Jonathan Greenblatt

O/C Antisemitism on the rise, campus controversies, and concerns about double standards and hypocrisy…this week on Firing Line.

 

“From the river to the sea!”

 

It’s been called the longest hatred…

 

“long live the intifada!”

 

And since Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on October 7th there’s been a surge in antisemitic attacks… including on college campuses…

 

“You support genocide!”

 

A situation so serious that the presidents of three prominent universities came to Congress to testify…

 

Stefanik: Ms. Magill at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? 

 

Then caused an uproar with their equivocating answers…

 

Magill: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. 

Stefanik: It’s a context-dependent decision? That’s your testimony today?

 

GREENBLATT: These universities privilege certain speech over others.

 

Jonathan Greenblatt is the CEO and national program director of the Anti-Defamation League, an entrepreneur turned advocate who has been fighting antisemitism for years. 

 

GREENBLATT: This is like a sickness. We’ve seen scores of assaults. 

 

With questions about double standards for hate speech, growing concerns about antisemitism on the left, and a war still raging in the Middle East, what does Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt say now?

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab and by The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button.

 

INTERVIEW

 

HOOVER: Jonathan Greenblatt, welcome to Firing Line. 

GREENBLATT: Thank you for having me. 

HOOVER: Within hours and days of the October 7th attack by Hamas against Israel, anti-Semitic incidents were already on the rise. 

GREENBLATT: Yes. 

HOOVER: How do you explain how the floodgates opened with anti Semitism. after an attack against the Jews. 

GREENBLATT: It’s really quite something. It almost felt to us like some of this is not exactly grassroots. It’s more Astroturf. 

HOOVER: What do you mean? 

GREENBLATT: We saw a mobilization of many of the groups on campuses and off campuses as early as October the 8th.

HOOVER: Do you think it was coordinated? 

GREENBLATT: Yes. 

HOOVER: What do you mean? 

GREENBLATT: I believe that these different groups are all in communication with each other. I believe as soon as the–. 

HOOVER: Hamas is in coordination with?– 

GREENBLATT: Well I am unable to say with certainty that Hamas was directing this from overseas. But what I can say at a 99% confidence interval is the bad actors here – there’s a group called American Muslims for Palestine, there’s a group called Students for Justice in Palestine, and there are others – absolutely saw this as a moment and they mobilized. So literally, while we were still trying to understand what happened, while we were still unsure how many people were killed, what just transpired, these groups had released toolkits, discussion guides, talking points. So they were organizing rallies before the Israelis went into Gaza. 

HOOVER: You’re the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. 

GREENBLATT: Yes. 

HOOVER: What concerns you most for American Jews now? 

GREENBLATT: I think– I’ve been worried for years, Margaret, and we’ve talked about this, about the normalization of anti-Semitism. And it’s very obvious when it happens on the right, when people talk about great replacement theory, which is this, you know, they marched, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ 

HOOVER: Charlottesville. ‘Jews will not replace us.’ 

GREENBLATT: And then, you know, people were killed in Pittsburgh and Poway. 

HOOVER: Why is it not obvious on the left?

GREENBLATT: You know what I liken it to? It’s kind of like climate change. So the hate on the far right is like a Category Five hurricane. You see it coming. It’s going to hit your house. It’s going to blow apart everyone inside. You can’t deny it. Here it comes. No matter what you do it’s going to kill you. On the left, it’s like climate change. It starts down here so people don’t notice it and it intensifies. And then suddenly the temperature gets up here and here. And then guess what happens when the temperature is so high? Category Five hurricanes. So, you know, I got to say, I think on the left, they say, ‘oh, no, no, no. It’s not prejudice. It’s political to say all the Zionists must die,’ or it’s we’re not being hateful. You just need to hear the hard truth that Jews are white, colonial oppressor, whatever madness. And this is like a sickness, Margaret, that we need to recognize and call it out for what it is. 

HOOVER: When did you first notice it on the left?. 

GREENBLATT: Oh it’s been building for years. I have heard students, college students, Margaret, tell me, “We can’t be openly involved in Hillel and do social justice work. We can’t be involved in, like, queer organizing if people know that we’re engaged in Hillel because Hillel is part of the, quote, Israeli war machine.” So just to step back, Hillel is the student center for Jewish kids. God bless Hillel. They do great work. They can barely organize, you know, a potluck dinner, let alone be part of the Israeli war machine, for goodness sakes.

