- [Announcer] Production and distribution of City Club forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(bright upbeat music) (bell chimes) - Good afternoon and welcome to The City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, December 10, and I'm Kristen Baird Adams, president of the City Club Board of Directors and Chief of Staff of PNC's National Office of the Regional Presidents.

I'm pleased to introduce today's speaker, David Harris, Chief Executive Officer of the American Jewish Committee, the leading global Jewish advocacy organization.

From city halls to Capitol Hill, at the United Nations and in global capitals, AJC works to impact policy and opinion on the most critical issues facing the Jewish people.

Harris' passion for his work in his 30-plus-year tenure at AJC is inspired by his late parents, both Holocaust survivors.

Harris grew up in New York City's Upper West Side, anchored by generations of a close-knit family.

And while during his youth his family never hosted a Shabbat dinner, his parents and the stories they shared of struggle and survival inspired him.

Widely recognized for his skill, diplomacy, and vision, Harris has led AJC'S efforts to combat the troubling resurgence of anti-Semitism here in the U.S. and across the globe.

And to advocate for the nation of Israel and to build bridges with allies across the nation and the world.

Harris first joined AJC in 1979, departing briefly in the mid eighties for a role advocating for Soviet Jewry before returning as its Washington director, a role in which he helped lead a 1987 rally of 250,000 on the National Mall, one of the largest ever gatherings of American Jews.

Just a few years later, Harris was credited for his leadership in the successful lobbying of the UN's General Assembly in 1991 to reverse its 1975 Zionism is Racism Resolution, one of the few times in its history that the UN repealed a resolution.

More recently in January of 20, Harris led a historic delegation of Muslims and Jews to visit Auschwitz.

Harris has been honored by more than 20 times by foreign governments for his international work, making him the most decorated American Jewish organizational leader in U.S. history.

Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and London School of Economics, He has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and Oxford university.

Today, Harris, who has announced his plans to retire in May, joins us for the Annual Robert D. Gries Forum on Inspiration.

Invitations to which are only extended to speakers who by way of their achievements, reflect a level of accomplishment well beyond the ordinary.

Members and friends of the City Club, please join me in welcoming American Jewish Committee CEO, David Harris.

(audience applauding) - Thank you, Kristen.

I'm really quite moved by the introduction.

It's my third time at the City Club and I'm grateful to this venerable beacon of freedom and bastion of democracy to have the privilege of being back here, Dan, thank you.

I walked into the room and I immediately though I had a crisis, which I need to share with you.

I saw two tables in my line of vision and the first one said speakers, and the second one said friends of Bob Gries.

(audience laughing) And my wonderful City Club hosts were kind of nudging me towards the speakers table, but I had a kind of outside force pulling me to the other table and I really wanted to set myself up right there in that spot between the two tables.

If I had to summarize the American Jewish committee in simply one image, it's Bob Gries.

(audience applauding) Thank you, Dan.

If I could add an image it's Lee C. Shapiro.

(audience applauding) And I think I better get off because this becomes a slippery slope.

(Harris laughs) I've learned in life that people that you mention never remember you mentioned them, and the people you'll omit, never forget.

Jill, our president, our former presidents and other members of the board who are sitting at this and other tables, again, thank you.

I was invited to do something I've really never done before, which is itself quite challenge given 40 or more years of public life.

And that was not to look ahead so much as to look back to offer a retrospective of sorts.

So join with me on this, for me, very unusual journey.

As Kristen said, the journey for me began in my home.

It wasn't immediately apparent to me that it would.

I thought I was just another New York city kid.

For those of you who will admit to being from New York, playing stoop ball and handball, and playing on the basketball courts of Riverside Drive, and going to camp in Maine.

I thought I was just a normal American kid, but there was something different.

It took me a while and then I began to understand.

I was the first person in my extended family to be born in the United States.

My family cherished this country.

For them, this was holy ground.

I was just a kid who liked some things and criticized other things.

And then I ran into resistance from my family when the criticism came; don't ever forget the precious gift that America has given us freedom, safety, opportunity.

Bless this country.

I learned some other things.

My parents started a sentence in one language and never finished it in the same language.

I had to become pretty adept pretty quickly at sorting this out.

