Abraham Foxman, who in 28 years as leader of the Anti-Defamation League fought antisemitism and other forms of prejudice, building the group into a powerful if sometimes controversial watchdog, died May 10 in New York. He was 86.
He died of unspecified natural causes, ADL communications director Todd Gutnick said.
Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor who came to the United States at 10 speaking no English, went to work for the ADL 15 years later, in 1965. He took over the top job, national director, in 1987 and over three decades turned the New York-based organization into one that — with 300 employees and a $60 million annual budget — dwarfed most other Jewish advocacy groups.
As the ADL expanded, Mr. Foxman became a frequent commentator on op-ed pages and TV news programs. For decades, “if you wanted to know if something was anti-Semitic or not, you went to Abe,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said in an interview for this obituary.
“Is Holocaust denial anti-Semitic?” Sarna added. “What kinds of attacks on the state of Israel are anti-Semitic? He became a kind of chief justice of what is anti-Semitic or not. Somebody had to fill that role, and there was a sense that he knew how to do it.”
To his admirers, Mr. Foxman was an unflagging defender of the Jewish people. He “doesn’t really intellectualize things,” conservative commentator Seth Lipsky, who regarded Mr. Foxman as a “living national treasure,” wrote in the New York Post. “He’s like a cop on a beat. One sign of bigotry, and out comes the rhetorical or legal nightstick. Thwack.”
Mr. Foxman said his vigilance in confronting even minor insults reflected the admonition of the Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that “the crematoriums of Auschwitz did not begin with bricks; they began with words.”
Mr. Foxman was a skilled fundraiser and a savvy political player in Washington, where he helped the State Department formulate a definition of antisemitism that it applied diplomatically and beyond.
He defined his mission broadly, supporting efforts to combat white supremacy and Islamophobia, to further LGBTQ equality and to secure immigrant rights. “We have always believed you can’t fight one kind of defamation without fighting the other,” Mr. Foxman told the Associated Press in 2015.
During the 2000 election, when then-Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut became the first known Jewish candidate to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket (as Democrat Al Gore’s running mate), Mr. Foxman criticized Lieberman’s frequent references to his faith.
“To even suggest that one cannot be a moral person without being a religious person is an affront to many highly ethical citizens,” Mr. Foxman and another ADL official wrote to Lieberman.
But Mr. Foxman’s chief mission remained protecting Jews and defending the state of Israel. He did not hesitate to speak out when he believed that opponents of Israel were motivated by antisemitism. “If the only nationalism that you find apartheid in is Jewish nationalism, then you’re an anti-Semite,” he told the New York Times in 2015.
At times he attracted criticism for his seeming disregard of Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians. And he responded forcefully to two American professors, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, whose 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” argued that the power of the “Israel lobby” in Washington prevented the United States from being evenhanded in the Middle East.
In a C-SPAN interview in 2006, Mr. Foxman accused the scholars of “bias and bigotry” and called their analysis “anti-Semitic.”
In his later years, Mr. Foxman increasingly used his position to help celebrities such as British fashion designer John Galliano, who made international news in 2011 when he unleashed an antisemitic tirade at a Paris cafe. Under Mr. Foxman’s tutelage, they studied the history of antisemitism and performed acts of contrition.
At a gala dinner marking his retirement in 2015, Mr. Foxman told an audience, “Some of my most satisfying moments as director of ADL were in witnessing people who did bad things and said vile things turn around and become better people.”
But he never reconciled with Mel Gibson, whose hugely profitable 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ” depicted Jews cheering Jesus’ crucifixion, and who unleashed an antisemitic outburst during a drunken-driving arrest in 2006.
“He was No. 1 in Hollywood, the most sought-after star, the people’s choice, the icon,” Mr. Foxman told J. Jewish News Weekly of Northern California in 2008. “Then he revealed himself as an anti-Semite, and look where he is today. That’s the beauty of America.” (Gibson later began a climb back, including a best director Oscar nomination for his 2016 World War II drama, “Hacksaw Ridge.”)
Among the ADL’s longtime activities was monitoring the media for signs of antisemitism. In later years, its watchdog role increasingly meant tracking Internet hate groups. The organization also provided antibias training and published Holocaust curriculums.
Mr. Foxman was a particularly compelling messenger for his cause, Sarna said, because “his personal story, which he told very well and often, was a story of personal rebirth, of overcoming Nazi hatred and adversity, that made him the embodiment of what he wanted to accomplish.”
A traumatic childhood
Mr. Foxman — his birth name was sometimes rendered Fuksman — was born on May 1, 1940, in Baranowicze, a town in eastern Poland then occupied by the Soviet Union. (The community is now called Baranavichy and is part of Belarus.)
His father, editor of a Zionist newspaper in Warsaw, fled Baranowicze as the Nazis overran Poland. In Vilna — now the Lithuanian city of Vilnius — he and his wife were ordered into a ghetto. To save their only child, then 15 months old, they placed him in the care of his Polish Catholic nanny, Bronislawa Kurpi, who had him baptized, gave him the Christian name Henryk Stanislaw Kurpi and raised him as a Catholic. He said some of his earliest memories involve spitting on Jews.
The family was reunited in 1946. By that time, however, young Henryk was attached to the woman he called “Mamoushka,” and she refused to release him to his parents. Legal battles followed, with the parents prevailing.
“She did it out of love — for me, for the church, for Jesus,” Mr. Foxman told the Chicago Tribune in 1987 about his nanny’s actions. “She risked her life for me for four years, every day. … She was guilty of human frailty. … But my life was preserved by an act of compassion by a non-Jew. … And in my work I pay tribute to what motivated her, the goodness in her.”
Mr. Foxman lost his grandparents and 13 aunts and uncles to the Holocaust. After a period in a displaced-persons camp, he and his immediate family were permitted to immigrate to the United States, and they settled in Brooklyn.
Mr. Foxman recalled that he reflexively crossed himself the first time his father took him to synagogue. His parents introduced him to his “new” religion slowly. He attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush and then received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the City College of New York in 1962 and graduated from New York University Law School in 1965.
The day after he passed the bar exam, Mr. Foxman joined the ADL, which was founded 1913 as part of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith. Mr. Foxman started out as an assistant director of its law department and then moved into international affairs. In 1987, when longtime ADL director Nathan Perlmutter died, Mr. Foxman was chosen as his successor.
As well as successes, there were controversies.
In 2000, Mr. Foxman played a backstage role in helping obtain a presidential pardon for fugitive financier Marc Rich, who had been indicted on federal racketeering, fraud and tax-evasion charges. Rich had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ADL over the years, and Mr. Foxman’s involvement, including a letter of support to President Bill Clinton, brought withering criticism. Mr. Foxman later expressed regret for his role.
In 2010, Mr. Foxman was widely criticized after he tried to block a proposed Islamic community center and mosque a few blocks from the World Trade Center in New York. “The main charge was that an anti-bigotry organization had joined with the bigots,” Mr. Foxman wrote in a Huffington Post essay that year. He denied that accusation, saying that his only goal was to respect the wishes of survivors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Mr. Foxman retired from the ADL in 2015 and later headed the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage.
In 1967, he married Golda Bauman. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children, Ariel Foxman and Michelle Foxman; and grandchildren Cielo, Leila, Gideon, and Amirit.
Late in life, Mr. Foxman confronted — and resisted — the rise of “cancel culture,” in which people perceived to have bias are essentially erased from conversation.
“All my life I was lucky enough to fight prejudice and antisemitism,” he told the Times in 2020. “If you don’t believe you can change people’s hearts and minds, why bother? If you are not going to try and change hearts and minds, why are you in this business at all?”
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