The ADL Is Endangering Jews

The org founded to fight antisemitism has put a target on anti-Zionist Jews.

Image: Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL director, by Gage Skidmore. CC

The Anti-Defamation League was founded specifically to fight right wing, racist, populist violence against Jewish people in the United States. In 1913, Jewish executive Leo Frank was falsely accused of murdering a 13-year-old girl: a literal blood libel. After a judge commuted Frank’s death sentence, a violent mob kidnapped and lynched him. Sigmund Livingston, a Jewish Chicago lawyer, was horrified, and created the Anti-Defamation League to fight antisemitic violence and the burgeoning power of the KKK.

The ADL has a storied history of fighting bigotry. It helped close down Henry Ford’s antisemitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1929; it campaigned for the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In recent years it has been a key organization tracking and advocating against far right militias, organizations, and individuals.

Choosing Israel Over the Diaspora

The ADL has also, though, been a major supporter of Israel. This commitment to Zionism has gradually overtaken and overwritten its other values and programs. Its current director, Jonathan Greenblatt, has made it clear that he is much less concerned with the far right than he is with left wing Jewish people who dare to criticize Israel.

In 2022 Greenblatt  declared that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and pointed specifically to Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as organizations which “epitomize the Radical Left, the photo inverse of the Extreme Right that ADL long has tracked.”

This year, as Israel has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza, Greenblatt and the ADL have begun to count any anti-Zionist protest as an antisemitic incident in their tracking statistics, arguing “that fanatical anti-Zionism from the hard left is as dangerous to the Jewish community as rabid white supremacy from the extreme right.” Greenblatt also told ADL employees that if they disagree with the organization’s demonization of progressive groups—including Jewish progressive groups—then they should quit.

Antisemitism is a pervasive issue, and it can be a problem in anti-Zionist spaces. The ADL could do valuable work by carefully separating out legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. But The instead Greenblatt has made it clear that the ADL’s mission is no longer about fighting antisemitism. Its mission is to attack Israel critics, even if—or especially if—those critics are Jewish.

When leading Jewish organizations abandon the fight against antisemitism in order to defend the worst actions of Israel, it puts Jewish people in the diaspora at risk in multiple ways. First, the ADL, in aligning itself with reactionary anti-leftists, undermines its ability to criticize antisemitism on the right.

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Genuflecting to Musk

Greenblatt has demonstrated this in repulsive fashion by rushing to lick the boots of twitter CEO Elon Musk. Musk, like Henry Ford before him, has used his media empire to push neo-Nazi conspiracy theories and egregious antisemitic hate.

Greenblatt did initially criticize Musk when the billionaire shithead eagerly cosigned a tweet which claimed that Jewish people were pushing “hatred against whites.” But then Musk promised to ban terms like “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea” as a way to insulate Israel from criticism and silence pro-Palestinian voices.

For Greenblatt, Musk’s pledge to censure criticism of Israel trumped Musk’s egregious, vile, far right antisemitic bile. The leader of the ADL was happy to indulge Musk’s antisemitism as long as he could join Musk in Islamophobic censorship.

Rather than fighting Musk’s far right antisemitism, Greenblatt’s ADL provides Musk with cover and protection. In contrast, Greenblatt has withdrawn solidarity from left wing, anti-Zionist Jews. When Greenblatt says that “Every Jewish person is a Zionist,” the obvious corollary is that any anti-Zionist Jew (like, say, me) is not really a Jew, and therefore doesn’t deserve or merit protection from antisemitism.

This is extremely dangerous. Historically, and today as well, bigots are often strategic. Attacking all members of a hated group can lead to pushback. So they target those who are unpopular for other reasons, or who have less resources or protection.

Hitler excluded Jewish World War I veterans from anti-Jewish laws, which made the Nazis seem reasonable, and helped them get mainstream support for targeting other Jewish people. Today, anti trans forces say they just want to prevent young people from accessing trans healthcare—which again allows the right to build support for anti trans measures which can eventually be extended to all trans people of whatever age.

The Defamation League

The right, as Musk demonstrates, is more and more openly embracing antisemitism. Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has given antisemites an opening to try to hijack the pro-Palestinian cause. Now more than ever, Jewish people need a collective response to push back against crude antisemitic stereotypes and antisemitic hate on every part of the political spectrum.

Instead, the ADL has abandoned its historical commitment to fighting hate in the US in order to embrace Israel’s far right government and its escalating program of war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

The massacre at Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 was committed by a far-right antisemite who picked the synagogue specifically because of its progressive activism for immigrants. Greenblatt is now telling his antisemitic friends on the right, like Musk, that targeting left Jews for antisemitism is fine, and even virtuous. I very much hope this will not lead to more violence. But if it does, Greenblatt will have Jewish blood on his hands. That’s a disgusting legacy for the organization founded to fight for Leo Frank.