A League of our Own

By Emily Raij

Several recent and very public anti-Semitic incidents in the Orlando area have the Central Florida Jewish community on edge. Fortunately, as the director for Jewish community outreach and anti-Semitism for the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Southern Division, Eric Ross is busy leading educational programs, engaging organizations, and offering concrete strategies for combatting hate.

Eric’s position is new, but his connection to Central Florida is not. When he was eight years old, his family moved from New York to the Orlando area. They became members of Congregation Beth Am, and Eric attended the former Hebrew Day School (now Jewish Academy of Orlando). He was involved in Young Judea, serving as the Orlando club president, and has fond memories of participating in the Orlando Community Hebrew High School. He studied abroad at Israel’s Alexander Muss High School and via a Young Judea program.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in religious studies and master’s degrees in Jewish studies and Jewish communal studies, Eric began his career at various Jewish organizations.

He joined ADL in 2015, and in his current position, Eric focuses on the organization’s cooperative engagement and relationship building with Jewish Federations, Jewish Community Centers, and Community Relations Councils as well as synagogues and other Jewish communal organizations throughout the Southern Division. Eric explains this holistic approach to outreach is new.

“In the past, Jewish communal outreach was catch-as-catch-can,” he says. “Nobody was ever tasked with planning for the future and reaching out to organizations they weren’t working with.”

Standing Together

One of those outreach efforts happened on February 8. After back-to-back anti-Semitic incidents throughout the area, Eric provided a community-wide anti-Semitism update sponsored by Orlando’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). The briefing, which took place via Zoom, covered current statistics and trends but also offered ideas for countering rising anti-Semitism.

During the early 2010s, Eric explains there had been a national decrease in anti-Semitic incidents reported for five years, but starting about six years ago, those incident reports began drastically increasing. During his briefing, Eric shared the ADL’s data collected from 2017 through 2020, with each of those years representing a new “top-three” year.

ADL’s 2021 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents was recently released, and things proved even worse, both nationally and here in Florida. Anti-Semitic incidents reported to ADL reached an all-time high in the U.S. in 2021, with a 34 percent increase and a total of 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment, and vandalism. This represents the new single-highest total number of incidents in a year since ADL began tracking them in 1979. Florida saw a dramatic 50 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents, with 190 total –                                                                                an all-time high for the state. This comes after a 40 percent increase from 2019 to 2020. In 2021, Florida saw a 46 percent increase in harassment-based incidents, a 57 percent increase in vandalism, and thankfully only one assault.

Those incidents can be viewed on the ADL H.E.A.T. (Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, and Terrorism) Map at ADL.org. The map is interactive and customizable, detailing incidents by state and nationwide, which are gathered from news and media reports, government documents, police and victim reports, extremist-related resources, the Center on Extremism, and other sources. The map is updated monthly, but the ADL Tracker of Anti-Semitic Incidents (also at ADL.org) shows a list of the most recent cases of anti-Jewish vandalism, harassment, and assault reported to or detected by ADL.

“It’s a very large and monumental process to compile and, most importantly, vet the anti-Semitic incidents that happen,” says Eric. “We try to vet incidents in real-time as they come in to us.”

Fighting Darkness with Light

So what can people do to fight anti-Semitism? Eric offers some clear guidance.

“Anti-Semitic rallies are very in-your-face, and our advice is to stay away,” he says. “People at those rallies are usually trying to incite others to throw a first punch and get heated under the collar. With the recent rally in Central Florida, people from those two groups [Goyim Defense League and the National Socialist Movement] were specifically filming. The more people who congregate to counter-protest, the more likely it is for the media to show up and for someone to get hurt. Instead, try to turn a negative into                                                      a positive.”

Eric explains this was the same advice given in the 1990s when an anti-Semitic rally occurred adjacent to The Roth Family JCC. Local rabbis pleaded for people not to attend and, instead, an interfaith rally was held in the JCC gymnasium with people from outside the Jewish community standing in solidarity and discussing the importance of the Jewish community.

“That was the first time I heard someone from outside the Jewish community talking like that,” Eric says. “It was such a better, more effective use of time.”

A Community Resource

When incidents do occur, Eric encourages people to report them to the ADL using its online incident form, which includes five or six questions and a place to upload a photo or video. The report immediately goes into the ADL Tracker, and staff is notified. Then, the ADL reaches out to local law enforcement, if necessary.

However, Eric recognizes that the first call people often make after witnessing an anti-Semitic incident in their community is to their local Jewish Federation. That is why Eric recently started a quarterly webinar specifically to connect with Federation staff members. The first webinar was held in January and covered the current state of extremism in America from the far left to the far right. 

“Our hope is that Federations will start having a more uniform approach to using ADL for help,” says Eric. “Some contact us all the time, others only when needed.”

Local schools can complete ADL’s No Place for Hate anti-bullying program, which teaches students, teachers, administrators, and parents how to be upstanders instead of bystanders. More than 200 schools in Florida and thousands around the country have completed the program to become No Place For            Hate schools.

“When the entire culture of a community shifts to ‘I’m going to do the right thing,’ administrators don’t try to sweep an incident under the rug,” says Eric.

The ADL’s Words to Action training is another school program that uses role-playing to teach high-school and college students how to recognize anti-Semitism, assess situations, consider possible outcomes, and respond.

“Role-playing can feel silly at first, but the act of going through it makes you more comfortable, so when confronted with it, you know what to do,” says Eric.

For synagogues, Eric is in the process of launching a Southern Division Signature Synagogue Program that provides an ADL presentation, ADL’s Words to Action training for students, access to educational resources, subscriptions to email newsletters, and more – all of which Eric describes as “basically having a hotline to ADL for assistance.”

“The best way to be a passionate advocate,” he says, “is to be an informed advocate.”