slate | The ADL is arguably the most prominent organization in the country dedicated toward countering antisemitism. It is not that the ADL has not faced criticism before (earlier this year, a report from the Intercept charged that the ADL had “lobbied for counterterror legislation that singled out Palestinians”). Nor is it the case that the ADL has never before chosen to cooperate with law enforcement or authority over forging solidarity with left-wing Jews. (Indeed, it did so during the Red Scare.) Still, the group is the go-to American organization on antisemitism, and it also played a prominent role in championing civil rights historically. It has also been a resource for me personally: I have, over the years, interviewed and been greatly informed by various ADL staffers, and have turned to the organization’s research in my own writing and thinking on antisemitism. I believe that a civil rights organization “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” the founding principle of the ADL, remains necessary in this country.
But the ADL, under the leadership of Greenblatt, is insisting on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and it has made this conflation central to the ADL’s work. This has not only muddied the waters of its own antisemitism research, it has also undermined the safety, security, and pluralism of American Jews.
For example, the ADL reportedly mapped protests for a cease-fire led by the Jewish groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow as antisemitic incidents. The ADL also, in its report on antisemitism this year, updated its methodology to include certain anti-Israel incidents in its calculation of how much antisemitism had risen. This not only makes it more difficult to see what the actual year-over-year change in antisemitic incidents was—of course an increase will seem more dramatic if you are now counting incidents that you weren’t before—but it also arguably undermines the rest of the ADL’s reporting on antisemitism. If the group tracking antisemitism considers pro-Palestinian speech or differences in foreign policy preferences to be motivated by antisemitism, how seriously will those who disagree with the ADL on foreign policy take its calls to tackle antisemitism?
At least as troubling as the new research methods, though, are the statements and posture of Greenblatt himself. Some observers thinking that he privileges support for Israel over civil rights is not new; a Jewish Currents story from 2021 revealed that former ADL employees felt Greenblatt was choosing defense of Israel over protecting civil liberties, one of the group’s stated missions. In March of last year, the same publication published a report on internal dissent over Greenblatt comparing pro-Palestinian groups to the extreme right.
But if this had been a running undercurrent, the past six months have thrown it to the surface. In November, mere days after X boss Elon Musk called an antisemitic conspiracy “the actual truth,” Greenblatt praised Musk’s suggestion of banning the terms “from the river to the sea” and “decolonization” from the platform.
In a speech at Brown University in February, Greenblatt reiterated that he thought anti-Zionism was antisemitism, and said he wanted to define the terms before “activists who participate in ‘BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now’ start to object.” The next month, addressing the Never Is Now Conference, Greenblatt similarly dismissed “the editors at left-wing Jewish magazines that very few of us actually read,” and said, “I must say, I have to share: What amazes me is that when ADL says that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, or when the Hillel director says that the mob chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ [is], … journalists at major newspapers don’t listen to the victim. Instead, they literally go looking for an alternative point of view. … You’ve all read these paragraphs: ‘To be sure, Professor So and So says’ or ‘the head of Jewish Voice for Peace counters …’ ”
These students and professors and activists are also Jewish. Again, historically, the ADL has had as its mission not only to protect Jews, but also to protect civil liberties for Jews and all Americans; on its website today, one can still read that the ADL stands up for religious freedom and against discrimination. It is thus theoretically Greenblatt’s job to defend these ostensibly little-read journalists and Professors So and So, too, even if he disagrees with them on Israel. Instead, he has repeatedly used his platform not to defend their right to expression even as he disagrees with their definition of antisemitism, but to undercut them. That isn’t just abandonment of part of the ADL’s mandate, but an abandonment of some of the people who are at risk of antisemitism.
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