HOOVER: A significant number of anti-Semitic incidents, nearly 20% that you guys have reported, have occurred on college campuses. Where did this anti-Semitism on college campuses originate? 

GREENBLATT: Well, that’s a good question. I think there is just a sort of ideological bent among many people in the faculty and in academia more generally. And the tenure track doesn’t subject them to the same kind of market pressures that we face in the private sector. You get your job, you get in, and you publish some good research and then you’re in for life. 

HOOVER: Yeah. 

GREENBLATT: And that, I think, renders them somewhat, you know, invulnerable to the typical pressures that we face, because you can’t lose your job. 

HOOVER: Pressures to not be anti-Semitic?

GREENBLATT: Well, the pressures to see things that are fact-based way and to be responsive to what’s happening in the world. And that comes together with this, what I would call this toxin of anti-Zionism, this notion that essentially Zionism was somehow racism, was somehow genocide, all these terms. And this ideology has taken root on many of these campuses. And I think this evil needs to be confronted and needs to be dismantled once and for all. 

HOOVER: Do you consider yourself a Zionist? 

GREENBLATT: I am a ferocious, unapologetic and proud Zionist. And the deal is that if you believe that Jews have the right to self-determination, you’re a Zionist too. And that used to be the vast majority of everyone. Because, look, I’m a proud American. That doesn’t mean I’m proud of everything America does. I’m a proud Zionist, and I don’t agree with everything Israel does. But I think it has the right– do I even have to say it has the right to exist? That’s ridiculous.

HOOVER: So help people understand. There’s a generation of people that don’t understand the difference between being anti-Zionist and critical of Israel. 

GREENBLATT: Well, if you’re looking for someone who’s been critical of Israel, you know–

HOOVER: In particular the Netanyahu government.

GREENBLATT: –I’m exhibit A.Yeah. 

HOOVER: You have been quite vocal about the Netanyahu government. 

GREENBLATT: I disagree with many things that the prime minister has done. But anti-Zionism is not about being critical of Israel. So anti-Zionism is basically an ideology of negation. 

HOOVER: It is an ideology that believes Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. 

GREENBLATT: Exactly. And so, again, if I were to say, well, I don’t believe that France has the right to exist or something crazy, or the Maldives, I don’t know. That would be silly. But Israel is a country that’s in a state of war with its neighbors and has been for 75 years. Israel is a country that faces relentless terror attacks and has since it was founded. So these questions, these existential questions, really matter there. So anti-Zionism is the idea that Jews don’t have the right to self-determination. That’s what it is. Denying Jews the rights that you would have, accord to anyone else simply because they’re Jews. That’s discrimination. That’s hate. And it’s wrong. 

HOOVER: I want to go to the college campuses and the incidents that occurred last week. 

GREENBLATT: Sure. 

HOOVER: They were precipitated from an invitation that three university presidents had to testify before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

STEFANIK: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MITs code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? 

KORNBLUTH: If targeted at individuals not making public statements. 

STEFANIK: Ms. Magill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? 

MAGILL: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes.

STEFANIK: And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, Yes or no? 

GAY: It can be, depending on the context. 

 

HOOVER: You graded all three of those university presidents… 

GREENBLATT: I gave them all F’s. 

HOOVER: F’s. 

GREENBLATT: Yeah. 

HOOVER: What should they have said? 

GREENBLATT: They simply should have said ‘Yes. Calling for genocide against any segment of a student body is a violation of our code of conduct. 

HOOVER: Why was it so difficult to give a satisfactory answer? 

GREENBLATT: I think they were over coached and underprepared. I think their lawyers were worried about, you know, the potential implications of free speech on campus. But they’re really unprepared. But I’ll tell you something else. This is the real story. Like, I think these campus presidents like Liz McGill and the others, they’re afraid of offending anyone. 

HOOVER: Yes, that’s right.

GREENBLATT: They’re afraid of offending. So they would rather say nothing, do nothing than potentially offend some segment of their, you know, their quote unquote stakeholders. 

HOOVER: Do you think they genuinely believe in free speech? 

