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Briefs
VETERAN OF NATIONAL JEWISH GROUPS IS NEXT WHITE HOUSE JEWISH LIAISON
Shelley Greenspan, a former staffer and board member for a number of national Jewish groups, is replacing Chanan Weissman as the White House liaison to the Jewish community.
Greenspan, 32, whose appointment was first reported by The Forward, worked for a period in the mid-2010s in the legislative shop of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel powerhouse lobby, and has been a board member of the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Women International.
A rapid response member of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, she then went to work for Amazon on its policy team. She joined the State Department in 2020 and recently moved from there to the Biden National Security Council as a policy advisor for partnerships and global engagement. In February, she helped launch Jewish Democratic Women for Action, which seeks to expand Jewish involvement ahead of the November midterm elections.
The White House liaison leads interactions with national Jewish groups. Weissman is ending his second stint in the job, after closing out the Obama administration as its final Jewish liaison and then joining the Biden administration as its first. During his tenure, Weissman launched a number of online forums including frequent pre-Shabbat briefings for the community. (JTA)
UN INVESTIGATOR APOLOGIZES FOR ‘JEWISH LOBBY’ REMARK AND OTHER COMMENTS
United Nations investigator has apologized for recently using the phrase “Jewish lobby” and suggesting that Israel could lose its U.N. membership, comments that drew widespread condemnation, including from U.S. officials.
Miloon Kothari sent an apology letter to Federico Villegas, head of the U.N. Human Rights Council, for statements he made during a podcast interview last month with the anti-Zionist Mondoweiss site.
Kothari is a member of the Human Rights Council’s commission to investigate human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinain Territories that was formed following Israel-Gaza violence in the spring of 2021.
In the interview, he said, “We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by—whether it is the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs, a lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us, but the important thing is our mandate is based on international human rights and humanitarian standards and that we are all seeking the truth.”
He added that “the Israeli government does not respect its own obligations as a U.N. member state. They, in fact, consistently, either directly or through the United States, try to undermine U.N. mechanisms.”
At the time, the head of the commission, Navi Pillay, defended Kothari’s comments as being taken out of context. Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s special envoy on antisemitism, and Michèle Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, both condemned Kothari’s rhetoric.
“We are outraged by recent antisemitic, anti-Israel comments made by a member of the Israel COI,” Taylor tweeted.
In his letter sent Thursday, August 4, Kothari wrote that “It was completely wrong for me to describe the social media as ‘being controlled largely by the Jewish lobby.’ This choice of words was incorrect, inappropriate, and insensitive.”
Israel, which has refused to participate in the U.N. commission’s inquiry, was unsatisfied with Kothari’s apology. A deputy director general at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the statement “pitiful” and “unconvincing.” (JTA)
CANADA SAYS JEWS WERE MOSTTARGETED RELIGIOUS MINORITY FOR HATE CRIMES LAST YEAR
Canada’s 380,000 Jews were the most targeted religious minority for hate crimes reported to police in 2021, the country’s official numbers keeper reported.
Statistics Canada said that the Jewish community, comprising about 1% of the population, were victims of 14% of reported hate crimes. Jews saw a 47% rise in reported hate crimes compared to 2020, according to the bureau.
“We are deeply concerned that incidents of hate crimes rose yet again in Canada in 2021,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, head of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “This disturbing trend clearly proves the need for more proactive measures to stop the rising hate targeting diverse Canadians based on their identity.”
Only Black Canadians, who make up about 3.5% of the country’s population, reported more hate crimes. Overall, 1.3 Canadian Jews in every 1,000 reported being victims of hate crime in 2021.
“Statistically, Canadian Jews were more than 10 times more likely than any other Canadian religious minority to report being the target of hate crime,” Fogel said. “This is alarming.”
Canada’s official tally showed the same trend as tallies of antisemitic incidents in other countries last year. The Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom all reported increased incidents of antisemitism, while the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit in the United States, said it recorded more antisemitic incidents last year than at any time since it began tracking incidents in 1979.
Statistics Canada cautioned in its crime report that “fluctuations in the number of reported incidents may be attributable to a true change in the volume of hate crimes, but they might also reflect changes in reporting by the public because of increased community outreach by police or heightened sensitivity after high-profile events.” (JTA)
AMY SPITALNICK WILL GO FROM FIGHTING CHARLOTTESVILLE NEONAZIS TO LEADING BEND THE ARC
She led a group that won a $25 million judgment against the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march. Now Amy Spitalnick is taking up a broader battle.
