Adam Katz was hired by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft to lead the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism earlier this year before it was renamed the Blue Square Alliance in October. He has adapted skills he picked up working for the National Football League and as a corporate consultant to understand the root of antisemitism, to engage new allies and to build a proprietary data-culling and psychological assessment tool to aid his foundation in its deliverables. He shared with City & State in late June that his Holocaust survivor grandparents inspired him to find more challenging and complex problems to work on as he progresses through his career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Please introduce yourself to our readers, just in case they’ve never heard of the Blue Square Alliance.
I’m the president of the foundation. Our organization exists to reduce antisemitism, reduce Jewish hate and, frankly, hate of all kinds by activating those who we call “unengaged” who are sitting on the sidelines. They don’t consider Jewish hate to be a significant problem or a relevant problem to them, and our organization exists to bring them in and activate them as allies, as supporters, in the fight against Jewish hate and other forms of hatred.
Your slogan is: “Get people off the sidelines and into the game.” I’ve heard you repeat it often, and you use it to motivate people to be an ally to the Jewish community, to be thinking about antisemitism. It’s a tie-in to your previous career in the National Football League and to Blue Square’s founder, Robert Kraft. There was also the Super Bowl ad the organization paid for earlier this year. What other kinds of plans do you have to leverage sports and entertainment to unite Americans around combating antisemitism?
We use many different forms of media to distribute our messaging, and we’re always thinking about what are the most powerful, broadest reach and impactful channels through which we can distribute this information. To get people activated in the fight against hate with sports and entertainment, they provide a great canvas for this, for many reasons. Live sports, for example, is one of the few remaining television advertising opportunities where people aren’t fast forwarding or watching without commercials and without streaming. It’s something where people are engaged. You get people that are emotionally involved in what they’re watching, often watching in groups, and it’s an opportunity to reach a broad audience at a time where they’re willing and able to watch and receive the message. And we use sports that way, but that’s just one example.
We also got all the commissioners of major American sports leagues: NFL, NBA, NHL, onboard. Similarly, we work with entertainers and content creators who also have broad reach and have significant influence over their audience. We’re always looking for what are the most cost-effective ways to reach a big audience because we’re targeting tens of millions of Americans, and sports entertainment is a great vehicle for that.
The foundation has been around since 2019. There was a huge jump in your organization’s funding from fiscal years 2022 to 2023. It went from $10 million to $160 million in revenue. How did the Blue Square Alliance build so quickly?
When we were founded in 2019, the first couple of years were spent really defining how can we be most effective at achieving our mission. We were founded by Robert (Kraft) in 2019 after he had been awarded the Genesis Prize by the state of Israel. When Robert was studying all the various organizations that are focused on antisemitism, he didn’t find any that were taking the angle that (Blue Square Alliance) is now taking. There are a number of organizations that are a little more academically oriented, more about white papers and research, which is wonderful and valuable, but not necessarily that action-oriented. And then there’s a number of organizations that are a little more confrontational. And you know some of them are more lobbying-oriented, and things like that. Nobody was really focused on engaging this unengaged population, building empathy, building bridges, providing education through messaging. And so he founded the organization, used the $1 million grant (from the Genesis Prize), and then threw in significant additional sums himself. On top of that, they spent the next couple of years really defining what our exact strategy looks like in partnership with organizations like the Boston Consulting Group. And then we got into a period in 2022-2023 where there’s a pretty clear vision for how we are going to achieve what we are trying to achieve, using vehicles like mass media, using partnerships like sports and entertainment. It made sense at that point to start to ramp-up the capital contributions, and we also had outside partners come in and contribute significant amounts of money.
What sort of software are you using to receive and filter your data? What are you spending your money on when it comes to software?
It’s a mix of proprietary and third-party software where we’re getting a big part of our data and insight from. We use systems that monitor social and other media conversations. And so we use a few different vendors to help us with that. All this is publicly available information; we just aggregate it so then we can analyze it. We integrate AI in different ways. A good chunk of what we do is proprietary, adding on to the software that we purchase. But then there’s another big chunk, which is understanding sort of what I call consumer sentiment or audience sentiment that hones in on why do people think what they think? And so this is kind of a modern version of old-school field research. We are doing focus groups and audience surveys and interviews and trying to deeply understand why do people feel the way that they feel? Why do certain messages resonate and others don’t? We run a semiannual big survey where we field over 8,000 participants who give us information about their beliefs about Jewish people and about other groups, stereotypes, tropes, feelings about America, Israel, all sorts of other topics. We can use that data to classify who is “unengaged,” but also to really understand why do they believe what they believe and how do they consume information?
