By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – When Fabienne Perlov, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, speaks about building better relationships among different ethnic, religious, racial, and gender communities, it is heart-felt. It has been what her life has been about since 1998 when she was a French teenager who was welcomed in Kirov, Russia, as an exchange student.
While she was staying with a family in that city on the Vyatka River, about 550 miles northeast of Moscow, the Russian government devalued the ruble, defaulted on its debt, and prompted a major increase in inflation. Perlov’s host family saw their savings wiped out, and they had to struggle to put “meats or sweets” on the dinner table.
Perlov, who had grown up in Rennes, in northwestern France, as the daughter of two bankers who had worked their way up the ranks, found the situation of her host family “eye-opening” and “very hard for me to see.”
“It was a turning point in my life where I felt that I had been so privileged in my life,” she said. “I wanted to give back and to alleviate suffering wherever I would find it. It really triggered my career, working with refugees for more than 10 years, working with diverse communities in need around the globe, and ultimately in diplomacy as well.”
After returning home, Perlov obtained a bachelor’s degree in Russian Studies, while creating with her friends and fellow students a small organization to raise money for an orphanage in Russia. As part of her bachelor’s program, she studied for six months in Moscow, interning at a nonprofit organization helping to prevent HIV/ AIDS among commercial sex workers.
She also traveled to Brazil to work on a reforestation project.
Next, she studied for a master’s degree in international development studies, interning in Azerbaijan with an agency of the United Nations focusing on HIV prevention.
“Once, I graduated with my master’s degree, I was hired by the French government to work with refugees and stateless persons,” she said. She processed requests for asylum from Chechen refugees who fled the war between Chechnya and Russia. “I was in charge of adjudicating their applications, interviewing asylum seekers, making assessments of their claims and legal decisions,” she said. “My portfolio included other countries. I did a lot of work with asylum seekers from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.”
After four years in that position, Perlov was hired by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Tel Aviv, Israel, to help deal with the crisis of refugees mostly from sub-Saharan African countries crossing into Israel via the Sinai Peninsula. It was in Israel, she said, where she “chose” Judaism.
“The Israeli Ministry of the Interior needed to increase their capacity to deal with the crisis, so they hired me with my experience to help them process the asylum seekers,” Perlov related. “Once the crisis was a bit settled, I would monitor the situation in the detention centers and how to release the asylum seekers who had a serious claim.” She often had to deal with women, children, and the elderly.
“I think my experiences with the French government, and the experience on the ground, really gave me a holistic view of the refugee crisis and challenged my own bias,” she said. “When you work with so many people of different cultural, economic, religious, ethnic backgrounds, you have to learn. Biases are universal so you have to look into yourself and understand what you bring to the table in order to help the people who you are supposed to help.” It is necessary to be “open-minded and curious to learn about others,” she added.
Altogether she was in Israel for five years, working for both UNHCR and with the Israeli government. “I worked in Jerusalem as well as in the West Bank with Bedouins and Palestinians,” she said. “There it was more programmatic management, just supporting human care programs.”
Her jobs helped her gain insight into the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, she said. “Being Jewish and working in both environments, it gave me a 360-degree understanding of the situation. Hearing different narratives, it really exposed me to the diversity of views and experiences.”
From Israel, she and her husband moved to Canada, where Perlov gave birth to two children in three years, while also working for a time in Toronto with the Jewish Family and Service Agency on child welfare programs.
Her husband happily accepted a position in San Diego. “Canada is an amazing country; we love the cultural diversity, but the winters are brutal,” Perlov explained.
In San Diego, for six years before joining the ADL, Perlov served as the executive director of the San Diego Diplomacy Council.
“Our main partnership was with the U.S. Department of State which has this prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program,” she said. “That program has U.S. embassies around the world identifying movers and shakers, emerging leaders and influencers, and inviting them to come to the United States on three-week professional exchange programs where they go to different cities, meet with their professional peers on their topic of expertise, and meet with the communities.” In addition to professional exchanges, the program also tries to foster for the visitors “a better understanding of Americans and the American way of life.”
While leading the San Diego Diplomacy Council, Perlov also served as vice chair of the City of San Diego’s International Affairs Board which “advises the San Diego mayor and the City Council on international issues and promoting the city’s cultural diversity.” That Board interacts with the various official San Diego Sister City organizations – there are 16 of them spanning the globe – as well as unofficial “Friendship Cities” such as Sha’ar Hanegev, Israel, which is a partnership city with the Jewish Federation of San Diego.
During that time, Perlov interacted with the ADL in different ways. She arranged for its experts on extremism to meet with international delegations that wished to focus on combating violence and extremism. On a more personal level, she joined in the Walk Against Hate following the fatal shooting of Lori Gilbert Kaye at the Chabad of Poway in 2019, and attended ADL Interfaith Seders.
