Jonathan Greenblatt Quotes

We think it's time for the president Donald Trump to announce steps for the White House to undertake. We'd like to see a White House task force on hate crimes. This could be something again convened by the attorney general, but you would bring to bear DHS, the Department of Education, the FBI and other federal agencies to use all of their resources to deal with this problem.

We saw images and ideas from white supremacists literally shared from political campaigns showing up in the Twitter feeds of major news organizations. We saw it in our political rallies as well.

After the Donald Trump's election, there was a surge of hate crimes. We saw acts of vandalism, certainly a lot of slander on social media and, in fact, in the last few months, as you mentioned, a number of bomb threats, almost 70, to dozens of Jewish community centers across the country.

We think every state should have hate crimes laws. It's worth sharing that five states today don't have hate crimes laws, including South Carolina, where a man was arraigned. He had been arrested by the FBI for plotting a Columbine-style attack on a synagogue in Myrtle Beach.

The attorney general could push and the president Donald Trump could push governors and state attorney generals to move forward with hate crimes laws all over America to protect the Jewish community and other marginalized groups.

The president Donald Trump took an important first step. Literally, we hadn't heard him speak in the way that he did, talking about that these threats are painful and that anti-Semitism is horrible. Of course we agree. But, as we have said for a long time, now we need the next step, which is a plan of action to calm these communities where anxiety has reached an incredibly high level.