By CARLOS SAPIR
In early June, news media reported in shocked tones that the editors of Wikipedia had decided by a wide margin to no longer consider the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a “reliable source” on the topics of antisemitism, Israel, and Palestine. This decision was welcomed even by Zionist Jewish publications such as The Forward, calling for the ADL to introspect and recommit to being a civil liberties organization, rather than a pro-Israel advocacy group. However, this framing of the ADL as a group that has “lost its way” misrepresents the ADL’s history as a bourgeois institution that has actively worked to prevent the Jewish community from forming ties of solidarity with anti-oppression movements.
The ADL of yesteryear
The ADL did not appear out of thin air: Its creation in 1913, alongside a similar group, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), formed seven years earlier, responded to the specific political needs of the bourgeois layer of the U.S. Jewish community. The bourgeois establishment of the existing Jewish community in North America felt threatened by their proletarian Jewish counterparts, and particularly by the new waves of working-class Jewish immigration to the U.S. at the time, who were making active connections of solidarity with the socialist movements of their home countries in Eastern Europe. Rather than encouraging ties of solidarity and embracing democratic organizing, the ADL and AJC hoped to stop Jews from organizing in the streets and social movements, and to instead put themselves forward as representing “the interests of the Jewish community” in bourgeois backroom deals with politicians and big business.
From the ADL’s perspective, Jewish communists fighting for liberation were not advancing the interests of the Jewish community. In fact, the ADL considered them to be part of the problem, embodying “negative stereotypes” about Jews that would impede their assimilation into white U.S. society. While Nazi Germany was arresting communists and Jews in the 1930s, the ADL responded by publishing pamphlets titled, ““Communism never was Jewish! Communism can never be Jewish!” In the 1950s, the ADL took a step further, engaging in internal purges of their organization in keeping with the McCarthyite repression sweeping the country.
The ADL and other bourgeois organizations of U.S. Jews greatly emphasize the legacy of their participation in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and it is to their credit that they did participate in marches. But they did not show up in this struggle to pledge their support to Black liberation; they intervened with very selective political criteria, associating only with the conservative voices in the movement and withdrawing support when it was no longer convenient. The ADL would come out against affirmative action and community control of schools, and eagerly supported U.S. imperialist interventions in Latin America as well as propping up the State of Israel.
An organization against antisemitism that spends its time attacking Jews
If ADL’s project in the first half of the 20th century was to disidentify U.S. Jews with the left and to ingratiate them to the bourgeois establishment, their project in the second half of the 20th century, and since then, has been to instrumentalize the Jewish community against the left. While today this is most visible in their hyperbolic declarations that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic and to portray even the most peaceful pro-Palestinian protests as mortal threats of violence against Jews in the U.S., this disingenuous work goes beyond Palestine. In the 1980s, for example, they ran propaganda campaigns falsely claiming that the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua was persecuting the Jewish community.
The ADL continues to demonize progressive forces—and particularly those that organize along anti-racist or anti-imperialist lines—as anti-Jewish, despite the significant and visible participation of Jews in these movements. Virtually every campus encampment in this past year has had a visible, enthusiastic presence from self-identifying Jews. While Jews are not a majority of the pro-Palestine movement in North America, their participation is disproportionately much higher than their 2% presence in the overall U.S. population.
Campus divestment efforts provide dramatic statistical snapshots of where Jewish students actually stand. A vote to divest from Israel earlier this year at Barnard College, one of the most Jewish schools in the country by enrollment with just under 30% of students identifying as Jewish, received 90% approval from the student body. Even if it were to be assumed that every single no-vote was cast by a Jewish student (an assumption for which there is no evidence), this would still mean that two out of three Jews at Barnard voted in favor of divestment from Israel.
The ADL’s distortions of reality and its continuous attempts to present Jews as a monolithically white, genteel population itself crosses the line into antisemitic activity on multiple levels. To the Jewish community, the ADL and its fellow travelers have presented an onslaught of misleading propaganda to argue that Jews are in mortal, constant danger. While it would be a stretch to call the ADL’s misrepresentation of statistics about antisemitism “terrorism,” ad campaigns that build on the ADL’s messaging to target Jews with propaganda about how they are in imminent danger of being killed are quite literally an attempt to terrorize the Jewish community in service of political goals.
Meanwhile, the ADL’s rhetoric that all Jews support Israel is itself defamation, making visibly-Jewish people a target for outrage about the ongoing genocide. The ADL and similar groups exist to drive a wedge between Jewish community organizing and broader liberatory movements; its endorsement of violent repression of pro-Palestine and anti-racist protests only serves to seemingly confirm the antisemitic canards that Jews control politics.
The roots of antisemitism, like all other forms of societal oppression, are tied to the existing economic system. While antisemitism has been a tool of the ruling classes since before the emergence of capitalism, it is today a significant part of capitalism’s arsenal of oppressions, used to both diminish the economic security of Jews and to misdirect anti-capitalist anger into anti-Jewish sentiment. To truly stamp out antisemitism, we need to bring down capitalism, and to do that we need to build bonds of solidarity among all movements against oppression. We cannot hope that the ADL, with its consistently bourgeois outlook, will ever introspect itself into becoming a liberatory organization. The fight against antisemitism must be fought despite, and against, the ADL if it is to succeed.
