The first time we met Abraham Foxman was in the early 1990s at a small dinner party at the home of the former mayor, Ed Koch. There were eight persons at the table, and the stories were told of Foxman’s infancy, during which he was placed by his parents for safe-keeping by his Catholic nanny. After the war, which Abe’s parents survived, the nanny was reluctant to return the child. It took lawsuits and two kidnappings before Abe’s parents won.In the car going home, Mrs. Editor turned to us and said she understood why the nanny and other caregivers refused to give up Foxman voluntarily. He was, she said, the most lovable person she’d ever met. We’ve no doubt that, with the news of Foxman’s death Sunday, the thousands who knew him are savoring a similar sentiment. Foxman was a loving leader. Plus, he and his wife, Golda, whom he met at a Zionist camp, raised two children.Foxman, born in Belarus in 1940, famously grew up to lead one of America’s greatest civil rights organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, between 1987 and 2015. He joined the ADL the day after he passed the law exam and rose in the ranks. As national director, he transformed the ADL into a force against bigotry. He cultivated relationships with global leaders and advised on hostility to Jews and Israel. He was nicknamed the “Jewish Pope.” Though Foxman lived through periods where antisemitism declined, he foresaw that the world’s oldest hatred was not a relic. He warned that hatred of Israel was emerging as a new form of antisemitism. His warnings were confirmed with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and response that followed. Though by then he had retired as head of the ADL, Foxman continued to advocate on behalf of the Jewish people and their state. Recently Foxman focused on the left’s rising hostility. He decried Democrats for demonizing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as “un-American and immoral.” He criticized Governor Gavin Newsom for likening Israel to an “apartheid state,” urging him to “repair your views and stand by friends, allies, and interests you held dear.” He called Vice President Harris’s probe of Governor Josh Shapiro’s ties to Israel “very disturbing.” Foxman raised an alarm over the conspiracy theories, embraced by both the left and the right, surrounding Iran’s war against America and Israel. He compared the canard that Israel and the Jewish community dragged America into striking Iran to the charges leveled against Jews when America entered World War II. “This is a very dangerous moment for the American Jewish community,” he wrote in March.After October 7, Foxman told the Times of Israel that he wished “the world wouldn’t test us so often.” Yet he liked to invoke Prime Minister Golda Meir’s line that “Jews don’t have the luxury to be pessimists.” He believed that as a Holocaust survivor he had “no right” to be a pessimist. Foxman reckoned that “the sense of hope, determination, continuum” is “part of the secret of our survival.” We’ll miss his advice and the open spirit of his leadership.