And when there were larger family gatherings, there were at least four languages being spoken all at once and sometimes again in the same sentences.

Now, why was this?

Other kids when I went to visit them, spoke English at home.

My parents with each other spoke French.

My mother with her parents who lived in the next department spoke Russian.

My father with his parents who lived a few blocks away spoke German, on top of which my grandfather got the Yiddish newspaper every morning delivered to his door.

What was going on here?

And then there was something else.

I mentioned a moment ago summer camp.

Well, my parents talked about camps, but they didn't have politically incorrect names of native Americans; Pocahontas and Hiawatha and Powhatan.

They were very different camps that they were speaking about.

And so I began to understand that something more was going on here.

And lastly, my parents and my larger family spoke about Israel, but not the Israel of daily politics or whatever might be reported in the news, but Israel in a much, I didn't know the word at the time, but in a much more metaphysical way, in a much more philosophical way.

Thank God there's an Israel.

Now, it's hard for a child of six, seven, eight, nine, 10 to process any much less all of this stuff.

But over time, I came to understand several things, which led me to this career and in a way to this moment.

Thanks to you Bob and these speaker series.

My mother was born in Moscow.

My mother was six years old when her family were among the very lucky ones to be able to leave Stalin's Soviet union at a time when immigration did not exist.

They happen to have an apartment that an an NKVD now KGB official wanted, and he traded them the apartment for four passports.

Later on, he would have just seized the apartment, but then there was still apparently a measure of 'civility.'

So my mother became a refugee with her parents at the age of six.

They came to France.

France welcomed them in 1929.

They started over; new language, new culture, new everything.

And then 11 years later, the France that they thought was their secure democratic home, the home of the rights of men, le droits l'hommes, the home of liberte, egalite, fraternite fell quickly to the invading German forces.

And moreover, as many of you know, France quickly saw the emergence of a collaborationist regime, Vichy, which participated in the arrest and deportation of French Jews and others.

At the age of 17, my mother was again a refugee together with her family and countless others.

And they fled to the south.

They fled to Toulouse and then Bordeaux, and eventually to Marseille.

And what did they discover in their 17 months of fleeing and hiding and fearing?

That the vast majority of the world did not give a about their fate.

Before Auschwitz, before Treblinka, before Belzec, Hitler had teased the world, taunted the world, "You want the Jews, take them."

There was even a 1938 conference at Evian.

That's why I still have difficulty drinking the bottles of water because I don't associate the name with H2O alone, where the world's nations gathered allegedly to address the refugee problem.

And each country found a reason or an excuse or a pretext to avoid the refugee problem.

Eventually, eventually my family was able to escape to Spain and then Portugal.

And one member who had gotten here earlier and who moved to a city called Mahoney City in Northeast, Pennsylvania persuaded a congressmen, maybe part of my non-partisan approach to life.

It turned out a Republican Congressman named Eve Fenton to persuade a reluctant U.S. government to issue 14 visas to that part of my family, and they came on the Eve of Pearl Harbor.

And they saw the Statue of Liberty, not on the circle line.

It wasn't just a photo op, they saw in the statue of Liberty that our future, they never looked in the rear view mirror.

Europe had expelled them, America was to be their home.

And they understood the social contract implicitly.

It was a two way bargain.

America gave them the chance.

Tragically, not enough Jews were given the chance, but my family was, that part of the family, and my family understood from day one, it's give back time, something that I think is lost and too often in today's America, both the appreciation for what this country has meant to millions of refugees and also the notion of a social contract.

Meanwhile, my father born in Hungary had moved to Berlin at the age of one with his parents.

And in 1933, after the January 30 Ascension to the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler and then the March 23 Enabling Act of the Bundestag, which gave Hitler complete and total power, including to bypass the Bundestag or the parliament, if you will.

They made a fateful decision and set my father and only child to safekeeping in, of all places, Vienna.

It wasn't the wisest decision.

Five years later, my father was a refugee as well having escaped from Austria after the Anschluss.

And he came to France, which by the way, is where my parents first met as teenagers.

My father's story is longer and it's more difficult, but involved imprisonment for three years by the Vichy, escape on the second attempt, crossing the Sahara desert, not quite in the way you did it, Bob, but if he were alive, you might be able to share some stories, joining OSS.

