Liora Rez, founder and executive director of the grassroots watchdog StopAntisemitism, has spent the two years since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, turning the tables on antisemites. And she claims a remarkable success rate.
“We have profiled more than 1,000 antisemites. Over 400 of them have been fired,” Rez told JNS of the organization’s name-and-shame social-media posts, saying people have become “very comfortable espousing their bigoted views towards the Jewish people and state.”
She likens StopAntisemitism’s work to “providing public service announcements to the general public and to individual community members that there is an antisemite roaming among you. The individuals we feature are not just having a bad day. These are grotesque antisemites,” as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which is used as a guide by the U.S. government and many state governments.
While people who broadcast their Jew-hated to the world often suffer consequences due to StopAntisemitism’s efforts, Rez said termination from their jobs is not the end goal.
“We’re not in the business of ruining people’s lives. Our goal is to always remedy a situation first,” Rez told JNS, saying that the organization has removed posts after “the few instances where an antisemite has realized they’re wrong and has issued apologies.”
Rez said she actively works with employers to “have them partner up with organizations that are more education-focused,” and those who posted offensive and often vile antisemitic content have often “realized the wrongness of their ways. Does that happen a lot? No. It doesn’t happen enough.”
Often, she said, employers themselves are slow to react or don’t respond at all, even after her organization reaches out to them, notifying them that a post about one of their staffers is about to go live. She said that notification of antisemitic actions or potential actions in the workplace should be viewed by employers as a serious “legal liability issue,” due to “hateful views” that could be brought into the office and create a climate of harassment or unsafe conditions.
“There have been several situations where employers, specifically human resource departments, have completely ignored our communication and have not acted until we put out a public call to action campaign,” Rez said. “At that point, when the public is involved, that’s when we see the needle move more because they don’t want to look like they dropped the ball or they ignored a case of antisemitism.”
‘Rancid hatred and bigotry’
StopAntisemitism’s work led to the firing of Dr. Abeer AbouYabis, an assistant professor at Emory University in Atlanta, as well as a hematologist and oncologist at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute.
AbouYabis posted on her social-media account weeks after Oct. 7: “They got walls, we got gliders/Glory to all resistance fighters.”
“That was definitely a doozy,” Rez said.
The post alluded to the air invasion into Israel that day by Hamas operatives and Palestinians using hang gliders, which descended on the Nova music festival near Re’im, where terrorists landed and then slaughtered hundreds of festival-goers.
The watchdog organization’s exposure has also led to the firings of teachers and health professionals, along with workers from high-profile companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and TikTok, all the way to small mom-and-pop shops.
“We are seeing it across the revenue spectrum, in companies large, small and medium,” Rez said, adding that most offenders come from the private sector.
Not all employers are so willing to take action, though. Rez pointed to the “shocking” case of Dr. Wael Sayej, chief of pediatric gastroenterology at Baystate Hospital in Springfield, Mass.
“We were notified by internal whistleblowers of the hospital of his just really rancid antisemitism, and hatred and bigotry,” Rez said.
While StopAntisemitism has been unable to verify the hospital’s response, she said that staff members in Sayej’s department made excuses for his behavior, “saying something along the lines of ‘He’s older. He didn’t know how to use social media, and the comments shouldn’t be public.’”
If that’s true, Rez says that means “they’re OK with private antisemitism. However, he’s got Jewish residents that work under him.” (JNS reached out to Baystate Hospital for comment.)
Still, the watchdog doesn’t appear to be taking political sides in calling out antisemitic behavior. In June, the organization published an alert about Paul Ingrassia, a Trump administration official who had been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
Its alert included Ingrassia’s troubling history, including his terming the Hamas atrocities, including sexual assaults of Israelis, a “psyop,” in addition to his support of Holocaust denier and virulent antisemite Nick Fuentes, among other issues. A Senate committee hearing to consider Ingrassia’s nomination, scheduled for July, was pushed back following the revelations.
That hearing was rescheduled for this week, but Ingrassia withdrew from the nomination process on Tuesday, as additional revelations, including describing himself as someone with a “Nazi streak,” came to light in recent days and made clear the requisite Republican support necessary for confirmation wasn’t there.
“We are extremely worried about what is happening to the GOP right now, and the antisemitism that is coming from radicals,” like Fuentes, and political commentators and podcasters Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host, Rez said. “We don’t think the end of the war is going to stop that.”
‘There is a gray area’
Rez stressed to JNS that, contrary to what critics claim, her organization does not “dox” its targets—meaning it doesn’t publish private or personal information used for malicious reasons.
“It takes a very quick point-two-second public search on Google that an 8-year-old can do to find the vast majority of these individuals,” Rez said, noting that almost all of the cases that StopAntisemitism publishes come from tips from private individuals, including occasionally a co-worker. “Public LinkedIn profiles identify their employers. They often talk about their own employers.”
Somewhere between two to five hours of work is spent by Rez and her team verifying leads and archiving material before they post about someone’s antisemitic activity. Sometimes, they will ask the public for leads in identifying those caught on video taking part in blatantly antisemitic actions.
While StopAntisemitism has posted about some 1,000 individuals and has an additional couple of hundred investigations ongoing, Rez told JNS that “we have over 2,000 individuals that we have not just posted about because there is not enough subject matter. There is a gray area.”
She said that among those in that gray area are physicians and pediatric dentists.
“They are the ones keeping me up at night,” she said.