Spitalnick, who made a name for herself as the executive director of the nonprofit Integrity First For America, is taking a new job as the head of left-leaning Jewish community organizing group Bend The Arc: Jewish Action. In her new role, she says, she will transition from fighting Nazis in court to organizing progressive Jews against the normalization of white supremacy.
“The core goals are exactly aligned,” she told JTA.
Spitalnick, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, will assume her new role as Bend The Arc’s CEO in November. Her predecessor, Stosh Cotler, left the organization earlier this year after a decade.
Integrity First For America, which built its operations entirely around the Charlottesville lawsuit, announced it will wind down operations by the end of the year.
The template for its successful suit, which drew on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to prosecute the Charlottesville march’s organizers for planning to incite racist violence, is being adapted for various other lawsuits, including several connected to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. But “the crux of our work,” Spitalnick said, ended with the lawsuit’s resolution, and she believes the group achieved its goals.
Spitalnick said she sees herself as continuing the same fight against white supremacy and “authoritarianism,” but focusing on broader targets, including the mainstreaming of the antisemitic Great Replacement theory, the rise of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legislation and voter suppression efforts.
“We’re actually grappling with a far broader, deeper moment of increasingly normalized bigotry and extremism in this country,” Spitalnick said. When white supremacists marched in 2017, “it was baffling to some people.” But now, she said, there’s a greater realization that “we’re seeing this sort of extremism become acceptable in certain spaces.”
“It’s crucial that we not just simply hold extremists to account,” she added, “but also take on the more systemic white supremacy, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and other forms of hate that underpin the broader moment we’re living in.” (JTA)
ANTISEMITISM
Deborah Lipstadt, back from Saudi Arabia, says progress underway on combating antisemitism in Gulf states
Andrew Lapin
(JTA)—When Deborah Lipstadt recently met with a Saudi diplomat, she recalled, “He stood up and he said to me, ‘I come from a city where there were Jews.’”
That interaction in Saudi Arabia, a country that has been widely criticized for its human rights abuses, was a highlight of Lipstadt’s recent Middle East trip, her first tour as the U.S. State Department’s special envoy for antisemitism, which she recounted in a virtual briefing Monday, August 1. She characterized the interaction as cordial—but it also spoke to the costs of the sentiments that she has been charged with monitoring.
In the briefing, Lipstadt acknowledged that the kingdom was not “perfect according to our human rights standards,” but said that she believed her presence in “a place which had once been the source of so much Jew hatred, so much extremism,” would prove to be a net positive. In her meeting with Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Waleed Al-Khuraiji, Lipstadt said, they discussed possibly mounting a future conference about “Judeo-Arabic” issues to explore the historic presence of Jews in the kingdom.
“If I can lessen that degree of animus [toward Jews], if I can make it so that that degree is not spread amongst others, I think I would have to,” she said. “I would be derelict not to do so.”
She cautioned that it would be wrong to conclude that the kingdom has fully reformed—that would be “drinking the Kool Aid,” she said. “The king of Saudi Arabia has sent imams abroad to various mosques, including in this country, who have preached antisemitism.”
But she saw some positive signs in the region, including in the fact that antisemitic material has recently been removed from Saudi textbooks.
Saudi Arabia, which backs the countries currently entered into the Abraham Accords, has lately hinted at a desire to normalize relations with Israel as part of a bulwark against Iran. President Joe Biden also recently visited the kingdom on his own Middle East trip, traveling there on a historic direct flight from Israel.
Though the Abraham Accords are seen as potentially having eliminated leverage for future progress in negotiations with Palestinians, Lipstadt said she hoped that her work in the region could help those talks by removing antisemitism from the equation in countries such as the United Arab Emirates.
“I hope that our ability to maybe diffuse the antisemitism piece and maybe infuse a different attitude, a conception of Jews and Jews within the Gulf region, will help this issue,” she said.
Lipstadt also shared that she offered a talk about the Torah portion at a Shabbat service in Dubai as part of a promotion of the Abraham Accords; met with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid on his first full day in office; and subsequently traveled to Argentina for the anniversary of the deadly AMIA Jewish center bombing in Buenos Aires.
In Argentina, one big policy development emerged: 28 years after the deadliest attack on a Jewish institution since the Holocaust, the president committed to appointing a special envoy for antisemitism, the country’s own version of Lipstadt’s role.
Deborah Lipstadt.
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