Sit Down, Jonathan

Greenblatt spent a decade spending down the moral authority Foxman built. He does not get to eulogize him now.

A eulogy in our tradition is not praise. It is a claim of inheritance — I knew him. He shaped me. His mission lives in me.

Jonathan Greenblatt cannot make that claim about Abe Foxman. And he should not try.

Foxman built the ADL into an institution that popes and presidents and the right and the left took seriously, because he refused to be captured by any of them. His authority was moral, and it was earned across half a century. Greenblatt inherited that authority and spent a decade burning through it. The ADL today is distrusted on the right for naked partisanship and on the left for almost everything else. That is not drift. That is demolition. He has inverted what Foxman built.

And now, on the day we lose Abe, the man who presided over that demolition steps forward to mourn him in public as if he were the heir, as if the institution he degraded were still the institution Abe gave his life to. This is not a tribute. It is a costume. He is wearing Abe’s life like a borrowed suit, hoping the cut of it will hide what he has done to the house Abe built. It will not. The Jewish people are not fooled. The right sees through it. The left sees through it. The donors whispering in back rooms see through it. Every rabbi in this country who has watched the ADL become a press-release factory for one party and a punchline for the other sees through it. The only person still pretending is the man holding the microphone.

Abe was a giant. A hidden child of the Shoah who spent fifty years standing watch over the Jewish people. He counseled presidents and confronted bigots and accepted apologies on behalf of an entire people. He led so many of us into a life of service. He deserves words from those who actually carry his mission forward — not from the man who squandered it and now reaches for the mantle while the body is still warm.

Sit down, Jonathan. Drink some Ethos Water. Let those who revered him speak.