Abraham Henry Foxman (born May 1, 1940) is a Soviet-born American lawyer.[4] He is the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and a survivor of the Holocaust.
Foxman, an only son, was born in Baranovichi, just months after the Soviet Union took the town from Poland in the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and incorporated it into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The town is now in Belarus. Foxman had Polish Jewish parents: Helen and Joseph Foxman.[2][5]
Foxman’s parents left him with his Polish Catholic nanny Bronislawa Kurpi in 1940 when they were ordered by Germans to enter a ghetto. Foxman was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church as Henryk Stanislaw Kurpi, and raised as a Catholic in Vilnius between 1940 and 1944 when (after several legal custody battles[citation needed]) he was returned to his parents.[6]
Foxman immigrated to the United States in 1950 with his parents.[5] He graduated from the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York City. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the City College of New York and graduated with honors in history. Foxman also holds a law degree from the New York University School of Law. He did graduate work in Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and in international economics at New School University.
Foxman joined the Anti-Defamation League in 1965 in its international affairs division. In 1987, he was the consensus choice of the Board to become its new National Director, replacing long-time director Nathan Perlmutter.[7][8] In February 2014, Foxman announced his plans to step down as National Director of the ADL effective July 20, 2015 (the fiftieth anniversary of his first having joined the ADL).
Foxman has been awarded several honors from nonprofit groups, religious figures and statesmen. In 1998 Foxman received the Interfaith Committee of Remembrance Lifetime Achievement Award “as a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism, bigotry and discrimination”.[9] Foxman won the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Leadership Award on April 18, 2002, from the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey.[10]
On October 16, 2006, Foxman was awarded as Knight of the Legion of Honor by Jacques Chirac, the President of France at the time. This award is France’s highest civilian honor.[11]
On a May 22, 2008, ceremony, Foxman was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Yeshiva University by Richard Joel, the presiding president of Yeshiva University.
Additionally, President George W. Bush appointed Foxman to serve on the Honorary Delegation to accompany him to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of Israel in May 2008.[12]
Foxman’s support for gay rights in America placed him at odds with many Orthodox Jews. Concerning the former, which involved his protest in 20002001 of a case (Boy Scouts of America v. Dale) in which “the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America could exclude a gay scoutmaster because of his sexual orientation”; it was reported that “For many Jewish groups that work with the Boy Scouts mainly Reform temples and Jewish community centers the ensuing year has been marked by soul-searching, as they grappled with whether they should end their ties to the organization because of the organization’s stance on gays,” and that “Within the Jewish community, Orthodox groups supported the ruling, saying civic organizations should be empowered to determine their own message but most Jewish organizations condemned it as endorsing discrimination.” According to that report published a year later, in 2001, “the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, and its national chairman, Howard Berkowitz, said in a statement at the time: “We are stunned that in the year 2000 the Supreme Court could issue such a decision. … This decision effectively states that as long as an organization avows an anti-homosexual position, it is free to discriminate against gay and lesbian Americans.”[13]
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