For decades, when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was mentioned, it was usually in reference to combatting antisemitism. Now the ADL is more accurately cited in the litany of pro-Israeli groups attempting to criminalize Muslim and Palestinian students for seeking an end to the horrific genocide in Gaza.
For over a hundred years, the ADL has described itself as a leading civil rights organization focused on Jewish American communities but also recognizing that the civil rights of Jews are interconnected with those of other minority communities. Indeed, the ADL was among the few non-Black organizations supportive of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
However, the gradual acceptance of Jewish Americans by white Christians into the social construction of “whiteness” starting in the 1970s, after decades of anti-Jewish discrimination, caused a divergence in economic and political interests with racial minority communities that continue to face systemic racism. Of course, that does not mean antisemitism no longer exists, but it is not structural—as it was when Jews were victims of housing segregation, admissions quotas at universities, explicit racial tropes in mainstream media, exclusion from elite law firms, and underrepresentation in elected office.
Simultaneously, the ADL’s increasingly pro-Israeli donor base equated combating antisemitism with censoring critiques of Zionism and defending the state of Israel’s policies. The ADL branded their revised agenda as “The New Antisemitism.”
The ADL’s current priorities differ starkly from those of Jewish communities a century ago whose members were primarily working class, described as a dangerous “Hebrew” race, and intentionally discriminated against in education, housing, and employment.
Instead, the ADL has increasingly become associated with spreading Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza in the fall of 2023, the ADL has been deploying its substantial resources to stop student activism and protests on university campuses—with seemingly little regard for the fundamental American right to free speech and political assembly.
To read the full commentary on Academe, click here.
