Abraham Cooper

Rabbi Abraham Cooper has served as Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center since 1977, making him one of the longest-tenured senior officials of any major American Jewish organization and the primary diplomatic and governmental relations officer for the institution that Rabbi Marvin Hier built. Born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family, Cooper was ordained as a rabbi and joined the Wiesenthal Center at its founding, developing the organization's relationships with governments, law enforcement agencies, and technology companies around the world over nearly five decades of sustained engagement.

Cooper has been the Wiesenthal Center's primary interlocutor with governments on antisemitism, hate crimes, and Holocaust denial. He has met personally with the leaders of dozens of countries across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — including meetings with Arab leaders on Holocaust education and antisemitism reduction that would have been unthinkable in a previous era. His work with technology companies has included sustained pressure campaigns on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube to remove Holocaust denial content, antisemitic material, and terrorist recruitment content from their platforms — pressure that predated by decades the post-October 7 debate about social media and antisemitism and that established the Wiesenthal Center as one of the first civil society organizations to take platform content moderation seriously as an advocacy target.

His relationship with the Japanese government — he has been a consistent interlocutor on antisemitism education in Japan, which has its own history of antisemitic publishing — demonstrates the range of Cooper's diplomatic engagement, which extends well beyond the standard European and North American antisemitism circuits. At Rank 67, Cooper is the institutional diplomat whose behind-the-scenes work with governments, tech platforms, and international bodies has produced outcomes — hate speech removals, government antisemitism programs, Holocaust education mandates — that are less visible than advocacy speeches but more durable in their institutional effects.