Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization with over 400,000 family members. Born in New York in 1950, Abraham Cooper has been a longtime activist for Jewish and human rights causes on five continents. For three decades, Rabbi Cooper has overseen the Wiesenthal Center’s international social action agenda ranging from worldwide anti-Semitism and extremist groups, Nazi crimes, to Interfaith Relations and the struggle to thwart the anti-Israel Divestment campaign, to worldwide promotion of tolerance education.

He is widely recognized as a pioneer and international authority on issues related to digital hate and the Internet. Rabbi Cooper’s trailblazing work in Asia has helped counter negative stereotypes about Jews and open new venues in dialogue and intergroup relations in Japan, South Korea, The People’s Republic of China, India, and Indonesia. He was a leader of the Center’s mission to China that brought the first Jewish-sponsored exhibition to the world’s most populous nation.

He also arranged national prime-time broadcasts of the Center’s documentary, Genocide, on Chinese and Russian TV to estimated audiences of ½ billion and 80 million, respectively. Rabbi Cooper brought the Center’s special Anne Frank and the Holocaust to tour Japan, which has been viewed by two million Japanese in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures. He brought the Center’s Courage to Remember Holocaust Exhibit to the Gandhi Cultural Center in New Delhi. He recently traveled to Jakarta, Indonesia to meet with former president Wahid and other religious leaders in the world’s most populous Moslem nation. Rabbi Cooper has his BA and MS from Yeshiva University and a Ph.D. from the Jewish University of America. He is a recipient of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Community Service Leadership Memorial Award and of the Orthodox Union’s National Leadership Award.