From the Newsletter | Abe Foxman and Howard Lutnick: One’s Confident, the Other’s Concerned
Abe Foxman is worried. The Holocaust survivor and former head of the Anti-Defamation League spoke yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, as part of its ceremony honoring Yom HaShoah. Expressing grave concerns over the “rampant antisemitism on college campuses and in cities worldwide” that followed the October 7 attacks, Foxman also cited “social media algorithms that promote extreme views and online conspiracy theories…just one click away from antisemitism.” And he noted the danger “not just for us Jews but for all of society, for all who care about democracy and individual freedom and dignity.”
“I wonder if the lessons of the Holocaust have been learned,” Foxman said, addressing the audience of survivors and others assembled for the solemn proceedings. His eyes appeared a bit bleary and his forehead etched by his years grappling with such concerns—by bearing witness not only to the Shoah and to its remembrance, but to the forgetting, the ignoring.
To borrow the famous Watergate line, there’s a “What did we know and when did we know it?” aspect to Holocaust remembrance. “They knew,” Foxman averred in his moving remarks yesterday, talking about how people in positions of power around the world, including in the U.S. government, had detailed intelligence about the camps and what was being done to Jews inside them, and yet failed to act to stop it. Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, also spoke of complicity, noting exceptions such as Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s efforts to persuade FDR to help Jewish refugees. In opening the ceremony, USHMM Vice Chair Allan M. Holt remarked that it had been exactly 80 years ago, on April 23, 1945 (two weeks before Germany surrendered), that General Dwight D. Eisenhower led a group of American journalists on a tour of liberated concentration camps. A U.S. congressional delegation would soon follow, as would reports to the public and then the Nuremberg trials. And yet, the horrors of the Holocaust either weren’t fully known or weren’t discussed until many years later. For some the reckoning arrived in 1961, on TV, when the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann, which included testimony from survivors, was taped and broadcast to shocked television viewers (or radio listeners) around the world. This included one nine-year-old latchkey kid in New Jersey whose family history was unlocked by the trial’s airing.
“Silence is a choice, and choices always have consequences,” Foxman said yesterday, remembering the Polish nanny who risked so much to save him from the fate of six million fellow Jews. Stressing that individuals can make a difference, he urged individuals to confront antisemitism today. He also acknowledged efforts by President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump to combat antisemitism. But, he pivoted, “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.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the keynote speaker, directly preceded Foxman at the podium and shared emotional testimony of his visit to Auschwitz in January to commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation. Lutnick connected the 9/11 and October 7 attacks to the hatred that claimed the lives of six million Jews in the Holocaust. He also pledged that U.S. colleges and universities that enable antisemitism will lose the government’s support: “The Trump administration will NOT protect institutions that protect hate.”
“America is great because we believe in freedom, we believe in justice and we believe in truth,” he said, concluding, “I’m here to tell you in very clear and plain language: President Trump will never back down from defending the Jewish people. Never.”
These applause lines got a somewhat tepid response, judging from the recording of the live event—you could hear clapping, but each time the camera panned out to the audience, the majority were sitting still. In contrast, when Foxman iterated all that makes his “antenna quiver,” the applause was audibly and visibly robust, and when he concluded his remarks, thanking the nanny who courageously saved his life, he got a standing ovation.