Evan R. Bernstein, the new CEO of B’nai B’rith International, does not think America is heading down the path of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. But the bad news is that he doesn’t think that American Jews need to look so far afield to be worried about what the community faces in the United States.
“I think it’s certainly getting to America in the ’30s, and that is a huge concern,” he told JNS, citing figures like Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin.
“My fear is the trends are not in our favor,” he said.
In August, the 51-year-old took over as CEO of B’nai B’rith, America’s oldest Jewish communal organization, succeeding Daniel S. Mariaschin, who helmed the organization, which was founded in 1843, for 27 years.
JNS sat down with Bernstein last week at B’nai B’rith’s new Washington office, about a half mile from the White House, amid boxes waiting to be unpacked.
Nearly three years after Oct. 7 changed the way that many Jews perceive their place in America and the world, Bernstein said that he wants to lead a “rebirth” of B’nai B’rith at a time when many are questioning the role of “legacy” Jewish organizations.
“We can’t be stagnant,” Bernstein said. “It can’t just be business as usual.”
“We have to get that entrepreneurial spirit again,” he said. “The mandate for myself, the board and the staff is to be as innovative as B’nai B’rith was when they started Hillel, when they started BBYO, when they started the Anti-Defamation League.” (All three organizations have since spun off from B’nai B’rith.)
“These are the iconic backbones of the American Jewish community. All came out of B’nai B’rith,” Bernstein said. “We’re not done yet.”
Bernstein’s career has spanned the “alphabet soup” of Jewish communal organizations, most recently as vice president of community relations at the Jewish Federations of North America, and before that as head of the Community Security Service, vice president of the ADL’s Northeastern division and as Arizona director of AIPAC.
A native of Niantic, Conn., Bernstein described his childhood as “a secular kind of experience.”
“Not a lot of Jews there,” he said, of the southeastern part of the state.After graduating from Western Connecticut State University, Bernstein followed in his father’s footsteps to work at United Way and settled in Arizona, which he still calls home.
A call from a former roommate, who asked Bernstein, then in his mid-20s, to be the head of AIPAC in Arizona, changed the trajectory of his career.
“I said, ‘I’ve never been to Israel, so, I don’t know how I’m going to do this,’” he told JNS. “I had to go to Israel before I could take the job. So, I went on a Federation mission to Israel, and I had kind of a Kotel moment, and then everything clicked.”
“That’s when my communal career solidified into something that I’m going to do for the rest of my life,” he said.
The geography of the hot-button Middle Eastern political issues has not changed much in the intervening two decades. “I was there for when Sharon pulled out of Gaza,” Bernstein said, of his time at AIPAC. “Our biggest lobbying point back then was talking about how we are going to deal with the threat with Iran.”
“Even then we started seeing a breakdown within the Jewish community around Israel,” Bernstein told JNS. “When I first started—and I think we had that from ’48, ’67, ’73, the Russian Jewry movement—the entirety of the Jewish community in the United States was very much on the same page and rowing in the same direction.”
Bernstein points to the Obama administration’s signing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal as opening “more of a schism in the community.”
“To start having that kind of segmentation in such a small minority is not always the best thing for us as a group,” he told JNS.
Jews are a small minority in every country they live except Israel, but Bernstein said that he sees B’nai B’rith playing a unifying role internationally.
“Our secret sauce is that we are in 50 countries around the globe,” he told JNS. “There’s no other organization that has the network of volunteers that B’nai B’rith has internationally. They may have a presence internationally, but they don’t have this network on the ground, and I think that network wants to grow. We’re going to help it grow.”
“I don’t want a single Jew in any one of our communities to feel like they don’t have what they need to fight the fight that they want to fight,” he said. “If someone’s raising their hand and saying, ‘I want to be a leader in my community,’ it’s our job to give them the tools to be able to do that.”
“Not doing that is what keeps you up at night,” he told JNS.
The leaders of many large, pro-Israel, American Jewish organizations have described a fresh unity of purpose within their organizations after the horrors of Oct. 7, but Bernstein said that he is aware that that has sometimes led to duplicative efforts.
“I want to be able to, in a year or two, talk to you and say, ‘I completely understand why B’nai B’rith is different than the American Jewish Committee or different from ADL or different from the Combat Antisemitism Movement,” he said. “I want that to be very, very clear.”
“We’re still in our lane, and we’re making a real impact in that lane,” he said.
Bernstein told JNS that one of the areas where B’nai B’rith can differentiate itself is working with local emergency services. “If you lose first responders, the Jewish community is done,” he said.
“Law enforcement gets a lot of play, especially in America, because of the need for security, and there’s a lot of interaction with law enforcement, but I do think that the ambulance and fire are areas that are not getting what they need,” he said.
“Where I grew up in Connecticut, these were volunteers—it was volunteer ambulance, volunteer fire,” he said. “These were average people that own the hardware store. They’re a lawyer. They’re an accountant. These are people that maybe never even interacted with a Jew.”
“We don’t want to get to a place where, if they see that there’s a call to a person with a Jewish last name, they don’t go through the light,” Bernstein said.
Like many minority interest groups in the United States, B’nai B’rith was established as a mutual support and public advocacy organization at a time when discrimination was both legal and common.
Bernstein described the quality of life for American Jews that emerged after the Holocaust as a “golden age” that he believes is now over.
“By the time of the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, you really had the ability for Jews to have freedom of movement,” he told JNS. “They could go to the colleges they wanted. They could go to the country clubs they wanted. They can go to different communities. They had freedom of movement that my grandparents in the ’20s and ’30s only dreamed about.”
“Then it started to erode,” he said.
Bernstein listed the places that have now become synonymous with America’s newly-born wave of violence against Jews—Poway, Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Monsey—and described the solidarity march against Jew-hatred in New York in 2020.
“When we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, that was the official marker, for me, that the golden age had ended,” he said. “Things that we took for granted for the last 50 years are maybe now on the table, and we have to be very cognizant and be activated to do that.”
The need for a Jewish state, Bernstein said, is one of the topics that he thinks can no longer be up for debate, even as political anti-Zionism has become a force in U.S. politics.
“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and we believe that, especially in today’s world,” he said. “I used to put caveats on that before Oct. 7. Now I think it’s crested over so much that it’s impossible to differentiate the two. It pains me to say that, but that’s the reality that we’re in, and so those things are never going to change.”
He pointed to the motivations of Jews emigrating to Israel as indicative of the need for the international Jewish community to back Israel.
“They’re making aliyah not because they want an apartment for Passover or a second or third home. They’re moving there for security reasons,” he told JNS. “They’re moving there to be in a place where they can be openly Jewish and not and not be afraid, where they can wear their Magen David or their kippah.”
With figures on both the political left and right engaging in hatred of Israel and Jews, Bernstein said that he wants B’nai B’rith to be an organization that is “calling balls and strikes” and speaks out for the “moderate middle.”
“I don’t think anyone really perceives it as being far-right or far-left, and I think a lot of organizations in the communal space have kind of fallen into one or the other,” he told JNS. “We’re not, and that’s a legacy that I want to continue.”
“I hope that both the Republicans and the Democrats that are kind of leaning into more of these left- or right-wing ideologies can figure out a way to come back to the middle of the way this country was built and had been done for 250 years,” he said.
“The Jewish communities around the globe for thousands of years have had major challenges,” he said. “Whether it was Spain, Italy—you name the country—we had the Crusades. We’re just going to have to be stronger than ever before. I think we’re going to have to try to reunite ourselves and we cannot be fractured.”
