Antisemitism is rampant. Campus protests aren't helping things. | The Excerpt

On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: It’s now been over six months since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, when more than 1100 Israelis were killed and over 200 taken hostage. These were mostly civilians. While the Israel-Hamas War has been ongoing since that day, the repercussions of that attack have also been keenly felt here in America in the form of a surge in antisemitism. On college campuses, and in communities across the country, Jews have felt targeted, threatened, and frightened. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League or ADL, a Jewish civil rights organization, joins The Excerpt to talk about the issues. Next Sunday's episode will feature an interview with Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, April 28th, 2024. A brief note about this and another coming episode. Today we're featuring an interview with Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization. Next Sunday, we'll feature an interview with a guest with a different perspective. That guest will be Nihad Awad, the National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization.

It's now been over six months since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, when over 1100 Israelis were killed and over 200 taken hostage. These were mostly civilians. The repercussions of this ongoing war were also keenly felt here in America in the form of a surge in antisemitism. On college campuses and in communities across the country, Jews have felt targeted, threatened, and frightened.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were nearly 9,000 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a rise of nearly 140% over the previous year. As Jews across the country gather to celebrate Passover, a holiday that commemorates the exodus of Jews from Egypt where they were enslaved, the millennia-long persecution of Jews is particularly resonant for many.

To talk about the growing problem of antisemitism here in America, I'm joined now by Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, a Jewish civil rights organization.

Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Jonathan.

Jonathan Greenblatt:

Thank you so much for having me.

Dana Taylor:

The ADL recently released its annual report on antisemitism in the US, a report that it's been publishing since 1979. What have you been seeing in recent years?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

In recent years, we had already been seeing an increase and an intensification of antisemitism. It started in 2016. That was the year of the general election that was very sort of fraught and polarized, and antisemitic incidents, which we've been tracking, as you said, for 45 years started to rise.

That increase has continued apace, and in four of the five last years we've hit new record highs. But in 2023, literally there was a surge that's probably best described as a tsunami. The numbers, the total numbers of acts of harassment, vandalism, and violence increased 140% over the prior year. So literally way more than doubled. Keeping in mind that the prior year, 2022 was the previous high water mark. And before that 2021 was the previous record. And before that 2019. So things are intensifying, things are escalating, and that's why we're so alarmed.

Dana Taylor:

And since the Hamas attack on October 7th specifically, what have you been hearing from Jews here in the US?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

Well, so that attack in Israel, which was the bloodiest day that the Jewish people have experienced since the Holocaust, interestingly, while I think by all measures it was grotesque and it was horrific, and it was just the losses are almost incalculable, I mean, we can say 1100, 1200 people, but it's far greater than that in many ways. Interesting, the antisemitism surged on that day right here in the US. We saw hundreds of incidents on October the 7th and October the 8th in towns and cities and campuses and whatnot all over the country.

When so many seem to react to this horrific attack with glee, seem to celebrate the rape and the torture and whatnot, it left many American Jews feeling kind of unmoored, feeling uncertain. But what's happened since then has been really quite shocking. So between October the 7th and December the 31st, we tracked 5,204 acts of antisemitism. Just so we're clear, that alone Dana, would be the largest year on record, and that was just less than three months.

So I think Jewish people feel vulnerable, they feel fairly isolated, and they feel anxious. Anxious because in so many places where Jews have lived in diaspora over, as you laid out thousands of years, we've seen this sort of unmooring. And to see it happening here in the US is quite frightening.

Dana Taylor:

The Forward, an American-based independent Jewish newspaper reported in January that two thirds of the antisemitic incidents reported since October 7th are tied to Israel. Tell me how the criteria for what constitutes an antisemitic incident changed since that day and why?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

That's a good question, and it allows me to kind of explain. At ADL, we have 25 regional offices, almost 500 full-time staff, and our people respond to incidents. People call in when they feel like they have been the victim or been targeted by hate. Now we get lots of kinds of calls. The vast majority are antisemitic, people concerned about an antisemitic attack, although we get other kinds of calls as well.

Our staff investigates everything that we report. We don't publish complaints. We don't publish accusations. We don't publish charges. We only publish what we are able to verify, whether a law enforcement agency has done so, charging an individual with a hate crime, or we've done so. And we look at things beyond just the crimes, Dana, right? So if your child is bullied at school, that's not a criminal offense, but we would track it. Or if you claim discrimination in the workplace, again, law enforcement wouldn't be involved, but we would track it. So we are looking at bias incidences and hate crimes.