The war times espionage agency of the United States, parachuting behind enemy lines, and then Colonel Wild Bill Donovan, if you know the name, the founder of OSS brought him to the United States to help create the CIA.

But here came another, if you will, true blue new American, who fought for the United States even before he ever saw the United States.

And like my mother understood the eternal gratitude that was required both to this country and to the promise of this country.

And as if that weren't enough to cement my kind of Weltanschauung as the Germans would say my worldview, a few years later, I met a young woman in Rome, Italy, where I was working with Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union.

That young woman became my wife of now 46 years, and she too was a refugee.

She was a refugee from a place that has been largely neglected by history, Libya.

It's still difficult to penetrate the mindset as we speak about the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and all of the dimensions thereof.

It's still so incredibly tough to penetrate and remind the world that there were two refugee populations, not one.

There were two and exhibit A for the second is my wife, her seven siblings, her parents, all of whom were forced into hiding in Tripoli and eventually given safe passage by the Italian ambassador, never to return.

Their first taste of freedom, and a word that I had never heard before, pluralism came into Italy.

And then 12 years later, she and I came to the United States.

She for the first time and we built a family and a home together.

This is where I come from.

I come from a family, if you will, that has no CVs with PhDs in History, no BAs with majors in History, they all have PhDs in the history of life.

They've lived it.

They haven't just studied it or extracted it, they felt it and they've understood, and now I understand the thin veneer, the fragility of what we call liberal democracy.

And when I use the word liberal, I don't mean it in a binary context versus conservative, I mean it versus illiberal, versus the people's democracy that we saw in the cold war or the Democratic Republic of North Korea as it officially calls itself.

Because after all, Germany was a democracy from 1919.

It was a messy, chaotic democracy called Weimar, but it was a democracy with elections, and free speech, and civic institutions, and multiple political parties.

It was all that more.

And by 1933, that democracy had yielded to absolute tyranny.

So from my perspective, living in a democracy is not just about exploiting it, savoring it, it's about defending it, 'cause my family could bear witness to the fact that it's not guaranteed to last.

And my wife could add to the picture by saying, "Remember, the majority of nations today are not democracies.

I, Julietta came from Libya.

I can attest to what the absence of democracy means," in this case for a minority like the 40,000 Jews who were essentially denied all rights, by the way, though they were all enshrined in the 1951 Libyan Constitution, which launched the independence of Libya.

It's a beautiful document.

The problem is it's completely meaningless.

So words alone are insufficient, and frankly, I'm not here to flatter the City Club and you, though I hope you won't reject the flattery, but for me and if I just know a little bit about the history of this institution, you are more essential than ever, bottom line.

You are more essential than ever.

But how did I move from this into specifically the Jewish world?

Well, in the 1970s, having been to college and being in graduate school and thinking about life, some things happened that reminded me that Jewish history had not ended, neither with the end of the Holocaust in 1945, nor with the rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948.

And I emphasize the word rebirth.

It hadn't ended.

The 1970s, what happened?

Well for one thing, Soviet Jews behind the iron curtain began very courageously and very improbably to shout "Otpusti narod moi."

Those who spoke Hebrew said, "Shalach et ami."

Those who spoke neither said, "Let my people go."

Now, to understand this, while my mother and her family had left under Stalin, the word emigratsiya, emigration did not exist in the Soviet lexicon.

Borders were built in the Soviet Union not to keep people out, borders were built in the Soviet Union to keep people in.

And those brave Jews said, "We will not be party to a modern day policy of cultural genocide that seeks to extinguish every last vestige of Jewish life, 30 years after Hitler almost succeeded in extinguishing every last vestige of physical life of the Jewish people."

In 1973, Egypt and Syria, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippor launched a surprise attack.

And in the early days of that conflict, Israel was pushed back.

Its future became uncertain and all eyes turned to the United States.

And in particular to one man reviled by many, and his name was Richard Nixon.

That's where I not only got my lesson in democracy, but also in non-partisanship because I understood in that moment that if I really care about the safety and success of the State of Israel, it's not a matter of whether I voted for Richard Nixon or not, or like Richard Nixon or not, he was sitting in the white house and he had the power either to authorize or deny Israel the spare parts and the resupply that would be necessary for Israel to continue the war and hopefully succeed.

