Three Years of ‘Staring Hate in the Face’

“Staring hate in the face for a living is a really hard thing to do.”

That’s how Eytan Davidson described his tenure as director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Atlanta-based Southeast region (Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina).

Davidson stepped down Aug. 1, saying, “I made the decision to pursue other professional opportunities, having served for three years in a very fulfilling and challenging role.”

Not to minimize the ADL’s education and anti-bias programs, nor the controversies that swirl around the organization, for this column I wanted Davidson’s assessment of how the work of combatting antisemitism changed after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel and where he sees the Jewish community 690 days later.

When the 48-year-old grandson of Holocaust survivors came on board in July 2022, “The rise of extremism was having a particularly profound effect on the Jewish community, but writ large, it was having a devastating impact on our society,” Davidson said.

The Southeast region’s Twitter (now X) feed that month included a swastika painted on the “rainbow intersection” in Midtown Atlanta, issues with Cobb County schools, and antisemitic projections outside the Florida-Georgia football game. Earlier that year, Georgia’s legislature began debating a definition of antisemitism for the state legal code (eventually approved in 2024).

Those issues pale compared with the impact of the Oct. 7 gut punch. “I was sitting there in bed, looking at my phone, and realized immediately that the entire world was different, drastically different,” Davidson said, recalling that morning.

Beginning at 6.30 a.m. in Israel (11.30 p.m., Oct. 6, in Atlanta), as Jews marked the Simchat Torah holiday, Hamas fired more than 3,000 rockets at Israel. At the same time, upwards of 3,800 Hamas fighters, along with another 2,200 attackers, breached fences and stormed kibbutzim, towns, and an outdoor music festival in the “Gaza envelope” of Southern Israel.

Some 1,200 men, women, and children were murdered, while another 250, alive and dead, were kidnapped into Gaza as hostages. At this writing, 50 hostages remain, of whom maybe 20 are alive.

“An event like Oct. 7, you’re doing the work with a broken heart and that will make any job more difficult,” Davidson said. “It did provide more motivation — not like we needed it.”

Davidson said that previous anti-Israel protests tied to clashes with Hamas, such as those in May 2021, were a “foreshadowing” of what was to come, “But we didn’t know it would be that times a million.”

“Being Jewish in America took a real hit on Oct. 7, and we are still figuring out what to do with that as a community,” he said.

Protests against how Israel has waged war in Gaza have included demonstrations and speeches with anti-Jewish overtones, intimidation of Jewish individuals and vandalism of Jewish businesses and institutions by perpetrators boasting of their support for the Palestinian cause, Jewish students voicing fears for their safety on university and college campuses, and an erosion of support for Israel among some previously allied (or at least sympathetic) individuals and groups.

Davidson said: “I think the fault lines already were in place and they were ready to be exploited . . . to divide and conquer the progressive community,” in which liberal Jews with any affinity toward Israel found themselves no longer welcome in that ideological tent.

Communal organizations remain distressed about the attitude of younger Jews toward Israel. “Surveys show higher levels of animus and lower levels of approval in the Millennial and Gen Z generations. It is in the Jewish community’s interest to fight to get people back into the fold . . . to feel part of the Jewish people,” he said.

Those coming of age since 2000 “have seen Israel portrayed as an aggressor to such an extent that on Oct. 7, when Israel was so clearly and violently attacked, you had members of the Jewish community who were trying justify the attack on Israel,” Davidson said.

To bring them back into the fold, “You do it the way any family reconciles, you form relationships and you work on them. If you think about this, it’s a family problem,” he suggested.

Taking a long view, Davidson advised, “It is really important to take a step back and take a look at the long sweeping arc of history, and what the arc of history tells us is that the Jewish people have always found a way to survive. They have not always thrived but they have often thrived, but they’re not going to thrive without surviving.”

“Right now, it’s survival, that’s the mission, but also, the work that needs to be done is to think about 25 and 50 years down the line, what we want our community to look like and what do we need to do now to make it look like that,” he continued.

As Davidson considers what lies ahead, “I plan on staying in Atlanta and I will always be deeply engaged with our Jewish community.”

Of his three years spent staring hate in the face for a living, he said, “I was proud to have done it. It was an honor.”