In a hearing before the Knesset’s Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Committee on Tuesday, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt acknowledged that the Jewish community had fallen short in its efforts to combat antisemitism, resulting in what he described as an “inferno” against the Jewish community in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks and subsequent war in Gaza.

In order to tackle the challenges, Greenblatt argued, the Jewish community must “adopt new strategies to experiment with creative tactics to study the results and scale what works.”

Following his testimony in Jerusalem, Greenblatt sat with Jewish Insider for a wide-ranging interview about combating antisemitism, Meta’s move toward a “Community Notes” feature and the incoming Trump administration.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Jewish Insider: How did this Knesset hearing come together?

Jonathan Greenblatt: So it was the Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Committee, and they wanted to talk about global antisemitism. I suspect that the incidents in Amsterdam last November likely piqued their attention. I talked about the global nature of the problem. We talked about what I see as the eighth front in this war. We talked about the need to do things differently. And then finally, the need for collaboration between the State of Israel, the Diaspora communities, the NGO sector, all of it.

JI: So let’s talk about the need to do things differently. Because that was the headline yesterday in our sister publication eJewishPhilanthropy, that was the thing that really stuck out to us. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. What is being re-evaluated?

JG: It’s funny you say that. So there were two interesting stories yesterday. In a way, they’re related. So one was the coverage of my comments on the need to do things differently. Then I don’t know if you saw the story in JTA, and I think it was totally coincidental, there’s a story about this guy, Matt Williams, who works for ADL, and he’s running our Center on Antisemitism Research. Interestingly, we created this back in 2022 so it’s not new, but my thinking then was we need to do a much better job of measuring the effectiveness of our programs, we need to do a much better job of understanding the efficacy of different kinds of interventions. ADL has always been very data-driven, grounding the work in evidence. If you look at our policy recommendations, our advocacy activities, our engagement with law enforcement, our monitoring of extremism — all of that, in many ways, is predicated on this systematic approach to trying to understand the problem as in, what are the attitudes like, what are the incidents like? We’ve been doing the attitudinal research since the 1960s and we have better longitudinal data on attitudes than any other organization, at least vis-à-vis the U.S. market. We’ve been doing the systematic track of incidents since the 1970s, before there were hate crimes laws. So this is all to say we aspire to have, and I believe we do, a very data-driven approach, and yet, whereas we’re thinking about it on the front end, I don’t think we’re doing a sufficiently effective approach on the back end. So you have law enforcement training resulting in more reporting of hate crimes, so you have attitudinal analyses and education programs to engage the younger generation. Is it resulting in a reduction in antisemitic attitudes over time and so on? So the idea behind this evidence in research was, how do we actually drill down multiple levels to get more visibility into causality, and again, to assess performance. 

This was the thesis, and then Oct. 7 happened, and antisemitism had already been intensifying and had already been expanding. I think if you’re not stepping back and rethinking, considering the facts, just the facts — how so many allies fled, or at least didn’t stand by us in the way you would have thought — just the fact that in the younger demographic there’s a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes than in the older segments of the population. If you start to think about the fact that the Jewish community has been very supportive of diversity initiatives, and yet these initiatives, which are supposed to promote inclusion, actually result in the exclusion of Jews. So all of this, and the moment we’re in, leads me to say we have to step back and rethink and reconsider and have the humility to acknowledge it all wasn’t working the way that we hoped. Now the funny thing is that we put the CAR in place more than two years ago, three years ago. So we’re already down that path. I can’t speak to other organizations in the sector. I can’t speak to any other entities. But that’s what I was talking about. And you know, by the same token, I think the State of Israel has done this very effectively. I think the State of Israel historically has done the equivalent of after-action reports, learned from the 2006 Lebanon engagement, learned from Guardian of the Walls in 2021 and you saw that in the way that they approached this conflict. And that’s what I talked about in my remarks. We need to do the same.

JI: So one thing that you said yesterday was that we can’t just be dumping money into initiatives. But you say that at the same time that two weeks ago, the foreign ministry here, they now have an influx of money, and they convened dozens of influencers to help them curate their strategy.