GREENBLATT: It’s not about free speech. In my view, Margaret, it’s about favored speech. These universities privilege certain speech over others. You know this. You can get– literally you can get kicked off campus, a student can be expelled, professors can be, if not denied tenure, they can lose their classes, they can lose other privileges, if they get someone’s pronouns wrong. If they invite a speaker who doesn’t hew to the orthodoxy. Yet somehow this is not just allowed, it’s encouraged. And I say it’s encouraged because when kids come to the classroom with bullhorns and interrupt Jewish teachers, as has happened at MIT, and has happened at Harvard, and they’re not deterred, no one is suspended, no one is penalized, it encourages other kids to do the same. 

HOOVER: There’s a double standard. 

GREENBLATT: Double standard. Yeah, I mean, this is moral relativism at its worst. 

HOOVER: Is there any anti-Semitic speech that should be protected by the First Amendment on campuses? 

GREENBLATT: Look, the truth is, I think that hate speech is the price of free speech. So I don’t have a problem if the campus truly is committed to an open environment where lots of ideas can flourish. I do have a problem with the prevailing philosophy, Margaret, is hypocrisy. 

HOOVER: Yeah. 

GREENBLATT: So you don’t get to say, this speech is okay and this speech is not. Either it’s all okay or none of it is. 

HOOVER: Explain to a generation of people who don’t understand why calls for intifada, or ‘from the river to the sea’ are incitements to violence. 

GREENBLATT: So they’re definitely incitements to violence. 

HOOVER: Explain why. 

GREENBLATT: So intifada. So the calls for intifada are references to the actual intifada, which was a series of violent attacks against Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas and other Palestinian nationalist organizations. It was ugly and awful. So when students say, ‘globalize the intifada, bring that violence here.’ that isn’t a trigger word, you know, for Jews. We know what it means. Like, it’s pretty obvious to us. 

HOOVER: So it’s a you think it’s an explicit call to violence against other students? 

GREENBLATT: It is. 

HOOVER: And you’re saying there’s no place for that under any circumstances at any college campus? 

GREENBLATT: I don’t think– Now, look, talk about it in class when you’re studying history of the modern Middle East. But at a time when Jewish students are being forced to barricade in the library, hide in their dorms, I mean, we’ve tracked an 1,100% increase in anti-Semitic incidents at college campuses over the 60 days since the massacre. Think about that. So let’s talk about ‘river to the sea.’ So people didn’t just invent this phrase. It comes from the Hamas charter. And the idea is that they will liberate historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And these are the sort of. 

HOOVER: But that’s where Israel is. 

GREENBLATT: Exactly. 

HOOVER: So it’s a call for the annihilation of Israel. 

GREENBLATT: Absolutely. They’re not calling for a two state solution. They’re not saying let’s figure something out. And to give you, to make an analogy, saying from the river to the sea in 2023 is like saying ‘Germany for Germans’ in 1933. And so we here from the river to the sea, we know exactly what they’re talking about. 

HOOVER: Should campus administrators allow student protesters to chant those chants– 

GREENBLATT: Here’s the question. 

HOOVER: –in protests on campus. 

GREENBLATT: Just imagine if the class of people being targeted weren’t Jews, but they were African-American people, or Latino immigrants, or LGBTQ people. Would you allow for people to walk up and down the campus and chant, ‘stone the…’, ‘kill the…’,  ‘hang the..’ fill in the blank? My position is really simple. Again, we’re a First Amendment organization. Like, we have fought for this for 110 years. And I, again, hate speech is the price of free speech. But if hypocrisy is your operating model, I have a big problem with that. 

HOOVER: The president of Penn has resigned. The president of Harvard has not resigned. Should Dr. Claudine Gay resign? 

GREENBLATT: If the Board and the office of the president have a plan right now that they’re going to proceed with, then maybe she can stay. 

HOOVER: But you haven’t seen–

GREENBLATT: If they don’t have a plan, then I have zero confidence in the leadership. 

HOOVER: With zero confidence in the leadership, you think they should resign. 

GREENBLATT: If there is no plan, then I think they need new leadership. We need a plan. We need it right now. This is not that hard–. 

HOOVER: When is right now? Like in 24 hours? In a week?

GREENBLATT: Like in a week. 

HOOVER: Will you call for the resignation if you don’t see one? 

