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July 31, 2022

After a barrage of criticism over its failure to deal with the surge of anti-Zionist Jew-hatred, the ADL — the Jewish people’s “defense agency” — finally chose to respond to charges that it had embraced partisanship over its nonpartisan mission.  It took a column by North Carolina parent Kathryn Wolf published in the left-leaning Forward, whose audience the ADL cannot afford to ignore, laying out an instance where ADL erroneously warned of parents’ statements at school board meetings (on COVID measures and other irrelevances) to elicit a refutation by the ADL’s senior vice president for policy, Eileen Hershenov.  
Ironically, every one of Hershenov’s responses lends credence to Wolf’s critiques.

In her letter to the Forward, Hershenov claims that Wolf distorts the ADL’s record, and that in fact the ADL is committed to an “unambiguously nonpartisan mission to fight antisemitism, regardless of whether the source is the political right or left — or anywhere else.”  She makes her case by listing the few instances where ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt “called out” Democratic Party politicians for anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric.  She boasts that “in November 2021, Greenblatt issued a clarion call against antisemitism from the far left in his annual state of hate remarks.”  And she points all the way back to 2017 when he wrote “Anti-Semitism Is Creeping Into Progressivism” in TIME magazine.

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This is meaningless.  The scandal that Wolf points to is ADL’s failure for almost 30 years to understand anti-Zionism as the “new antisemitism,” let alone to combat it.  A few tweets and long-overdue, yet toothless, statements just won’t do.

It was in 1989 that the ADL first turned down a key chance to address the issue of anti-Zionism.  That was the year we were involved in forming the Boston branch of CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) as a grassroots effort to combat the mainstream media’s incessant assault on Israel.  We were surprised to learn that two of Boston’s establishment Jewish leaders — Lenny Zaikim, ADL’s chief in the Hub, and Steve Grossman, one time head of AIPAC — wanted the ADL and not CAMERA to spearhead the effort against media bias, arguing that ADL speaks in the voice of American Jews so we should “Let the ADL be the ADL for Israel.”  

But ADL CEO Abe Foxman declined.  This was a significant, historic error.  It meant that neither the American public nor the Jews were told by the “defense agency” of the Jewish people that the media systematically promotes Palestinian propaganda about Israel as news.  Even today, after decades of media poison that falsely paints American Jews as supporters of a cruel “apartheid” nation — and inevitably drums up violence against American Jews — the ADL offers no analysis of media bias, let alone a strategy to correct it.

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What’s more, since the start of the campus assault against Zionist students, dating roughly to the year 2000, the ADL has refused to support Jewish college students intimidated and harassed first by anti-Israel professors, and then by a panoply of leftist groups.  As with the media problem, Jewish students were helped by newer, grassroots organizations which came into existence when — and because! — the Jewish establishment failed them.  (The ZOA is the exception, being the only legacy organization which always fought anti-Zionism and was always there for Jewish students.)  The David Project, StandWithUs, Hasbara Fellows, SPME, CAMERA on Campus, manned the gap created by ADL’s reluctance.

Then anti-Israelism came to the high schools.  In Newton, Massachusetts, after grassroots groups organized to fight horrific, deceptive “lesson” plans, some funded by Saudi Arabia, the ADL told the Jewish community that there was no big problem in Newton schools. 

Finally, the ADL has yet to deal with Islamic Jew-hatred, much of it promoted in the guise of “criticism of Israel.”  Radical imams in mosques across America can be seen cursing Jews and radicalizing the historically moderate Muslim community.  In Boston, when we gave the ADL incontrovertible documentation that the largest mosque on the East Coast was run by the Muslim Brotherhood; they turned away.

Hershenov writes that ADL fights antisemitism whatever the source.  This claim is risible.  On April 9, 2019, Hershenov testified before a congressional hearing on racism and hate crimes and the rise of the White Nationalism.  Both her formal written statement, and her oral remarks focused almost exclusively on “white supremacism,” with no mention of Muslim antisemitism.  On the contrary, Muslims only appear in her testimony as victims of hate.  Earlier that day, the ZOA’s Mort Klein had testified to the same committee that Islamic Jew-hatred is a major problem, citing the ADL’s very own data showing that 34% of American Muslims and 49% of Muslims worldwide hate Jews.  Hershenov explained why the ADL did not act on its own alarming findings.  She said:

Um, one of the witnesses [Mort Klein] talked about global — the global attitudes that we look at. That’s non-violent — looking at attitudes — and the ADL does track that.  We feel it is incumbent — vulnerable, marginalized — marginalized, ah, communities have bigotry within them.  It is incumbent first for members of those communities to call that out.  There are members of the Jewish community that are bigoted, that are Islamophobic, and we need to call that out…

It is ADL policy then, expressed by Hershenov herself, that Muslims are “vulnerable” and “marginalized,” that they need to call out Jew-hatred in their community on their own, there’s nothing for the ADL to do about it, and that Jewish “Islamophobia” is a parallel phenomenon.  She then cites rises in hate crimes against Muslims (third highest year) but not the much greater rise of hate crimes against Jews (68% of all religious hate crimes), many committed by Muslims.