by Yaakov Menken
For over a century, the Anti-Defamation League has enjoyed a reputation as the preeminent Jewish organization combating antisemitism and all forms of hate. Its acronym, ADL, has “household name” status—and not just in Jewish homes. This makes its current penchant for partisanship extraordinarily dangerous for, and beyond, the Jewish community.
Last December, Senate Republicans learned that a Joe Biden nominee for a lifetime judicial appointment, Adeel Mangi, was previously a board member and generous supporter of the antisemitic Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.
At his confirmation hearing, they questioned Mangi about his alarming affiliation with that center and his knowledge of its repugnant activities. Just last week, proof emerged that Mangi had worked closely with the center’s director and others with ties to antisemitism and terror.
Yet rather than applaud the senators’ concern, the ADL stunningly accused them of bigotry. It decried supposed “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment” of Mangi that appeared to be “motivated by bias towards his religion”—Islam. Mangi’s faith and ethnicity were never mentioned in the questions, in contrast to the activities and ideology of the center.
For daring to question a nominee’s association with anti-Jewish bias, the ADL accused Republican senators of anti-Muslim bias. One could hardly imagine a more outrageous betrayal of the ADL’s historic mission.
Yet this was no rare instance of the ADL leveling a politically charged but fundamentally wrong indictment. Rather, sectarianism permeates the organization, especially since Jonathan Greenblatt left the Obama Administration to become its CEO in 2015.
Greenblatt’s background is notably lacking in an advanced Jewish education, specifically regarding how Judaism itself has, for millennia, consistently identified antisemitism, the world’s “longest hatred,” using a neutral yardstick. He has surrounded himself with like-minded progressives, such that today’s ADL views antisemitism, like everything else, through a partisan lens.
In a post to Elon Musk’s X platform, Greenblatt recently lumped “neo-Nazis at CPAC” (the Conservative Political Action Conference) together with antisemitic rants by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and delinquents who verbally assaulted writer Bari Weiss and Jerry Seinfeld in Manhattan.
CPAC declared that it stands with Israel, offered plenary sessions on antisemitism and the hostages held by Hamas, and has for years sponsored a “Shabbat at CPAC” program for observant Jews. To associate it with the very people it bans from attending, much less speaking, is simply deplorable—and consequential. It alienates the millions of Americans who support CPAC and its policy positions while blunting the efforts by CPAC’s leaders to combat antisemitism.
And speaking of Musk, Greenblatt (pictured above) wondered if Twitter, as it was known at the time, should be shut down after Musk restored Donald Trump’s access to the platform. Apparently, Greenblatt shared the opinion of X’s previous owners, who thought Trump’s tweets were hateful, but deemed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s calls for Jewish genocide merely “foreign policy saber-rattling.”
This bears no resemblance to nonpartisan concern for antisemitism. The results were predictable: Musk is no antisemite, but his response to this gratuitous attack inadvertently elevated one.
So anxious is the ADL to malign conservatives that it even targets Jews who favor traditional values. Last year, the ADL’s Center on Extremism took aim at Chaya Raichik, the Orthodox Jewish woman behind Libs of TikTok; it tarred her as a purveyor of “anti-transgender hate” until Raichik threatened to sue. The ADL immediately quailed, conceding by implication that its accusations were indefensible.
Yet in November, the same Center on Extremism published a similar hit piece on the National Center for Public Policy Research and the National Legal and Policy Center. These organizations criticize supranational organizations like the U.N. and the World Economic Forum and what they call “globalist” agendas.
Although the ADL readily admitted that the “globalist” language was consistent with what “mainstream personalities and politicians” use and that “there is no evidence to suggest that either organization’s … proposals were filed with antisemitic intentions,” the ADL insisted nonetheless that the word globalist “could be interpreted” (emphasis added) as “an antisemitic dog whistle,” along with “conspiracy theories” that “sometimes promote antisemitism” (emphasis added).
Rather than learning to focus upon accuracy after the Raichik debacle, the ADL seems to have learned to employ weasel words to evade legal culpability.
This is especially offensive considering that one of the ADL’s named targets, the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Ethan Peck, is another Jew, an Israeli-American who condemns globalists in part for funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
The relief agency, of course, was lavishly funded from around the world as it taught Arab schoolchildren to murder Jews until the Israelis recently proved that the agency provided electrical power, internet connectivity, support, and terrorists for Hamas.
If the ADL truly believes Peck is blowing an antisemitic dog whistle, the problem is ADL’s hearing, not the decent, respected, and philo-semitic National Center for Public Policy Research. But given the careful language choices the ADL uses to smear Peck and his organization, it honestly appears more likely that the ADL knew its charges were specious from the outset.
The weaponized sectarianism of the ADL’s national headquarters undermines the fight against Jew-hatred, including efforts by its less ideology-driven (and thus, more effective) local offices to engage with law enforcement, legislators, and the public.
This is true, first of all, because those on the disfavored side are silenced: How can Peck be a credible advocate for Jews and their indigenous rights while the ADL implies that the organization he serves is spreading antisemitic tropes?
And, still more dangerously, the ADL’s silence and even expressed tolerance for left-wing antisemitism permits that antisemitism to fester.
The ADL legitimized groups like Black Lives Matter organizations that promoted antisemitic tropes until BLM’s reaction to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 made this untenable. Until Whoopi Goldberg claimed the Holocaust wasn’t about race, the ADL’s own definition of racism attributed it uniquely to whites.
All of this was happening while the most-targeted demographic in history—the one the ADL was created to defend—was smeared by leftist antisemites as possessing “white privilege.”
Greenblatt is now confronted by a reality quite different from his ideology. It was not conservatives who disrupted his speech at Brown University about antisemitism. And, of course, to the Mangi-supported, antisemitic Rutgers Center, the ADL remains a den of reviled “Zionists.” The center’s director, Sahar Aziz, obtusely accused the ADL of “aligning itself with right-wing leaders.” Just last month, when the ADL pointed out correctly that American student groups were supporting Hamas, the center denounced the ADL for engaging in “anti-Palestinian advocacy.”
The Coalition for Jewish Values, where I serve as managing director, is one of several organizations calling out antisemitism on both sides of the political aisle.
The ideological tilt of the ADL harms both our and its own efforts, and this can no longer be ignored. While our Jewish communities are surrounded by real wolves, it is unconscionable that the ADL continues to cry wolf, wounding those favorably disposed toward Jews and Israel while true antisemites endanger America’s future.
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Rabbi Yaakov Menken is managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, the largest Rabbinic public policy organization in America.
Photo “Jonathan Greenblatt” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