GREENBLATT: Yeah. I would. By the way, one last point, ADL released a survey last week asking– after having asked American Jewish students, what’s been their experience on these campuses? 73% said they have either directly experienced or seen themselves anti-Semitic incidents on campus in the last two months. That is unreal. Like the red lights should be going off for all of these campus presidents. So, again, we come back to this here. And when you ask me, can President Gay lead, President Kornbluth too at MIT? Like, I don’t understand what’s so hard about this. There will be hard questions. This one is easy. You can’t incite violence against a class of students who are literally being attacked almost every day. 

HOOVER: What can the ADL do to combat anti Semitism on these campuses? Is it a ranking of antisemitism on college campuses? 

GREENBLATT: It’s funny you say that. We’ve been thinking about doing a kind of ranking of universities. But I tell you, look, I’m not going to wait for these college presidents to find their moral core. We just need to act. So I’ll tell you what ADL needs to do right now 

HOOVER: So what are you going to do? Yeah. 

GREENBLATT: So, number one, as I mentioned at the top, I think there are some problematic actors who are driving this process, like this group Students for Justice in Palestine. You know, you can’t hold a bake sale for Boko Haram. You go to jail because they’re a foreign terror organization. You don’t get to, you know, release a newsletter for ISIS and publish it, because they’re a terror organization. You go to jail. It’s a violation of the criminal code. And so these groups that are sharing Hamas propaganda, that are pushing out their talking points, I believe they’re providing material support for a terror organization, and it’s a violation of the law. So I’ve already been to Washington. I met with people at the very top of U.S. law enforcement pushing them to investigate. And I sent a letter to 200 campus presidents about a month ago pushing them to investigate these SJP chapters on their campuses for violating the codes of conduct. So, number one: they should investigate, potentially de-charter, at a minimum, you know, suspend the students who are doing this. By the way, Brandeis University de-chartered SJP, GW and Columbia suspended students and more are coming. So that’s number one. Secondly, the college needs to understand, you know, as institutes, institutions that get federal funding under the Civil Rights Act, they are liable for Title VI violations. Title VI is the clause of the Civil Rights Act that protects students or faculty or staff from being discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity. It’s actually– the exact language is: race, color or origin. The courts have interpreted that to encompass Jews. So these institutions could lose federal funding. Grants could be terminated. Future funding could be jeopardized. 

HOOVER: Do you have cases on this already? 

GREENBLATT: Do we ever. 

HOOVER: How many? 

GREENBLATT: So we set up a legal hotline. Because we were hearing about students, you know, let’s put on a hotline. We’ll make it easy for people to submit potential cases to us. In less than a month, we have 375 cases have been submitted. 

HOOVER: In 1993, William F. Buckley Jr. hosted a debate about political correctness on campus. Listen to college President Leon Botstein on the rules of speech and how they should apply at the university. 

BOTSTEIN: The university regulates speech all the time. Someone in the physics department telling us the earth is flat–we take action. Someone who says the Holocaust didn’t exist–we take action, and should. We are about teaching. But in order to teach, I think we have to establish serious standards, and that’s really at the heart of the political correctness debate. 

HOOVER: How much of this is really just about the culture of universities? 

GREENBLATT: I think a lot of this is about the culture of the universities. I think, again, a university president resigning doesn’t solve the problem. I think there is a kind of rot in these institutions that have been captured by this ideology of victimhood.

CONGRESS

HOOVER: I want to go to American politics. Representative Rashida Tlaib has called Israel’s military operations in Gaza a genocide. 

GREENBLATT: Yeah. 

HOOVER: Representatives Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing. Are these ideas from progressive politicians anti-Semitic? 

GREENBLATT: I think, again, making wild claims against the Jewish state in a moment when Jews here are being targeted and assaulted, I think that’s anti-Semitic. 

HOOVER: Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer recently called out progressives for turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism. 

GREENBLATT: Yes. 

HOOVER: You see this lack of moral clarity on the left? 

GREENBLATT: Oh, there’s the lack of moral clarity that we saw at that hearing does exist in some segments of the left. But let’s also make a point. Chuck Schumer, he’s got it right. Hakeem Jeffries, he’s got it right. And the vast majority of other elected officials on the Democratic ledger, starting with President Biden, they’ve all got it right. This week at the Hanukkah party President Biden stood up in front of the cameras and the world stage, he said, “I am a Zionist.” That’s what we need. We need pushback for people in leadership positions to make sure the Cori Bush’s, the Ilhan Omars, the Rashid Tlaibs understand they are not the majority. They are the fringe. We need to keep them on the fringe where they belong. 

