The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 in the wake of the lynching of Leo Frank. Its noble purpose was to defend the Jewish people and fight antisemitism wherever it might be. But in this generation, the ADL has lost its way under the leadership of CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt.
Greenblatt’s background was as a partisan left-wing political operative. It often appears as if he uses the ADL as a political weapon rather than a means of protecting Jews. He demonizes his political and ideological opponents, including other Jews and Jewish groups, and does little to confront the sources of today’s antisemitism.
In America and around the world, antisemitism is at shocking levels, mainly in leftist politics and academia. Yet the ADL continues to advance partisan leftist ideologies and often wrongly attacks conservatives.
In 2023, the ADL blasted the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for hosting Chaya Raichik, an Orthodox Jewish woman and founder of Libs of TikTok. The ADL claimed that she was “anti-LGBTQ.” To be sure, CPAC has had its share of controversies. It is the nation’s largest political grassroots gathering, and its “big tent” will always, unfortunately, attract fringe groups. I make no excuse for this. But somehow, the ADL said nothing about the Democratic National Convention, where Palestinian flags reportedly outnumbered American flags and attendees burned Israeli flags.
More recently, the ADL smeared two mainstream policy organizations—the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) and the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC)—accusing them without evidence of antisemitism. The ADL
