Malcolm Hoenlein writes the rulebook for diplomatic success, and wants Orthodox Jews to step up

Photos: Meir Haltovsky, Flash90

Malcolm Hoenlein is no alarmist, but he’s sounding the alarm.

The man who’s had the ear of democrats and despots across the world for what seems like forever, is deeply worried by the last year. Hyperbole isn’t his style; interests are more compelling when it comes to calculations of power. But now, as a child of Holocaust survivors, he reaches for some dark imagery. “It’s not Germany 1938,” he says, “but it feels like 1935.”

The reason is an unprecedented convergence of threats to the Jewish world. Even after the historic peace deals with Gulf States justified Hoenlein’s long-held hopes, the Iranian threat is turning critical. And for the first time, anti-Semitism is not just a European problem. While threats to milah and shechitah are ever-present in the Old World, the mainstreaming of far-left anti-Israel hostility as embodied by the Squad and the spillover of Gaza tension onto New York’s streets are new to American shores.

In a conversation that’s part stream-of-consciousness, part tour d’horizon after a year of diplomatic breakthroughs, he returns more than expected to the home front.

“No one anticipated that in 2021 America, we’d have to worry about the security of our shuls. We used to deal with country-club anti-Semitism, but now religious-looking Jews are being attacked for what’s happening in Gaza.”

Hoenlein’s concern takes in the future of community leadership as well. After decades at the helm of the Presidents’ Conference — perhaps the most influential Jewish diplomatic post outside of Israel — he’s stepped back from the day-to-day to focus on larger projects for the organization. But although religious Jews are politically active more than ever, the numbers following in his own footsteps to head major nondenominational organizations has fallen.

Fifty-five years after he took up advocacy for the Jewish People, Malcolm Hoenlein has his eye on the next generation of leaders, and he’s sharing his hard-earned wisdom.

“You have to be able to keep a secret,” he says of his decades-worth of conversations with world leaders. That’s why Hoenlein gives very little away despite his torrent of analysis, anecdotes, and sometimes-passionate statements.

“Leaders,” says this unusual mix of accessibility and shadow man, “value trust.”