A message of solidarity

We last spoke in 2022, well over a year before October 7. Could you have foreseen this explosion of hate that followed?

I think we’re seeing a global crisis, and I think what makes this tsunami of antisemitism so devastating is its breadth, in that I don’t know that we’ve ever seen in the history of our people a moment of such reach where you’re seeing real threats, kinetic threats directed against the Jewish people in the Western Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere, the Near East, Western Europe, Southeast Asia. There is a very, very terrifying kind of totality to it.

Deborah Lipstadt, the noted Holocaust historian, has said it starts with words … but we’ve seen how it is manifested. From October 9 at the Sydney Opera House to what happened at Bondi. It starts with words and signs and slogans, and I don’t know why anyone is then surprised when it explodes into violence.

I am coming to Australia. When I was invited to do so by [Australian Friends of] Magen David Adom, I was so honoured.

Magen David Adom, [is] an organisation focused on saving lives, regardless of how they pray, regardless of where they’re from – that is the opposite of this anti-Jewish enterprise which tries to treat us as a pariah among the nations. I’d like to think at ADL we run toward the fire, not away from it. Magen David Adom runs toward the fire, never away from it. I’m coming to deliver a message of solidarity, to express the fact that the Australian Jewish community is not alone. The attack happened in Bondi, and prior to that, there was a firebombing in Boulder, Colorado, and a few weeks before that, there was a shooting in Washington, D.C. And just a few months ago, we had an attempted suicide bombing at a large synagogue in Detroit, Michigan.

Australia, similar to the US, was a place that was long considered a haven for Jews. It was a place of refuge after the Shoah. And to think that now it is a place where Jewish people find themselves under a kind of siege, where you have a government that has dithered and denied and dismissed, it’s really a shocking turn of events. Statements are not enough. We need solidarity, and solidarity itself is not enough. We need sustained action if we are going to turn this around.

As go the Jews, so goes Australia. And the same illiberal, violent forces which would marginalise, isolate, and then murder Jews, are the same illiberal forces that will try to isolate, marginalise, and literally destroy what is great about Australia – its pluralism, its diversity, its sanctity as an open society. It starts with the Jews; it never ends with the Jews.

To what extent have international bodies such as the UN, the ICJ and the ICC contributed to normalising antisemitism?

Dramatically so. We need to recognise that many of the institutions that we cherish – some of which were built by Jews – have been captured, and have been seized, and have been instrumentalised by the other side.

I don’t know if you’re reading about the IDF’s accounts in southern Lebanon. Beaufort Castle, this well-known strategic position built by Crusaders 1000 years ago … it turns out that this ancient castle, over the last probably 15 years, Hezbollah excavated underneath, dug tunnels, and created an entire citadel underneath the structure. That’s what the other side has done to these NGOs, some of which we built, like Human Rights Watch, or concepts we pioneered like genocide. The other side has worked to invert these against us.

So you see it with the ICC prosecution. You see it with groups like Human Rights Watch, which have made themselves anti-Israel vehicles. You’ve seen this with the usage of the word genocide against the Jews. They’ve used terms like apartheid, which do not in any way explain the situation in the State of Israel. Language itself has been seized as pirates might do and repurposed to prosecute a case against the Jewish state.

And by extension the Jewish people.

Of course. The Jewish state is but an extension of the Jewish people. This is not just about the perceived misdeeds of a particular country. This is about suggesting that Jewish people don’t have the same rights that other people are entitled to. We don’t question the legitimacy of other religions, we don’t question the legitimacy of other people, the ethnicity of other people, we don’t question the validity of other states, only the Jewish state, only the Jewish people, only the Jewish religion, gets cast in such a malevolent light. The application of double standards, the strategy of demonisation, the process of delegitimisation, those are hallmarks of antisemitism.

You have spoken before about antizionism being antisemitism.

Antizionism is antisemitism, period. Full stop. No comma, no conjunction, no additional explanation is needed.

There was a time when the hatred against Jews was framed as anti-Judaism, that our religion was not legitimate because we didn’t accept Jesus … And then with the age of science came antisemitism. It’s just their race that is illegitimate … And of course it culminated in the Shoah. And then in the wake of the Shoah, people realised maybe racialising them, saying they’re genetically inferior, is wrong, but then it became a convenient way to transfer all that hatred into this new vehicle of antizionism. I don’t hate the Jews for their religion. I don’t hate the Jews for their race. I hate the Jews for their state. And then the same aspersions, the same slurs were just morphed … The Jews don’t kill Christian babies now, they kill Palestinian babies. Those who say, “I’m not an antisemite, I’m just an antizionist” — that’s like saying “I’m not a racist, I just think slavery was okay.”

One of the challenges that makes this different is you have Jewish people who say I’m an antizionist, and that is the cover that’s often used by the real bigots. But just because someone says I’m Jewish and I’m an antizionist, that doesn’t inoculate them from the fact that they are trafficking in stereotypes and hate. They might not intend to do it, but the outcome is the same.
When people say “I’m just an antizionist,” I remind them of Bondi or Manchester or Boulder or Washington DC. If you traffic in these lies that the Jews are committing genocide, then you end up in this place where you think it’s okay to kill Jewish people, or to burn their synagogues.

