Source: https://spectator.org/adl-jonathan-greenblatt-left/
April 16, 2021
Imagine that a group of prominent Catholic “human-rights activists” issues statements condemning the pope and the Vatican for their stands opposing gay marriage and abortion on demand. Actually, it happens all the time. Probably the two most powerful Catholics in America, who also double as two of the most powerful people in America — Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, both of whom go out of their ways regularly to tell us that they are devout Catholics — are two of the leading movers in the Western world for supporting gay marriage, all kinds of transgender theories and practices, and legalizing not only abortion on demand but even post-birth terminating of newborns whose parents did not intend to have them. And did we mention other prominent Catholics like, say, the Honorable Gov. Andrew Cuomo, he of abortion on demand for fetuses, COVID by his demand in nursing homes, and women by his command whenever? What — does that guy think he lives in a tree house where no one sees him?
What is a Jew like me — a fairly educated Orthodox rabbi who studied comparative religion during my undergraduate years at Columbia University, during an era when they taught real stuff — supposed to think about the authentic Catholic position on issues like these? Well, first I read my American Spectator colleague George Neumayr. I know he is real. I consider the extended conversations during private audiences I have enjoyed with the present and previous Catholic bishops of the Orange County, California, diocese where I live. I am reasonable. I know what’s what. And I commiserate because, as a Jew whose entire life has been rooted in authentic Jewish teachings, I know the frustration when impostors gain access to a complicitly fake Left mainstream media who willingly play the game to replace the authentic with the pale imitation.
Back in the mid-to-late 19th and very early 20th century, a huge rush of immigration was apace in America — from China, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Eastern Europe. Whereas there had been 250,000 Jews in America by 1880, an influx to the United States of 3.25 million Jews from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914 changed the complexion of American Jewry. We changed from a mostly westernized, non-religious or Reform Judaism-based German-descending community, centered significantly amid such Midwestern German Protestant populations as Cincinnati, into an East European community of New York–based immigrants who spoke little English, knew little of the West, and came with deep-rooted Orthodox Jewish religious practices or with no religion at all. When those 3.25 million arrived during those three frantic decades between the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the start of World War I, they were greeted by the Jewish social welfare agencies that were just being created by the now-established German Jews who had preceded them here.
It was a strange love-hate thing. In those days, America did not heap benefits on destitute newcomers. Therefore, on the one hand, the established German Jewish agencies in America truly wanted to help their fellow Jews avoid starvation. They also did not want newspaper headlines about millions of newly arriving Jews draining the economy. On a deeper level, the landed and assimilated German-American Jews desperately raced to rid the immigrants of their religious beliefs and values that made them seem so “different.” The German Jews worried that the sudden appearance in America of millions of Orthodox Jews, with strange religious practices and wearing quaint clothes and sporting ancient hairstyles, would incentivize anti-Semitism to a degree hitherto unknown here. So they worked feverishly to assimilate the East European arrivals. Julia Richman, the superintendent of the New York City public schools in the Lower East Side, gave teachers orders to grab any child heard speaking Yiddish in the school hallways and to wash the child’s mouth out with soap. Minnie Lewis stood on street corners, offering children free cookies if they would let her cut their extended sideburns. Efforts were made to convert the young immigrant generation from their parents’ religious Orthodoxy to Reform Judaism, a theology akin to Unitarianism, where pork is eaten and intermarriage is boasted.
It really was quite love-hate. The German Jews built Jewish hospitals like Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City because Jewish doctors still were being barred from practicing elsewhere. And yet those same Jews then initially barred the children of East European immigrants from practicing at Mount Sinai. While German Jews who had business sense went into investing and finance, they tried persuading the East European immigrants to move to Vineland, New Jersey, and to the Catskill Mountains beyond New York’s boroughs to be farmers. That would get tens of thousands of East European Jews out of view, out of sight, out of mind — and also might counter the stereotype of Jews as financiers once the immigrants succeeded as farmers. To be sure, the German Jews did not send their own kids to farm in Vineland and in the Catskills. And the projects failed miserably. The immigrant Jews in Vineland ended up getting Ph.D.s in agricultural science and publishing magazines about farming, while the ones in the Catskills ended up turning their farmhouses into small restaurants, then bigger ones, and then into resort hotels where other Jews, denied other job or career opportunities because of discrimination, became stand-up comedians.
