Andrew Goretsky has experienced antisemitism throughout his life, as most if not all Jews do, but it wasn’t until recently that he decided he needed to dedicate his professional time to alleviating the problem in the communities he loves.
He said there were three factors in his decision to work for the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia office.
The first was the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. At that event, Nazis and other far-right actors gathered at the campus at the University of Virginia to protest the school’s decision to remove controversial monuments in the area.
“I always paid attention to what was going on around protests on campuses, and at this [one] individuals were chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’” he said.
Goretsky was confused as to why an event supposedly about preserving Confederate statues turned to antisemitism. So, he grabbed his computer.
“That’s when I did a bit of research and really started learning about ADL, learning about the great replacement conspiracy theory,” he said, citing a conspiracy that blames Jews for orchestrating the nonexistent systematic replacement of white Americans with Black and brown ones.
Then, in the fall of 2018, more tragedy struck, this time much worse: The Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, was the victim of an antisemitic mass shooting, taking 11 lives and shocking the nation. Goretsky said that when he dropped off his son at Hebrew school the next day, the situation felt different.
“I experienced antisemitism in my life, but dropping him off at Hebrew school was really the first time I experienced real fear around my Jewish identity,” he said.
The final factor that led Goretsky to seek a position in the Jewish professional sphere, particularly combating antisemitism, was what he saw on college campuses as a lifelong professional in higher education: rising antisemitism.
For Goretsky, after time at Landmark College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Maryland, George Washington University, Temple University and Arcadia University, at the last of which he served as dean of students, it was clear where the tides were headed.
“I talked about this during my interview process back in 2021 before I was hired: my concern over rising antisemitism, anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses,” he said. “It’s something I had been feeling for some time, seeing it for some time, and you know, in the spaces that I worked, I really gained a view and understanding of that. I spoke about it a lot.”
As regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Philadelphia since January 2022, Goretsky’s tenure has been short but turbulent. Following the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, subsequent war and the global rise of antisemitism, running the regional office has required a comprehensive approach to stemming the tide of discrimination.
In Philadelphia, that issue is more present on the campuses of colleges and universities than perhaps anywhere else. With a number of large and historic schools in the city and more in the immediate vicinity, the tensions felt particularly inflamed in Philadelphia immediately following Oct. 7.
Thankfully, Goretsky is the perfect man for the job.
His previous work allowed him to see the factors that preceded and contributed to what has happened since Oct. 7: unbridled hate speech against Jews being protected by colleges in the name of the First Amendment. To be clear, Goretsky said he will defend someone’s right to free speech, but not when it crosses the line into harassment.
He summed it up with a metaphor.
“If we think of higher education as a piece of cake, there was rot in that cake going on for decades,” he said. “On Oct. 7, that rot broke through the icing and it became visible to everybody. There was always this underlying [component] and incidents have been going up dramatically for years.”
He cited one event that occurred right before the Oct. 7 massacre as evidence. The University of Pennsylvania was hosting an event called “Palestine Writes” that featured noted antisemite Roger Waters at the end of September 2023.
Despite the fact that the ADL and students presented evidence of Waters’ past statements qualifying as not just antizionist but antisemitic, UPenn leadership did not cancel his attendance or the conference.
For Goretsky, a lifetime of Judaism and a background in higher education made him a good leader for what would come in the first years of his tenure. He said that the ADL’s description of the gravity of the situation is backed up by statistics.
In 2022, the Philadelphia chapter received about 500 reports of antisemitism. The next year, that number jumped 200% to more than 1,500 complaints. (Goretsky did note that these are the number of complaints his office has received for this region alone, though not all of them make it into ADL’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.)
“Almost 1,000 of those were received after Oct. 7, through the end of December. So the explosion and exponential increase of issues was dramatic,” Goretsky said.
For Goretsky, work can be exhausting. His day-to-day grind focuses so much on people who hate him, but it’s work that has to be done. He said that he got a chance to describe his ethos at his son’s recent bar mitzvah, which he tabbed as “one of the proudest moments” of his life.
“When I spoke, I said to him that Judaism is important [because of the] community. It has always been about community for me and how it comes together,” he said. “We are blessed to be part of a community that has existed for multiple millennia, and despite challenges, continues to survive and thrive.”
