Even with two decades of work in counterterrorism under his belt, Rafael Brinner was shaken by the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his line of work, antisemitic violence was not central, but the raw display of anti-Jewish hate made him realize he needed to pull it into focus. The following year, Brinner became senior director of community security at the Jewish Federation Bay Area.
In that role, Brinner, 59, has leveraged his public safety expertise to help Bay Area Jewish communities strengthen their resilience. His team does security consultations and safety assessments with Jewish organizations, and has also developed training programs in collaboration with the Secure Community Network, a national nonprofit that works with federal law enforcement agencies on behalf of the Jewish community.
As the son of renowned Middle East scholar William “Ze’ev” Brinner, he was a self-described “faculty brat” growing up. His childhood was split between Berkeley, where his late father taught Near Eastern studies at Cal for 35 years, and Jerusalem, where the elder Brinner led the UC Overseas Study Center at the Hebrew University.
As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Rafi Brinner (as he’s familiarly known) started to follow in his father’s footsteps into the humanities. But his horizons widened in graduate school when he studied history and spent time abroad in Vienna, the hometown of his mother, a Kindertransport survivor.
“By living in Vienna, I got to revisit those roots from the perspective of studying history where it was happening, rather than from the safe and comfortable distance of California,” Brinner said. “I became inspired to have a more international career.”
Upon returning to the Bay Area, Brinner pursued another master’s degree, this one in international policy, and interned for the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (now an affiliate of Middlebury College). He began his career as a terrorism analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense and later worked for the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security before joining the Federation.
Brinner spoke with J. about what led him to his current role and what his team is doing to better prepare the Jewish community on responding to tense or potentially dangerous situations.
Keep reading or listen to the full interview below. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you early on to pursue a career as a terrorism analyst?
The terrorism field was very small during the early 1990s. The Soviet Union had just fallen apart, so the nonproliferation center at the institute was a focus of my work. My interest in counterterrorism really emerged once I got into the federal government in the mid-1990s. I was aiming to become an intelligence analyst, and the attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia happened [in 1996], which killed several U.S. Air Force members.
The thing that really is the thread that carries forward from my upbringing, my time living in Israel through [the Yom Kippur War], is that even though I was still a kid, when I got back from Israel in the mid-1970s, I found myself always reading about what’s going on in Israel in the news.
I already had the understanding and grounding, just from the life that I lived, the curiosity that I had. Even as a kid, on the evening news in Israel we’d hear about whatever terrorist attack had happened. So I really grew up with terrorism as my biggest fear, as opposed to crime being my biggest fear, long before 9/11.
And did the Sept. 11 attacks impact how you approached your work?
I think the lesson from those few years before 9/11, when I got started in my career in terrorism analysis, is that there are limits to what intelligence can provide, and understanding those limits is really important to assessing what the threat is. After 9/11, the terrorism industry grew into a huge thing, and in that context, a lot of people’s understanding of terrorism was formed by 9/11 without having the background of what led up to it.
Has that continued to inform your thinking?
In some ways, my philosophy is shaped around, how do we avoid amplifying the impact of terrorism? How do we avoid growing the level of fear on behalf of those who are trying to instill fear in us? How do we continue living our lives in a way that allows our communities to grow and feel free to be active and participate, be out in public, form bonds with our neighbors, be Americans, be Jews, all of the above? I think that is really the essential thing for us to move forward in the 21st century.
Your role at the Federation is your first Jewish community job. What led you to change direction?
One thing that prompted my career shift was the jarring impact of what happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Having studied World War II and the rise of the Nazis, having lived in Austria, I never for a minute thought that I’d see the day that we’d have Americans marching with torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.” I hadn’t heard of replacement theory yet either, that somehow Jews are orchestrating the replacement of whites in the United States. So there was a shift in understanding, that this background noise of white supremacy was actually something larger.
In what ways has your work changed since Oct. 7? Have you and your team taken extra measures to help people feel more safe?
Our team’s workload quadrupled after Oct. 7. We handled 40 threats and incidents in the 12 months leading up to 10/7; that rocketed to 287 incidents in the year following 10/7, and demand for our services spiked across the board. As antisemitism and anti-Israel protests surged, our team advised event organizers, film festivals, Jewish heritage nights at sporting events and hostage vigils and shared security best practices with them so that our communal life thrives and we continue to show up as a community.
Are there special precautions around the High Holidays, when Jews are visible in large numbers?
With High Holiday services expanding into rented venues and filling our shuls to capacity, extra effort goes into making these gatherings secure. We held in-person trainings with staff, greeters and congregants at synagogues over the summer and have advised leadership about the current threat environment and appropriate safeguards. While each year the lead-up to High Holidays is a full-court press, security has to be a year-round commitment.
What prompted the launch of security fundamentals training webinars?
It was a follow-up to both the shooting in Washington, D.C., outside the Capital Jewish Museum, and the attack on Run for Their Lives activists in Boulder, Colorado, both of which took place outside of the protection of a Jewish facility. We realized we really wanted to reach not just Jewish organizations in our community, but community members themselves, because it’s really about being safe in your environment, wherever you are. Situational awareness is key.
There’s been an expansion of all these efforts as things have progressed … the litany of events in the last seven, eight years, right up to Oct. 7 and all the things that have happened in recent months. So the security fundamentals training we currently offer is an outgrowth of the level of concern in the community. But it’s also an opportunity to empower our community to be responsible for their own security, and for us to look out for each other.… really to be our own protectors.
We plan to hold the trainings at a regular monthly cadence and include new topics like cybersecurity. Check the Federation’s events page after the High Holidays, or email us at [email protected].
How do you personally deal with the stress that comes with your line of work?
Around the beginning of the Covid pandemic, I got off of social media. Not completely, but I avoid it. I stopped being on Twitter all the time, I pulled back from Facebook significantly. I just found that [social media] reinforced all the negative trends of fear and anxiety.
The larger move is keeping perspective. I’ve had the benefit of working in a career where I had access to the information that other people didn’t have through classified sources, and getting a better sense of the scope of the problem.
Another course correction is that if we think more about the daily life choices we make, the risks that we’re taking — not to be fearful of them, but just to be alert to them — then some of the events that are much less likely can recede into the background.