And so it went. To get the East Europeans out of sight, the German Jewish agencies even shipped ten thousand more of the immigrants from New York to Galveston, Texas. When other American men’s fraternities barred the wave of Jews who came in from Germany, they formed B’nai B’rith fraternal lodges. And then, initially, those lodges barred East European Jews. Many, though not all, historians believe the very epithet “kike” first gained currency in the German-American community. Yep, dem’s my peeps.
But when Jews came under anti-Semitic attack, that was a time to pull together. Jew-haters do not distinguish between East European Jews and German Jews, Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. They just hate blindly and irrationally. The stereotypes are crazy and contradictory. Disgruntled tenants will complain about the Jewish landlord, and disgruntled landlords about the Jewish tenant. Haters among the communists, as typified by the worst Jew-hater of them all, Karl Marx, accused all Jews of being capitalists who live for mammon, a Hebrew word for money. (Marx did not regard himself as Jewish and hated Jews. His father had converted to Protestantism.) Haters among capitalists meanwhile accused all Jews of being communists. How confusing it must have been for such haters in the 1970s, as Jews emerged as the single most anti-Soviet demographic in America.
As Jews arrived in larger numbers, new forms of anti-Semitism emerged. Some were the subtle Gentleman’s Agreement version that kept Jews out of hotels and country clubs into the 1960s. Thus did the Republican Party lose a Jewish constituency that initially had backed it, just as Republicans likewise lost the Irish, Italian, and other ethnic Catholic classes for a century until Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter fostered some reorienting. When, amid the Great Depression, one famous “restricted” Beverly Hills country club decided that, with so many of their white-shoe Christian members going bankrupt, they needed finally to allow Hollywood Jews in as dues-paying members, Groucho Marx famously said that he would not join any club that wanted him as a member. Many think he was being cleverly witty Groucho, but he was not joking; he knew why they suddenly wanted him, and he wanted no part of that. He had no problem joining the Hillcrest country club that Jews established as their alternative.
In 1913 Atlanta, Georgia, anti-Semitism took a dramatic new turn. It was the Georgia of Tom Watson and the KKK. A young girl was found strangled in the basement of a local pencil factory. Without evidence to justify the accusations, just suspicions and unsubstantiated claims, a public hate campaign spurred by Watson, amid other factors, led to the arrest of the factory manager, a New York Jew who had moved down there to assume the job. After arriving, he had become president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith. That Jew, Leo Frank, was put on a show trial and was convicted amid mob violence outside the courtroom. He was sentenced to death. The governor, John Slaton, whose name had been bandied about as potential vice-presidential material, heroically brought his rising political career to an abrupt end by commuting Frank’s sentence. His life and family threatened, Slaton had to leave Georgia for 10 years. Meanwhile, armed Jew-haters invaded the jail where Frank was being held, kidnapped him, and lynched him in August 1915 in Marietta, Georgia.
Thus emerged the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith. America’s Jews desperately needed a defense organization, and B’nai B’rith, the fraternal order, was their biggest group, so best situated to act. They formed the ADL. ADL emerged to defend German Jews in America, and they defended East European Jews because, when anti-Semitism arises, haters do not distinguish. For the next century, ADL became identified with Jewish legal defense.
But this no longer is the case. As Jew-hatred of the Marietta, Georgia, sort abated in America, ADL increasingly lost sight of its fundamental purpose. Expanding its mission to focus on opposing other forms of hate, ADL became more of a general all-purpose human-rights organization. That can be a good thing if implemented fairly. Unfortunately, ADL’s demise as a Jewish organization was cemented in July 2015, ironically almost 100 years to the day of the Leo Frank lynching, when the organization named Jonathan Greenblatt to be its new national director. Greenblatt, a hardened “progressive,” had just served as special assistant to the president in the Obama White House. He is an Obama acolyte through and through. From the day that he arrived, he converted the ADL into a markedly left-focused organization. Under Greenblatt, ADL has focused almost exclusively on combating right-wing hate and also attacking conservative non-haters among Republicans, Fox News anchors, and the like — while giving virtually free passes to the Left.
