half Jewish children perished. I survived. How dare I not have an optimistic view of our future? It’s going to be tough. It was worse. It was worse.

But it’s all about us. You know, people say to me, well, I said, you know what, I am an optimist because it’s not about them. It’s about us. Because I once went to a seminar where the Jewish civilization will survive. And the organizers had a study of Spengler and Toynbee to try to find the secret of Jewish survival. I think they found it. And they came out and they said, you know, after the Roman Empire fell, no Roman got up and said, I want to be a Roman. How do I become a Roman? After the Greeks civilization fell, no Greeks came running. I want to be a Greek. The secret of Jewish survival is after the destruction of the first temple in the Anzal and the second temple.

Jews were running around, how do I continue being Jewish? Maybe we’ll write a Talmud, maybe we’ll do, you know, whatever. We were being Jew. And if after the Shoah, if I said to my father, why are you teaching me to be Jewish? Okay? Why are you sending me to Yeshiva? Okay? So he explained it, you know, we have a tradition, we have history, whatever. And then when Jews stood up, built families, rebuilt Israel, Jewish sovereignty. So I look at that.

Now, so far I think we’ve done okay after October 7th. You know, with all the issues, the question is going to be how many Jews take mezuzahs off from the door. That to me, and you know, as long as Jews get up there and say, want to be a Jew, we will continue to survive and overcome all our enemies. But that’s, so far, Jews returning to synagogue, I don’t know how many billions they raised for Israel. So far the signs are good. And you have to be seichel. I don’t think it’s heroism to go to Colombia and wear a t-shirt that says tzahal. Okay, that’s a little stupid at this moment. Doesn’t show heroism unless you want an incident. And there are some people like incidents. That’s not courage. That’s not standing up for being a Jew.

But so far I see the Jews standing up. I worry about Israel. I worry because the internal strife, you know, we overcame it two years ago on October 8th, but I have this annoying feeling we’re going back to milchemet hayehudim. And that’s the scary part. So again, it’s not about them, it’s about us. And so that’s why you’re in business.

Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah, no kidding. Well, before I know, and I’m grateful for the plug, but I’ll ask you one last question. And it really is like raising the ante. To me, it’s not just sufficient to have a strategy about immigration. I really feel that the role of those of us who care, who fight anti-Semitism, who fight hate have a special responsibility to look out for the vulnerability of others.

And here I feel that since your tenure, this has gone away. I remember growing up, when I went to, I was in a Jewish day school, Orthodox day school, but the place where I encountered real serious understanding of racism and hate in America was when I did an after school ADL program. That’s where ADL introduced me not to how do I stand up for myself? How do I advocate for myself? That I got from my day school. What it taught me was, what country do you live in and how is immigration of value and how is as fighting racism of value and who are the multicultural tapestry of this country that we’re responsible to and I have to say that’s gone away.

It’s entirely been replaced by if you are fighting anti-Semitism if you’re opposing hate you’re opposing this hate and now we’re going to jeopardize our relationship with the Black community and with immigration advocacy groups because we’re just standing up for ourselves. It’s really in a mi li, moment, it’s, “who is for me?” How does the Jewish community reclaim that the nobility of fighting anti-Semitism is intertwined with the nobility of fighting for, fighting against hatred to all, that we are intertwined with these commitments?

Abe: Okay, so it’s part of our teaching is, tzedek tzedel tirdof is not about us. It’s about everybody else, okay? So we’ve always been taught. I remember, we did the first book, The Nation of Immigrants. We did World of Difference. Okay, all that.

But part of the reality here is that October 7th was a major trauma. People asked me after October 7th, Abe, were you surprised? And my short answer was no. I wasn’t surprised, but I was shocked. I was shocked at two things. One was the depth of the hate that was out there, and two, the silence and the difference of all the people that we stood with together. I never believed you. When I worked for LGBT or African, it was always for me. It was always good to my values. If I raise the level of respect and tolerance for anybody, it raises the level of tolerance and respect for us. So even in that, it wasn’t altruistic. It was selfish as well.

The Civil Rights Act of 64 helped us open up resorts for Jews because all of a sudden you couldn’t discriminate in interstate commerce. Okay. It was done for African Americans, but all of a sudden Palm Beach opened up for Jews because we sued the breakers under the civil rights. So I never spoke out, we never embraced because there’s gonna be a return, okay? Because we did it, again for us, for our values, et cetera.

But I think the trauma of October 7th is so deep still. You can’t put on the fingers of both hands 10 organizations that stood up. You can’t, the NAACP, which has no international agenda, to come out with a resolution against arms to Israel in this period? And it becomes hard, you know, to embrace. So we’re in a period now where the first part of Hillel is going to be a lot more impactful than the second.

But again, I believe that the second part is not for anybody else but for us as well. We need to educate. The problem is most Jews don’t understand Jewish values, okay? And so that’s another problem. That’s another, they don’t even know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. If they only knew, maybe they would embrace it a little bit more. But you’re absolutely right. “Am l’vadad yishkon” is not, we can’t live alone. We can’t. And we know that Israel certainly can’t, and we can’t, and we can’t.

And the problem, lot of problems of what happened in the Holocaust. But the Holocaust would not have happened if only Germans did it. If it wasn’t for the Ukrainians or Lithuanians and the Latvians, that’s who did it. So, you know, it does matter who we’re with. You know, my nanny, know, not agree… She stood up. She could, you know, if she made the risk for her, this was the right thing to do. And that’s what we’re teaching. It’s the right thing to do. To stand up for others is the right thing to do. So you know what? Immigration, it’s going to hurt us too, eventually.

Yehuda: Of course it will.

Abe: Education is already hurting us. So we, again, so I think it’s selfish and altruistic at the same time. But yeah, you’re absolutely right. We can’t throw it away because at the end of the day, we will be alone and we can’t survive alone.

Yehuda: I can’t thank you enough for doing the show today. Thanks for being with us.

Abe: Thank you.