Frontpage Interview's guest today is Dr. Charles Jacobs, a columnist for the Boston Jewish Advocate who is concerned about the failure of leadership in America and in the Jewish community to deal with anti-Semitism. He has done a series exposing the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for failing to deal with Islamic anti-Semitism. He's been widely published, including in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Jerusalem Post, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. He has appeared on local and national television and radio, including NBC, CBS, NPR, CNN and PBS. He received his doctoral degree in social policy from Harvard. In 2007, he was named by the Forward newspaper as one of America 's 50 top Jewish leaders.

FP: Dr. Charles Jacobs, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about the series you are doing on the ADL and its failure to deal with Islamic anti-Semitism. What have you discovered?

Jacobs: Thanks, Jamie. Let me provide some context. The Jewish community has come under siege. We have had a wonderful 50 years after the end of WWII but the world has changed and unfortunately some of our leaders seem not to have recognized this. Given our small size and our sizable foes, the Jewish community has always valued unity. Unity is important, but I reluctantly decided to become critical of some of our leaders because of the seriousness and urgency of the current situation.

A few months back, I decided to break what is in effect a gentlemen's agreement among Jewish leaders not to criticize each other in public. At the end of an op-ed about Wafa Sultan, the courageous Muslim reformer who risks her life daily to fight real threats posed by Islamists to us all, I chided ADL for its relative silence on this, the greatest threat to Jews today. When Abe Foxman responded with a letter to my home town Jewish paper attacking me, I began a series of articles on the ADL's failure, and I proposed a list of key principles for beginning a serious effort against Islamic anti-Semitism.

Bernard Lewis explains that anti-Semitism is a virus that morphs over time. After the Holocaust, it became no longer acceptable for most in Western societies to hate Jews for the old reasons -- either because of our religion (as "Christ-killers") or because of our race -- the Nazis taught we were racial vermin. Instead Jews were coming to be hated in the West because of their state. As you know, this animus against Israel comes mostly from the Left. At the same time, Radical Islam, with its virulent, theologically based anti-Semitism, surges throughout the Muslim realm. So Jews now are in a New Time, a daunting situation that can be described as a perfect storm. Unexpectedly, we became targeted simultaneously by two powerful world currents - anti-Israel Leftist "Palestinianism" and Islamic anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, Jewish leaders and their organizations, for the most part, have not responded effectively to this new situation.

For years, as President of the David Project, I had been writing articles and speaking with top Jewish leaders behind the scenes about this, urging them to call the Jews to order, to announce and explain the "New Time" and the new threat profile, and to create strategies to effectively respond. It was extremely frustrating. I recall several years ago the American Jewish Committee published a powerful pamphlet authored by Robert Wistrich on Islamic anti-Semitism. It was shocking and could have been an effective tool to awaken the Jewish community to what Wistrich showed was a looming existential threat. Yet in Boston that pamphlet stayed mostly on AJC's shelves. I ordered copies from their New York office and used it in our summer training programs for college bound Jewish students. It should have -- and could have -- become a tool for AJC to run a national mass educational campaign about the realities and dangers of Islamic anti-Semitism. That didn't happen.

Two years ago I attended a three day conference in Jerusalem on Global Anti-Semitism sponsored by Israel 's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Senior leaders of American Jewry were present. We all heard how Islamic anti-Semitism - theologically based, was spread with Saudi funding to mosques and madrassas throughout the Islamic world, instructing tens if not hundreds of millions of people that Jews were the sons of monkeys and pigs and that to kill us is a holy deed. It was a breakthrough conference: Hundreds of Jewish leaders, teachers, scholars sat through days of powerful presentations. Everyone agreed. I sat right behind Abe Foxman. But ADL made no significant change. Attending conferences is necessary but not sufficient. Talk is cheap. We must become activist in fighting against the new anti-Semitism. We must go beyond talking to each other and wringing our hands...