Why the ADL Abandoned Antisemitism and Went Woke

By Daniel Greenfield, 

In 2018, the ADL announced that it was no longer in the ‘kindness’ business. “Forget Kindness. Schools Need to Foster Social Justice,” Jinnie Spiegler, the ADL’s curriculum director, barked.

By three years old, Spiegler claimed white children in America are already racists.
Spiegler, an obsessive leftist with seemingly no Jewish interests, whose Twitter account promotes anti-Semitic leftists like AOC, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar, has a singular obsession.

“When my daughter was 3 years old, I taught her the word stereotype,” she revealed in one article. “I figured that planting the seed might yield fruit soon enough.”

Planting leftist ideological seeds in children is what the ADL’s education programs do.

While the ADL claims to fight anti-Semitism, like a lot of activist groups it discovered that there was a much better way to pay the bills by getting into the business of diversity training and education. That freed the ADL from having to solicit Jewish donors or to care about anti-Semitism.

When Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Obama operative, took over the ADL, its annual revenues were $56 million and had been roughly in that range throughout the decade. A year later they shot up to $65 million, then $76 million and totaled $91 million in 2020. With revenues having nearly doubled in 5 years, the odds of ousting Greenblatt remain vanishingly small.

The ADL shares a fundraising firm with Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and the ACLU, but it also has developed a massive nationwide presence in the educational system.

Its educational ‘No Place for Hate’ arm claims that its present in 1,800 schools reaching 1.3 million students in one school year. It offers “anti-bias” workshops and training, online and in person for teachers, and curriculum and ‘non-hate’ certification for schools. According to the Seattle branch of the ADL, “workshops cost a school or district $1200?. Activists have documented contracts with school districts amounting to tens of thousands of dollars each.

But one of its more successful areas is also where its teachings may violate state law.

Florida’s ‘Stop Woke Act’, signed into law by Gov. DeSantis, bars subjecting any student to the idea that anyone is morally superior or oppressive on account of their race. The ADL’s ‘No Place for Hate’ handbook however demands that students “explore, recognize and acknowledge your privilege” and defines racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color, based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”

The familiar message here from critical race theory is that only white people can be racist.

This violates the Stop Woke Act’s warning that schools may not teach that “an individual’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”

The ADL operates its ‘No Place for Hate’ program in Florida. One press release bragged that “22 public schools in Miami-Dade County were designated as ‘No Place For Hate’, including all 8 City of Miami Beach Public Schools”. Another claimed that it was present in 234 Broward County public schools which is the 6th largest district in the country with 270,000 students.

That means potentially as many as 270,000 students may be taught that white people are evil.

This disastrous program is being funded by $100,000 in federal funds.

Broward is such an asset for the ADL that its local director, Kiesha Edge, a former black employee of the Florida Department of Health, is now the ADL’s National Director of Education Operations, even while remaining back in Florida, in charge of 450 “education facilitators”

“We live in a society where systemic racism is alive and well,” Edge contended.

The only remaining systemic racism is teaching kids that they’re racist because of their race.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center took the lead in drawing up a K-12 code of ethics to end classroom indoctrination banning “teachers from using their classrooms for political, ideological, or religious advocacy.” But that is exactly what the ADL is doing with ‘No Place for Hate’.

And we’re taking on the ADL’s racist curriculum too.

The old ADL is mostly dead. Kiesha Edge and Jinnie Spiegler are what the organization is now:. a collection of woke leftist activists who believe that America and its people are evil racists.

ADL officials can be of Jewish ancestry, like Spiegler, or black like Edge or even Arab, like Senior Vice President for National Affairs George Selim, but what unites them is politics.
And the money doesn’t hurt either.

Education and training is what the ADL actually does more than anything else. What had started out as a gimmick with the ADL’s original ‘World of Difference’ program became toxic as it was transformed into ‘No Place for Hate’.

Spiegler, the ADL’s curriculum boss, objected that “many schools hope to engage young people in social action work, yet mistakenly focus on kindness”. Her ideal was the mobilization of some Parkland students to advocate against the Second Amendment after the school shooting there caused by Obama’s dismantling of school discipline policies.

“The first step is to facilitate students’ learning about the issues in a rigorous and complex way, and then to get them involved in action, advocacy and/or activism,” she laid out.

This year’s No Place for Hate Coordinator Handbook & Resource Guide doubles down on the war on kindness.

“Each year, ADL receives activities from participating No Place for Hate schools that focus on kindness,” the handbook complains. “ADL highly encourages schools, in designing their activities, to move beyond kindness to social justice.”

The ADL’s definition of social justice, one that it’s forcing into schools, is wholly partisan.

Students, Spiegler urges, should not just go “volunteer at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen”, they should “advocate for affordable housing”. Instead of just “tutoring children”, they have to fight for criminals and break up the “prison-to-school pipeline”. Obama’s efforts to break up the “prison-to-school pipeline” led to the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland.

And the ADL states that “each student must have an opportunity to participate in three ADL approved activities”. Parents are not wrong to describe this as partisan indoctrination.

The ADL claims that “as a 501c3 nonprofit organization, we take no position on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for office.” That is not true. Even during the 2020 election, the ADL continued to attack Trump while offering no criticism of Biden. And it certainly does not meet the IRS test of operating “primarily to further the common good and general welfare of the people.”

Its curriculum and its agenda are wholly partisan and like many leftist groups, it operates with the complicity of the IRS and other federal and state regulatory organizations.

But the ADL has bigger issues on a statewide level with its racist educational curriculum.

In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin banned critical race theory and “inherently divisive concepts” from K-12 classrooms. These include the idea that anyone is morally superior or should be “discriminated against because of their race” or that “members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith”.

‘No Place for Hate’ has a sizable presence in Virginia including in the Arlington Public Schools.

These are only two of the twenty states where the ADL’s racist curriculum may run into trouble.

The ADL’s education curriculum had started out teaching tolerance, but now teaches intolerance, and advocates partisan politics. Despite the organization’s origins, its handbook is notable for mentioning Jewish people only three times, once in the ADL’s background and twice in its definition of antisemitism.

But the ADL is not a Jewish organization anymore. It’s a generically lucrative leftist group which provides bias insurance to schools while joining in leftist attacks on conservatives.
A few years after Greenblatt came on board, the ADL announced a new program together with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar: one of the leading funders of the anti-Israel Left. ADL Senior VP Eileen Hershenov was the former general counsel for Soros’ Open Society octopus.

“Kudos to my former boss, George Soros,” she gushed.

Hershenov oversees the ADL’s partnership with the Aspen Institute, funded by Soros. The joint ADL-Aspen program’s civil society fellows included the founding Co-Director of the Open Society Foundation’s Economic Justice Program.

Small wonder that Greenblatt attacks any critics of Soros and the ADL, formerly critical of the Nazi collaborating billionaire, now has a page dedicated to defending the anti-Semitic leftist.

The ADL’s funders and partners list increasingly resembles those of most leftist activist groups with $1 million from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, the Rockefellers, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. There’s nothing Jewish here.

As an organization, the ADL doesn’t belong in Jewish circles, and its educational curriculum doesn’t belong in any schools.

(This article was republished from the author’s blog at: https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/12/why-adl-abandoned-antisemitism-and-went.html )
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.