“One of our biggest challenges today is to make it very clear that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Daniel S. Mariaschin told JNS in an extended interview.
Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker, JNS
In his 50 years of Jewish communal work, including 35 at B’nai B’rith International, which he has led for a quarter century, Daniel S. Mariaschin has never experienced such alarming Jew-hatred.
“It’s certainly as bad as I’ve ever seen it,” the 75-year-old suburban Maryland resident told JNS in a conversation that ran about an hour-and-a-half at the B’nai B’rith offices in Washington, D.C., in early September.
Jew-hatred is rising so dramatically for two reasons, Mariaschin believes.
“First of all, because of social media—because of the ability now, real time, to find out if Ilhan Omar says, ‘It’s all about the Benjamins,’” he said, of the Minnesota Democrat and member of the so-called “Squad” in Congress who has a long history of antisemitic remarks.
“In another era, that might have taken a little bit longer,” Mariaschin said.
There have long been members of Congress who Mariaschin said “were not friendly to Israel,” including former Republican House members Pete McCloskey of California and Paul Findley of Illinois, both of whom served from the 1960s until the early 1980s.
“You knew, more or less, who they were and you responded,” he said. At the end of his career, Chuck Percy, the Republican Illinois senator from 1967 until 1985, who was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair for the last four years, “was, I felt, hostile toward Israel,” the B’nai B’rith leader said.
In the past, there were also far-right groups, like the Liberty Lobby, founded by Willis Carto, and people like Holocaust denier Arthur Butz, who remains on the Northwestern University faculty.
“These are names from the past who were purveyors of antisemitism, but the antisemitism they purveyed was largely through the U.S. mail, and you’d receive it and then maybe there would be a meeting somewhere,” Mariaschin said. “We knew they were there, and we were greatly troubled by it. Now, it’s really become much more mainstream.”
Mariaschin thinks that the culprit is the “artificial separation” which anti-Israel organizations have fostered for several years between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. “‘Look, we’re not antisemitic. We’re just against Israel,’” he said, channeling the antisemites. “It’s clear to me as a Jew that Zionism is in our DNA. Zionism is in our roots. My reaction is, you’re not fooling us.”
“If you want to stop trade with Israel, as the BDS crowd was and is doing, but now it’s much beyond that—if you want to do that, we know what you’re up to,” he said. “We know what you really want to do is to starve Israel economically. You want to isolate Israel. You want to make it a pariah. We get that. We understand what you’re doing.”
“One of our biggest challenges today is to make it very clear that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” he added.
Sitting in synagogue weekly, Mariaschin said there is always something in the Torah reading with which to connect as one follows along. “The language, which is used today, about ‘colonizers’ and ‘usurpers’ and we came in after 1945, come on. What are you talking about? That’s what I’m saying to myself.”
Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, in Berlin in September 2024. Credit: German government.
Jew-hatred on campus
Those who seek intentionally to harm the State of Israel, and by extension the Jewish people, aid and abet rising antisemitism. That includes anti-Israel encampments on college and university campuses, Mariaschin told JNS.
“If someone says, ‘They’re a colonizer,’ well if that’s the case, then we have to be against this,” he said.
The problem of antisemitic faculty is broader than just Middle East studies, according to Mariaschin. “It’s across the board,” he said.
“If you’re a donor, Jewish or non-Jewish, and you feel that the university is going in the wrong direction, that it’s worrying about ‘context’ to borrow a term, then I would say, if they feel that their way of sending a message is to withdraw their gift then all the more power to them,” Mariaschin added.
In their testimony before a House panel on education, several presidents of top universities said that whether calls for genocide against Jews violated their institutional codes of conduct would depend on “context.”
Alumni can send messages in many ways, including quitting a board if one is a trustee or withholding donations, according to Mariaschin.
“I take my hat off to those who’ve gone the extra mile. They can put their money in other places,” he said. “It’s not always so easy to replace the money, but why do people give money to begin with? They give money because they had a good experience as an undergraduate or a graduate student. They felt they got a lot from the university experience.”
Vast university endowments, which are unique to American schools, “does give you some leverage,” Mariaschin said, “and I think it’s important that they do.”
News media
From age 17 until his first year of graduate school, Mariaschin worked for six years in commercial radio for the CBS Radio affiliate in New Hampshire. At the time, CBS “had these heavyweights” like Charles Collingwood, Alexander Kendrick, Douglas Edwards and Dallas Townsend, he said.
“These were all protégés of Edward R. Murrow, and even though I was in New Hampshire, I didn’t have anything to do with these guys, but they were on CBS Radio, and so I felt a certain affinity,” he added.
The media landscape has changed dramatically over the course of Mariaschin’s career. More organizations are trying to be connected to Capitol Hill today, he thinks. “I don’t know whether members of Congress or their staffs are more accessible, but I see that there’s more of an interest, particularly those who have Washington offices or are Washington-based, to be able to reach out to the Hill,” he said.
