Last month, the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Jewish hate incidents increased 36% in 2022. That marked an all-time high in a half-decade of all-time highs.
Four days later, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism announced its #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, a $25 million commitment aiming to provide part of the cure through education on television, radio and across the outlets where antisemitism is most widely spread: social media.
At just two weeks old, it’s impossible to say what kind of impact the campaign, the result of a strategic planning process begun in 2021, will have. But it’s already gaining traction. The #StandUpToJewishHate pages on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok have racked up more than 90,000 followers combined, and YouTube videos featuring one of the effort’s four videos have been viewed nearly 150,000 times, helped along by postings on both the NFL’s YouTube site and the site of the TV show “The Voice.” Prominent individuals including Kelly Clarkson, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Harvard University professor and civil rights activist Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have promoted the campaign, and a wide range of organizations have signed on as partners, including the AARP, the National Parent Teachers’ Association, the Asian American Foundation, and the National Association of Evangelicals.
According to Foundation to Combat Antisemitism Executive Director Matthew Berger, the goal of the campaign is to raise awareness of the everyday hatred faced by Jewish Americans, and for organizations to encourage individuals to counter antisemitism they see in their communities, whether online or in person.
Initial response to the effort indicates that people are, indeed, becoming aware. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the response,” said Berger. “And what’s been really heartening to see is the number of non-Jewish organizations, whether that’s the civil rights groups, social justice groups, different religious organizations and community groups that have partnered with us, and recognize there’s a moment here where antisemitism is rising as an issue that needs to be on our collective radar screens.” Small donors are also stepping up; more than 4,500 individuals have sent money to the effort since its launch.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, and the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign itself, are both backed by Robert Kraft. Given his estimated net worth of over $10 billion, his history of philanthropy and his ownership of the New England Patriots, Kraft has built up the wealth and networks needed to give an effort like this a big splash. Kraft has been drumming up attention for unwelcome reasons following some high-profile personal and professional scandals. But more recently, he’s been taking a strong public stand against antisemitism, having grown up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Brookline, Massachusetts, and growing increasingly disturbed by the rise of hate crimes.
For people like me, who grew up without social media, it may be hard to understand how sharing a blue square or a hashtagged phrase is going to move the needle on antisemitism. But the fact remains that images, hashtags and videos are the way ever-increasing numbers of people are receiving and acting on information — and they are the primary tools being used by extremists both to recruit others to their causes and to harass and intimidate religious and other minorities and women. To combat an attack, you have to go to where the action is happening.
About the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism
Kraft started the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS) in 2019, combining the $1 million awarded to him as a Genesis Prize recipient with an initial $20 million investment of his own funds. The foundation reported over $15.8 million in assets in 2022. In addition to Kraft, substantial 2022 donors ($1 million-plus) included Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Foundation, which mainly supports science, and Rob and Karen Hale, a billionaire Massachusetts couple who made the news in 2022 for reportedly donating $1 million a week to smaller, local nonprofits.
Prior to the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, FCAS’ work included commissioning and running television ads during NFL games and creating its “Command Center,” a program that monitors more than 300 million data sources including public social media, traditional media, websites, blogs and online forums.
The development of the Command Center, perhaps even more than the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, demonstrates the ambition that FCAS and Kraft are bringing to the fight against hate. Berger said that the command center application was adapted from a program used to track brands on social media and is now used to monitor for instances and trends, both in antisemitism and hatred against other marginalized groups, and efforts to combat both.
“Most people, when they go onto a social media account, get a little slice of the world based on what they have followed, who they are connected with and what they are interested in, and have no real way of accessing the rest of the conversations that are happening on social media,” Berger said. “We’re able to look at the full landscape of social media and understand what is bubbling up, understand conversations that are happening, and use that information to tailor our messaging to help our partners do their work better.”
That level of monitoring is frightening in the hands of government institutions or for-profit companies, and may also be frightening in the hands of nonprofit entities. At the same time, it’s hard to argue against the collection and use of information to stop online hatred in its tracks, particularly when 65% of members of marginalized groups have experienced harassment online. Online spaces are where these battles are happening, and more entities are looking for the right tools to engage in them.
And while FCAS is focused on fighting antisemitism, the organization is aware of the relationship between the rise in anti-Jewish hate and hatred against other marginalized groups like Asians, Black Americans, and the LGBTQ communities. According to Berger, a survey by Wunderman Thompson SONAR, which was conducted for FCAS in March 2022, found that over 52% of U.S. adults 18+ do not believe “antisemitism is a big problem,” and 45% believe that Jewish people are more than capable of handling issues of antisemitism on their own.
“That research helped us recognize that there’s an awareness gap. It’s not that people are actively choosing not to care about antisemitism — they don’t recognize that it’s an issue that needs to be on their radar screens,” he said. “They don’t recognize that it needs to be part of the same conversation that we’re having around racism, around gender inequality, around LGBTQ rights, Asian hate and all of those issues.”
FCAS has also used information gleaned through the command center application to fight ignorance. In one example, Berger said that FCAS had noted a rise in the use of the word “Gestapo” as a euphemism for police or military tactics they disagree with. The Gestapo, of course, played a key role in tracking down and brutalizing Jewish people, and sending them to concentration camps in Nazi Germany. After seeing the trend, Berger said, FCAS created educational materials to inform people of just what the Gestapo really was and shared the information with the U.S. Holocaust Museum so the museum could conduct an educational campaign of its own.
A lesson for funders in combating hate?
In early March, we reported on the moves that some funders are making to combat the rise of extremist hatred in the U.S. Those efforts, for the most part, can perhaps be described as scattershot, with few funders having anti-hate programs or strategies, and others disagreeing about the causes and solutions to the problem.
While the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign is relatively top-down in the sense that it was created by marketing firms and is initially being promoted by many large and legacy organizations, the fact remains that #StandUpToJewishHate has made at least an initial large impression on computer, phone and TV screens across the country.
Given the degree to which hatred against America’s Jewish communities and other marginalized groups is itself being promoted by powerful, monied interests — including, arguably, prominent members of one of the country’s two major political parties — a diversity of strategies is clearly needed. #StandUpToJewishHate offers a compelling complement to supporting anti-hate work at grassroots community groups.
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