Good Friday morning!

Ed. note: Your Daily Phil will not be publishing on Monday, May 30 in honor of Memorial Day.

Fighting antisemitism across the political spectrum was the order of the day at a gathering of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Thursday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan. Speakers — from keynote Deborah Lipstadt to the head of a recent campaign against antisemitism — emphasized the need for a broad-based Jewish fight against hate, even as different speakers focused on different manifestations of the prejudice.

Lipstadt, who was officially sworn in earlier in the week as the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, focused the majority of her speech on threats from the right (more on Lipstadt’s day in New York below). William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents, spent almost all of his speech decrying antisemitism from anti-Zionists and progressive activists.

“What we experienced during and after Operation Guardian of the Walls is a paradigm shift, the culmination of a confluence of movements and events that have… provided a license to discriminate against and target Jews for their mere possible association with the Jewish state,” Daroff said in his speech, referring to the spike in antisemitic attacks in the U.S. that accompanied Israel’s 2021 conflict with Hamas in Gaza. “It is disingenuous and appallingly ignorant to argue that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are unconnected.”

The conference also featured a video and speech by Kirsh Foundation CEO Carly Maisel celebrating Shine A Light, a campaign against antisemitism endorsed by dozens of Jewish organizations, including all four major Jewish religious denominations. The campaign, which reached nearly 13 million unique users, recently won an award in the social activism category of this year’s Shorty Awards, a social media prize. And multiple speakers praised the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which has been endorsed by dozens of countries and states that some criticisms of Israel are antisemitic.

The rest of the conference was off the record, and featured sessions on antisemitic threats, antisemitism on campus, outreach to non-Jews and how corporations can combat antisemitism. The conference took place at the Battery Park City museum just weeks after it emerged that the museum had barred Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis from speaking there. No elected officials spoke at Thursday’s event.

SCENE YESTERDAY

‘I’m here to depress you.’ At home in New York City, Deborah Lipstadt plays to the crowd

Shahar Azran

Deborah Lipstadt gave a pair of speeches in New York City yesterday, her first in her hometown since being ceremonially sworn in earlier in the week as the antisemitism envoy, and she appeared at ease in her morning appearance, throwing Yiddish into her speech and joking about getting lost in the State Department headquarters, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales.

Watching her words: Prior to her appointment, Lipstadt gained renown as a Holocaust historian and for decades was a professor at Emory University. “I was looking at a very nice life in Atlanta, traveling, saying what I wanted to say,” she said, talking about how she decided to take the envoy position, and drawing laughter from the crowd. “I’m putting spontaneity in the rearview mirror. Many of you know me and know that’s hard to imagine.” Earlier, she joked, “I’m here to depress you.”

Main points: Lipstadt appeared before the Conference of Presidents, and later keynoted Yeshiva University’s commencement ceremonies. The bulk of her remarks at the first speech, if not depressing, were far from lighthearted. Judging from a few of her appearances since she was confirmed by the Senate in March, Lipstadt appears to have composed a stump speech of sorts explaining how antisemitism is interconnected with other forms of hatred, that its associated conspiracy theories cross borders and that antisemites from left and right can agree on hating Jews despite disagreeing on everything else.

Read the full story here.

FUTURE TENSE

The value(s) of a cup of coffee

iStock / Getty Images Plus

“In my home, I have a beautiful painting from my colleague and friend Rabbi Me’irah Illinsky. It sits above my espresso machine, and I look at it every morning while I impatiently wait for the machine to heat up. It is the scene of Moses standing in front of the burning bush. What moves me about that story is that it is where Moses learns that Judaism is not about the past or the present. When Moses is seeking his missing animal in the wilderness, he turns aside to notice a bush that is burning but is not being consumed. In that moment, he encounters the Source of All and receives God’s name, ‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh — I will be what I will be.’ This future-tense phrase means that God’s name belongs to the future tense. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) wrote in his book Future Tense, ‘God’s call is to that which is not yet. Judaism is a future-seeking civilization,’” writes Rabbi James Greene, president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

The Starbucks experience: “To stick with our coffee theme — there was a meme that floated around the internet recently of cars lined up around a Starbucks all waiting for their morning coffee. As someone who makes my espresso at home most days, I was somewhat surprised that people would wait in line for 20 minutes and pay $5 for a cup of coffee that could just as easily be made at home. It was just another reminder that people are not just purchasing a product. They are purchasing an experience and the atmosphere on top of the item itself. For folks who need that particular experience of Starbucks, the wait and cost are simply worth it, regardless of the price, wait and aggravation. For others, they will drive on by because that is not their point of availability, and the experience of a home-brewed coffee may serve them better. Both individuals are looking for the same product but are trying to figure out how to build the components to their liking.”

Trying, but not succeeding: “Institutional leaders within the Jewish community should be asking: Are we simply providing an item and trying to quantify its value so people will purchase it, or are we considering the full experience when we are looking to engage people in Jewish life? More importantly, are we seeking information from those we hope to engage about the experience they are looking for, and not just the end product they want? I would argue that we may be trying, but not actually succeeding, in shifting away from a value-proposition model to a vision-guided model of community development.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Post-pandemic Priorities: In Debra Kahn’s interview in Politico with Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation — now the author of a pandemic playbook — spoke about the relationship between philanthropy and capitalism, as well as how to move forward after the pandemic. “We will surely see the reverberations of this pandemic for generations to come, but it is not too late to decide how these impacts will shape our collective futures. In order to achieve a truly equitable recovery to the pandemic, we need to go beyond relief and short-term fixes. The only viable way forward is to lay the foundation for a true, reformative recovery that is inclusive of all people. We need to prioritize workers by expanding access to opportunity and making them owners so they have equity in the businesses that employ them, protect our environment and quality of life, and put the needs of the people who we depend on to dig us out of these crises first.” [Politico]

Pic of the Day

Courtesy of Chai Lifeline

Nearly 200 physicians, medical referral professionals, rabbis and others gathered Tuesday night at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for an event with Chai Lifeline to meet and hear from physicians and scientists who are pioneering surgical techniques and developing new treatments for childhood diseases.