Now, I also think it's fair to say that as a civil rights organization, we cherish and we ferociously fight for the First Amendment. ADL has decades and decades and decades of hard-fought experiences arguing on behalf of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, the divide between church and state and so on. And that's all very material here because there's nothing antisemitic about protesting the state of Israel or not inherently. There's nothing antisemitic about expressing strong views about the need for Palestinian self-determination. There isn't.

So I wouldn't call it antisemitic. And I actually think to be honest, that hate speech is just the price of free speech. Oftentimes we're going to hear things we may not like in a democracy, and that's what it means to live in a democracy. But we would classify something as antisemitic Dana if it is targeting an individual or institution because they are Jewish.

What I mean by that is, it's one thing if you say free Palestine marching down the street. It's another thing when you vandalize a kosher restaurant with the words free Palestine. Okay? That's not just an act of vandalism. That's a hate crime where you're holding that restaurant because it's kosher, somehow responsible for what's happening in the Gaza Strip.

Or again, you can have strong feelings about the two-state solution or whatnot. And again, it's one thing if you want to claim that Israel's not doing enough to pursue peace. It's another thing when you scream at students walking into a Hillel or you spit at someone because they're wearing a kippah or a Jewish star around their neck. That again, strong views shouldn't translate into slandering someone or physically intimidating people because of where they worship or how they happen to dress.

So at ADL, we speak out against all forms of hate. I think I thought it was wrong when President Trump talked about a Muslim registry and was threatening to hold all Muslim people culpable for the actions of a few. I mean, it was crazy and it was wrong. So we called it out. And I've spoken out when again, the same administration was making wild claims against Mexicans and immigrants. I mean, it's just wrong to hold people collectively responsible. It's wrong to stereotype. And the same thing applies here.

When we talk about antisemitism, we're talking about holding individuals responsible or making accusations again just because of their identity.

I should also point out, if we try to think about why we're in this moment, antisemitism data is a kind of conspiracy theory about how the world works. I mean all prejudice is different, but all of it ultimately regards somebody because of their difference as inferior. Antisemitism is an interesting kind of, it's an interesting virus because it holds the Jews responsible. Again, it scapegoats the Jews.

In communist Russia, the Jews were capitalists. In America in the '50s in the Red Scare, the Jews were communists. Sometimes the Jews are accused of having too much power. Sometimes the Jews are accused of not having any power. The accusations range depending on the time and place. But in our America today where conspiracy theories are so dominant where everybody seems to see the world through the filter of, again, some wild conspiracy and where trust has fallen, that makes people more susceptible, I think, to scapegoating and is the kind of environment in which antisemitism can really breed.

Dana Taylor:

You've answered this, but I do want to circle back. Speaking plainly and directly, does the ADL support the freedom of Americans, Jewish or not, to criticize Israel and its policies?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

I mean, not only do we support it, if you want a good example of criticizing the state of Israel in a way that's not antisemitic, maybe I would encourage the audience Dana to go to this website. I'll give you the URL, adl.org. That's our website because we criticize the state of Israel, and we do that because we're Zionists and we believe in the right of Jews to self-determination. That doesn't mean we believe that Israel always gets it right. Just like we're proud to be, I'm proud to be an American, I'll criticize the American government.

But there's something decidedly different when there are countries in the world like Iran, but that has a goal that they reiterate on a continuous basis of wiping Israel off the map, that's what they say, or groups like Hamas, which talks about, again, not a two-state solution, not even a peaceful resolution. It talks about killing Jews and wiping Israel off the map.

In an environment where you have governmental and non-governmental actors spewing hate as policy, when people here in America delegitimize the Jewish state or demonize Israelis or hold them to double standards that are not applied to any other country in the world, that to me isn't "criticism". That's something else. That's something almost more existential.

Now, again, one could say, "Well, what if you can say strong things about any government? Is that necessarily prejudiced?" I mean, not necessarily. But again, when the Jewish state is contending with countries like Iran and nongovernmental likes like Hamas that want to destroy it and kill Jews, when people hear champion Hamas, when they rationalize Iran's really malevolent behaviors, and when they make excuses for things like again, screaming at people walking into a synagogue on a Saturday morning, we realize it's not just criticism, it's something else. And that's what I find really offensive.