When the position of ADL Regional Director opened with the departure of Tammy Gillies, Perlov said she felt motivated to apply for the job, to which she was appointed last October. “With antisemitism being at historic high levels, I felt like I could not stand on the side and not put my experience forward,” she said.
“My family are survivors of the Holocaust and with antisemitism in America and around the world revived, and with the pain of Holocaust survivors, and the second and third generations, I wanted to assure that my children who are now San Diegans grow up in a community where they can thrive with their friends, Jews and non-Jews,” she said.
“I have seen the rise of hate in general across the nation and this increase in bigotry of all kinds is really a threat to our safety and the security of our neighborhoods, and I want to do something about it.”
She was interviewed by national ADL officers in New York and members of the local regional board, and staff, before being offered the job.
Today, “my focus area has been to double down to responding to incidents; supporting victims of incidents with the right strategy and advice; and coordinating with and liaising with law enforcement organizations to respond appropriately to antisemitic and hate incidents,” she said.
“We have also done a lot of work tracking and reporting trends of antisemitism to inform policies and education solutions,” she continued. “Advocacy has been a big priority at the local, state and federal level. As soon as I arrived, I pushed forward a resolution by the County Board of Supervisors to condemn antisemitism. We also had the City Council voting on a proclamation to recognize Yom HaShoah and the Holocaust survivors in San Diego.” She complimented San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria for “forcefully condemning antisemitism.”
At the state and federal levels, ADL has been pushing for more community security grants “to help secure places of worship and other community institutions, Jewish and non-Jewish.” At the federal level, ADL has backed legislation to encourage Holocaust education throughout the country.
“Education is a very important part of ADL’s work and very close to my heart because I strongly believe in preventing biased attitudes at the youngest age in our society,” she said. “We have increased just in a year the number of “No Place for Hate’ schools, bringing it from 169 schools this year to 200 schools – with 140,000 students” in the academic year just about to begin. “In addition to our anti-bias program we are doing more and more workshops on antisemitism, training more and more educators on Holocaust education, and really doubling down on our efforts.”
In government offices and private industry, Perlov said, ADL sponsors seminars “to learn about who are the Jews, what is antisemitism, how to combat it, how to support Jewish employees in the company, understanding Jewish holidays, and how we Jews observe them.”
Perlov said she relies on the media to help increase awareness of the dangers of antisemitism and hopes to educate some arms of the media about how they inadvertently assist white supremacists who drop antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ+ leaflets in various neighborhoods around the county, as has been occurring recently.
“Some of the media showed the content of the flyers, shared the name of the group behind them,” Perlov said. “We have to educate the local media to not give more publicity to these groups that are just craving the exposure.”
In ADL’s work with law enforcement, she said, “I can tell you that we have people who are undercover tracking these extremists and sharing information with law enforcement to make sure major attacks don’t happen.”
The current wave of antisemitism comes from the extreme right and the extreme left, Perlov said. The extreme right tries to popularize myths about Jewish power and a purported design by our people to replace White people with immigrants of various races. The extreme left, meanwhile, contends that Israel has no right to exist, that its establishment was racist, and blames Jews, wherever we may live, for Palestinian suffering.
Recently, two members of San Diego County’s Human Relations Commission made comments that were widely seen as both anti-Israel and antisemitic. Perlov has just been appointed to that commission by County Supervisor Tara Lawson-Remer, and said when she takes her seat in September, she will try to dialogue with those commissioners.
In the interim, ADL joined with the American Jewish Committee and with the Jewish Federation of San Diego to condemn the statements.
“We need to have more education on antisemitism and anti-bias education,” Perlov commented. “We need to have dialogue and training for the commissioners, and it needs to be recognized that there is really anti-Jewish settlement. It has no place on the Human Relations Commission which is supposed to promote positive relations among communities regardless of their ethnic, religion, or background. This is a test case for San Diego County, and it has to be addressed. The Human Relations Commission has to be a place where we build relationships and not hate.”
Asked if action should be taken against the two commissioners, Perlov responded: “ADL is always about counseling, not canceling, so I would definitely push for dialogue.”
On Monday, July 24, Orthodox Rabbi Aharon Shapiro reportedly was followed into a 7/11 store near San Diego State University. A White man, approximately in his early 30s, asked him if he were Jewish. The rabbi responded proudly that he was, and the man allegedly yelled antisemitic and anti-Israel slurs, at one point coming up behind the rabbi and allegedly ripping off the rabbi’s tzitzits before running away. San Diego Police Lt. Adam Sharki subsequently reported that they were investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.
Perlov encourages people to report hate incidents to the ADL. “They can use our text application called Hate Help, and the number is 8334480248,” she said. “We encourage messages of solidarity and rejection of hate. Allyship is really important. It is true for other marginalized communities to stand with the Jewish community, and it is true for the Jewish community to stand in allyship with other communities that are attacked by hate. We are all in this together!”
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com