The news cycle has also sped up rapidly. “I was trained, if you didn’t get your release out by—somebody would always be hawking me, ‘it’s got to be by 11:00,’ ‘got to get it by 11:00,’ ‘you got to get it by 4:00,’ ‘by 5:00.’ That’s not the case today,” he said. “Even with Twitter, in the beginning we didn’t want to clog up our Twitter feeds.”
Daniel S. Mariaschin. Credit: Courtesy.
Now, B’nai B’rith is “commenting on a lot more than we used to comment on,” he said. “It is easier to weigh in, and the news organizations are looking at Twitter feeds, which wasn’t always the case in the beginning.”
More organizations are trying to have higher profiles, and more are joining the fight against Jew-hatred, said Mariaschin, who worked for the Anti-Defamation League for eight-and-a-half years.
“The battle against antisemitism historically was the purview of several organizations, two or three organizations, four organizations. We’ve been fighting it, B’nai B’rith has been fighting in very interesting ways since 1843,” he said. “I think because antisemitism is so evident and has affected so many that many organizations now are joining that fight, so I think that’s a change.”
In the past, the media rarely or never covered antisemitism. That is different now, according to Mariaschin.
“If you have, as The Washington Post had for months at a time, a front-page story, above the fold, if you are The New York Times, and you have these maps of the territories, where you have all these kind of infrared aerial maps, high-tech maps, then why are you doing this every day?” he said.
“Some papers cover antisemitic incidents, but if there’s confusion, some of it intentional, about ‘anti-Israel,’ ‘anti-Zionist,’ ‘antisemitic,’ then there’s a lot of biased reporting, particularly on Israel, on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Mariaschin added. “No question about it.”
It’s a “mixed bag” whether the news industry is covering left-wing antisemitism in the same way that it does Jew-hatred on the right, according to Mariaschin.
“Israel has been struggling to meet expectations. Not to live up to expectations—to meet expectations, which are thrown out every day. ‘You got to be more precise.’ ‘You can’t do this.’ ‘You can’t do that.’ ‘Don’t go into Rafah.’ ‘Don’t move the population,’ even though they had a plan to do so. ‘Don’t use the weapons,’” he said. “We could go through the entire list, and it’s struggling on an existential issue.”
By contrast, he said, “I don’t think there’s enough coverage that speaks to the choices that Israel struggles with. In fact, I might say there are probably very few governments out there that struggle like this, and none today that have exactly and precisely these threats and challenges. I think there, much of the media falls short.”
Daniel S. Mariaschin (center), CEO of B’nai B’rith International, meets Pope Benedict XVI in 2011. Credit: B’nai B’rith International.
Like antisemitism today, Jew-hatred in the news is as bad as Mariaschin has seen in his career. “I think there’s a lot of me-too-ism in the media,” he said, noting that reporters tend to cite casualty statistics from Hamas-run bodies as facts.
Mariaschin calls it “the case of the disappearing facts.”
“We had ‘famine.’ We had ‘starvation.’ We had ‘thirst.’ Months later, tucked away in a U.N. document, there was that famine could have happened but it didn’t. There wasn’t starvation, but it’s stuck. All of it’s stuck, and it’s being used,” he said. “You’re entitled to your opinion. You’re not entitled to your facts. That’s really what we’ve got here.”
“We have a ‘don’t confuse me with the facts’ attitude on the part of much of the media,” he added.
Loyalty tests
JNS asked Mariaschin about reports that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was passed over for the Democratic vice presidential candidacy in part because of his Jewish name and identity and support for Israel. (As a nonprofit, B’nai B’rith doesn’t endorse candidates.)
Mariaschin told JNS that Jews have achieved many positions of power in the Unites States, and although there used to be a time when one was hard pressed to find Jews on nameplates at the State Department, today that is commonplace.
“I hope we’re not entering an era where loyalty tests on the Palestinian issue are going to be imposed, meaning it could be a politician, it could be a faculty member applying for a position, it it could be a reporter, somebody just out of journalism school applying for a job at a website, at a newspaper. ‘How do you feel about Israel?’” he said. “If these are questions that will be asked, that’s not a good path that we’re going down.”
Whoever wins the election in November and puts an administration in place on Jan. 20, Mariaschin hopes that the new president “will take another look at what it means to back an ally.”
“I would address this to both sides: No quick solutions, no easy solutions, no tired solutions that are not relevant. Israel is struggling here in a way that no other country has had to struggle,” he said. “It is sitting in the most volatile spot now on earth, and it needs to be backed by its friends and its allies and primarily the United States, because Europeans have been fair-weather friends over a period of years.”
He doesn’t fault the “succession of administrations” that have tried to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. “We’d like to resolve the issue,” he said.
Mariaschin noted that there’s hardly been a year since 1948 that he hasn’t had relatives fighting in the Israeli military, including cousins, nieces and nephews who now serve in combat positions.
“This is not the normal,” he said. “This is not the usual.”