Dana Taylor:

Rising antisemitism on American campuses has been a particular concern since last October. Earlier this month, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing at which Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testified. This was in many ways, a part two to the hearing last December in front of the same committee, which ultimately took down the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

The day before this recent hearing, Shafik had an Op-Ed published in the Wall Street Journal in which she wrote, "While there may be some easy cases, drawing the line between permissible and impermissible campus speech is enormously difficult."

Whether on or off college campuses, where do you draw the line between free speech and hate speech?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

Hate speech is the price of free speech. You have to be willing to hear things in a democracy that you find deeply, deeply distasteful, repugnant. But here's the problem on these campuses, Dana. Number one, there is an uneven application of the rules. I'm okay again with free speech, but I'm not okay with favored speech. And so if you would allow certain kinds of speech, but censor others, I have a problem with that.

And all too often we've seen campuses interject and inject their values into the conversation what is permissible or not permissible. I mean, for years we've had conservative speakers who would just get altogether canceled because the administration found them to objectionable. But when you bring speakers to campus who say incredibly hostile things, not just about Israel, but about Jews, about students on the campus and the president or the provost not only allows it, but actually doesn't apologize for it, that's a problem.

So again, if you can call for genocide of any people on your campus, then you should be able to do that. But when you don't allow others, but you do allow it only against the Jewish people, that's a problem.

University of Chicago has this long-standing policy of institutional neutrality, I think it is a very noble cause that if all universities would adopt it and just say, "We're going to be value-free zones, we're going to allow all of our students and all of the ideas," that would be great. But they don't do that. And it's the selective morality, Dana, that we have a problem with at ADL.

But we've gone deeper than that, just saying we have a problem with, that we've studied it. And we've seen, for example, that the DEI programs at many of these universities, I mean we are very data-driven organization. We survey the students. 82% of the students who've participated in a DEI training program or orientation program at the universities report to us that it didn't include anything about antisemitism or the Jewish people.

Now, that's a problem when you think about the fact that diversity education should be teaching about all kinds of people, and when Jews in particular are the most frequently targeted religious minority in the country. I mean, Jews are only 2% of the population, yet somehow they're more than 60% of the hate crimes inspired by religion.

So I think the campuses have an issue. I want the campuses to be raucous environments, but I also want them to respect all the different elements of their community. I want the campuses to have heated debates, but I don't want them to allow hate against one group of people.

And I'll say something else. While I believe in the notion of heated debate, and I believe in kind of raucous environments, I don't think anyone should get the heckler's veto, right? So if you look back at the court decisions over the generations really about the First Amendment, the heckler's veto has been found by the course to be a problem again and again. Your freedom of speech doesn't allow you to impinge on my freedom of speech. You don't get the right to speak over a speaker. You don't get the right to interfere with somebody's ability to express their views. And that's frequently what we see happening on these campuses.

So again, I think if the campuses would, number one, adopt a position of institution neutrality and not favor any particular point of view, that would be okay. They're not doing that. Number two, if they would in an even-handed manner, enforce all the rules that they have, they're not doing that. And then finally, if they would just say, "We're not going to allow for the heckler's veto," all of these things make campuses a much better, safer, and truly more inclusive environment for everyone.

Dana Taylor:

At the risk of being accused of both sides-ism, I also want to note that Islamophobia in the US has also been on the rise. The Council on American-Islamic Relations received more than 8,000 complaints in 2023, the highest in its 30-year history, and nearly half of those complaints came in the final three months in the year.

Do you think Muslims have the right to draw their own line between free speech and hate speech? And if so, where should that be?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

Now let me be clear. We saw a Palestinian American toddler stabbed to death in Plainview, Illinois in October in what law enforcement considered a hate crime. We saw three Palestinian American young people shot in Burlington, Vermont in December. I'm not sure it's been classified a hate crime, but the victims felt that it was.

And whereas I know with certainty there were about 9,000 actual instance that impacted the Jewish community, I don't know that in the Muslim community, but even though I can't say that with any degree of confidence, what I do know is, and I feel super confident about is incidents like the ones I just described, the stabbing, the shooting, that creates tremendous alarm and anxiety in the Muslim community. And we need to be sensitive to that, because no one should be stabbed or shot because of their nationality. I mean, give me a break. It's disgusting.

And so I am sensitive to the rise of anti-Muslim hate. At ADL, we've spoken out about it repeatedly. I'm sensitive to the intensification of strong feelings on all sides, and I think we need to call it out as we see it.

