Mutiny at the Anti-Defamation League

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, January 04, 2024

 

Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard had nothing to do with anti-Semitism and had everything to do with anti-Semitism. She refused to spend a moment’s thought on it, despite campus anti-Semitism being the reason she was hauled in front of Congress last month, setting in motion the events that would lead to her downfall. At the same time as the Harvard drama was playing out, a slow-burning rebellion at the Anti-Defamation League picked up some speed. This, too, is a direct result of the politics that ultimately tripped up Gay.

 

In both cases, those who have engineered or benefited from the ideological capture of facially nonpartisan institutions are being forced to choose between serving their institution’s stated mission or polishing their progressive bona fides.

 

The commotion at the ADL is centered on the AsAJew phenomenon. AsAJews are political activists who front their claim to Jewishness as collateral in return for affiliation with purely partisan political causes. They tend to begin each of their attacks on Jews or Israel with the phrase “As a Jew…” Essentially, they are the Jewish section of political movements that seek to limit Jewish power and representation.

 

The Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 made it much more difficult to camouflage one’s hostility to the Jewish people. After all, the beginning of Claudine Gay’s trouble was the “well laid trap” (her words) of being asked a very simple question about her institution’s position on calling for a genocide of the Jews—a question that she flubbed because much of Harvard’s student body and faculty are sympathetic to the perpetrators of that massacre.

 

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, for years has spent the organization’s political capital on accruing acceptance in progressive spaces. The ADL has become home to a great many AsAJews. After Oct. 7, the bill came due: The AsAJews and their political mentors decided it was time for the ADL to throw off the yoke of its pretensions and defect from Jewish organizational life to officially join the ranks of those marching on Jewish neighborhoods chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

 

Greenblatt balked, and his creation has apparently risen from the table and walked out of the lab. According to Jewish Currents, the house organ of the AsAJews, several employees have left the ADL unit dedicated to countering online hate, including the Obama administration alum who led that unit, because of Greenblatt’s attempts to get social-media services to crack down on anti-Semitism:

 

“Former staffers told Jewish Currents that in the past months, Greenblatt has redirected the ADL’s day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the organization’s credibility.”

 

To translate that from doublespeak: The Anti-Defamation League’s public opposition to those calling for the mass murder of the Jewish people is not what these staffers signed up for. Perhaps this clash was inevitable: Greenblatt’s support for censorship in the public square was a weapon his progressive allies were never going to accept being turned on them.

 

And there is much anger at the realization that the activists who thought they had fully captured this particular institution still have work to do. Greenblatt’s conscience has awoken in the wake of Oct. 7, and now he won’t just take orders from his subordinates, which apparently was the state of play prior to the massacre.

 

“There’s a pattern of Jonathan going rogue—belittling in-house experts and ignoring talking points prepared for him,” one former ADL staffer told Jewish Currents, with no apparent self-awareness.

 

The breaking point came when Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), threatened to suspend users who deployed genocidal language toward Jews, including the phrase “From the river to the sea” and the term “decolonization,” an academic justification for race- or ethnic-based extralegal killings.

 

Greenblatt praised the statement. “In response,” Jewish Currents reports, “Eli Pariser, a member of ADL’s tech advisory board, which provides guidance and tech expertise to the CTS, told Rolling Stone that he was considering resigning if the ADL didn’t apologize and change course; Peter Fox, a member of a different ADL advisory board, wrote a Forward op-ed publicly criticizing the organization’s appeasement of Musk.”

 

To be clear: That the defense of Jewish lives was a bridge too far for so many ADL officials represents the reaping of Greenblatt’s own harvest. As well, the fact that Claudine Gay came to oversee an institution brimming with violent antipathy for Jews is hardly a coincidence. Gay stepped down from the presidency but will keep her faculty position. That was the move required to ensure that Harvard will not see a change in its demented campus culture. The people who work for Greenblatt think Greenblatt works for them, and they would like to see him return to his pre-Oct. 7 self. If Greenblatt caves, it’ll truly be the end of the ADL in any recognizable form.

 

As a Jew, I eagerly await his decision.