JG: There are a few things just to kind of break down what you’re saying. Number one, it certainly requires resources to respond to the challenge. Let’s just acknowledge that, right? So the fact that they’re doing that, I think, is encouraging. Secondly, I think, in a prior time, the government of Israel — by the way, like most governments — would have focused entirely on traditional media. Yes, we need that. And we also need to acknowledge that influencers are the new sort of opinion-makers. Is there a previous foreign minister who sat down with influencers before? I find it hard to imagine. I do think when you tell me that they’re engaging influencers, that’s certainly a step in the right direction, but I think there’s no silver bullet on this. A single influencer, or even a panel of them, isn’t going to solve the problem. We need to think in a holistic manner, and we need to apply the same kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that the State of Israel has done for different organs of the State of Israel, like the IDF, or like the Shabak, or like the Mossad, or like Startup Nation Central, to tackle this problem, There’s no magic formula, right? There’s no single intervention. It requires multiple models, engaging with influencers, people who are working bottom-up, people who don’t have any formal affiliation. I think that’s, if nothing else, a step in the right direction. 

Could you imagine [Secretary of State] Tony Blinken sitting down with a group of influencers to talk about State Department strategy? 

JI: No, but I also don’t know that that’s necessarily a good idea. Influencers are passionate about Israel, about Jewish continuity, but they’re also passionate about making money and driving views, and their audiences are not outside of the Jewish community.

JG: Well, I don’t know. So a few things. Number one, I don’t know the data, so I don’t know that that’s true. But number two, so is The New York Times about making money. So is Al Jazeera about making money. So is CNN about making money. And so that they have an interest in making money, that isn’t disqualifying, from my point of view. But again, look, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit or the PMO’s press secretary, historically speaks to CNN and The New York Times, the traditional media. They do so because it matters. But young people today get their news from TikTok, not from the Times. And so trying to break into that new media environment, I think it’s important. … I’m glad they’re talking to them. But once again, there’s no silver bullet. You gotta break out of the Jewish bubble. 

JI: I think that because we’re such an insular community, we don’t know how to do that. We know how to talk to other Jews. We don’t know how to talk beyond the Jewish community.

JG: All institutions need to step back and ask hard questions about their programs, about their approaches. And this is something I learned in Silicon Valley: There’s nothing wrong with failing as long as you fail forward. And by that I mean as long as you learn from the failure and then assimilate those insights into your approach. That’s what we’re trying to do at ADL, and I think our peer organizations and anyone who cares about this fight would benefit from that type of philosophy.

JI: Thinking about the things that we do in the states that maybe don’t always have the outcomes that we want, when it comes to antisemitism education, I think about two things. One is the Never Again Education Act. And one is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the adoption of its working definition of antisemitism. Dara Horn has a lot of thoughts on Holocaust education and how, even though it’s mandated in many states, it hasn’t made a difference. And then with IHRA, what was intended to be something that would do a lot of good has instead, almost become weaponized, where if you adopt IHRA, you’re signaling something very specific, right? You’re signaling that you’re with the majority of the Jewish community. But now you see all of these municipalities and towns and cities around the country voting on this, and you’re seeing the issue in Congress right now where they can’t pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act because of the IHRA definition. 

JG: We’ll take them one at a time. So on Holocaust education, I’ve seen some ADL data that suggests that in pre and post surveys, students who take Holocaust education demonstrate higher degrees of empathy versus the control group. So I think there is merit to it in terms of understanding the uniqueness of the Holocaust, its singular impact, and what it tells us about demonizing a particular segment of people, how dangerous that could be. Holocaust education on its own, again, is an insufficient condition. … I do think Jewish pride is one of the best ways. And Jewish security, in a personal sense, like confidence about who you are, your tradition and your faith. Holocaust education on its own should not be the totality of the modern Jewish experience for all the reasons that Dara Horn has written and explained. However, I think it is important to make sure that we understand the singular nature of that crime against humanity. Now, unfortunately, Jewish people, we’ve always, literally, had our Amalek and our enemies. And the reality is that there’s a whole cottage industry of people who want to deny the Holocaust and want to distort the Holocaust, or who want to weaponize the Holocaust as an instrument against the State of Israel, as an instrument against Zionism. And so it’s hard, because we’re not doing that in a vacuum. There aren’t enemies of history or science or mathematics, but there is a whole cottage industry of people pushing back against the facts of the Holocaust. So I think that’s part of the issue here. It’s hard, but I do think it matters, and it’s important. 

