The shame of the American Jewish establishment
At the end of 2015, soon after taking over as CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt brought the organization’s leadership to Georgia and Alabama. The journey constituted a kind of homage to the ADL’s role in the civil rights movement. In an essay about the trip, Greenblatt noted that in 1965, his predecessor, Benjamin Epstein, had summoned the ADL’s top staff to Selma, where they joined Martin Luther King Jr. in one of the country’s most famous marches for Black voting rights. Greenblatt and his team reenacted that procession, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge as thousands had once done before. In his essay, Greenblatt pledged to honor “the inheritance bequeathed to us by Dr. King and Epstein” by pursuing “justice and fair treatment to all.”
More than a decade later, Greenblatt still leads the ADL. But when the Supreme Court this April gutted the Voting Rights Act for which King and Epstein marched, the organization said nothing. The ADL webpage about Epstein’s activities in Selma—which Greenblatt’s essay once linked to—has been taken down, along with much of the organization’s other material about civil rights.
The ADL is not the only American Jewish organization that has lost interest in whether Black Americans fully possess the right to vote. The American Jewish Committee has also turned away from its civil rights past. In 1965, the organization asked its staff to march in Selma. “Our responsibility to the Negro,” declared the AJC’s president the previous year, “is really no more or less than our responsibility to ourselves.” Yet when the Supreme Court this spring enabled Republicans to gerrymander away most Black congressional representation in the South, the AJC was silent too. (Both the ADL and AJC failed to respond to repeated requests for interviews as well as a request for comment).
These are not isolated incidents. The silence of the ADL and AJC reflects a historic transformation: an abandonment of the democratic solidarity that animated establishment American Jewish politics for roughly eighty years. [Continue reading…]