By Chris Leppek | Intermountain Jewish News | October 2, 2024
StandWithUs founders and directors Roz and Jerry Rothstein, with Miri Kornfeld (middle), SWU Colorado director, in Denver, Sept. 23, 2024. (Courtesy)
StandWithUs was born in the midst of strife and bloodshed in Israel.
Terrorists were on the offensive. More than a thousand Israelis, civilians and soldiers alike — and children — were killed.
Anti-Zionism, and sometimes anti-Semitism, fueled by orchestrated waves of misinformation, rose across the globe.
But as familiar, and as recent, as all this sounds, it took place more than two decades before Oct. 7, 2023.
The year, in fact, was 2000, and the Second Intifada was underway.
“We started for similar reasons to what’s going on right now,” says Roz Rothstein who, with her husband Jerry Rothstein and Esther Renzer, are the cofounders of StandWithUs and its CEO, COO and international president respectively.
“The Second Intifada started in September of 2000,” Rothstein told the Intermountain Jewish News last week, while she and her husband were in Denver to do a presentation at BMH-BJ entitled “What’s Being Done About Anti-Semitism On Campus . . . And Beyond.”
The visit, organized by the Denver-based StandWithUs Colorado, directed by Miri Kornfeld, was something of a homecoming for Jerry, a Denver native and graduate of George Washington High School.
“There was a lot of violence and bloodshed,” Roz resumes. “The Palestinian terrorists were targeting children.”
Roz and Jerrry, who at the time were working as a family therapist and advertising executive in California, were also Jewish community volunteers. They saw, and were shocked by, not only the death and destruction in Israel but the international misunderstanding that resulted from it.
They decided they had to do something about it.
The initial idea was to spearhead a coalition of Jewish educational and community organizations, to form what they tentatively called an “Israel Emergency Alliance” to “come up with a strategy about educating people about what’s going on in the Middle East, what’s going on with Israel, why Israel responds to terrorism the way it does, the history of the conflict, the Jewish connection to the land — the whole nine yards.”
In May, 2001, the Rothsteins hosted a meeting at their Los Angeles-area home, with representatives from the local federation and ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jewish educational leaders and “rabbis of every denomination,” she says.
“Literally, every Jewish organization we could invite came to that meeting.”
But despite the genuine concern that the attendees expressed, the Rothsteins realized that the alliance they envisioned wasn’t going to come to fruition.
“We realized that everybody was doing their own mission,” Rothstein says. “They didn’t have a plan, and they didn’t have the resources.”
Seeking to fill what their perceived as a community vacuum — concluding that ultimately, “nobody is coming” — StandWithUs was born in May, 2001.
“And we’ve been working ever since, prioritizing the needs that we see,” Rothstein says.
“Now we have 15 departments. We have 175 people working for us around the world, on six continents.”
“We do education and fellowships and internships. We work on college campuses and in high schools and middle schools. We’re doing Holocaust education in the classroom.
“We’re leaders in social media.
“We have a legal department that’s growing and filing Title VI lawsuits. We have an office in Israel across the street from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and we just built an auditorium there.”
Rothstein pauses to catch her breath.
“We have grown significantly in 23 years,” she understates.
Its experience and expertise notwithstanding, Rothstein says, StandWithUs did not anticipate the wave of anti-Semitism that came in the wake of the Hamas massacres on Oct. 7 of last year.
“We did not,” she says. “Nobody did. The students were very, very shocked by the level of cancel culture, of cancellation, that they experienced when they came back to campus after Oct. 7 — much of it from professors expressing shameless, open anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas rhetoric.”
Practically overnight, the organization’s legal department received 10 times the number of complaints from Jewish students concerning anti-Semitic activity.
“None of us were prepared for the level of animosity,” Rothstein says. “It was like a crash on all of our key departments, crashing with pressure from our target audiences.
“There was so much need for social media that our staff was working morning, noon and night, and we had a small staff of four people.”
StandWithUs has been forced to change after Oct. 7, not only by hiring significantly more staff in several departments, but by having to seek funding increases to pay for that expansion.
