Michael Hiltzik: How CEOs are threading the needle in talking about Israel and Gaza

"Disappointing at best, disastrous at worst": That's how Anti-Defamation League Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt described the response of American corporate leaders to the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israeli civilians. Companies were opting for silence, Greenblatt told CNN in an interview on Oct. 11, because "most CEOs think it's too political."

But is that so?

Scores of U.S. corporations have issued statements about the terror attack and its aftermath; the list of companies doing so maintained by Yale's business school currently exceeds 180 and includes some of the country's largest corporations, as well as small and medium-size businesses.

Many of these statements explicitly condemn antisemitism, the surge of which in the U.S. and globally since the attack was Greenblatt's immediate concern; he was speaking specifically of the reluctance of corporations to sign on to the ADL's Workplace Pledge to Fight Antisemitism.

By some standards, business leaders have been "rising to the occasion," in the words of Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, and on Oct. 18.