For example, ADL presented data on anti-Semitism during the Trump presidency that defied reality. In one egregious case, they reported a 57 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents during Trump’s first year when other data showed a decrease. Notably, in blaming Trump’s emergence, they included in their tally some 150 bomb threats made to American Jewish institutions by a mentally disturbed Israeli Jewish teen who ultimately was convicted by a Tel Aviv court of phoning in thousands of such threats from overseas.
The demise of ADL as a Jewish organization and its conversion into a mouthpiece for Obama acolytes has been mourned for the past five years. Seth Mandel has written about it in Commentary. Liel Leibovitz, another leading American Jewish commentator, wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal. Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield exposed further details in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Mag. Likewise Andrew Harrod in Jihad Watch and the Orthodox Jewish online source Matzav. Most recently, Jonathan Tobin has written about ADL’s pronouncedly left bias and “overhyped statistics” in several articles in JNS, a national Jewish news service.
In an era of white supremacist hate and an extraordinary outbreak of rabidly anti-Jewish hate on the left, especially on college campuses with the Nazi-like BDS movement to boycott only the one country in the world with a Jewish majority, and even among Democrats in Congress like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and others, it is regrettable that the Jewish community has lost a defense organization to the politics of unbridled progressivism. But that is the reality of the day. Just as devout Catholics endeavor to persuade non-Catholics that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are not who and what they say they are, so it now has had to fall on the Coalition for Jewish Values, representing 1,500 American traditional rabbis, to speak out against Greenblatt’s and ADL’s latest outrage, the totally unwarranted and unjustified attack on Tucker Carlson for his condemning Biden’s effort to import millions of new voters to “replace” the landed electorate by imbalancing future American elections. As Jeffrey Lord has explained thoroughly in The American Spectator, Carlson is absolutely correct. Voter “replacement” is exactly, precisely what the Biden–Pelosi–Schumer Democrats now are endeavoring to do, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine seats next in their sights.
One looks at the conservative red California that once dependably elected governors like Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson. Or at Nevada and Arizona, dependably Republican until supplanted by the coordinated Democrat effort to open the borders and then to convince the likes of even a Reagan, and certainly Bushes, to grant mass amnesties and rapid “paths leading to citizenship” — i.e., paths leading to voting for the party that promises unlimited government payouts and services. Of course we now are watching, before our very eyes, a concerted effort to replace the electorate that was electing Republicans. And look where newcomers are being sent, all those unaccompanied children who are wrapped up by Biden’s administration in aluminum foil and placed initially in Obama–Biden cages — places like San Diego, one of the last redoubts of conservatism in California, and Texas, the red state with the most electoral college votes. Understandably, North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has spoken out forcefully, telling Biden that she will not let her state be next.
How can anyone objective not see what is happening? The reason that Biden insists that the chaos at the border is not a “crisis” is plain to see: it is planned chaos, aimed at overrunning the system to leave no choice but to move millions of future Democrat voters ultimately into states where they can turn those tides as they have in the American Southwest. Along with aiming to add two new guaranteed Democrat states, thus four new Democrat U.S. senators, and packing the U.S. Supreme Court, it marks a concerted Democrat effort to turn the entire country into a California with one-party rule.
Yes, white supremacist haters in Charlottesville spoke of “replacement” theory, and they falsely and wrongly targeted the slogan with bigotry. But because a white supremacist says that it gets warm in the summer and cold in the winter does not mean that Tucker Carlson is racist for observing the same. If white supremacists oppose tax increases, that does not make it racism for normal people to oppose tax increases, too. If white supremacists protest being banned by Facebook or Twitter, that does not make Dennis Prager an anti-Semite when he blasts YouTube for taking down some of his fabulous five-minute Prager University segments, like their absurd censoring of his segment on the Ten Commandments on grounds that it violated YouTube standards by speaking of murder (“Thou Shalt — uh … — Not Murder”).
