Abe Foxman, the former Anti-Defamation League national director, offered pointed criticism of the Trump administration in a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at the Capitol on Wednesday.

“As a [Holocaust] survivor, my antenna quivers when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach. As a survivor who came to this country as an immigrant, I’m troubled when I hear immigrants and immigration being demonized,” Foxman said, to sustained applause from the audience.  

Foxman, who led the ADL for nearly three decades, made the comments while delivering an address at the 2025 Days of Remembrance, which was organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. 

Foxman also praised the Biden administration and the second Trump administration for each committing to addressing antisemitism. “We live in very chaotic times, where our values, our history, our democracy are being tested. As a survivor, I’m horrified at the explosion of antisemitism — global and in the U.S. I’m appreciative of President Biden’s historic initiative on antisemitism and thankful to President Trump’s strong condemnation of antisemitism and his promise to bring back consequences to antisemitic behavior,” Foxman said.

“We look around us and what do we see? Rampant antisemitism on college campuses and in cities worldwide in the aftermath of that horrific terror attack on our cherished Jewish state, Israel. We see social media algorithms that promote extreme views, conspiracy theories,” Foxman continued, adding that “online conspiracy theories are just one click away from antisemitism.”

“We also see forms of antisemitism that seemed unthinkable: Holocaust denial, distortion, civilization, exploitation and even glorification. We look around and see here in America antisemitism on both the far left and far right. The 20th-century history of Nazism and communism should be an alarm bell as to just how dangerous this is, and not just for us Jews, but for all of society, for all who care about democracy, individual freedom and dignity,” he said.

Foxman also noted that the scourge in domestic antisemitism was reminiscent of how Jew hatred worsened for years prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. “Antisemitism [is] not so different from the conspiracy theories that permeated Europe for centuries, long before Hitler was born and helped make the killings of two-thirds of our people possible,” he said.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also spoke at Wednesday’s reception, where he described the Holocaust as a “failure of humanity” and argued that the evil that perpetrated it was akin to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. 

“The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. But as we all know, no matter how hard we try, that kind of hatred continues to exist, just in many, many other forms. It shows up in different ways, and it shows up at different times,” Lutnick said. 

The Oct. 7 attack, Lutnick argued, was “carried out with the same genocidal hatred that fueled Auschwitz, and it’s that same disregard for human life that fueled the Sept. 11 attacks. It’s just the same hate, it just comes at a different time with a different name.”

Becoming emotional, Lutnick vowed “in very, very clear and plain language” that Trump “will never back down from defending the Jewish people, never.”

Top Talker – Report: Iran and Israel met for secret talks – “Iranian and Israeli diplomats, as well as those from the U.S. and Arab countries, participated in a secret meeting last month to discuss the possibility of an international conference on banning nuclear weapons in the Middle East, according to The Jerusalem Post. Diplomats told the Israeli newspaper Tuesday the meeting occurred Oct. 21-22 in a hotel in Glion, Switzerland. The envoys expressed their positions, but the Israeli representatives had no direct communication with the Iranians and Arabs, the report says. An Arab diplomat told Reuters, however, “that they were there, the Israelis and Iran, is the main thing.”

–More than a dozen delegations attended the meeting along with Jaakko Laajava, Finland’s undersecretary of state, who is responsible for organizing the conference, a diplomat said in the reports. The source also described the meeting as “quite constructive,” and suggested another meeting would take place in November. “This was a completely procedural meeting,” a foreign ministry official in Jerusalem told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. President Obama tasked Secretary of State John Kerry with navigating peace talks with the Iranians on their nuclear program. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in September he would not produce nuclear weapons and told Obama he’s open to negotiating the limits of his country’s program with the international community. During his international trip Tuesday, Kerry said in Poland the U.S. does not yet have a deal with Iran. The G-5 — the U.S., France, Britain, Russia and China, plus Germany — are slated to hold a new round of negotiations in Geneva on Thursday and Friday.” [The Hill] (more…)