Noah Shachtman writes:

On June 4, an executive at the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded with a mission to defend the Jewish people and “to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” walked into a room on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower building across the street from the White House. They were there to attend a meeting between Jewish groups and members of the Trump administration. Just a few years before, in the waning days of Trump’s first term, the ADL’s presence at such a gathering would have been inconceivable.

Officials included the Justice Department’s civil-rights chief, Harmeet Dhillon, who had been sparring with the ADL since she was a student at Dartmouth in the 1980s; Trump’s top spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, whom the ADL had once criticized for participating in what it called a “fake Jewish ritual” (a bogus rabbi had wrapped her body in a Torah scroll); and National Security Council counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka, whom the ADL had previously said was linked to “openly racist and antisemitic hate groups.”

The meeting, which included representatives of the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, AIPAC, and others, had been convened to discuss the administration’s next steps in responding to an outpouring of antisemitism. The past two weeks had seen two of the most heinous antisemitic crimes on American soil in decades. On May 21, a young couple, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, two Israeli Embassy staff members, were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., shot by a man who reportedly chose them at random and shouted “Free Palestine” during his arrest. On June 1, in Boulder, Colorado, a group of mostly elderly Jews demonstrating in support of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 were attacked by a man using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. One of the 13 injured was a Holocaust survivor; another, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, later died of her injuries.

Following the attacks, ADL national director and chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt traveled to Boulder and made a series of speeches and media appearances. “I’m angry,” Greenblatt said over and over again. He blamed pro-Palestine activists and social-media influencers for contributing to an environment that radicalized the assailants. On Fox News, visibly agitated, he called out Guy Christensen — a teenage TikTok influencer who had urged “support” for Milgrim’s and Lischinsky’s murderer — and the Twitch personality Hasan Piker, who had not but who said he would continue to speak out against Israel’s “livestreamed child holocaust.” Greenblatt described both as “promoters of hate” alongside the leaders of colleges and universities, who he said had allowed antisemitic attitudes to fester. He referred to a recent commencement address at MIT in which the senior-class president had condemned the school’s cooperation with “the genocidal Israeli military,” declaring that such talk spreads “blood libels” and “creates the conditions” for violence. “We’ve got to stop it once and for all,” Greenblatt said. “I hope the Trump administration will do just that.”

Greenblatt, 54, a former Clinton- and Obama-administration official, was in his tenth year at the helm of the ADL, and he had spent much of his tenure directly opposing Trump. In March 2016, when Trump was competing to become the Republican nominee for president, Greenblatt announced he was redirecting the mogul’s previous donations to anti-bias efforts, citing Trump’s “penchant to slander minorities, slur refugees, dismiss First Amendment protections, and cheer on violence.” In the following years, Greenblatt publicly blamed the president for helping to create the environment that led to the deadly Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally and the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were killed. In 2019, the ADL took to the courts to fight what it called the “widespread violation of immigrants’ fundamental rights” under Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and in 2021, following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Greenblatt became the first head of a major Jewish organization to call for the president to be removed from office.

But all that felt long ago now. For the past several years, and especially since the October 7 attack, Greenblatt and the ADL had insisted that surging antisemitic activity — thousands of violent incidents per year in the U.S. — was being driven largely by the political left. Greenblatt had emerged as a spokesperson for a large swath of American Jews alienated from their traditional liberal allies. For decades, the ADL argued that anti-Zionism could lead to antisemitism, but recently, the group had adopted the position Greenblatt more or less aired on Fox: that opposition to the Jewish state was the same thing as antisemitism, full stop. That tens of thousands of Jews were active in the pro-Palestine movement was not just put aside — it was taken as evidence that they were antisemites, too. Later, at the end of July, when the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza would finally come to the fore of the world’s attention and many long-standing supporters of Israel would call on the government to ease its grip on the territory, Greenblatt would maintain, in the words of a post on X, that “Hamas alone has power to end this tragedy.”

It’s unclear if Greenblatt’s antipathy toward Trump faded as the ADL’s perspective on the left shifted. But he unquestionably saw and took common ground with elements of the MAGA right. In March, when the Trump administration pulled $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, Greenblatt tweeted, “We at ADL appreciate the Trump Administration’s efforts to counter campus antisemitism.” A few days later, when ICE agents began snatching pro-Palestine activists from their apartment buildings and off the streets, the ADL hailed the administration for its “broad, bold set of efforts.”

Inside the ADL, the change has been deeply controversial. Over the past six months, I spoke with more than 40 current and former staffers, donors, board members, interlocutors in government, and other allies. Seventeen of these people, all of whom were either previously employed by or closely affiliated with the organization, have chosen to quit or part ways with it in recent years. Critics say that rather than “calling balls and strikes” regarding what is and isn’t hate, to use a favored Greenblatt phrase, Greenblatt has seemed to bend the rules for those in power. When Elon Musk threw up a pair of straight-arm salutes on Inauguration Day — which many ADL insiders, including Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abe Foxman, believed to be a sieg heil — the organization’s official X account posted in Musk’s defense, calling the action an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute” and asked for a “bit of grace” for the billionaire. Confused ADL employees blew up the organization’s Slack channels. According to a source close to the ADL, Musk’s perceived support of the Jewish state factored heavily in the decision. As the source put it: “We heard numerous very positive and glowing things, publicly and privately, about what he’s done in Israel.” To this source, this was evidence that Musk had no “antisemitic tendencies.” In recent weeks, Grok, X’s generative AI chatbot, began disparaging Jewish-sounding surnames and proclaimed itself to be “Mecha Hitler.” (In a post on X, the ADL called the bot’s behavior “irresponsible, dangerous, and antisemitic.”)

Several liberal longtime donors to the ADL told me they have stopped giving to the group. Some said they would not be involved as long as Greenblatt remained in his position. After the Musk incident, Walter Jospin, a Georgia attorney whose family has donated around $1 million over the years, wrote to the ADL’s board, “Most of the past and present regional leadership and donors no longer have confidence in Jonathan. These episodes are embarrassing; Jonathan is making it so hard to support and defend ADL.” Steven Ludwig, a regional board member in Philadelphia and an ADL volunteer since the 1990s who resigned in May, wrote in his own letter that the group has been “silent when it is most needed,” failing “to stand up against the spread of hatred, the erosion of the rule of law, and the threat of authoritarianism.”

At the same time, the organization has been bleeding young staffers. Many who have left mourn the narrowing of the ADL’s mission — that “justice and fair treatment for all” has been put on the back burner. [Continue reading…]