Jeff Robbins

Hundreds packed a New York synagogue last week to mourn the death of longtime Anti-Defamation League head Abraham Foxman, but also to celebrate his life.

A child of the Holocaust, miraculously hidden from the Nazis by his Catholic nanny, only to be equally miraculously reunited with his parents after the Nazis were defeated, Abe Foxman emigrated to America and became a civil rights lawyer. For decades, he was both the face and the embodiment of the fights against anti-Semitism, making the ADL as well a powerful advocate for civil rights broadly.

Whoever coined the phrase “speaking truth to power” must have watched Abe in action, because he was as blunt as he was relentless. Let’s put it this way: he spoke his mind.

But he was also sophisticated about letting things speak for themselves. In Jerusalem in 2012, he quietly advised a group he was about to introduce to Jodi Rudoren, the new chief of The New York Times Jerusalem bureau, that they might want to consider keeping their faces impassive during the meeting with her.

With good reason. Rudoren informed the group without any discernible sheepishness that she knew nothing about Israel or the Middle East. Still, since she had grown up in Newton, Mass., with a large Jewish population, “I do know Jews.”

Jaws dropped in the conference room. Seeing this, Rudoren assured us that even if she knew nothing about the region, the New York Times editors back in New York did, and they would be instructing her on what to write about.

Abe lived to see the mushrooming anti-Semitism on both the Left and the Right that burst forth post Oct. 7th. He passed away just before New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, whose history of being what may be kindly called “credulous” about transmitting Hamas’ narrative, accused the Jewish state of training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. Kristoff’s account, defended by the Times with the customary boilerplate, is riddled with patently dubious “sourcing.” It also rests on a sensational claim that appears not only to be highly improbable but clinically impossible.

But so it goes these days. Abe Foxman was especially astute about the fact that bigots and fools rarely self-identify as such. His death, accordingly, comes at a particularly bad time.

But his life was a triumph, not least of all for the number of eyes he opened and the places where he opened them, as well as the inspiration he imparted to so many to keep fighting, regardless of how overwhelming the fight can seem.