There were the speeches. There were the statistics. There was Jonathan Greenblatt on the main stage warning of the most dangerous surge of antisemitism in living memory. All of that mattered — and all of that was real. But the people who spent two days at Never Is Now, the ADL’s annual summit and the world’s largest gathering dedicated to fighting antisemitism, will tell you that the most powerful moments often happened somewhere else entirely. In the corridors. Over coffee. In the accidental, lingering conversations between sessions that no agenda could have planned. This was not simply a conference. It was a community coming together — to learn, to grieve, to compare notes, to find allies, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, to feel hope.

Thousands arrived from across the country and around the world. Policymakers sat beside activists. Campus leaders sat beside corporate executives. Holocaust educators sat beside first-generation advocates who had only recently found their voice. And woven through all of it was a recognition that in this particular moment in Jewish history, none of them should be doing this alone.

It felt like a reunion in many cases — seeing people you know, learning and growing, and seeing for the first time in a while: hope. Knowing you are not alone in this fight. That is the magic of the experience.

The State of Hate: What Greenblatt Told a Full House

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt opened the summit with a blunt accounting of where things stand. The numbers alone are staggering.

But Greenblatt made clear the threat is not just statistical. He described the West Bloomfield, Michigan car-bomb attempt on Temple Israel — where 106 children were in daycare when the attack was thwarted — and violence from Australia to Canada. “Antisemitism has not just become murderous,” he said. “It’s become mundane.” He named the full spectrum of perpetrators: white supremacists, Islamist extremists, conspiratorial politicians, and media figures. The hate, he said, is “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

“We are facing the most concentrated, the most dangerous, and lethal surge of antisemitism — the worst in living memory.”

— Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO

He also closed the door on a growing debate about whether fighting antisemitism is worth the institutional investment. “Some have argued that we need to choose between fighting antisemitism and building Jewish life,” he said. “Those aren’t competing priorities — they are inseparable preconditions.” And the stakes, he argued, reach beyond any one community. “A country riddled by antisemitism is one where democracy is in danger — for everyone.”

The Magic in the Hallways

If the main stage set the urgency, the corridors carried the soul. Never Is Now attracts a genuinely unusual mix of people — and the unscheduled collisions between them are part of what makes it singular. Professionals connected with students. Advocates met philanthropists. Shlichim — emissaries from........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)