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New ADL Chief says Europe and campuses keep him up at night

“It’s not about filling Abe’s shoes,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, 44, who took over as national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in July, assuming the high-profile role filled by Abraham Foxman for the past 28 years until his retirement.
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December 2, 2015

“It’s not about filling Abe’s shoes,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, 44, who took over as national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in July, assuming the high-profile role filled by Abraham Foxman for the past 28 years until his retirement. 

“ADL has been around for 102 years, and so, just as Abe stood on the shoulders of his predecessors, so I stand on his shoulders.”

It’s a question Greenblatt has answered often since he was unanimously appointed a year ago by the ADL’s board of trustees.

Greenblatt is the sixth head of the ADL, which is widely recognized as among the most influential civil rights groups in the world, with a particular emphasis on fighting anti-Semitism. His path to the top has included jobs in business, politics and social entrepreneurship that together reflect a resume that reads a lot like those of many of today’s young chief executives.

Greenblatt, who now lives in New York, graduated from Tufts University in 1992 and worked for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign that same year; he holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and is a co-founder of Ethos Water, a bottled water brand that donates 5 cents of every sale to help bring clean water to the developing world. Starbucks purchased Ethos in 2005, vaulting Greenblatt into the role of Starbucks’ vice president of global consumer products.

Greenblatt lived in Los Angeles for 13 years, and it was here that he met his wife, Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, at a Shabbat dinner. They belonged to Sinai Temple and, among other ventures, he taught at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. In 2012, he became director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation for President Barack Obama’s administration. Then, in 2013, he got a call from the ADL’s national office inviting him to consider replacing Foxman.

“I was surprised in some ways about getting the call,” Greenblatt said in a phone interview. He thought that having no experience in law or running a large nonprofit wouldn’t have made him the natural choice to head the ADL. But by the time the offer was finalized in fall 2014, he enthusiastically assumed leadership of what he calls “arguably the most important organization in the Jewish community.”

Ironically, one of Greenblatt’s first public statements for the ADL, coming right on the heels of his departure from the White House, was to publicly explain why the ADL opposed the president’s landmark nuclear agreement with Iran, a position the group took under Foxman.

“By taking that position, I didn’t line up with a number of former colleagues; however, I think ADL took its position on a principled basis,” Greenblatt said. There is, he said, “no country in the world that’s more a progenitor of anti-Semitism than the Islamic Republic of Iran. An agreement which potentially might normalize that government and that ideology is difficult for ADL.”

Since July, Greenblatt and the ADL have made news for speaking out against calls to reject Syrians fleeing a civil war and seeking refuge in the United States, comparing their plight to Jews attempting to escape the Nazis. He and the ADL also have strongly condemned “incendiary anti-Muslim rhetoric” from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. 

Meanwhile, the ADL continues its mission to document and help combat persistent anti-Semitism worldwide, but nowadays especially in the Middle East and Europe, and to fight rising anti-Israel sentiment and activity on American campuses, most pointedly exemplified by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. 

“It keeps me up at night to think that Jews [in Europe] live in fear for their physical safety,” Greenblatt said. “Here at home, concerning the virus of BDS — [it] is spreading across campuses.”

Asked whether his former role in the Obama administration has the potential to inject political or ideological bias into his role at the ADL, Greenblatt said that “the quarters that worry we’ll be too ideologically aligned with the administration” have made their concerns known. 

“We’re pragmatic, and the organization has always been in the middle,” Greenblatt said. “We’ll continue to do that.” 

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