I'll also just say that when that Palestinian American boy was stabbed, I didn't say we should be wary of ... we should be upset about Islamophobia and antisemitism. That was the case of, I believe, anti-Palestinian racism, period. End of story. We need to call that out for what it is.

And when these young men were shot in Burlington, Vermont and I went to Brown University where one of them was a student and visited there just a month or two later, we should call that what it was. Again, I think it was a hate crime against these young men because they were perceived to be Palestinian or Arab American. And we don't need to say antisemitism is also a problem.

So when we talk today about antisemitism, I think we can also say antisemitism is a problem, full stop. And I don't think we need to say, as is Islamophobia, as is anti-Asian hate, as is other forms of bias.

I don't think it's controversial to say hate is hate no matter whom it happens to. And yet at the same time, we need to have sort of the moral clarity to call it out when it happens, and to recognize and support the victims in their moment of need.

Dana Taylor:

This is another sensitive subject, but I want to ask you to respond directly. Over 30,000 Palestinians have died since October 7th according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the majority of them civilians. There's a humanitarian crisis on the ground in Gaza now with regards to food and safe housing. Where does the ADL stand with regards to this dire situation for Gazans?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

So first and foremost, I'm focused on fighting hate here in America. That's what I do. I'm not a geo military strategist. I'm not an expert on health and human services. So let me just say that upfront. Because I think we see a lot of people opining in areas that are not their area of expertise. That's number one.

Number two, I don't believe the numbers of the Gaza Health Ministry, which is a unit of Hamas. This is the same health ministry that claimed back in October that Israel targeted a hospital with a missile and killed 500 plus people if you remember. Turned out that it was a parking lot, not a hospital. Turns out that it was a missile sent by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that failed and hit that parking lot and killed 50 some odd people.

We don't even have any signs of life of hostages, Dana. They've been unable to share that. So I'm unclear how they're able to give us statistics. They say they don't know anything about the hostages, but somehow they can give us the number of killed in Gaza down to the person by the second. There's something incongruous about this that I find difficult to square.

Number three, if we take the number at face value that 30,000 people have died, we don't know how many of them are Hamas fighters because Hamas fighters don't wear uniforms. The Israeli government reports that somewhere between 12 to 15,000 Hamas fighters. So maybe it's a lot less than what we're hearing from the Gaza Health Ministry. So when we use that number, I think we've got to say again, we know that the Israelis have not gotten any signs of life of the hostages. We know that the Red Cross hasn't visited them, so it's hard for me to square when they say they know these numbers with precision Dana when they can't give us some basics about other stuff.

Now, all of that being said, let's say it's 15,000 people. Let's say it's 15 people. Let's say it's one person. Every innocent killed, every civilian killed is a tragedy and is a world destroyed, and we should mourn and we should pray for every innocent life lost, Israeli, Palestinian, whatever, the aid workers from the World Central Kitchen and others, every innocent life killed in this way is a life stolen and it's a tragedy.

Dana Taylor:

I want to end with a story recently published by USA TODAY and ask what your thoughts are there. USA TODAY journalists Leora Arnowitz and David Oliver teamed up with reporters from across the Gannett Network to document how American Jews are feeling at this challenging time. The result was an emotionally compelling tapestry of stories that showed both the increase in antisemitism, but also meaningful community support in some places. What was your biggest takeaway from this piece?

Jonathan Greenblatt:

Yeah, I loved it. I mean, I think it was hard to read and yet really struck home. I mean, I think we're heading into the Passover holiday when Jewish people around the world will celebrate the story of the Exodus, how the Jews who had been enslaved, where liberated and came back to the land of Israel, their ancestral homeland from which they had been taken.

And when I read a story like that, even though it's hard, you also see these glimmers of hope. Even though this is painful, as they say, it's darkest before the dawn and the stories of solidarity, of people coming together, people finding comfort in one another, I find really uplifting.

And look, it's hard. I mean, I talk to people every single day, Dana. I talk to kids. I talk to college students. I talk to parents. I talk to grandparents, and I hear stories where people say to me, "Is this place really safe for us? Is America really safe for us?" And it breaks my heart.

But then when I read like that piece, it reminds me that again, it's darkest before the dawn and on the other side of hate is hope. I just, like I said, I pray every day for the return of the hostages, for the end of the fighting, and for us to get to the other side, which will hopefully be a better and more just and fair place for everyone.

Dana Taylor:

Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me.

Jonathan Greenblatt:

Thank you for having me. I so appreciate it.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks for watching. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll see you next time.