Photo courtesy of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. What makes the American Jewish Committee (AJC)’s new director for combating anti-Semitism interesting is the fact that she’s a practicing Christian.
Holly Huffnagle was promoted from assistant director to director last month. Born in Thousand Oaks, Huffnagle told the Journal she became interested in combating anti-Semitism when she studied the Holocaust at Westmont College in Santa Barbara.
“Years of persecution of Jewish communities in Christian Europe … helped set the stage for the Holocaust,” Huffnagle said. “This didn’t happen in a vacuum. I actually entered the combating anti-Semitism space through the window of Holocaust education and Jewish-Christian dialogue, trying to figure out, can I somehow right an egregious past?”
Huffnagle’s background includes working as a research assistant at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and working as a policy adviser to monitor and combat anti-Semitism in the State Department. She joined AJC Los Angeles as assistant director in 2018.
Huffnagle views combating anti-Semitism as her calling. “[Anti-Semitism is] not a Jewish problem,” she said. “It’s a societal problem. It’s a reflection of our society, and effectively countering it requires non-Jews.”
“I actually entered the combating anti-Semitism space through the window of Holocaust education and Jewish-Christian dialogue, trying to figure out, can I somehow right an egregious past?” — Holly Huffnagle
The biggest challenge in fighting anti-Semitism today, she said, is that it comes from more sources than ever before, thereby making the issue more complicated. “The danger is when we only focus on one source, like when we’re only focusing on white supremacists and we lose sight of what’s happening on the far-left or on college campuses,” she said.
Since her promotion, Huffnagle has been primarily focused on online anti-Semitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews and Israel for spreading the coronavirus. “Anti-Semites will always find a way to blame Jewish communities,” she said. “It’s nothing new but it’s just so much more [in] number. The real question is, what’s going to happen when we can go back to ‘normal’? Will these conspiracy theories change in any way [the] minds of people viewing them when they go back into the world?”
Because everything has moved online during the pandemic, tech companies have been overwhelmed when it comes to monitoring anti-Semitism and have had to use artificial intelligence to track and remove anti-Semitic posts from their respective platforms, Huffnagle said. Consequently, some posts that aren’t anti-Semitic have been mistakenly removed.
On the new phenomenon known as Zoombombing, in which people disrupt Zoom calls with neo-Nazi imagery, anti-Semitic messages and other hateful content, Huffnagle said that while there are only a handful of people doing this, “They’re still affecting multiple Jewish student meetings; they’re affecting board meetings where there’s Jewish chairs, so this has been a huge problem.”
What’s most concerning about Zoombombing, she added, is that white supremacists’ reach has been furthered through the tactic. “We’ve known that they’ve been growing, however, now they have more of an audience than ever before.”
AJC has been combating anti-Semitism online through partnering with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in monitoring anti-Semitism and through their Advocacy Anywhere videos, Huffnagle said.
“One thing that we have now is further reach,” Huffnagle said, noting that the Advocacy Anywhere videos have received a million views on Facebook since the pandemic started. “The access that organizations combating anti-Semitism … have during this time is incredible.”
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