‘So important to teach American Jews what it is to be Israeli,’ Elan Carr says

Just as Israelis unified against a common foe after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, the hundreds of thousands of Israeli Americans stateside have also mobilized in the past 10 months to fight rising Jew-hatred, including on U.S. campuses.

Elan Carr, CEO of the Israeli American Council, said recently during an interview with JNS that his “national community-based organization” has been a “bridge” strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship and engaging with the estimated 800,000 to a million Israelis in the United States.

“These are community members that turn out in good times to celebrate Israel and rejoice—on Yom Ha’atzmaut or Purim and various events—but also turn out in bad times,” said Carr, a former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. “We have seen that par excellence since Oct. 7, where our community has been at the forefront of leading the fight for the Jewish people in the State of Israel in the United States.”

Those with whom the IAC engages turned out in large numbers after Oct. 7 “from Boston through Austin to Los Angeles and everywhere in between,” Carr said. “Mass amounts of our community members took to the streets and had rallies demanding that the United States support Israel unequivocally and unconditionally.”

Israeli-Americans demanded that Hamas free the hostages, including doing so in the heart of Manhattan. “We closed the northern part of Times Square. We had every digital billboard surrounding Times Square with pictures of hostages,” he said. “We held a rally in that intersection of the world that Times Square is.”

When Jew-hatred “exploded” on U.S. campuses, IAC “was the first organization to jump into the fray,” holding “massive rallies” at or near Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George Washington University, University of California, Los Angeles and elsewhere, according to Carr.

“We came and showed that much-needed solidarity with students, with Jewish students and Jewish faculty who are pro-Israel, who are frankly besieged, suffering unbelievable harassment and discrimination,” he said. “We leapt into the action and brought much-needed strength and solidarity to campus.”

Investment in the future

Carr told JNS that he has been service-focused for his entire life.

He served in U.S. law enforcement, as a criminal prosecutor who went after Los Angeles gangs and as a U.S. Army officer, who served in Iraq for a year.

“Service to country, service to the Jewish people,” he said.

Carr also served as the international president of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, because “investing in the future leaders of the Jewish people is the most important investment we can make,” he told JNS.

As U.S. special envoy, he had the “tremendous honor” of both serving the country and fighting for Jews worldwide. The job, he told JNS, involved “really leading all U.S. policy globally on this fight against this vicious scourge of Jew-hatred, ancient and yet modern.”

At the IAC, which was founded 17 years ago, Carr is focused on helping unify the Israeli-American community and making the Israeli-American voice an essential part of the U.S. Jewish world.

“It’s so important to teach American Jews what it is to be Israeli,” he said. “The Hebrew language isn’t just the Israeli language. It’s the language of the Jewish people, and the idea of Jewish sovereignty and understanding that living in the Jewish homeland, under Jewish sovereignty, is something that belongs to all Jews.”

“The essence of IAC is to bring the Israeli-American voice and ethos into the Jewish American experience and really create a joint identity, whereby Israeli-Americans and Jewish-Americans are entirely together and unified in how we approach our identity, the future generation but also the great challenges affecting us today,” he said.

Beyond rallies

Since Oct. 7, IAC’s department devoted to fighting Jew-hatred has worked intensively on 600 individual cases—300 in universities, and 300 in primary and secondary schools—including meeting with families and attending school board meetings and diversity, equity and inclusion events.

“It’s not only about rallies and taking to the streets. We do that better than anybody, but it’s also about being aggressive in confronting challenges and threats and in advocating for our rights, something that the Israeli ethos is famous for,” Carr told JNS. “We’re not only reactive and handling these many, many cases of harassment and discrimination and violence—terrible stuff. We’re also proactive.”

IAC has trained nearly 2,000 public school teachers about Jew-hatred, anti-Zionism, Jewish peoplehood and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism since Oct. 7, according to Carr.

