An Eternal Optimist

The death of Abraham Foxman feels like the end of an era. I have lost a friend and I am grieving, grieving more than I expected. 

Abe—anyone who knew Foxman called him Abe—and I could talk shorthand. We knew the same history, we shared the same values. We were shaped by the same events, and we loved some of the very same things. We even spoke the same Hebrew. He was taught at the Yeshiva of Flatbush. I was a student at Yeshiva of Central Queens and Ramaz, schools where the content of Zionism was not yet the land and the State of Israel but the rebirth—then still fragile—of the Hebrew language. Our teachers were old school, either survivors or refugees.

His love of the Jewish people was deep and passionate, the center of his public and personal life, integral to the way he lived, natural, authentic, part of his essence, his very being.

His love of Israel was a given, not an uncritical love but one tested by fire and anguish. The torment of recent years had shaken him to the core. He had known it was coming, but the sorrow of recent days was nothing short of shattering.

And he loved America. He believed in America’s core values, freedom of religion, separation of powers, inalienable rights to life and liberty, the wisdom of the Constitution, the promise of pluralism. His was the love of an immigrant who never took for granted the blessings of freedom for the Jewish people and for all the American people. 

He played a vital role in the expansion of Jewish life and Jewish possibilities, a role that intensified as he rose in the ranks of Jewish leadership. He helped shatter the glass ceilings, dismantle barriers to Jewish participation in American life and expand the freedom of Jews to live as Jews and as Americans. A denizen of both worlds, he was at home in both.

Abe was a mensch to his core. He fought fiercely yet fairly. He could disagree with your views and yet still embrace you, even cherish you. I know of few men of power who expressed their love so freely. As a friend, he was loyal and trustworthy, candid, supportive, yet not uncritical. Even at the height of his power, when he was privy to much inside information, he would not traffic in gossip.

He was candid, truthful. You always knew where he stood and how you stood with him. Reporters admired that he spoke on the record. 

The torment of his loves for America and Israel were also shaken to the core in recent years. He suspected it was coming, but the anguish of the past two and half years was heartbreaking, the angst of the past 16 months disillusioning. He understood some dark currents in America, he said:

Trump is an expression of an American environment. He’s only responding to them. But he didn’t create it. It was there. But he broke all the taboos. And when he broke the taboos about Hispanics and about African Americans—and he did—the system that protected us [Jews] broke down as well.  

First went the taboos. Then went truth. He destroyed truth. The answer to the Big Lie is truth. And if you destroy truth, you lose an element of defending against racism and antisemitism. He called the media “fake media,” the news “fake news,” but in our arsenal, media was an important element to educate, to embarrass, to expose.  

We almost lost Abe from the Jewish people. His nanny saved him from the Nazis but almost took him from the Jews. A devout Catholic, she had him baptized and loved him as her own, protected him and then tried to claim him, refusing to return him to his parents. “I saved him. He is mine!” A battle ensued. Thankfully, his parents prevailed and he came back to his people.

America almost lost Abe to Israel. His father was an ardent revisionist Zionist. His hero was Zev Jabotinsky, not David Ben-Gurion. But he came to America instead because he was told that Mapai, the socialist party of Ben-Gurion, dominated Israel and that his opportunities there would be limited.

In recent years Abe was shaped by the fear that all that he tried to do, all that he believed, all that he stood for, all for which he had fought for, might go for naught. Because he had reached fourscore years of age, he understood that he had more yesterdays than tomorrows and he did not have a lifetime to give to the next fight. He had given all that he had, all that he was, to the struggles of his generation. He could look back on the past with satisfaction, but he understood that challenges would face the next generation. One may charitably say that he was skeptical whether the Jewish people, in the United States or in Israel, have the leadership we need for this moment in history. He was no less skeptical of American political leadership. Sadly, he may well be right.

When Gilbert Kahn and I were creating a book entitled A Shattered World: Jews and Israel After October 7, we knew we must speak with Abe Foxman. In speaking with us, he expressed pride that American Jews had stuck with Israel, but he felt that ties that seemed unbreakable to our generation could not sustain themselves if Israel ceased to have democratic values that embraced pluralism, human rights and human dignity. Or, worse still, if Israelis had disdain for American Jews.

He permitted himself to be far more critical of Israel publicly than he might have been when he headed a major Jewish organization and told a story about Benjamin Netanyahu that bears repeating in his words.

“I said to him, ‘Why did you have to give Smotrich and Ben-Gvir the positions you gave them?’ You could have given them something else. He [Netanyahu] says, ‘I made a mistake. That’s it… And Abe, I’ll fix it. You’ll see.’

“I said to him, ‘Bibi, I have known you for a long time. You’re not a racist. Now you’re a racist. Because now you embrace two racists in your government. You don’t challenge them. You don’t criticize them… He said, ‘Abe, I’ll fix it. The argument is over. I made a mistake.’

“I’m still waiting,” Abe concluded.

And yet, Abe was an optimist about the Jewish future.

What makes you optimistic? he was asked. His answer: 

“A million and a half children were murdered, an entire Jewish civilization, and yet we came back. How do I dare not be an optimist about Jewish people?”

We shall not see the likes of him soon again. We need the likes of him again.