It sounds like you have built an internal system that is part customer management, part psychological predictor and part data scraping that other nonprofits could potentially use as a model?
Yes, absolutely, and we’ve been in conversations about how to share what we’ve built and who to share it with first. More to come on that.
Let’s talk about New York City. The city has been at the center of recent discussions regarding antisemitism because of the clashes on local college and university campuses. Your founder, Robert Kraft has even stopped giving money to Columbia University because of the administration’s reaction to campus protests. What are the foundations’ plans to specifically address what’s going on at New York City educational institutions?
We’re still in conversations with a number of colleges and universities in New York City and elsewhere. The university setting is so, so impactful. If you’re a freshman in college, you’ve often only lived in one place your whole life. It may be (that) your local community might be somewhat diverse, but it’s still kind of a bubble, that’s all you’ve seen. You get to college. And suddenly, you see people from all other parts of the country. And it’s the first time you’re exposed to that. This is where many of the future leaders of this country start to take shape. It’s very impactful, not only on them personally, but for the future of this country. Having vibrant and collaborative and culturally rich college and university campuses is essential. We want to ensure it remains equally essential and positive for future decades and generations. And so we work with a number of universities, including some in New York City, in a few different ways. We do programming, like unity dinners. We also share our data and our research and our insights with a number of universities, and we’re doing more and more of that where universities want to better understand what’s happening on their campus with respect to Jewish hate. We have the ability to take our data and filter it, narrow it down to a geographic area. And you know, while Robert is an alumni of Columbia, and still in conversation with that administration, we care deeply about getting Columbia back to where it was and where it should be. We can help get there and we would like to do so.
You have had an interesting career path. Is there a thread or a skill set that you feel has suited you well and carried you from entertainment to the corporate world to nonprofits?
I tell my children that they don’t need to career plan! They’re 8 and 7. They don’t need to settle on a career path just yet. I am strongly, intrinsically motivated by really difficult challenges and using data and analytics and logic to solve those things. I worked in football and worked for the Eagles where the problem statement there was, “How do we make our budget?” How do you use analytics and smart decision-making and understanding the rules of the National Football League salary cap and collective bargaining agreement to get the most talent you can for the dollar? Then I went to Boston Consulting Group, where I had a series of strategic problems that we always addressed using all the possible data sources to come up with the most optimal strategy, and that varied from retail and consumer companies to mission-driven companies. Then at Wayfair, I was overseeing a big part of our consumer marketing program focused on driving deeper relationships, which actually is in many ways quite similar to the work that (Blue Square Alliance) is doing. We basically pull the audience through a consumer funnel, from recognizing the problem to caring about the problem to being activated as an ally against the problem. The problem there being Jewish hate and other forms of hate. We use a very similar “funnel” philosophy. It’s a different application but the same concept of how can you know as much as possible about your audience to be as effective as you can, to pull them through the funnel, to ultimately make the behavioral decision that you hope they make.
Looking at your track record, it’s clear that you’re a person who runs toward the fire and not away. What’s behind that?
The short answer is, it’s inherited, and I try my best to live up to the legacy of the generations that preceded me. The slightly longer answer is my grandparents, on my father’s side, thankfully escaped Germany. My grandmother was on a boat called the “Kindertransport.” She was one of the last groups of children to leave Germany before the war started, and unfortunately her mom and sister did not make it out. My grandfather made it to New York, and they met and married and they’re both lucky. They might not have made it but circumstance worked out in a way that they did – and they instilled those values of caring and putting humanity first in their children. I share all this to say that they had to go through hardship, and so they sought out ways to make a difference. I’ve always wanted to be able to create positive value for the world. This opportunity at the (Blue Square Alliance) is so important to me personally. It just made a ton of sense, and I’m just thrilled, and consider myself extremely fortunate to have the opportunity that I do to lead this organization and learn from and work extremely closely with Robert to achieve all the goals that we set out to achieve.