“Think about impact,” he said. “Think about one teacher. One teacher, 40 kids in a class. Class after class after class. That’s one teacher. We’ve trained nearly 2,000 since Oct. 7.”

The organization is proactive in approaching schools, rather than waiting for them to come to the IAC. “We rush into the fire, because we know now this is a crossroads, and we have to mobilize our community, unite not only Israeli-Americans but the Jewish-American community and rush to defend ourselves, because we are under attack.”

IAC, through its IAC for Action, has also focused on lobbying states to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

“I had the great privilege of being at signing ceremonies across the country, where governors in ceremonies have said, ‘I am signing this IHRA law that not only adopts but uses IHRA to determine whether it’s antisemitic harassment or discrimination or hate crimes,’” Carr said. “‘And I’m proud to sign it because my state is standing with the Jewish people unequivocally.’”

“That’s what these governors are saying. I was with Gov. (Kristi) Noem in South Dakota and Gov. (Henry) McMaster in South Carolina and Gov. (Brian) Kemp in Georgia, and the list goes on,” Carr said. “Gov. (Chris) Sununu in New Hampshire just signed an IHRA legislation. All of these bills are bills that IAC was integrally involved in helping craft and helping pass.”

Not just a blip

Although Jew-hatred has been rising for two decades, much of the world turned a blind eye, according to Carr. “Even some of the Jewish organizations said, ‘Well, it’s just a blip,’” he said. “Everyone gets it now.”

The Oct. 7 attack, “the most horrendous and savage pogrom since the Holocaust,” not only didn’t embarrass the world’s antisemites, but it had the opposite effect. “The fact that that savagery, in all of its barbarous medieval cruelty, would cause the antisemites of the world to come out of the woodwork and with unvarnished, unhinged vehemence against our people demand more of the same.”

“Let’s be clear. That’s what this is. They demanded more of the same,” Carr said. “They saw what happened. They know what happened to babies, to women, and they said, ‘intifada revolution.’ ‘Globalize the intifada.’ Meaning ‘Bring it here. Let’s not stop there. Let’s do this to all the Jews in the world.’ Or ‘from the river to the sea. Let’s do that to every person who lives in Israel.’ This is an absolute disgrace. It is horrific.”

It is also “absolutely unacceptable” that certain states, governments, mayors and others allow this to happen and allow campuses to be taken over by antisemites. The IAC and its partners “are saying ‘Not on our watch,’” Carr said. “We are not going to let this happen, and we’re going to fight.”

Anti-western

Jew-hatred has been hiding not in the shadows but in plain sight, according to Carr. “It’s taught in classes, the new antisemitism that brands Jews as ‘white oppressor colonialists,’” he said. “Certainly the State of Israel that way, and defines people of color, regardless of their skin color, as perpetual victims from whom nothing should be expected and who can’t be criticized for any conduct, because they have every right to rip the system apart.”

“This is an ideology, a neo-Marxist ideology that is orthodoxy on campus and has been orthodoxy on campus for a long time,” Carr said.

Since Oct. 7, parents and others have realized that “we can’t allow our most important asset, our kids, to be indoctrinated in this poisonous anti-American, anti-western and of course antisemitic ideology,” he said.

Even as that hatred of Jews has spread in the halls of Congress and elsewhere, Carr is optimistic that it can be countered.

“If I weren’t optimistic, I wouldn’t have taken the appointment in the Trump administration and I wouldn’t be leading the IAC now,” he said. “There is no question that if we are unified and if we take the right actions together, we absolutely can roll this back. Not only contain it, but roll it back.”

“That requires a muscular, strong, aggressive, forward-leaning approach,” he added. “Not only to defend ourselves. Yes, certainly that. But also to go on the offense. This is a war.”

In the ideological war against Jews worldwide, as in every war, one needs to be aggressive. “I’m an Army officer, 22 years in the U.S military. Let me tell you, you don’t win only by playing defense,” Carr said. “You have to defend yourself, but you also have to go on the offense. If we do that, there’s no question that we’ll win.”