The veteran British broadcaster Trevor Phillips began a recent Sunday-morning program by telling his audience that he had been distressed to learn of a conversation that is increasingly common around Shabbat dinner tables in the United Kingdom. The question being asked is: Who among our non-Jewish neighbors would try to rescue us should we find ourselves being rounded up for the second time in less than a century?
I thought of Phillips’s monologue last Tuesday, when I attended the funeral in Manhattan of my former boss, the legendary national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman. As the rabbi pointed out, among the many anecdotes, maxims and bon mots that distinguished Abe’s career was his occasional reminder to his interlocutors that he “couldn’t afford to be pessimistic.”
Abe, of course, was famously rescued as a Jewish infant in Nazi-occupied Poland by his devoutly Catholic nanny, who raised him as her own child, despite the profound risk to her own life. For Abe, this salvation was cheering evidence of the capacity of ordinary human beings to do extraordinary good. His notion of pessimism as a luxury was perhaps based on this experience.
Consequently, he believed that undiluted pessimism was an abdication of personal responsibility. Instead of turning to action, human beings lose themselves in the notion that the world is going mad and that nothing will arrest that process.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feel pessimistic, or wary, or scared—all emotions that have shaken Jews the world over in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas pogrom in Israel and the global wave of antisemitism, unprecedented since the Shoah, it unleashed. It simply means that we shouldn’t give in to them.
One might argue that the environment in which Abe operated was more benign than the one we are confronted with now, and therefore, that it was easier for him to reach that conclusion. I have to think, based on my private exchanges with him following Oct. 7, that this was something he’d realized. At the same time, and admirably, he never threw up his hands in irredeemable despair.
That left me wondering whether Abe’s basic stance—never sugar-coating the world but not abandoning our moral duties and obligations in the face of despair either—is something we can carry over into the decidedly new era of politics that has been taking shape over the past decade and a half.
For both the State of Israel and the Jewish people, it has been a profoundly traumatic period.
Four wars in Gaza—all launched by Hamas—yet all of them bringing cacophonic shrieks of “genocide” in the direction of Israel that grew louder each time. A fanatical regime in Iran that, for now, still survives despite the punishing airstrikes of June 2025 and the full-scale war carried out by the United States and Israel this year. The rehabilitation of antisemitism on the political left and, more recently, ever-larger swaths of the conservative movement. The accumulating antisemitic violence that was already in evidence before Oct. 7—arguably at its worst in France, where the fatalities included, but were by no means restricted to, an 8-year-old Jewish girl in Toulouse; a small group of shoppers in a kosher supermarket in Paris; and two elderly Jewish women, one a survivor of the Shoah, also in Paris—and which has escalated to sickening levels since.
As I’ve argued in his column on previous occasions, while Jews are the sole targets and victims of antisemitic agitation, there is a ripple effect that extends into non-Jewish communities. I am not speaking of our immediate neighbors—the recipients of warnings, issued mainly by Jews, that what starts with us won’t end with us. I am speaking of the silent masses who are largely invisible to us, whose daily struggles and trials fail to move a world in thrall to the cult of Palestinianism.
I work for a think tank focused on national security and international relations, so it should perhaps be expected that the issue of the abduction of more than 20,000 Ukrainian children by the Russian invaders is one that crosses my desk on a regular basis. But how many people beyond the world of policy are given the opportunity to study or raise awareness of this issue in a sustained manner? The same can be said for the plight of the Kurds, especially in Turkey, Syria and Iran; or the fate of migrant workers in Qatar and other countries in the Arab Gulf; or the torture and executions meted out to anti-regime protestors in Iran detained by the authorities.
The list is almost endless, in fact. And yes, while it’s true that the issues I mentioned do occasionally attract media coverage, expressions of concern and the odd protest rally, that is never sustained on anything like the scale reserved for the Palestinians. One might point out, in that regard, that this observation extends to episodes of anti-Palestinian persecution that can’t be pinned on Israel—like the mass expulsions from Kuwait and Libya, or the appalling massacres in Yarmouk and other areas during the Syrian civil war.
The moral selectivity of Palestinianism, rooted in a classically antisemitic conception of Jews as the bearers of original sin, loyal only to themselves, bears much of the responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. At best, these other instances of suffering are ignored; at worst, they are regarded with contempt or even justified. Some readers will have seen the recent video shared on social media of a young Iranian woman who lost her eye to a bullet fired into a protest by regime security forces. She was mocked and abused on the streets of Berlin by a teenage leftist who had peeled off from a demonstration littered with Palestinian flags. That encounter is emblematic of what I am talking about.
Even so, it tells us something else: that those who are disdained or overlooked by the present guardians of public discourse—from Haredi Jews facing harassment in Brooklyn, N.Y., to the Christian worshippers arrested by the Chinese authorities for attending unregistered churches—are actually the majority.
Pregnant within this realization is Abe Foxman’s refusal to surrender wholesale to unbridled pessimism. The responsibility now falls on us and future generations to carry out the research, craft the messages and build the alliances that will overcome this current, terrible moment. I hope with every fiber of my being that we are up to the task.