Look, the Jewish people are the only people who are not permitted to define what offends us. The Jewish people are the only segment of the population, the only minority, who are not allowed to describe what they know to be true. The IHRA definition is not a political one. It was put together by scholars and pretty vanilla people who are simply trying to codify a very complicated topic. But again, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There’s a whole cottage industry of people pushing back against IHRA. It comes from the same anti-Zionist Gestalt that tries to deny or to distort Zionism, which works assiduously and relentlessly to try to undermine the fundamental legitimacy of the State of Israel. I think it’s unfortunate that our political conversation has been infected with this virus, and I think it’s unfortunate that we don’t have stronger leaders who see this, who don’t recognize just how cynical this is, and push back on it. I’m using the term leaders broadly. We have Jewish leaders who don’t, in my opinion, realize what’s happening. We have elected leaders who fall prey to it. We have other communal leaders, and it’s deeply disappointing to me.

JI: Why, within the Jewish community, do you think that happens?

JG: Someone who’s more erudite on group psychology maybe could think that through. … I think we know that participation in organized religion is down for every religious group. It’s not unique to the Jews, and I do think in many ways with respect to our communal sector, Jews innovated in ways that are the envy of other minority communities. I know that because I speak to the minority communities and everything from our federation system to organizations like ADL, other communities don’t have sort of similar structures. We spoke at the top of this conversation about the way that ADL, for generations, has, in a systematic way, measured attitudes and tracked incidents. There isn’t really an equivalent. There just isn’t. Or think about the breadth and vision of the federation system, from mortgages to vocational services to family services to homes for the elderly. It’s extraordinary. I think it’s fair to say that it seems like the pace of change has continued to accelerate, and we need our communal leaders, our communal institutions, and the leaders responsible for them, to adapt now.

You see a fair amount of entrepreneurship in our field. Ten years ago, Stop Antisemitism didn’t exist. Jewish on Campus didn’t exist. Project Shema didn’t exist. JLens didn’t exist. OneTable didn’t exist. So those are five examples just off the top of my head of really interesting, dynamic entities, which are, in different ways, trying to deal with the modern Jewish experience, whether it’s Stop Antisemitism, which is a product of social; Jewish on Campus, a product of Instagram; JLens, which is focused on the investing space; OneTable, which is focused on offline, communal local engagement; Project Shema, these are fascinating. So I think there is innovation. I do think it’s a fair question to ask, and I’m not the one to answer it, but what are we doing in response to the decline in organized religion? 

JI: I’m glad you bring up the smaller organizations like JLens, Jewish on Campus, because those organizations are exactly the kind of thing you were talking about yesterday during the hearing. There are people who are thinking strategically and innovating, and yet they’re under-resourced.

JG: So organizations like mine [which acquired JLens] have a very large platform, have incredible reach, have a lot of momentum. How can we put that scale and that reach to work in service of smaller entities like JLens? They have a very innovative, impactful approach. So that’s why we acquired JLens, I think what they’re doing around shareholder activism is really, really compelling. We couldn’t do it. I really do think about ADL, in many ways, as a platform and trying to adopt a platform-centric approach, which gets to [the question of] how do we use our capabilities in service of the issues right now and allows, let’s say, to your point, like under-resourced or smaller challengers, to use what we’ve got. So I think about that, there’s more of that to be done.

JI: Let’s talk about Meta, because I know we don’t have a ton of time. What do you make of yesterday’s announcement?

