Two of the central figures in the diaspora’s fight against antisemitism are not confident that things will improve in the short-term.
Jonathan Greenblatt is chief executive of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League while Dave Rich, his friend and colleague, is head of policy at Britain’s Community Security Trust. Greenblatt, who marks a decade of service at ADL this summer, says the CST is the organisation which most closely resembles his — and expressed warm admiration and respect for the work Rich and his team do. Rich, for his part, shares that admiration, and the pair reported that they are in constant contact.
Additionally, the ADL and the CST are part of a group known as the J7 — the seven largest and most influential diaspora communities. The leaders of communities in America, Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Germany and Argentina, exchange experiences and information on a regular basis in order to help and support each other’s challenges.
Greenblatt says: “In the last decade, we have seen a shocking expansion and hardening of anti-Jewish attitudes in the United States and around the world. We have seen the normalisation of anti-Zionism at a scale which is almost mind-boggling. And we have seen Jewish people caught in the cross-hairs in an increasingly polarised and political world. I think all these trends are really very worrisome.”
ADL does three core things, he says. “We protect, we advocate and we educate” — and in all these categories, Greenblatt says, things have never been more difficult.
Dave Rich
Rich is in broad agreement. “What none of us foresaw, a decade ago, was the impact of algorithmically driven social media on mass attitudes towards Jews and extremism in general.” Perhaps, he says, Jewish organisations should have pushed for government intervention and regulation much earlier “in understanding the role of social media in spreading antisemitism and of hateful extremism”.
Rich believes that though there has been a massive escalation in such attitudes since October 7 2023, “most of it is not in itself new. But the scale of it — that’s what has changed the atmosphere for Jewish people in our countries.”
Greenblatt adds that the really shocking thing is how “all this has been normalised. Conspiracism has become the coin of the realm”, he says, and in the US there is a “fragmentation where people no longer get information from experts, but from influencers… in a world where conspiracism is considered acceptable discourse, we shouldn’t be surprised that antisemitism just becomes commonplace”.
For ADL, he says, the real horror, which was not foreseen, was the level of influence carried by populist broadcasters such as Joe Rogen and Tucker Carlsson, who Greenblatt says are “virulently anti-Israel and are front and centre of the world we’re living in today”.
It’s not, of course, just the mainstream media and social media which cause the problem: there is the trickledown effect for both the ADL and the CST of having to operate in an environment where there is “an inversion”, according to Rich. “Once, mainstream opinion was built around facts and evidence and the conspiracy theories, or what has been called fake news, were on the fringes”.
That is no longer the case, he says. Covid, and the rise of populism and polarisation, has had “a huge impact”. While CST does work closely with government, it also knows that “for a large part of the population, government is the least trusted messenger in some ways…. the people who are spreading conspiracy theories will always see government as ‘the bad guys’. And while we always want to be completely non-partisan in tackling antisemitism, and we have to be able to work across the political spectrum of the mainstream parties, that has become more difficult in recent years”.
Greenblatt echoes this. “Distrust in government now is at historic highs: but there is also distrust in the judiciary, in the media, in the universities, in so many of the institutions which we think of as holding up a free society. The whole enterprise of liberal democracy is being challenged, in a way that was hard to imagine not too long ago”.
On one thing Greenblatt has no doubts: “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This is not some abstraction, this is a reality”.
Rich has a nuanced take: “In theory, you can construct an anti-Zionist argument that is not antisemitic, whether that is from parts of the haredi community, or from some Utopian fantasy about a different political arrangement between Israelis and Palestinians. But in practice, the anti-Zionism that we see today is antisemitic, in language, in goals, in methods. There is no other conflict on earth where a bunch of people, who call themselves progressive, look at that conflict and say that the way to solve the conflict is just to get rid of one of the countries – it shouldn’t even exist. That’s a fundamentally racist position, it can’t be anything else. Contempt and hatred for Israelis as people and for Israel as a nation is the permitted racism of progressives.”
Greenblatt says he “strongly concurs”. He compares the phenomenon with the racism of the South African Afrikaner: “he would say he was not a racist but that the political order was better served by having Black people in a subservient role….that is, in my mind, a bigoted, intolerant position. In the world in which we operate, anti-Zionism is antisemitism, plain and simple. It results in the marginalisation and the persecution, not just of Israelis, but of Jewish people”. He speaks of a “blanket demonisation” of people in relation to their ethnicity or nationality.
The ADL leader says that these are “unprecedented times” in which his organisation — and, presumably, others in the Jewish community must change tactics. “We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. In light of these extraordinary times, we are taking extraordinary measures. For a long time, ADL relied on working behind the scenes”. Now, he says, it is time to work out front and in addition to political advocacy, “do legal advocacy in a much more direct way”.
He says: “We have filed more lawsuits in the last 12 months than we had done in our first 112 years of existence. We are suing the Islamic Republic of Iran for their role in facilitating the 10/7 on behalf of 180 Americans… we are pulling out all the stops. And we have not only to operate differently downstream, we have also to try to move upstream, and shape conditions where we can stop antisemitism from taking root in the first place.”
ADL has also set up a first of its kind legal hotline for students, CALL, for students and staff on campuses who feel victimised by antisemitism but did not know what to do. CALL operates in conjunction with some of America’s most prestigious law firms whose partners offer pro bono services together with other Jewish organisations.
CST’s work has also shifted in emphasis since October 7 and Rich says that they are now also dealing with those expressing support for Hamas and calling for violence against the Jewish community. “There have been a few cases which have come to court and CST has been involved in research and reporting to the police”.
The community as a whole, he says, could learn from ADL when it comes to civil cases relating to people experiencing antisemitism in the workplace. “This is an area where institutions such as universities or hospitals need to be held to account. We have rights and if we don’t exercise those rights, they wither away and we may as well not have them. We will see more and more of this kind of thing in the UK, and we have to redraw the boundaries as to what is permitted behaviour in the workplace. Civil, legal cases, can be a very effective way to deal with that.”