Is what’s happening in Australia worse than the world trend? And what of the Australian government’s response?

I don’t have the Australian data in front of me because I haven’t done a comparative analysis. But I have watched this Royal Commission, this creation of it, and I think Prime Minister Albanese was weak immediately after Bondi. There was more courage in the people who stepped up to fight back against the terrorists than there was in the politicians. I’m reminded of what happened on October 9 when they arrested that man, Mark Spiro, when he showed up to confront the protesters. It was the one Jewish guy who got arrested.

I welcome the Royal Commission, but I think the real test will be implementation.

If Australia does this right, it could set an example for all these other countries … On the other hand, it could be a case study on how to get it wrong. This is a test of Australia’s democratic institutions. This is a test of Australia as an open society. Because if you don’t, as go the Jews, so goes the country.

This week the Royal Commission is looking at antisemitism on campus. How do we bring universities back from the brink?

In America, from calendar year 2024-25, antisemitic incidents, which had reached the highest point we’d ever tracked – we had 9354 incidents in 2024 – that number dropped to 6274 — a drop of roughly 30 per cent. That could be attributed specifically to the decline in college campuses. Those incidents were down 80 per cent … anti-Israel demonstrations were down 90 per cent year over year.

Why? The largest factor is that institutions enforced their own policies … they did so in 2025 because we had government oversight. The Trump administration and the US Congress together created an environment in which the universities felt pressure. Number two, there was litigation, sometimes brought by advocates like ADL, sometimes brought directly by the students. Then number three, ADL created a report card … it catalysed a race to the top by evaluating these institutions in an empirical manner, entirely transparent, using data … and no school likes to get a failing grade.
The same thing should happen in Australia, but enforcing policies is number one, and that didn’t happen on its own. That only happened because of government oversight, litigation pressure, and watchdog engagement.

Social media is another major breeding ground. Have you seen improvement?

It’s a complicated question. In 2022, ChatGPT was not a thing, Anthropic did not exist, Alphabet had not invented Gemini. Flash forward, and a third of all search traffic is now flowing through AI applications today. Since 2022, we’ve seen a pullback on moderation and a diminishment of the standards around trust and safety. So social media arguably is worse today than it was.
AI is the new frontier, and the big companies seem to be trying much harder than the prior generation of social media companies. But there’s still a lot of issues. Wikipedia has now become a key vector … an institution founded in part by Jewish people that’s been completely inverted and captured. And there’s a whole new raft of areas that have become recruiting grounds for radicalisation: video games, messaging applications, tools like Sidechat, Fizz, Yik Yak, which are anonymous and specific to the university, and they are cesspools of antisemitism.

ADL is tracking all of this. We just released a study on the major consumer-facing generative AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek, Grok – let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. Claude did the best, and ChatGPT followed, and then the rest went way down from there. We can’t afford to take our hands off the wheel … because our enemies are exploiting these tools. In 2022 I was talking about the New York Times. In 2026, I’m talking about TikTok, because that’s where the story is today.

What can individual Jews do to help combat this problem?

A lot. There are no spectators in the fight against antisemitism … we’re all actually on the field.

Number one, you can speak up when you hear something said over the water cooler, when you see something online, when you read an op-ed you find problematic. Speaking up when you see a video on TikTok or Instagram could be flagging it or adding a comment. When you downvote a video, when you flag it, the systems learn from that, and when you ignore it, they learn from that too. When you see something, you’ve got to say something.
Second, share facts. We’re the people of the book. We have an obligation to be literate, to be informed, to know our history. In our world today, nobody even reads the article. They just see a headline … and click retweet. Sometimes you have to slow things down to speed it up.

And number three, you have to show strength. Not leaning back, but leaning in. That could mean writing a cheque to an organisation, volunteering, or tapping your own skill. If you’re a content creator, create content on antisemitism — not just antisemitism, but pro-Semitism. If you’re a musician, compose a piece for Jewish musicians being boycotted or denied venues. If you’re a lawyer, do pro bono work to support people who’ve experienced antisemitism. Everybody has a role to play. Speak out, share facts, show strength.

Finally, on US politics: both sides seem to be moving away from the Jews and Israel. What does that mean for American Jewry?

America has been the most generous, the most giving, the greatest country for the Jewish people in the history of our exile. Nothing was handed to us – we fought for everything. But it’s unmistakable that if you look at the 20th century, it was the American century. It was also the American Jewish century.

Now history has kind of caught up with us, and some of the peril, some of the pressures we face from both sides, feel more familiar to people who know their history than to people who know recent American experience. That’s part of what it means to be a Jew — not that we are destined to suffer, but that being chosen creates a special set of responsibilities. I believe in American exceptionalism … and we have an obligation, if we want to retain it, to fight for it every step of the way. There have always been pressures on us, but it’s our extraordinary resilience, our incredible creativity, our unmatched set of gifts that have allowed us to succeed. They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. These trends are definitely worrisome, but I have boundless faith in our people. We can not only survive this moment, we can thrive in it.

Jonathan Greenblatt will be the keynote speaker at Australian Friends of Magen David Adom’s major event on Wednesday, August 5 in Sydney. Bookings: https://events.humanitix.com/australian-friends-of-mda-with-jonathan-greenblatt