U.S. negotiations, Iran
Living in the United States, with Canada on the north, Mexico to the south and oceans to the east and west, it’s hard for those in the U.S. foreign policy field to understand the complicated position in which the Jewish state finds itself, and the American tradition of negotiation doesn’t apply, according to Mariaschin.
“We introduced negotiations to the world. It started with labor negotiations. We have a conciliation board for federal agencies. We have the NLRB,” he said, of the National Labor Relations Board. “This is what we do best, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that if you bring people into a room—you can see that’s not how it works.”
The United States needs to be “more sensitive not only to the predicament that Israel finds itself in, but also we have to be more proactive in terms of those who are bringing about the chaos in the region,” he said.
Whoever the next U.S. president is, the United States must be tougher on Iran and impose more sanctions due to its efforts via proxies to eliminate Israel and its domestic human rights violations, according to Mariaschin.
“There’s an opportunity for both parties here in power to reset,” he said. “It’s very clear where the center of this activity is, who’s bringing about the chaos in the region. They’ve got to impose sanctions, and they’ve got to be more aggressive also at the United Nations.”
Europe, too, needs a change of approach, according to Mariaschin.
“Instead of having some of our European allies trading with the Iranians and having these kind-of ambivalent relationships, we’ve got to be much more proactive,” he said. “Where we’re going to be able to bring down the flames in the region is by having a much more proactive policy toward the Iranians.”
The new U.S. president will also need to respond to anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, where Mariaschin expects the next session to be more hateful toward the Jewish state—“if there is such a thing”—and he anticipates issues at the Human Rights Council and at UNESCO, among other bodies.
The global body is slated to discuss funding for Palestinians, some that it votes on annually and some every two years, and the next U.S. president will need to push back on anti-Israel efforts at the United Nations, according to Mariaschin.
“In terms of a two-state solution, there’s also a wax and wane here,” he said.
Mariaschin was in a meeting some 15 years ago with Jewish leaders and with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, he told JNS. During a question-and-answer period, someone asked Abbas if he thought Israel had a right to be a Jewish state.
“He shrugged and he said, ‘Israel can call itself whatever it wants,’” Mariaschin said. “There’s the problem. We’re not going to have a solution to what’s going on now, and we’re not going to have a long-range solution, a day-after solution if Palestinian leadership—I’m not talking about Hamas here, I’m talking about the P.A., which today it’s here and today it’s there, and they’re playing both sides,” he said.
Daniel S. Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, meets with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Credit: B’nai B’rith International.
The Palestinian Authority “go to the U.N., where they really push,” he said, expecting that Abbas “will make his speech, and you can be sure this is going to be one of his usual speeches.”
“There’s a tendency to not take that issue as seriously as we do, because we know if Palestinian leaders are saying that they’re not sure, or that they really don’t accept it, frankly we’re wasting a lot of time on shuttle diplomacy,” Mariaschin said.
Weeks later, Abbas said in his U.N. speech that the Temple Mount was “exclusive property of Muslims.”
‘So much to be proud of’
When Mariaschin’s family moved in 1955 to the town in New Hampshire where he grew up, there were four Jewish families. There might have been 2,500 or 3,000 Jews in the entire state, of some 600,000 people, he told JNS.
“How are they going to know Jews?” he said. “There are many many people still in this country like that, because we’re still only five-and-a-half million people in this country.”
“We need always to have friends and allies. We need them. We need them in Congress, and we have them,” he said. “We need them in the media, those who are not Jewish, and we need mayors who speak out, or are sensitive to our issues.”
There were no Jewish organizations—“that went from left to right and here and there and every place”—in the New Hampshire town when Mariaschin was growing up. “We had a synagogue. We had a Hebrew school,” he said. “But the love of the idea of Israel was the most important thing, without kind of going in this direction or that direction.”
There was a photograph of his mother’s cousin and the latter’s family on a kibbutz in Israel on the Mariaschin family’s mantel. “To me, that picture was Israel,” he said.
“I think we need to take a deep breath here and say, look, we can disagree on a whole range of issues. This is something that is not unusual in our community. But now with these existential threats, we really need to strive for some kind of unity and leave some of the discussions, some of the disputes perhaps for after we are able to get through this particular very threatening phase,” he said.
Amid all of the challenges that Jews face, “we have so much to be proud of as a people,” Mariaschin said. “We have made so many contributions to civilization in this country. We have made so many contributions to American civilization in a range of fields. It sets the compass. It really does.”
He wouldn’t have used the term at the time, but as a young boy a sense of the “continuum of Jewish history” was imparted in Mariaschin at the dinner table.
“Be proud of it. Take a look at what we’ve done. Look at Einstein. Look at the guys who built Hollywood,” he said.
“There’s this variation on the times in which we are living. Israel’s done nothing wrong here. I mean, what is wrong wanting, after 2,000 years, to survive as a place where Jews can be safe, in a country which itself has made so many contributions?” he said. “That to me says it all. The rest is commentary.”