Jonathan Greenblatt’s and ADL’s attack on Tucker Carlson must be deplored by all fair-minded Americans. And, as 1,500 Orthodox rabbis have made clear — and has been reported across online news media but suppressed uniformly by the Left mainstream media — ADL does not speak for Jews and no longer even is a Jewish organization.
The ADL Is Undermining The Battle Against Anti-Semitism By Jonathan S. Tobin
Source: https://jewishleadershipproject.org/the-adl-is-undermining-the-battle-against-anti-semitism/White Rose Magazine
June 10, 2022
ARE donors to the Anti-Defamation League aware of what they are funding?
Do they know that the organization created to fight prejudice and attacks against Jews is on the record supporting an ideology that grants a permission slip to anti-Semitism?
Do they know that the group still considered to be the gold standard for monitoring hate crimes is promoting the notion that Jews should be divided along racial lines—an explicit acceptance of radical theories that categorize Jews and the State of Israel as a function of “white privilege”?
Do they know that the organization committed to support Israel has, in recent years, often joined with those sniping at it and hired vicious critics of the Jewish state as staff members, like Tema Smith?
Do they know that a group that prided itself on nonpartisanship and building bipartisan coalitions against anti-Semitism has cast those principles to the winds and become part of America’s political tribal wars?
Do they know that the organization committed to support Israel has, in recent years, often joined with those sniping at it and hired vicious critics of the Jewish state as staff members?
Do they know that the organization that always considered defense of civil liberties essential to its mission has now joined hands with Big Tech companies to promote censorship of ideas and organizations?
Perhaps many of those still pouring money into the ADL’s coffers are aware of all this and are supportive of the sea change in the organization. The abandonment of core principles and its job of defending Jews places the ADL on the same side of those it is pledged to fight. This is one more casualty of the shift in culture that has produced toxic divisions tearing apart the fabric of American society.
Most of the many American Jewish organizations and institutions founded in the early 20th century have long since become obsolete. The Jewish hospitals created to find places for unhired Jewish doctors and the Jewish country clubs established to compete with the exclusionary non-Jewish facilities have long since become secular once those barriers evaporated.
The abandonment of core principles and its job of defending Jews places the ADL on the same side of those it is pledged to fight.
Many national organizations that once were considered essential platforms for speaking up for a beleaguered community are now mere shadows of themselves as they struggle to find a purpose as their constituencies changed or disappeared altogether.
But there is still one national Jewish institution that not only still has a job but arguably is faced with an even more daunting task and bigger responsibilities than it did when it opened its doors: the Anti-Defamation League.
Outraged over the anti-Semitic hate that fueled both the wrongful murder conviction of Atlanta businessman Leo Frank and his subsequent lynching in 1915, the B’nai B’rith organization established the ADL to deal specifically with the plague of anti-Semitism. The daunting challenges of a century ago—in the form of hate sponsored by auto magnate Henry Ford or populist preachers directly invoking age-old stereotypes about Jewish “aliens and power brokers”—have evolved to reach even wider audiences on the Internet. The delegitimization of the Jews and the Jewish state is louder than ever, and now has become a feature of the increasingly influential left-wing of the Democratic Party, which has embraced radical notions like intersectionality and critical race theory, opening the door to anti-Semitism.
That makes the ADL, which has become not only independent of its initial sponsor, but an organizational powerhouse with a massive fundraising machine, more important than ever. Its infrastructure of regional offices and large staff perform the task of monitoring acts of anti-Semitism at a time when attacks on Jews are not only on the rise but essentially mainstreamed under the guise of “criticism” of Israel. As open calls for Israel’s destruction and the stigmatizing of its supporters as racists and oppressors have become commonplace, an effective Jewish defense organization with the clout of the ADL ought to be a vital tool in combating this problem.
But the ADL is failing.
That failure can’t be measured financially since it is raising more money than ever before. Nor is it a communication problem, as the ADL retains its status as a go-to source for comments about Jewish issues as well as the ultimate arbiter in determining what constitutes anti-Semitism.
As open calls for Israel’s destruction and the stigmatizing of its supporters as racists and oppressors have become commonplace, an effective Jewish defense organization with the clout of the ADL ought to be a vital tool in combating this problem.
Yet, its failure is palpable.
Ever since its current CEO Jonathan Greenblatt succeeded longtime head Abe Foxman in 2015, the former Clinton and Obama administration staffer has largely discarded the group’s non-partisan stance. Greenblatt has effectively turned it into just one more partisan advocacy group supporting Democratic Party talking points on a variety of issues, including those that have little or nothing to do with the defense of Jewish interests. As his grip on the organization solidified, the ADL also became an ally of ideologically driven Big Tech firms seeking to enforce censorship on the Internet. In this way, the ADL has fallen far short of the needs of an increasingly embattled Jewish community.
As worrisome as those actions are, in the past two years the problem has grown even worse. The ADL’s prioritization of its ties with left-wing allies has also led to decisions that not only undermine its core mission, such as the sanctioning of partisan weaponizing of the issue of anti-Semitism, but its willingness to endorse ideas that enable anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Jews and Israel has, incredibly, placed it in the position of actually aiding and abetting the very forces it was created to oppose. As a result, it is not simply an example of failing Jewish leadership, but it is a group that now must be considered increasingly part of the problem rather than the solution to the dilemmas faced by American Jewry.
The organization that Greenblatt inherited from Foxman, the ADL’s venerable leader who worked for the group for 50 years and led it for 28, was politically liberal on many issues but still scrupulously non-partisan. Moreover, though it had long since branched out into the business of educating communities on the dangers of all sorts of prejudice, it was still focused on its primary mission of combating anti-Semitism, including that which is directed at the Jewish state.
The ADL’s prioritization of its ties with left-wing allies has led to decisions that not only undermine its core mission, but has, incredibly, placed it in the position of actually aiding and abetting the very forces it was created to oppose.
Greenblatt immediately began re-orienting the organization to be more directly in line with his own partisan instincts. He had previously been a staff member of the Barack Obama White House, which was itself embroiled in a number of disputes with Israel and the Jewish community. President Obama’s determination to pursue a policy of appeasement toward Iran and its nuclear ambitions placed him in conflict with Israel—which viewed Tehran as an existential threat—and put him at odds with American Jews and certain members of Congress, who agreed with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opinion about the disastrous nature of the nuclear deal. In seeking to dismiss those arguments, Obama and his staff—including those who were orchestrating what former national security advisor Ben Rhodes called their media “echo chamber”—were at pains to spin the debate as one between a president pursuing his nation’s interests and a powerful lobby that was buying support in Congress, a trope of traditional anti-Semitism.
But far from seeking to confront his former colleagues, Greenblatt was more interested in using the ADL to critique Netanyahu. He went out of his way in 2016 to publicly oppose Netanyahu’s claim that the Palestinians’ desire to push Jews out of West Bank communities would amount to “ethnic cleansing.” According to Greenblatt, that was a wrongful use of Holocaust terminology. Yet he was guilty himself of using a similar analogy to criticize enforcement of American laws against illegal immigration.
There is, however, more at play here than mere hypocrisy. Though Greenblatt will occasionally criticize a Democrat for an anti-Semitic utterance or inappropriate Holocaust analogy, under his leadership, the ADL became focused on aiding the “resistance” to the administration of President Donald Trump, constantly accusing him of supposedly inciting or inspiring a rise in anti-Semitism on the far right. Indeed, the ADL became a prop for branding Trump a Nazi and/or anti-Semite.
While Trump’s intemperate and vulgar tone, as well as his willingness to attack opponents and critics was unorthodox, Greenblatt’s repeated attempts to connect the dots between his comments and far right extremists was rooted primarily in partisanship, not a defense of the Jews. That was apparent when it came to blaming the president for acts of violence against Jews, such as the attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California. But it was also the case with respect to Greenblatt’s willingness to lend the ADL’s prestige to the false claim that Trump had somehow endorsed or expressed moral indifference to the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 because of a comment that was taken out of context about “very fine people” being on both sides of the barricades there. Trump said there were such people who disagreed about the need to clear public squares of all memorials to Confederates and those killed in the Civil War, not in the confrontation with neo-Nazis.
In doing so, the ADL aligned itself with the political views of most of its donors. But in addition to committing itself to a misleading partisan narrative about Trump, Greenblatt also pushed the group into a confrontation with the Trump administration over issues that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. For example, Greenblatt tweeted his opposition to the nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court within seconds of the announcement, signaling that ADL would oppose any conservative.
The ADL condemned former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a man who was not only a friend to the Jewish community during his time in Congress and as director of the CIA but also helped to make historic breakthroughs for pro-Israel policies at the State Department. During his confirmation hearings, the ADL attacked him as a “bigot” for denouncing anti-Semitic Islamist radicals. That could be seen in the same context as Greenblatt’s reversal of Foxman’s opposition to the building of a Muslim community center and mosque in the Ground Zero area of Lower Manhattan where the 9/11 attacks took place. The ADL’s stance promoted the false narrative in which the real victims of the attacks were American Muslims, suffering from a mythical backlash.
The ADL also found itself closely aligned with Big Tech companies that it previously criticized for allowing anti-Semitism on social media. Though some of those firms, like Facebook, initially refused to go along with the ADL’s push for censoring hateful opinions, they soon found that the ADL was a willing partner when it came to justifying Silicon Valley’s shift toward censoring conservative opinions. The ADL’s efforts to steer those who logged onto hate websites to better sources of information actually led to another hate website that was spreading anti-Semitism. And its alliance with PayPal, intended to help weed out alleged radical groups, put it in the position of endorsing censorship more than actually fighting hate.
Despite the group’s claims to the contrary, the ADL’s leftist tilt caused it to be perceived as having shifted its priorities away from strictly Jewish issues. This led to even more dangerous problems than the disintegration of its gold-standard status as the ultimate authority on anti-Semitism. The spread of intersectional ideology—which lumps together all groups and peoples who claim to be oppressed because of their color or indigenous background and similarly views all of their opponents as linked by “white privilege”—has convinced many on the American left that the Palestinian war against Israel is somehow analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
This has led not only to attacks on Israel as a beneficiary of “white privilege”—the irony that a majority of Israeli Jews trace their origins to the Middle East or North Africa and are therefore “people of color” under the definition accepted by the left is lost on the Jewish state’s critics—but it has also provided fuel for a rising tide of anti-Semitism in which assertions of Israel’s illegitimacy are the primary line of attack.
This has proved troublesome for the ADL because of the way Greenblatt has helped to steer it into a position where it is an important ally for a party whose left-wing—including its young rock stars of the congressional “Squad”—are not only anti-Israel but in the case of Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), are open supporters of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, which seeks Israel’s elimination. The group’s defense of Omar and Tlaib against criticisms from Trump about their anti-Semitism undermined their credibility in speaking up against the BDS movement while simultaneously earning them brickbats from the left.
Just as important, when the Black Lives Matter movement rose to prominence in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd, the ADL was swept along with the rest of the country’s leftists into supporting its demands. The anti-Semitic connections of the radicals behind BLM and the vicious attacks on Israel in its platform should have placed the ADL first among the movement’s critics. But in the moral panic about race that has infected America’s leftist elites, the ADL felt compelled to endorse the movement, defend it against its critics, and, crucially, take a supportive position about the critical race theory indoctrination that was linked to the protests.
In the past year, Greenblatt has felt compelled to note that anti-Semitism is a problem on the left as well as the far right, especially once incitement against Israel during the conflict with Hamas terrorists in May 2021 led to an outbreak of violent attacks against Jews in the United States. This incitement was led by left-wing Democrats like Omar, Tlaib, and their popular colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who were appealing to intersectional ideology to justify their stance, libeling Israel and letting Hamas off the hook for firing thousands of rockets and missiles. The ADL was put in an awkward position, and was forced to push back against the delegitimizing smears heard on the floor of Congress, as well as from far-left and Islamist-friendly groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Yet that didn’t cause Greenblatt or his group to rethink their endorsements of CRT. To the contrary, as was revealed after Greenblatt intervened to provide cover for “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg after she spouted racialist nonsense about the Holocaust in which she claimed it was merely a case of whites attacking other whites.
A definition of racism had been posted on the ADL website (in which racism was limited to prejudice against persons “of color”) that actually was similar to the gross comments for which Goldberg had to apologize with Greenblatt’s assistance. After the rise of BLM, the group’s definition was altered from one that stated that “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another,” and that “a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.” The new definition held that: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
As soon as the Goldberg controversy occurred, the ADL scrubbed the intersectional definition from its website and restored the old entry, although appending to it a lengthy note reportedly by Greenblatt, claiming that the group’s focus on the racism of whites was “true but not the whole truth.”
This Orwellian turn on the part of the ADL is noteworthy. Yet it’s also an element of another controversy in which it has recently become embroiled when it hired activist Tema Smith as its new director of Jewish outreach and partnerships. Smith has a long history as a bitter critic of Israel and left-wing Twitter troll. In an earlier time, it would have been unimaginable for a group that was as solidly pro-Israel and reflexively centrist as ADL to hire such a person, but she was the perfect job candidate for the Greenblatt era.
The most serious problem with the hire is not what she might have posted on Twitter in the past but her current assignment. While outreach is important for the entire Jewish world in a time of rising assimilation and a Jewish population that is largely disconnected from the community and a sense of Jewish peoplehood, Smith’s brief is focused on “Jews of color.” That Jews who are not white sometimes face discrimination within the community is deplorable and should be condemned. Jews come in all different colors and from many places of origin (something that the non-Jewish Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t seem to understand). The idea of dividing Jews by skin color can never be accepted any more than bias against converts should be tolerated.
In its eagerness to get in on the fashion of racialist rhetoric on the left and in the Democratic Party, the ADL is embracing the cause of “Jews of color.” Yet in doing so, it and others on the left have lumped in a variety of communities including those Jews from Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and North African countries, most of whom do not identify with the term. As such, the ADL is not only undermining a basic concept of Jewish unity, it is also utilizing the same intersectional playbook used by Israel-haters to brand the Jewish state and its supporters as possessing “white privilege.”
In its eagerness to get in on the fashion of racialist rhetoric on the left and in the Democratic Party, the ADL is embracing the cause of “Jews of color.”
Jews should not be defined by skin color; no one should. The point of the civil rights movement was to discard the obsession with race that fueled segregation. America should aspire to a colorblind society, and yet CRT and intersectionality demand that it be treated as the most important element in defining any person. Joining with its left-wing allies to apply this idea to Jews across the board, the ADL is again undermining the cause for which it was founded and providing useful cover to those who are seeking to harm the Jewish people, here and in Israel.
At a time when both the statistics that the ADL compiles about hate and the tenor of the national conversation confirm that anti-Semitism is on the rise, the need for an effective Jewish defense agency focused on anti-Semitism is real.
Jews should not be defined by skin color; no one should.
The ADL now finds itself a rare Jewish organization with a mission that is at least as relevant to Jewish life today as when it was founded 109 years ago. That should make it a group whose continued efforts are not only necessary but deserving of support from the broadest cross-section of Jewish life.
Far more important is the way the ADL’s embrace of BLM extremists and CRT gives a boost to the very forces on the left, who, because of their influence in Washington and among a younger generation of Democrats, now pose the most important threat to Jewish life in America. That is not merely a setback for ADL. It is an abandonment of the very purpose of its existence.
It is ironic that this is happening at a time when ADL’s influence and financial clout are greater than ever. But it is also a paradigm of how Jewish leadership is failing American Jewry’s best interests all the while claiming to be defending them.
The ADL Has Corrupted Its Mission and Betrayed the Jewish Community By Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/adl-has-corrupted-its-mission-betrayed-jewish-community-opinion-17285007/28/22
The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, founded in 1913, originally declared, "The immediate object of the League is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike, and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens."
It was established, that is, to combat Jew-hatred. If and only if the Jewish community is secure, it would then be appropriate to extend organizational resources to helping others in need. Put another way, a Jewish rights organization, founded by Jews, should rightfully focus on the plight of...Jews.
