Whenever Abe Foxman came to Israel, we met at the Inbal Hotel. Once a year, sometimes more.
The lounge on the ninth floor has a view of the Old City walls. He would order something small, lean forward, and talk, and I would listen longer than I usually do.
We were supposed to meet there again on October 27, 2025. Three weeks earlier, his longtime assistant, Phyllis, had confirmed the time with “Shana Tova” written at the bottom of her email.
On October 15, she wrote again: Abe had to postpone for health reasons and hoped to reschedule. I wrote back: “No problem. Thank you.”
The reschedule never came.
Abe Foxman died Sunday at age 86. He will be buried on Tuesday in New York.
He was born in 1940 in Baranovichi (now Belarus). He survived the Holocaust as a small child after his parents handed him to his Polish Catholic nanny, who baptized him and raised him as Henryk Stanisław Kurpi until the war ended.
He came to the United States in 1950 and graduated from the Yeshiva of Flatbush, the City College of New York, and NYU School of Law. He joined the Anti-Defamation League in 1965 and ran it as national director from 1987 to 2015.
He wrote four books on antisemitism, was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor by France, and sat on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council under four presidents.
He could have been my grandfather. Both of mine were born in America, and I did not get to know either of them. One died shortly before I was born, the other on my first birthday. I have their pictures.
The last true spokesman for American Jewry
Abe, who arrived in America at age 10 in 1950, looked something like them, or what I imagine they would have looked like in their 80s. He stood for what that generation of American Jews had been able to do: leave the immigrant experience behind, build a place in America, and climb into the country’s institutions far enough to actually use the access.
He had been received by three popes. He sat in the White House under presidents of both parties. He spoke for American Jewry at a time when the position of “spokesman for American Jewry” still existed and still meant something.
That position is leaving with him, and not only because Abe is dead.
It is leaving because the conditions that produced him are gone.
He came up at a moment when American Jews were organized into stable institutions with stable funders, when civic pluralism was the consensus position of every serious Jewish leader, when Israel was a small embattled democracy that the Diaspora rallied around without much reservation, and when the difference between fighting antisemitism and fighting for liberal values was assumed rather than argued.
None of those conditions still holds. Abe outlived all of them and kept doing the same job in a landscape that no longer resembled the one he was trained for. That is part of why losing him is harder than losing a single individual.
I came to the Inbal lounge as a journalist. I left most of those meetings with notes on how a Jewish leader carries himself in a mostly impossible job.
He never raised his voice. He said on the record what others in his position said only off the record. He used the word “we” carefully and the word “I” generously, which is the opposite of how most Jewish leaders I have covered actually speak.
He read everything. He returned phone calls. He took young reporters seriously.
There is no graduate program for the kind of leadership he practiced, and watching him was a substitute for one.
I first interviewed him in 2014, during the fight over Rabbi Avi Weiss and the Chief Rabbinate. He was 73 then and still running the ADL.
“If the State of Israel defines who is an Orthodox rabbi, it’s likely they wouldn’t recognize me and my children as Jews,” he told me on the phone.
How, he asked, was he supposed to feel part of one people when the Chief Rabbinate decided who is a good rabbi and who isn’t?
Eight years later, on the eve of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most ideologically extreme coalition, I called him again.
The argument was the same: “If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it,” he told me [in November 2022], warning that under the Smotrich-Maoz vision of Judaism, “I won’t qualify as being a Jew.”
He had been saying a version of that line for at least a decade. He refused to soften it.
This is the part of Abe’s record that I think matters most. It is the part that tells us something about what Jewish leadership requires when an Israeli government goes somewhere its Diaspora cannot follow.
He did not threaten Israel. He did not boycott Israel. He did not enlist in the campaigns that have made a career out of denouncing them.
What he did was make his support contingent on the one thing he believed Israel could not afford to give up: its democracy and its pluralism. He said so out loud while it was still possible to say so without being read as a defection.
He understood, in a way that very few Diaspora leaders have, that unconditional support of a state is not a Jewish virtue. The Jewish tradition is full of conditional covenants. Abe applied the same principle to Israel.
Between 2014 and 2022, I interviewed him on most of the fights. The 69% of Greeks held antisemitic views, and the Greek prime minister tried to wave the figure off until Foxman told him that even at half, it was still one in two.
The Kansas City JCC shooting, after which he refused to let American Jews talk themselves into a siege mentality.
Netanyahu’s 2015 Congress speech on Iran, which Foxman publicly opposed and then went to hear anyway out of solidarity.
BDS on US campuses, where he had already started noticing that Jewish students were taking off their kippot and putting their Magen David necklaces under their shirts. He told me in 2015 that it was the worst year for European Jews since the war, and that nobody at ADL would be retiring any time soon.
At some point, the relationship became less formal. He started writing to me directly from his iPhone, in short notes: “Hope you are well. U r taking some very bold editorial positions.”
After a column in February 2025, he wrote, “Kol Hakavod. Toda. Abe.” After another, in March: “Continue to be impressed by your clear and frequently courageous voice on the outrageous occurrences in our beloved Israel.”
We disagreed plenty. He still wrote, often in Hebrew.
In September 2024, he messaged: “I am fine. Just so troubled by what is around us and so devastated about what’s happening in Israel.”
I have read that sentence many times since I learned of his death. A Holocaust survivor in his 80s, in Bergen County, is devastated about Israel.
Devastated is not a word he would have used by accident. He spent his life teaching the world to take Jewish suffering seriously, and he spent the last year of his life telling me, privately, that something about the Jewish state was breaking his heart.
He survived the worst thing that has ever happened to the Jewish people just to live long enough to be devastated about the Jewish state.
What I know is that there are now fewer people of his stature standing between American Jewry and its worst impulses.
The Holocaust survivor generation is leaving us. The institutional Jewish leadership that came up around them is shrinking.
The work of being publicly, civilly, stubbornly pro-Israel and pro-democracy at the same time is harder than it has ever been, and fewer people are willing to do it. Some of us are eventually going to have to try, knowing in advance that we will not do it as well as he did, and that doing it anyway is part of the obligation.
There will not be a meeting at the Inbal.
I have his emails, and I have twelve years of him saying the same thing in slightly different words: the Jewish state cannot afford to define most of the Jewish people out of it, and the Diaspora cannot afford to love Israel less than honestly.
May his memory be a blessing.