How its new executive director is betraying the organization’s purpose.
Can a Greenblatt-led Anti-Defamation League be saved?
The burgeoning hate aimed at Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century was the driving force behind the 1913 formation of the Anti-Defamation League. According to its original charter—as laid out by its sponsoring organization, B’nai Brith, the largest Jewish communal group in the United States—the ADL’s “immediate object” was “to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against, and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.”
Countering organized hate movements was, practically from the start, at the center of the ADL’s mission. The seminal case was that of Mary Phagan, a teenaged factory laborer in Atlanta, who was found murdered in 1913. Leo Frank, the factory’s Jewish superintendent, was framed in what became America’s blood-libel story for budding white supremacists. Frank was abducted from prison in 1915 and lynched. Before he was killed, Frank’s sentence was commuted by Georgia’s governor due in large measure to the argumentation and lobbying of the ADL and associated civil-rights organizations. The horror of Frank’s demise did not vitiate the lesson that organizing and solidarity with other minority groups were the key to political success in protecting Jews.
In 1920, under the banner “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent began serializing excerpts of the most infamous of all conspiracies: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Having inspired pogroms two decades earlier when first published in Russia, and coming on the heels of the Leo Frank case and the reemergence of the KKK, Ford’s actions sent a shiver up the spine of the Jewish community. A seven-year campaign of pressure, helped by Ford’s mounting financial troubles, succeeded in getting Ford to stop the series and apologize.
The cases of Leo Frank and Henry Ford still resonate, representing the twin pillars not only of anti-Semitism through the ages but of the resurgent anti-Semitism of the 21st century. One sees the Jew as unwanted foreigner, the despoiler of white bloodlines. The other holds the Jew responsible, from afar, for the world’s ills. Today, the Israeli has been substituted for the Jew like a clumsy search-and-replace macro in Microsoft Word. When nations go to war, the conspiracy theorists often blame not Jewish financiers but manipulative Israelis, and the censorial Jew is now the blacklisting Zionist.
Both pillars of anti-Semitism exist all along the partisan spectrum, but the nationalist pillar is, both in ideology and practice, more closely associated with the right, and the “Protocols” pillar with the left. This has rarely posed much of a challenge to groups like the ADL, which found itself able to criticize both. Like every organization, the ADL had its blind spots, but it never had an obstructed view of its own raison d’être—until the summer of 2015.
That was when Jonathan Greenblatt succeeded longtime ADL director Abe Foxman. Greenblatt is a man of the left in the purest sense, and one who holds partisan politics paramount. In the years leading up to his hire, the American left’s relationship with world Jewry had begun a steady decline. This decline was exploited and exacerbated by President Barack Obama—for whose administration Greenblatt worked before taking over the ADL. It is unclear whether the ADL’s reputation can survive Greenblatt’s stewardship.
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