And enter from my life, the word non-partisanship.

Similarly with Soviet Jewry, because as those voices were suddenly being heard in Washington and elsewhere, it wasn't about choosing my favorite government or political party.

If the United States was going to assist millions of Jews and others trapped inside the Soviet Union, we had to be able to reach the decision makers and hopefully influence their outlook.

And so Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, urban, suburban, rural, to me, it was all the same.

Each had a voice and each had a vote, and we needed to reach them, and we did, and they responded.

And then I saw something else in those formative years for me, and Kristen, you referred to it in your introduction.

In 1975, the United Nations, which had been built on the ashes of the second world war and the Holocaust, which was committed to preventing future war and future genocide, witnessed its general assembly adopt resolution 3379.

What became known, as Kristen said, as the so-called Zionism is Racism Resolution.

And ladies and gentlemen, Zionism, which is no more and no less than the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, the age old quest for self-determination, the effort to reconstitute a Jewish state after its destruction in the first century was now deemed a form of racism.

No other, no other attempt at this kind of re-establishment of national sovereignty was addressed by the United Nations in the same way, only this one.

And of course, what was particularly painful for people like myself, I was 26 years old at the time, was that not only did I believe that Zionism was anti-racism, not only had I read Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern day Zionism talking about the fact that once a Jewish state was re-established the next project of the Jewish people would be to help the people of Africa, of Africa to achieve their national independence, their national sovereignty, their national liberation.

But those of us of my generation here also saw ourselves as soldiers in the anti-racist movement in the United States.

Now we were being told that whatever we were doing in the civil rights movement, whatever we were doing and Selma and Montgomery, nonetheless branded us as racist because we also had an attachment to the foundation of the Jewish people, the connection between a people and a land and a faith.

I remember when I was younger, 1959, my parents, they got a car, that's a big deal.

And Eisenhower had built this national highway system.

So the idea of a long car trip was not daunting, it was exciting.

And they drove to Florida for the first time.

And they left me behind with my maternal grandparents.

And when they came back a week later, they brought coconuts and fun things.

And I said, "Mommy, daddy, how was the trip?"

And they turned pale.

These Holocaust survivors had never expected to encounter what they saw when they crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

How could they reconcile the country that had given them home, haven, safety, opportunity, security, how could that same country, just a few hundred miles south of New York City create separate accommodation, separate water fountains, separate swimming pools, separate and unequal, separate and unequal.

And so many Jews, as you know, we're motivated to fight in that civil rights struggle and AJC fought for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and marched, and prayed with our feet to quote a rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and not just with our mouth.

And now we were being told that we were racist.

No, I understood that whatever other career aspirations I might have had, let someone else do them.

I was gonna jump in with both feet into this Jewish world about which I still knew very little, the organizational world was a baffling alphabet soup.

It was pre-Google.

There was no simple way to find out what this or that organization did.

So I had to do with the old fashioned way, ask, (audience laughing) find the mavens, you know, the person whose uncle was involved in that thing called the Jewish world and talk to that uncle or whoever it might be.

And I found AJC in 1979.

I think I can probably safely say that I'm off probation.

What did I find in AJC?

I found the perfect match between everything that I was kind of experiencing and feeling, and trying to put together into something coherent.

Because in this organization I found the ideal blend of the universal and the particular.

I understood that this was an institution and there were very few that grasped that the universal condition mattered to us, that if any group was oppressed, if any group was targeted with separate and unequal, none of us were safe, secure, and no democracy could be worthy of its name.

But it also understood that the universal did not exempt us from the particular.

Who was going to speak for the Jews of the Soviet union if they had no voice of their own?

Who was going to stand up to the defamation of the State of Israel year after year?

Who is going to speak up for tens of thousands of Jews in Ethiopia that had lived for thousands of years without knowing that the Zion of their prayers, the Jerusalem, the (indistinct) of their prayers had now become the reality of Israel and City of Jerusalem?

Who was going to speak for them?

And to my mind, it became AJC.

And to those who wondered, is there some internal contradiction between the universal and the particular, I would say quite the opposite.

No democracy worth it's name can live with a persecuted minority.