JG: Look, I think Community Notes are an interesting model. I think they have promise in terms of, they sort of inverted ‘trusted flagging’ — where these companies, for a long time, have had relationships with organizations with expertise like ADL, and we can flag questionable posts or problematic content for them. So what’s happened first at X and now at Facebook/Meta is they’ve sort of inverted the process, and rather than trusted flaggers, they’re saying now it’s going to be Community Notes. You’ll have the public visibility into what’s being called out, rather than it being done privately, and it happens in a transparent way, or participatory way, where people can do it. That’s how I see Community Notes. Now, I think there’s questions about how the algorithms will work. Is it just going to be a function of popularity? Or is certain content going to be more likely to stimulate Community Notes? So there, I just want to say, right up front, Community Notes is building on a legacy approach. There’s questions about how it’s going to be implemented that I don’t think are necessarily understood. So I want to be clear — it may have great promise, and I’m excited to see how it plays out. On the other hand, these companies are some of the most technically capable, the most highly innovative, and certainly the most profitable businesses in industry today, not just in tech, but across the board. The reality is that the issue of content moderation has never been invested in user-targeting or ad-serving, or video-streaming or these other areas where they’ve chosen to apply resources. So much of their talent and so much of their tech has gone toward other things and not toward this. So this function, I think, has been vastly under-resourced for a long time, and it’s not gotten the level of innovation applied to it as these other functions. I don’t think Community Notes is a panacea. I don’t think Community Notes is going to solve the problem. And so while I might be optimistic to see what it does, we’ve got to acknowledge that these social media platforms have tremendous influence on the public conversation, and they shape opinion with an immediacy that we never saw in traditional media, and yet they lack so many of the guardrails and so many of the systems we talked a few minutes ago about, whether those guardrails and systems were effective in traditional media, but these businesses, but without any of that. And so I think that’s very worrying. We consider, again, their reach and their influence.

JI: Regardless of the community notes structure that they’re going to put in place, you still have a direct line.

JG: We still will. We will still stay at it. The reality is that Community Notes is here. It builds on a model of user-flagging. There’s also been user flagging so you see something and you can report things. What this is doing is sort of flipping it, instead of you reporting something, and then you getting an email, thanking you for reporting, now it’s public where now you’re publicly saying this is wrong. So here come the questions: How will the algorithm work? What’s the operating model? I think it may have promise, we need to learn more. I think it’s an insufficient condition, and ADL will continue to work with the platforms as much as we can to try to help them improve, and sometimes, when we need to, we’ll do it in public ways, because that’s our approach. 

I think the info sphere is a front in this war. And so there may be seven fronts to the terrestrial war, you know, as the Israeli government has talked about. But there are multiple fronts to this information war. In the information sphere, Wikipedia is a front. Video games are a front. Social media is a front. These messaging services are a front, and we need to understand that as well. So that’s why we monitor video games. That’s why we are being very robust and taking on Wikipedia. That’s why we are so actively engaging with the social media platforms, and we’ll continue to do that. 

I do think Wikipedia is a really good example of where there are subcultures behind these platforms that are not well understood. At the end of the day, like naming and shaming editors, I guess that’s one way to do it. But there’s something important here, like the way Wikipedia works, your credibility as a Wikipedia editor and to be part of that subculture, it’s not a function of your scholarship, it’s not a function of your academic research. It’s not a function of your domain expertise. It’s a function of how many articles you added. You don’t have to self identify. Wikipedia is really important, because if you think about again an AGI environment, it’s gonna be powered by LLMs that are extracting data in a kind of open-source way. Wikipedia will be really foundational to that. So that’s why ADL is so focused on it. There are issues with the editors, don’t get me wrong, but we’re focused on how we get the content.

JI: Totally different from everything we just talked about. We are a week and a half away from the inauguration. What are ADLs priorities in this next administration? 

JG: Well, I think number one, we don’t know yet, right? So our priority was, is and will be antisemitism, right? Our core purpose is protecting the Jewish people. We have a mission to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all. That’s in service of our core purpose, to protect the Jewish people. That’s why this organization was created. We’re living in this moment where antisemitism has surged in ways we’ve never seen before. Antisemitic intent and antisemitic attitudes are increasing in ways we haven’t seen in memory. So we’re focused on antisemitism. I am optimistic that we’ll be able to work with the new administration. Work with again, keep in mind, we don’t have anyone even confirmed yet, but we’ll work with the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys where we see violative behavior that we think deserves attention, that we’ll be able to work with Department of Education in not just the university level, but the primary-school level, because we’re seeing all kinds of issues with curricular interference, and the politicization of classrooms, again, at a lower level. So we want to work with the Department of Education on those things.

Here’s what’s encouraging. It’s encouraging that President Trump has been very explicit on things like returning the hostages, and it’s clear that that’s going to be a priority. I wear my dog tag every day. That’s a priority for us. So I’m optimistic about that.