“But our mission has not changed,” Rothstein says. “What changed was how drastic it all became after Oct. 7.
“Our mission has always been the same — fighting anti-Semitism and educating about Israel because the misinformation leads to hatred and anti-Semitism, and sometimes even violence.
“It’s very important to educate. Education is the road to peace. That’s our motto, because if people know more, then they have a backdrop. They have context. They understand what the issues are.”
The “other side” of this information war — those who Rothstein says are creating and disseminating the misinformation about Israel — “is very, very well-organized,” she says.
“It does a very good job staying consistent, staying on messaging, giving these tools . . . to people who don’t have information, who are ignorant, who are not paying attention. They don’t watch the news, they don’t read a newspaper. So many people are just uninformed, which makes them vulnerable. Misinformation becomes a magnet to people who have no information.”
Such untruths often lead people, who may be otherwise well-intentioned, to believe that Israeli is inherently bad and is arbitrarily killing Palestinian people.
That belief, in turn, can lead them to believe an “out of context blood libel” against Israel, or against Jews in general.
While this may have grown more concentrated in the post-Oct. 7 world, Rothstein says, it’s nothing new. Very similar dynamics were visible in 2001, when StandWithUs was founded.
“People didn’t quite get it 23 years ago,” she said. “Some did, but not many.”
Rothstein herself had no problem “getting it” back then.
“There were many organizations that thought, oh, it’s not so bad. But I’m a daughter of Holocaust survivors, and I know bad when I hear bad. I visited campuses 23 years ago. I saw bloodied Israeli flags, I saw coffins on the floor.
“The implication was that blood libel, that Jewish people and Israelis and Zionists are murdering people for sport. No context was given, not then and not now.”
While the misinformation campaign has been “brewing” for decades, it has been amplified exponentially since Oct. 7, she says, “which is why we’re in such a hurry to move information out into the schools, K through 12, into college campuses, into communities, into churches.
“It’s a rush, a fight, a race against time to make sure that people get more information so that they have context.”
It’s impossible to know how many of those advocating against Israel today are actually anti-Semitic or just dupes in a propaganda war, Rothstein says, but that’s not the point.
“It’s not that they’re anti-Semites,” she says, “but they can very easily become anti-Semites. That’s the danger.
“You know, the German people were not necessarily anti-Semitic before the 1930s. The seeds might have all been there throughout history, but what jumped up was propaganda, making the Jewish people the stranger, making gay people the stranger, making black people, gypsies, everybody, the stranger.”
A central goal of StandWithUs is to identify today’s propaganda, such as that of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine on college campuses, the spearpoint of much of the anti-Israel campaign since Oct. 7.
“They’re willing to walk in lockstep and deliver certain messaging,” Rothstein says of SJP. “They work together. Sometimes the Jewish community, as we know, doesn’t work together enough.”
A glimmer of hope is that since Oct. 7, “the Jewish community seems to be understanding that they need to work together more,” and that StandWithUs has been successful in enlisting allies from the non-Jewish community.
“For 23 years, we’ve had hundreds of partners — Jewish, Christian, Hindu — but now, post-Oct. 7, we have more and more partners. Everybody recognizes that the other side wants to destroy Israel . . . . and anybody that supports Israel, which happens to include the Jewish community at large.”
That threat isn’t going away, Rothstein stresses. Agitation already taking place on college campuses in the new semester suggests that the fight is far from over.
She hopes that at least some college administrations may have learned hard lessons from last term’s tumult, which has resulted in the firing or resignation of any number of administrators.
“Many of the universities that learned a bad lesson will hopefully fix things. That being said, we’re already seeing a lot of hostile campus climates, and we’re getting a lot of calls from students.
“Hopefully, the campus administrators, trustees, presidents, chancellors, everybody, will be much more engaged and careful as we move forward.”
Rothstein pauses and adds a sobering note.
“But the challenges will continue because the goal is not going away, and the goal, at the core, is to destroy Israel and anyone who supports it.
“This is the fight that we have had, and this is the fight that we still have,” Rothstein says.
“The good news is that many in the Jewish community, and also in other communities that are our allies, understand that we must work together.”
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