And if there's a persecuted minority and too often the Jews have been referred to as the proverbial canary in the mine, by the way, a reference that I think we all need to reject and eject, because I'll be damned if I'm going to die so the coal miner can live.

The methane gas reaches the canary.

The canary begins to gasp and keel over.

The miner has been warned and flees.

Thankfully, the minor is saved, but 2000 years of being the purported canary in the mine is a bit too much, certainly for my taste.

But we are here to say that a world in which anti-Semitism again in 2021 is growing is a world that is becoming more dangerous for all and challenges the basic tenants of the liberal democracy that unites us in this room in Cleveland.

Antisemitism is not a proprietary Jewish problem.

Antisemitism should be our collective universal problem just as racism, and xenophobia, and homophobia are our collective problems.

And I've understood, the only way to win is to stand shoulder to shoulder.

And the only way to win is to cut down on the sleep because our adversaries are not sleeping, they're not sleeping.

And we've had tastes just in recent months and years had my parents been here, they would've said, "We told you so."

We've had tastes of just how thin that veneer of democracy can be even in what many believe is a stable, secure, strong democracy.

So let's be reminded, let's be reminded that we may not complete the task as the first century rabbi Torfaen said, but nor are we free to desist from the task.

on your watch, on my watch, on the watch of those listening and viewing, I submit that everyone who cares about fundamental liberal democratic values, the values that have animated robust democracies need to be heard, seen, and acting.

The City Club brings us together.

The real question in my mind, not just for myself, but for all of us is what happens tomorrow?

And what do we do the day after?

If we all do something a little different, then perhaps this conversation will have served this purpose.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

We welcome questions from all; City Club members, guests, students, or those of you joining us via our live stream or the radio broadcast on 90.3 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question, please tweet it to @cityclub.

You can also text them to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794 and our staff will do their best to Work your questions into the program.

May we have the first question, please.

- It was a very moving speech and I'm impressed with your background and how you survive.

My question is in your statement, I missed the point that you didn't say Islamophobia when you talked about LBGT and other.

And I'll give you two examples.

One of them was the World Trade Center mosque that was supposed to be built.

AJC and other organization opposed it and 10, 12 years later apologized for that.

And then the recent thing that you had on France, that all the Muslims that are coming to France are anti-Semitic.

I'm involved in the interfaith community, I'm not anti-Semitic and the community here knows that.

And it pains me to read that the perception that exists within the Jewish Federation as well as from AJC, that all Muslims are anti-Semitic.

- Thank you, sir.

The answer is a very simple one.

I cannot speak for every Jew or every Jewish organization, but no one at the American Jewish committee has ever said all Muslims are anti-Semitic, no one.

In fact, Kristen spoke, I think in the introduction, about one of the most powerful moments, certainly in my career, which was in January of 2020, when arm in arm with 65 Muslim leaders from around the world led by Dr. Muhammad Al-Issa of Saudi Arabia, the chair of the Muslim World League we walked together to Auschwitz and to Birkenau.

And I can also tell you that right after the World Trade Center, AJC was among the organizations that called on other Americans not to allow the belief that all Muslims are terrorists.

19 Muslims perpetrated horrific act with whoever supported them, but we made very clear and we did so again and again.

And the last thing I will say, sir, is we are actively engaged on a local level across the country through a project we've called the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council precisely to engage with Muslims in a constructive cooperative way.

And we have said as an organization that if the 20th century for us AJC was largely defined by writing a new chapter in Christian-Jewish relations in particular Catholic-Jewish relations, the 21st century for us is about writing a new chapter in Muslim-Jewish relations, and I would add in Israeli-Arab relations as well.

We've made some progress, we have more to go, and if you are potentially a partner, we'd love to join together.

Thank you, sir.

Yes, please.

- Hi, your family history is certainly interesting and probably mirrors a lot of people in here including me who's, you know, Jewish and whose families came from Eastern Europe, but we haven't all taken the same lessons from what our families went through.

You had an organization that supports both the anti-democratic and the unconstitutional by every court that's ever heard them anti-BDS laws in the states.

You had an organization that is silent about Israeli apartheid.

And in fact, generally condemns those of us who condemn Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the issues on the West Bank of stealing homes and property, as opposed to, you know, condemning the Israelis for doing it.

