Eric Fingerhut Thinks He’s the President of the Jews

Abe Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in 2004.

It’s a sign of the weakness of the Jewish establishment.

By Josh Nathan-Kazis, Reposted from Jewish Currents, March 24, 2026

There is no formal Jewish polity in the US, no official Jewish parastate, but there is an informal one, and last week Eric Fingerhut declared himself its president.

Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, stepped to a podium in Washington last Thursday to deliver an unremarkable speech on JFNA’s legislative priorities: exhorting Congress to spend more on security for Jewish institutions, and complaining about pro-Palestinian protests.

What was remarkable was that Fingerhut and the JFNA called the speech a “State of the Jewish Union Address.” Delivered a week before President Trump’s own State of the Union, it was no less than an attempted Jewish communal coup; an effort to snatch the mantle of commander-in-chief of the American Jewish establishment from, say, William Daroff at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, or Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League.

Fingerhut, who served a single term in Congress in the 1990s, was never elected president of the Jews. But no one has ever been elected president of the Jews, and we’ve had them before: Louis Marshall, who helped found the American Jewish Committee in 1906, could have claimed the title. Marshall’s nemesis Stephen Wise, who led the American Jewish Congress, could have, too. Both claimed for themselves the mantle of American Jewish leadership, and did it convincingly enough that the general public, officials in Washington, and even some in the Jewish community itself, saw them as our legitimate representatives.

From the 1990s until just before the pandemic, two men prosecuted similar claims: Abe Foxman, the garrulous chief of the ADL, and Malcolm Hoenlein, the stony-faced executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents. Foxman presented himself as the Jews’ chief spokesman, with a quote ready for any reporter who wanted to know what the Jews thought. Hoenlein was the first on the list when the White House went looking for Jewish input on Mideast policy.

Foxman retired in 2015, and Hoenlein’s slow-motion transition out of the leadership of the Conference of Presidents ended in 2020; the presidency of the Jews has been vacant ever since.

Now, Fingerhut is making his own play for the throne. One top executive at a member organization of the Conference of Presidents told me this week that if the JFNA is trying to position itself as the central institution of the Jewish establishment, it is Abe Foxman’s role they’re looking to emulate. “To the extent there was one person who was seen as the unofficial pope of the mainstream Jewish community, it was Abe,” the person said. “ADL has clearly vacated that role. Perhaps Eric and JFNA are looking to fill it.” The JFNA didn’t respond to my email on Monday asking to talk to Fingerhut about his claim.

The very fact that it’s Fingerhut who is reaching for the crown in this moment is a sign of the extraordinary political weakness of JFNA’s rival establishment institutions, and of the American Jewish establishment at large.

The JFNA has historically been the least influential of the major national establishment institutions. A trade organization for the local Jewish federations, the JFNA’s top executive is beholden to the hundreds of local federations and affiliated groups in its network, whose dues cover the JFNA budget. The organization’s history is marked by squabbles over the pools of money it gathers and redistributes.

For decades, it has been the Conference of Presidents, the ADL, and the American Jewish Committee that have been the real seats of American Jewish communal power. Now, those groups are looking battered, as the pro-Israel consensus falls apart in Washington, and the Zionist consensus among American Jews is crumbling.

The Conference of Presidents, once the unitary voice of organized Jews in Washington, competes for influence with J Street to its left, and various Trump-era upstarts to its right. The ADL seems to have lost its ability to read the proverbial room, alienating virtually everyone with its splashy missteps, and finding itself with few friends. Fingerhut and the JFNA see this diminished landscape, and they’re seizing the moment to assert their own claim to communal leadership.

Whether Fingerhut can make himself our Abe Foxman is far from assured. For those of us who aren’t yearning for the next Foxman or Hoenlein to speak for us, there’s an opportunity here. Foxman and Hoenlein could only lead the Jews because we let them, more or less. The establishment is weak, and its traditions are open to challenges not only from the inside, like Fingerhut’s, but from those of us on the outside, as well. What Fingerhut’s coup attempt tells us is that the time to mount our challenge is now.

Josh Nathan-Kazis is a staff writer for the Jewish Currents. He covers charities and politics, and writes investigations and longform.

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