Everything about the direction of the Anti-Defamation League indicated that it would end up here. In response to Elon Musk saluting like a Nazi during Monday's inauguration celebration for Donald Trump, the organization run by Jonathan Greenblatt chose to look past "an awkward gesture" by the billionaire, who has worked to make Twitter a more welcoming place for all kinds of hate.
"Thanks guys," Musk replied, with a cry-laugh emoji. The two have plenty of recent history: In September 2023, he threatened to sue the ADL for defamation after advertisers abandoned Twitter, because few companies wanted to have their names associated with the hate speech spread and endorsed by Musk. A month later, the ADL said it was ready to buy advertising on Twitter again. That, in part, would explain the soft touch for the richest man on the world.
The ADL is seen as the praepostor of combating white supremacy and other forms of hate, but in reality it has less legitimacy than a hall monitor. In Greenblatt's decade as CEO, its actual goals have been to put together dubious statistics and defend Israel at all costs. Don't just take my word for it; listen to those who work there. "The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism," an anonymous ADL employee told The Guardian in a 2024 article about how staff were sick of Greenblatt's misrepresentation of their work.
When lazy media outlets need a secondary source to provide comment for news on antisemitism or another hate crime, they get a quote from Greenblatt or use his organization's cooked data, which according to its own staffers is inflated to include support of Palestine as incidents of antisemitism. For example, when the organization Jewish Voice for Peace protested in October 2023 by occupying the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, Greenblatt called the group "the photo inverse of white supremacists." He has used stronger condemnation for college students and Bella Hadid than he did for the world's richest man pushing antisemitism.
Greenblatt has disingenuously and repeatedly defined anti-Zionism as antisemitism, even though he has no issue working with antisemites if it buffs the image of Zionism. He is selective about who the ADL will absolve, on the basis of how it will help him, his organization, and Israel. As Noah Kulwin wrote for Jewish Currents in 2022, Greenblatt and his organization offer "a kind of corporate triage, providing or withholding its imprimatur as individuals and organizations adhere to or depart from criteria determined by the ADL itself." Regardless of how many times Greenblatt might criticize Musk for promoting antisemitism, the ADL CEO praised him in 2023 for announcing a crackdown on "From the river to the sea" and other pro-Palestine slogans on Twitter.
It would be convenient to say that Greenblatt singlehandedly ruined the ADL's reputation, but it was tarnished long before then. Founded in 1913, the organization's original intent was “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” By the 1950s, it was cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee. In more recent decades, the organization has boasted about a relationship with the FBI, and how it provides training to every new special agent. This all aligns neatly with the ADL's history of undermining Arab-American organizations, as well as black activists and South African anti-apartheid groups when they showed solidarity with Palestine. Read Emmaia Gelman's Boston Review article from 2019, and it's clear that Greenblatt is following a well-worn playbook:
The ADL’s conception of a leftist threat had already been guiding the organization for decades; in the 1980s this idea had cohered in neoconservatism. But in civil rights circles, the ADL did not acknowledge its hostility to the left. Instead, it portrayed itself as progressive, and anti-racists to its left as “rogue” and misguided, if not marginal: [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and black liberationists had hijacked real civil rights, New Jewish Agenda were outliers who were really anti-Semites. In the 1980s, according to the ADL’s spy Roy Bullock, the ADL’s anxieties “focused on groups critical of Israeli policies, such as anti-apartheid groups,” which Bullock also categorized more simply as “antidemocratic movements.”
Bullock was a freelance spy for the ADL, collecting information to discredit anti-apartheid groups, while also selling that intel to the South African government. As Glenn Frankel wrote for Foreign Policy in 2010:
The Anti-Defamation League participated in a blatant propaganda campaign against Nelson Mandela and the [African National Congress] in the mid 1980s and employed an alleged "fact-finder" named Roy Bullock to spy on the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States — a service he was simultaneously performing for the South African government. The ADL defended the white regime’s purported constitutional reforms while denouncing the ANC as "totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel, and anti-American." (In fairness, the ADL later changed its tune. After his release in 1990, Mandela met in Geneva with a number of American Jewish leaders, including ADL president Abe Foxman, who emerged to call the ANC leader "a great hero of freedom.")
The ADL is such a sham that Wikipedia editors argued to stop citing it as a reliable source. But there's a new organization in this genre, funded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft: the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. You might know it for its "Stand Up to Jewish Hate" campaign, with a blue square and a vague commercial in which a bunch of famous athletes call a timeout on "hate." (Yes, Shaq is in it.) On the foundation's website, a number of links for more information redirect to the ADL and its statistics. It won't come as a surprise that Kraft is a vocal proponent of Israel, taking NFL players on trips there to bring the hasbara back home. Last year, he pulled his financial support from Columbia University in response to the pro-Palestine student encampments.
With Trump now inaugurated and a tenuous ceasefire process in Gaza, the national attention will shift away from the Palestinians. The ADL will try to position itself as one of the few defenses against stateside authoritarianism, and will ask for your donations to help fund that fight. In reality, it's hollow branding, as demonstrated by the organization's meek reaction to Musk. The purpose of the ADL is to satisfy Greenblatt's shallow interests and extend the life of Israel's apartheid state. It will eat as many Sieg Heils as it needs to in order to get there.
