This afternoon, I will join tens of thousands of American Jews and supporters of Israel who will gather on the National Mall in Washington DC to voice support for the Jewish State, demand the release of the hostages held in Gaza, and express our outrage at the skyrocketing levels of antisemitism in the US and worldwide. The rally is organized by Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, with many others – including The Genesis Prize Foundation – promoting the event and encouraging as many people as possible to participate.
Similar rallies have taken place over the past week in Paris, London and several other European cities. But today’s Washington rally will be different, not because the American Jewish community is the largest and most influential in the Diaspora nor because the US government is Israel’s most important ally in the world.
It will be different because the National Mall is the same spot where the largest march organized by the Jewish community took place 36 years ago (“double chai”) on December 6, 1987, when 250,000 people came to demand that Soviet Jews be allowed to leave.
Human rights activist Natan Sharansky conceived of and helped organize the 1987 march on Washington to free Soviet Jewry. As in 1987, in addition to demonstrating the power and solidarity of the Jewish community, we need to focus on getting specific results.
A brainchild of the former prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, the 1987 Sunday Freedom March was extremely well thought through and well organized. It had very specific goals, a very clear message, and a very targeted audience in President Ronald Reagan, who was scheduled to meet with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev the following morning.
The organizers of the 1987 rally made their demands to President Reagan crystal clear: do not provide the USSR with any trade benefits, do not encourage investment in the Soviet Union by US companies, and do not throw Gorbachev a lifeline to salvage the bankrupt Soviet economy unless he permits any Jewish person who wants to emigrate to do so. Not just refuseniks, but all Jews.
It was a concept called” linkage” and virtually every speaker at the 1987 rally hammered at it. This included Sharansky himself, as well as Yuli Edelstein, Senators Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, NY Mayor Ed Koch and others.
Gorbachev resisted at first, but eventually was forced to concede. As a result, between 1989 and 2006, over 1 million Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union, the majority going to Israel. The emigration transformed and strengthened Israel and created a significant brain drain in the USSR, just as Gorbachev had feared and said as much publicly. Yan Koum, who created WhatsApp and whose family emigrated from the FSU in 1992, is the most visible example, but there are countless other Jews who left the USSR and “drained” the Soviet economy of their brains and creative energies.
In many ways, 1987 was the year when the American Jewish community discovered how strong we can be when we are united behind a common cause, when our determination is unwavering, and when our message is clear, consistent, and targeted.
Today in Washington we will once again show the strength and resolve of our community. We must then focus on specific institutions – public and private -- which allow antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric and actions to flourish.
We should start with our leading universities, many of which have allowed rampant antisemitism and violence against Jewish students on their campuses to go unchecked. Local Jewish communities should organize mass demonstrations at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Cornell, NYU and others. Jewish students don’t feel safe and are crying out for our support, but not a single mass demonstration has been organized by local Jewish leaders on any of these campuses with clear demands to administrations of these universities. Local Chabad and Hillel chapters are doing an excellent job supporting students at these universities, but we need a stronger show of support in order to send a message to the leadership of universities where Jewish students no longer feel safe.
We must demand: Clear, unequivocal commitment to ensuring physical and psychological safety for Jewish students: freedom from harassment, increased security around Jewish institutions on campus, and strong disciplinary action against those who spew hate, including zero tolerance for antisemitic professors, who should be fired immediately, regardless of potential contractual disputes and severance. And no hiring of faculty with a history of antisemitic statements and positions as was recently the case with the New York University professor Eve Tuck who will head the new Indigenous Studies Center at the university.
The other category of institutions which are allowing, and in fact amplifying, antisemitism are media companies. Ironically, many of them have Jewish CEOs, Jewish majority shareholders, and/or Jewish founders. Key among them are META, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and The New York Times.
Shouldn’t the Jewish communities in the Bay Area – among the most affluent and influential in America -- organize a rally in front of the META headquarters in Menlo Park and remind Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook’s role in allowing Russian disinformation to undermine the integrity the 2016 election and caution him that the stakes for the Jewish people and the State of Israel are now just as high, if not higher?
The Bay Area Jewish community must show up in force at Meta’s HQ at One Hacker Way and demand that Meta put safety ahead of profits, take down sites and rhetoric that threatens, incites violence, and spreads disinformation aimed at the Jewish people and Israel. And of course, we all should demand Congressional action to ensure that social media platforms do not further endanger vulnerable populations and that algorithms be altered so hateful messages against the Jewish community and Israel are not further served to those who engage with antisemitic hate.
While the Bay Area Jewish community is very strong, its power and influence pales in comparison to that of New York, a city that has become the hotbed of antisemitism. From Columbia, NYU, and The New York Times to the violence against Jews on the streets of Manhattan, the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel is no longer safe for Jews.
One of the most ironic headlines I have seen in my life appeared in The NY Times on November 10: “Antisemitic Hate Crimes Soar in New York City.” This, from a newspaper that consistently relies on Hamas to be its main source of information in the Gaza, with the most glaring example being its reporting about Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in which it initially reported that Israel struck the hospital and killed 500 Palestinians. It was later confirmed by Israeli and western intelligence services that the strike was the result of a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket which landed in the hospital’s parking lot and the number of casualties was 90% less. While later printing a half-hearted correction, the editors of the newspaper never issued a clear apology for the headline and the article that had quickly gone viral. The damage had already done; hundreds of thousands around the world now believe Israel is striking civilian targets such as hospitals.
Why haven’t Jews living in NYC protested in front of The New York Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue to publicly call attention to its biased and often antisemitic coverage? We must demand that The NY Times apologize (not explain away) for so quickly running with the al-Ahli story and commit to fact checking every bit of information coming from Hamas or Hamas-controlled institutions.
The list of institutions that tolerate and amplify antisemitism and which should be targets of our protests and rallies is long. And forcing these institutions to change and respond to the concerns of the American Jewish community will be difficult, expensive and time consuming. But American Jews are over seven million strong, and we should look to our Israeli brothers and sisters who filled the streets of major Israeli cities to protest proposed Israeli judicial reforms. They did it for 37 consecutive weeks – from January to early October – and would have continued had it not been for the October 7th massacre.
American Jews can – and should - do the same.
Stan Polovets is the founder of the Genesis Prize Foundation which annually awards the $1 million prize for Jewish achievement, dubbed “The Jewish Nobel Prize” by TIME Magazine.