My question is though, do you believe that Palestinians are human beings who are entitled to all of the rights that are afforded all human beings under international protocols, including the right to resist occupation as defined in the fourth Geneva Convention?

If you answer, no, please explain why.

If you answer, yes, please tell us where you find in international law, the exemption for Palestinians that makes it okay for you to hold the positions about Palestinians that you hold.

- Okay, well, let me begin with the first part, because I heard a tone that was a bit dismissive.

So let me ask the people in this room.

How many of you are the children of, not the grandchildren or great-grandchildren or neighbors of, how many of you are children of two Holocaust survivors two?

I guess it's not the whole room to begin with.

How many of you have members of your immediate family, spouses who are refugees from an Arab country?

Maybe it's not so common, sir, as you might've suggested by your framing of the question.

I'm not here at the City Club to engage in your interpretation of international law, nor am I here to accept what I believe is a libelous description of the State of Israel.

Israel is a good country.

It's not a perfect country.

I'm not here to argue that it is a perfect country, but it has a right to exist, it has a right to defend itself.

And when you asked the question, whether Palestinians do or do not have human rights, the answer is obvious, of course they do, except for one, the right to deny me my human rights.

So if there had been wiser heads that prevailed as early as 1947, when the United Nations grappled with this very issue of two national movements, then we would have been marking today the what?

74th anniversary of a two-state settlement.

Had wiser heads prevailed in 1948 when Israel established itself, and when it stretched out his hand in peace, we would have had a second chance at a two-state solution, sir.

And from 1948 until 1967, the areas that you're speaking about, unless between the lines you are speaking about all of Israel, maybe you'll clarify that on another occasion, the areas that presumably you're speaking about; the Gaza strip, the West Bank, and Eastern Jerusalem were not in Israeli hands, sir.

A two-state solution could have been created any time unilaterally by the Arab world.

The Gaza strip was under military rule of Egypt, sir.

The West Bank was the next, a next by Jordan and that included Eastern Jerusalem.

So I would have hoped that had we had this discussion, then you would have been equally vociferous, sir, in calling on the Arab world to liberate the Palestinian Arabs and give them the state of their own, which I wish to see one day.

But perhaps unlike you, I wish to see it living alongside Israel and not in place of Israel.

(audience applauding) I have to get used to this.

- That's a great line that I have to follow.

I'm both a right and a left.

There are what used to be fringes that seem to becoming more into the mainstream of both elected representative parties that seemed to be perhaps anti-Semitic here in this country and anti-Israel from an international standpoint.

If you look forward 10, 20, 30 years, what do you see from the parties that used to pretty much unanimously be supportive of Israel?

What do you see when you look out at those fringes and to the main parties?

- So thank you.

Let me take a broader perspective first and then narrow it, if I may.

I think what we're seeing now here in the United States, and by the way, it's not unique in the United States, we saw it in Britain as a result of Brexit, we've seen it in other countries, including most recently the vote in Chile for the presidency.

We're seeing this massive political polarization.

And I believe that that poses a clear and present danger to democracy.

Where did you go to sit?

There you are.

(Harris laughs) We've stopped talking to each other.

Even worse, we've stopped listening to each other, except at the City Club.

Even more so, we have created our own ecosystems, which give us self-justifying news that we want to hear.

So increasingly, we live in an informational bubble, we live in a political bubble, and I dare say, increasingly in America, we're creating geographic bubbles.

We run a risk.

And I don't think it's crying wolf.

We run a risk of eroding the glue that unites this country.

Remember this is not a country that was founded on the basis of nationality or language or blood.

However imperfect, it was a country that was conceived on the basis of an idea, an idea, that's all that unites us.

If that idea erodes, what's left?

We speak about the gated communities of Florida.

I see intellectually gated communities all over America, and that scares the bejesus out of me.

If I couldn't, and I'm very conscious that the next city council president is sitting right opposite me.

So maybe I'll do a little lobbying in front of you.

I was a high school debater.

If I were the principal of a school, a school that I could create for myself, among many other things, I'd make debating mandatory, not as a club, you know, you got football, you got basketball, you got the glee club, and not simply because I did it, but you know what I learned?