ALLYSHIP 

HOOVER: I want to ask you about allyship then, this notion that diverse special interests on the left will support each other’s causes. It strikes me that there’s been a great deal of disappointment amongst Jews from their allies since 10/7. 

GREENBLATT: So a few things. We stand in solidarity with other groups not because we expect a quid pro quo, but because it’s the right thing to do. So we weren’t asking for the Black community or immigrants or the FDQ or women’s groups or these other groups or Muslim groups– 

HOOVER: But where was the Movement for Black Lives on 10/7?

GREENBLATT: Yeah. I mean, look, we already knew that these people were not only, were not our friends, they’re our enemies. When they accused Israel of committing genocide, among other things. 

HOOVER: But help me understand why so many progressive groups who call themselves allies in some cases were totally silent after 10/7, and in some cases blamed the Jews for the attacks of Hamas against Israel. 

GREENBLATT: Yeah, look, there has been a lack of institutional support in ways I would have hoped for. I think it’s forcing a lot of people in our community to step back and say, wait a second, where, who are our friends? At the same time, look, I need to share some stories. The day, October 7th, the first call that I got from outside the Jewish community was from Al Sharpton. Reverend Sharpton called me and said, How can I help? 

HOOVER: Who has also in his past had a history with anti-semitism– 

GREENBLATT: A checkered history. 

HOOVER: I just, I wonder what, has allyship served you? 

GREENBLATT: Well, look, we will continue to do what’s right because it’s right. Not because I expect other groups to, you know, again, what is it, ‘scratch my back, I scratch yours’? That’s not why we do this.

HOOVER: Isn’t that the point of allyship? 

GREENBLATT: But then maybe I don’t believe in allyship. I believe in doing what’s right because it’s right.

HOOVER: There have been extensive and horrific reports of widespread rape and the use of rape as a weapon of war. Sexual assault that was carried out by Hamas against Israel during the massacres on ten-seven. Why are the UN women’s rights agencies: UN Women, UN Human Rights Council. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and many other progressive politicians, Representative Pramila Jayapal, silent on this issue? 

GREENBLATT: Or even worse, equivocating on it. 

HOOVER: Yeah. 

GREENBLATT: Like the silence is bad, but the slovenly, like, equivocation is even worse. 

HOOVER: Is this a double standard? 

GREENBLATT: Double standard?– 

HOOVER: Is this anti-Semitism? 

GREENBLATT: It’s no standard at all. 

HOOVER: Is it anti-Semitism? 

GREENBLATT: Of course it’s anti-Semitism. So I believe there’s anti-Semitism in different forms. There’s abrasive anti-Semitism, which is like in-your-face, like the rallies we’ve been talking about, vandalizing your home, tearing the mezuzah off your door. But then there is erasive anti-Semitism. And erasive anti-Semitism isn’t the sin of commission, it’s the sin of omission. It’s again, not speaking out when Jewish people are raped and sexually brutalized the same way you would when other people are. Erasive anti-Semitism is the people who held signs for the “bring back our girls” after Boko Haram kidnapped those Nigerian school children, somehow silent on hundreds of Israeli hostages being held in the tunnels of Gaza. That’s erasive anti Semitism and it is as toxic, and it is as poisonous as abrasive anti-Semitism. 

HOOVER: Jews around the world lit menorahs to celebrate the miracle of light. What does it mean to be Jewish in this moment? 

GREENBLATT: I mean, the Jewish experience for thousands of years has been one of exile, one of persecution, and yet one of triumph. We’re still here despite all those empires and regimes and leaders who tried to destroy us. And so while I take these threats really seriously, I find tremendous inspiration and pride, not just in my own faith, my own tradition, but the kind of unity we have in our community. A few weeks ago, I was on the Washington Mall with hundreds of thousands of other Jewish people who flew in from all over the country. And you had people wearing MAGA hats standing next to people with Pride T-shirts. You had white people and Black people and Asian people and brown people. You had Jews and non-Jews all coming together. It was breathtaking. It was inspiring.

HOOVER: This was a march for Israel on the mall. 

GREENBLATT: Yeah. You know, they say it’s darkest before the dawn. And I think that’s the case here, too. 

HOOVER: Well with that note of optimism, thank you for joining me, Jonathan Greenblatt. 

GREENBLATT: Thank you for having me.

END