More than 2,000 people from 60 countries gathered in New York City on Sunday for the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum 2025, where AJC unveiled a partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation to collect contemporary testimonies of antisemitism.
The testimonial archive aims to collect 10,000 accounts from across the United States and the world, documenting incidents of antisemitism since 1945. Once completed, it is expected to be the largest archive of its kind.
Ted Deutch, CEO of AJC, said at the opening evening plenary that the project was inspired by the agency’s research showing that personal testimonials are the most effective tools for combating Jew-hatred.
“We must clearly show to the world—and preserve for the future—what antisemitism is, what it looks like and the personal toll it takes on Jews around the world,” he said at the event. “AJC has seen, firsthand, the way antisemitism has morphed and manifested itself in different ways since the end of the Holocaust.”
Deutch emphasized the power of personal testimonies in not only “changing hearts and minds but in winning support for policies that protect Jewish communities.”
“The USC Shoah Foundation’s collection of testimonies will forever capture the personal experiences of thousands of Jewish people, enabling us to tell our story and share it with generations to come,” he said.
Keynote speakers at the April 27-29 conference included Santiago Peña, the president of Paraguay; retired U.S. Army officer John Spencer, an urban-warfare expert; and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), who received the Nita M. Lowey Congressional Leadership Award for his advocacy on behalf of the Jewish people.
‘A line of omission’
As he accepted his award on Monday morning during the conference’s plenary session, Torres told attendees that the American media often portrays Israel as the “greatest obstacle to peace” in the region.
“If only Israel had the right government or if only Israel made the right concessions, the argument goes, peace would become possible and a two-state solution would become a reality,” he said. “There’s just one problem with that one-sided narrative. It’s not true.”
“The narrative is a line of omission,” he continued. “It omits the most tragic truth of the Israeli Palestinian conflict—that there is a genuinely genocidal, anti-Zionist, and yes, antisemitic ideology that demands nothing less than the extermination of Israel as a Jewish state and the eradication of Jews from their ancestral homeland.”
An international media that sanitizes the genocidal ideology behind Oct. 7 is an obstacle to peace, according to Torres.
“The cruel irony of the so-called ‘Free Palestine’ movement is that it does not free the Palestinians but oppresses them,” he stated.
Torres said the future of the Middle East does not belong to the “Islamic Republic and its empire of terror” but to the Abraham Accords—the 2020 agreements that normalized relations between Israel and Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.