Because I was assigned the topic and I was assigned the side.

I didn't get to choose all my favorite sides.

I learned that you know what, even if I disagreed once in a while, there's some reasonable thinking and some good people on the other side.

So I've learned to try and look at issues in a more holistic 360-degree way.

Few of us do that today.

By the way, you didn't ask me, but my school would also make chess mandatory for every child.

And if you wanna ask, I got more ideas.

(audience laughing) As far as we're concerned as a Jewish community, sure, I worry about the erosion of bipartisan support for Israel, of course I do.

I also worry about the extremes in both political parties and the corrosive effect those extremes can have on the mainstream idea generation in both parties.

We have today in the United States House of Representatives, people associated with antisemitic ideas publicly on both sides of the aisle.

So I'm not asking which side of the aisle you're on and I'm on neither, but that's dangerous.

And it's not just antisemitic views, but I'm now speaking as a Jew.

And I don't think that the public reaction and the political reaction has been strong enough.

We also have in the Congress and I'm not here as I said to defend every action by every Israeli under every circumstance, but I am here to stand up proudly shoulder to shoulder for the U.S.-Israel relationship and for Israel's wellbeing.

We have daily, weekly defamation of the State of Israel.

At least debate the facts.

But I'll leave you with this thought, which is very scary again for a democratic society.

I think it was about two years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary, OED, every year comes up with their word of the year, their new word of the year.

A couple of years ago, you know what that word was?

Post-truth, that was the Oxford English dictionary word of the year, Post-truth.

Forgive me folks, whether you're on the red or blue side, liberal or conservative, how many of us want to live in a post-truth society?

- Thank you.

As a former Jewish Community Relations professional, this works being on the front lines of Jewish advocacy is incredibly difficult and it takes an emotional, personal toll on those that are doing the work.

What do you see for the future of talent in the Jewish communal world for community relations, Jewish advocacy given this, and the fact that there are changing opinions among Jewish youth on Israel and on continued unwillingness to consider opinions outside of what may be considered politically correct?

- Well, here, I'm gonna contradict a part of what I just said a moment ago.

I too live in a bubble, probably more than one.

I live in a wonderfully uplifting Jewish bubble.

Come to AJC, come to our New York headquarters, speak to Jillian Laskowitz right here, my chief of staff, meet all the young people that are working on the staff of AJC across the country and around the world, look at the people who are coming to our Leaders for Tomorrow high school programs, look at our college programs, look at our post-college access programs.

Believe me, I get there's an issue out there.

I also have three children and children-in-law.

I have grandchildren.

I've seen this play out in many ways, but, you know, we may want to mythologize.

The Jewish world has never been United, not in the way we sometimes think, but there is a strong core of proud Jews, including my grandchildren who are affiliated with the Jewish world, who want to be, who speak Hebrew and are proud of the State of Israel, and maybe even some of them will want pappy's job one day.

(audience applauding) - Today at the City Club, we've been listening to a forum featuring David Harris, Chief Executive Officer of the American Jewish Committee.

Today's forum is the annual Robert D. Gries Forum on Inspiration, a title given only to those speakers who by his or her achievements, reflect a level of accomplishment well beyond exemplary.

Next Friday, we will host the last live forum here at the City Club for 2021. we will be conducting an exit interview with David Abbott, the Executive Director at the George Gund Foundation.

He will be in a conversation with Randy McShepard.

This forum is sold out, but you are welcome to join us virtually at cityclub.org, or by tuning into 90.3 Ideastream Public Media.

If you cannot make it next week, please be sure to join us after a short break on Friday, January 7, for our first forum of 2022.

Cleveland has a whole new generation of diverse leaders, and they have a new vision for the future of our city.

For many, it starts with our neighborhoods.

Ideastream Public Media's Nick Castele will be here talking with Tania Menesse of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, as well as Local Community Development leadership about a comprehensive platform from which all neighborhoods can grow and thrive.

Tickets are available for this forum and you can purchase them and learn more about other forums cityclub.org.

That brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you, David Harris, and thank you members, friends of the City Club.

I'm Kristen Baird Adams, President of the City Club Board of Directors, and this forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauding) (bell chimes) - [Announcer 2] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Production and distribution of City Club forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC.