The Anti-Defamation League CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, sparked controversy in 2022 when he placed opposition to Israel on a par with white supremacy as a source of antisemitism.
“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Greenblatt said in a speech to ADL leaders. He singled out Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as groups that “epitomize the Radical Left, the photo inverse of the Extreme Right that ADL long has tracked”.
His remarks didn’t only upset grassroots activists and Jewish groups critical of Israeli policy. It also set off a firestorm within the Jewish advocacy group.
Some members of ADL’s staff were outraged by the dissonance between Greenblatt’s comments and the organization’s own research, as evidenced by internal messages viewed by the Guardian. “There is no comparison between white supremacists and insurrectionists and those who espouse anti-Israel rhetoric, and to suggest otherwise is both intellectually dishonest and damaging to our reputation as experts in extremism,” a senior manager at ADL’s Center on Extremism wrote in a Slack channel to over 550 colleagues. Others chimed in, agreeing. “The aforementioned false equivalencies and the both-sides-ism are incompatible with the data I have seen,” a longtime extremism researcher said. “[T]he stated concerns about reputational repercussions and societal impacts have already proved to be prescient.”
Even before the latest Israel-Hamas war, the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has increasingly inflected the debate around the bounds of legitimate protest, with the ADL playing a vocal role. Now, news reports show a troubling surge of antisemitism, with bomb threats against synagogues and antisemitic graffiti. The ADL has said antisemitic incidents in the US have risen 388% since 7 October. But its data is difficult to make sense of, precisely because of questions around how the ADL defines antisemitism.
And tensions continue to ignite between Greenblatt and ADL staff. At least two employees who spoke to the Guardian have quit in response to its overt emphasis on pro-Israel advocacy since the Israeli offensive on Gaza began, building on a pattern of departures from the organization. But the ADL has only doubled down on initiatives defending Israel and the policies of the Israeli government. It has welcomed a controversial congressional resolution that defined anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and it has called on law enforcement to investigate student activist groups for providing “material support” to Hamas, which the US government has designated as a terrorist organization.
Critics of the group argue that these and other actions risk undermining the civil rights organization’s counter-extremism work and say the group has foregone much of its historical mission to fight antisemitism in favor of doing advocacy for Israel.
The ADL said it could not make a representative available for an interview but over email a spokesperson said the organization “will continue to work tirelessly against efforts that delegitimize Israel and vilify Jews”.
A current employee of ADL, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Guardian that the organization’s conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is damaging its efforts to counter hate. “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.”
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The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 to fight antisemitism. It is an influential player in policy and media circles, and is often called upon to opine and propose solutions to antisemitism in the US.
Greenblatt joined as CEO and national director in 2015, taking the helm of its offices throughout the US, multiple research centers, education programs, community organizers and lobbyists. The ADL earned about $76m annually from contributions, according to its latest filing.
Though the rise of Donald Trump and growing white nationalism shocked the American mainstream, the ADL was prepared, having built out teams of researchers capable of plumbing the depths of the far right. In response to Trump’s call for a database to track Muslims, Greenblatt said: “This proud Jew would register as a Muslim.”
But many civil society groups are increasingly reluctant to partner with the non-profit. The ADL has facilitated trainings between US and Israeli law enforcement officers and allegedly spied on progressive and Arab American groups. (The ADL settled a lawsuit stemming from the spying allegations but denied wrongdoing.) In 2021, about 100 social justice and civil rights groups signed an open letter urging other organizations not to work with the ADL.
Since the 7 October attacks, the ADL has been working with law enforcement to crack down on college campus activism that it sees as antisemitic. They developed a legal strategy to go after branches of Students for Justice in Palestine, and reached out to 200 university leaders calling on them to investigate the group for allegedly providing support to Hamas, which the group vehemently denies. ADL has described grassroots calls for protests of Israel’s military campaign as “pro-Hamas activism”.
This and other recent activities have upset some of the ADL’s rank and file. “I resigned because I felt that Jonathan Greenblatt’s comments were undermining my ability as a researcher to fight online hate and harassment,” Stephen Rea, a researcher at ADL’s Center for Technology & Society who quit the group in October, told the Guardian.
As protesters led by the anti-occupation groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace took over the US Capitol in October to put pressure on Congress and President Joe Biden to call for a ceasefire, Greenblatt called them “radical far-left groups” that “represent the ugly core of anti-Zionism”.
In response, another ADL staffer left the organization. “Those were Jewish people who we [as the ADL] were defaming, so that felt extremely, extremely confusing, and frustrating to me,” they told the Guardian. “And it makes it harder to talk about that when any criticism of Israel, or anyone who criticizes Israel, just becomes a terrorist.”
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The precise contours of antisemitism and anti-Zionism are intensely debated. The ADL and many other Jewish establishment organizations have been pushing for years for governments to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, which defines some criticisms of Israel, and anti-Zionism in particular, as antisemitic. When the Biden White House released its strategy to counter antisemitism in May 2023, it mentioned several definitions in its document rather than enshrining a single one. At the time, the ADL said it shaped the strategy, claiming that the White House had adopted the IHRA definition outright and described that as a victory.
The ADL said in its statement that it does not conflate criticism of Israel, which is not inherently antisemitic, with actual antisemitism. But experts question whether its widely cited annual audit of antisemitic incidents does just that. Some fraction of those incidents, for example, are probably actions by anti-Zionist activists who are themselves Jewish, such as Jewish Voice for Peace.
“It contributes to a distorted view,” said Ben Lorber, an analyst of trends in white nationalism at Political Research Associates. “Parts of the ADL continue to do valuable work in monitoring and warning against the danger of the rising far right, but increasingly, that work is compromised by their reactionary approach on Israel.”
The ADL and progressive groups have previously clashed over its support of anti-BDS measures and the Trump administration’s investigations into Palestinian rights groups.
Sophie Ellman-Golan, spokesperson for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, believes that the ADL is responding to the rise of a progressive Jewish left that cuts into space the group has historically occupied.
“It is very threatening for institutions that have long been able to speak as the representative voice of the Jewish community to now be faced with such an undeniable set of loud, persistent and consistent Jewish voices that are directly counter to what they’re saying,” she said.
The group’s spokesperson wrote by email that Greenblatt “has long said that antisemitism from the far right is like the hurricane bearing down on you right now, and antisemitism from the left is like climate change where the temperature is slowly increasing; After Oct. 7, we’re at the point where that global warming is turning into a storm is now hitting us too.”
At the same time, Greenblatt has sought to win over or appease certain voices on the far right. In late November, Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X. Major companies pulled advertising, and the White House condemned it as an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate”. Greenblatt criticized it on a podcast, but the next day, he praised Musk, after the tech CEO said that tweeting the controversial protest chant “from the river to the sea” would be deemed a violation of X’s terms of service. Several dismayed ADL advisory board members threatened to quit their posts, and this week, according to reporting in Jewish Currents, an executive resigned over Greenblatt’s praise of Musk.
The flirtations with Musk might seem particularly bizarre, especially given the two men have a history of feuds. But it’s actually in line with ADL’s “general approach” which is “to try and stay at the table with people in positions of power to try to coax them into a better place”, according to an internal email from senior vice-president Adam Neufeld viewed by the Guardian.
“Jonathan was encouraged by Elon’s tweet saying that clear calls for extreme violence against the Jewish state, such as those calling for ‘decolonization’ of Israel or saying ‘from the river to the sea’ are a violation of the platform’s terms of service and will result in suspension,” the ADL spokesperson said. “This is the right approach – and Elon has laid down a gauntlet that other social media companies should follow.”
One major concern is that the ADL is looking at the threats facing Jewish communities and Jewish students in a vacuum, separate from other forms of hate. “We see antisemitism as sort of the connective tissue or the entry point into other hard-right ideologies,” Susan Corke, who directs the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said. “It’s woven within these other hate groups and extremists that we cover.”
When there have been surges of violence in Israel and Palestine, Corke explained, “There has been a similar uptick in antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents and violence and hate crimes.”
Greenblatt said that recent hate crimes against Muslim, Palestinian and Arab Americans “must be unequivocally condemned” and the spokesperson said the organization has regularly advocated against anti-Muslim hate in recent months. But the ADL’s renewed emphasis on Israel advocacy in its work against hatred may preclude it from partnering with civil rights groups to address growing Islamophobia.
The watchdog, according to Lorber, is “using the crisis moment to advance its longstanding agenda”.