But for several decades at least, what is now called the ADL does not prioritize Jews. Its new mission is "To stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all." The ADL has elevated efforts to serve what it perceives as marginalized communities to equal or higher priority than the Jewish community, as though it has already eradicated antisemitism.
It has not. Recent FBI statistics show Jews are subject to more hate crimes per capita than any other group of Americans; twice as likely to be targeted as Black Americans, more than twice as likely as Muslims, and 50% more likely than those who are targeted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.
There are many organizations devoted to supporting marginalized communities; there is only one, in theory, dedicated to protecting Jews. By expanding its efforts beyond the Jewish community, the ADL dilutes its impact at a time of surging antisemitism.
Even more egregious, some of the groups supported by the ADL are hostile to the Jewish community. In 2020, the ADL signed on to a statement, published in a full-page ad in The New York Times, endorsing the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Of course, Black lives do matter. But leaders of BLM and affiliated groups, under the umbrella of the Movement for Black Lives, have wholeheartedly embraced the antisemitic "Boycott, Divest, and Sanction" movement, slandering Israel as "an apartheid state" that commits "genocide." Even in defending the ADL's support for this organization, CEO Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that "some involved in the cause hold hateful ideas" and have "engaged in antisemitic rhetoric." Somehow, that wasn't a deal-breaker.
Later that year, a BLM rally turned into a riot in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles, where many synagogues were graffitied with obscenities, Jewish businesses were looted and vandalized, and anti-Jewish epithets, including "F* the Jews," were shouted. Yet the ADL downplayed the antisemitic nature of these events, laughably contending, "There is no indication that Jewish businesses or institutions were broadly targeted for vandalism."
In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991, Al Sharpton led mobs of Black residents in days of rioting as they looted stores, screeched "death to the Jews!," and attacked their visibly Jewish neighbors—even murdering a yeshiva student, Yankel Rosenbaum, following a car accident where a Hasidic Jew accidentally struck and killed a young Black boy. Sharpton's eulogy at the boy's funeral dripped with antisemitic tropes about Jewish money and power. In the three-plus decades since, Al Sharpton has never apologized for fomenting the infamous Crown Heights pogrom, but that didn't stop Greenblatt from mainstreaming him, appearing on his MSNBC television show multiple times.
The ADL should not be legitimizing Jew-haters, yet under Greenblatt the organization has created a technology initiative funded with $1.75 million from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's charitable foundation. Omidyar has also financed The Intercept, an Iran-apologist, radical left-wing news outlet that has at times defended Hamas and Hezbollah, antisemites in the British Labour Party, the Jew-hating leaders of the Women's March, and supporters of Louis Farrakhan. The Omidyar Network also funds anti-Israel professors like Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University, who has called American Jews "diehard Fifth Column Zionists working against the best interests of Americans," and has tweeted that Israel is responsible for "every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world."
Extremist imams in some mosques across the country can be found cursing Jews as "the most devilish ones on the Earth," who "specialize in the shedding of blood, in crime, and in killing." The ADL ignores this and actively works to increase immigration from Muslim-majority countries, which their very own studies show have the world's highest rates of Jew-hatred.
Islamist extremists, Black supremacists, anarchists, and left-wing groups where Jew-hatred is on the rise get scant attention from the ADL, which fixates on traditional right-wing bigots. This isn't surprising, given that Greenblatt is an alumnus of the Clinton and Obama administrations.
ADL leaders have hijacked the one-time stalwart Jewish defense organization to serve a progressive ideological agenda. This is a scandal that cannot be ignored—nor should it be tolerated. The ADL must return to its one-time "immediate object," which is to end Jew-hatred.
Sadly, other legacy Jewish organizations such the JCPA, as well as many Federations and Jewish Community Relations Councils, and even many of our synagogues, have also been commandeered to benefit the pet political causes of their leaders, rather than the people the institutions were formed to serve. Jewish donors, who anoint our American Jewish leaders, have permitted this "long march through Jewish institutions."
American Jewish elites are betraying the American Jewish community, and must be held accountable for their failures. The rest of us need to insist that the leaders fulfill their responsibility to the Jewish community, and to demand they do their jobs—or find new ones.
Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser are the founders of The Jewish Leadership Project.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
