The ADL Doesn't Speak for Jews, They Speak for the Rich

Trump’s claim that his 2025 inauguration was historic has more than a kernel of truth; the last month will go down in history. As we neared January 20th, government officials and the Secret Service braced the district for what some assumed would quickly become a tsunami of protesters. The Wyoming National Guard, a state-backed militia with few uprisings to quell at home, received training on how to put down civil unrest then were deployed to defend the incoming administration. This reaction was provoked by promises of ant-genocide protests as well as the People's March, a feckless rebranding of the Women's March, both of which were neutralized before the day arrived. 

Instead, what made Trump's second sequence of oaths, confirmation, and addresses significant, was, in part, the attendees. Over the last several years the great "tech re-alignment," beginning years earlier when the neoreactionary movement began percolating in Silicon Valley, finally established itself as Trump's enthusiastic collaborators. Marc Andreessen pulled his money away from Democrats, citing how angry he was that the wealthy were receiving criticism online, Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, and Mark Zuckerberg decided that since the GOP was staking its claim on the total eradication of trans people, queer humanity was fair game for Facebook comments. They surrounded Trump on the podium, led by their most enthusiastic representative: Elon Musk. 

Musk perfectly exemplifies the rightward lurch of the tech world as we, collectively, watch him spiral into far-right conspiracy theories amidst a fit of online rage the past couple of years. Now Musk is in lock step with Trump as he attacks Medicaid and public employees through his meme-coined Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), recently staging a coup on the Department of Labor. Musk is the de facto leader of this new pro-Trump oligarchy as he trailed Trump's campaign, taking the stage to jump up and down in jilted excitement and make lashing quips at liberal only legible to the terminally online. 

But at the inauguration, Musk wanted to thank the crowd for their apparent adoration, lifting a hand tilted towards the stands. It was this, more than Trump’s speech promising to strip the government and crucify his enemies, that will be most remembered from Trump’s first day. In full view of the cameras, Musk seemed to raise his arm in a stiff Roman Salute, the one made most iconic from Hitler’s Nazi rallies and still used by white nationalists. The gesture allegedly has its origins in Ancient Rome, but more correctly became part of Italian Fascism's claim to resurrect the Roman Empire, then becoming the mandatory greeting of National Socialists. Musk quickly dismissed this as anything other than an awkward “autistic” hand gesture, yet he performed it three times and given his accelerating and near constant comments about Jews and friendly relationship with the far-right, it was understood by most people as an affirmation of what we already knew.

“I'm just gonna say let's call a spade a fucking spade. Especially if there were two spades done in succession based on the reaction of the first spade,” wrote Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson on Threads, alleging that after the first Seig Heil received an applause he chose to repeat it. Musk was roundly condemned across the Jewish world. Or, more correctly, part of the Jewish world.

That’s when the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the most established and longest running “anti-antisemitism” organization in the world, made sure everyone knew that Musk was no antisemite. “It seems that [Elon Musk] made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge,” wrote the ADL on X. “In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath.”

Delicacy is clearly what the ADL is best known for. There have been two increasingly strained trajectories for the ADL since the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023. The first is to take their obsessive focus on anti-Zionism, which even before the attack they labeled as categorical antisemitism, and accelerate it by focusing on college students and policies that disproportionately target people of color and the left. The second trajectory was to watch Musk’s radicalization, his open antisemitism, his conspiracy theorizing, his support for far-right, xenophobic politics, and his willingness to attack the ADL itself in ways that come remarkably close to labeling it a “Jewish cabal,” and not just look the other direction, but run interference for him.

The ADL’s behavior reveals less about Musk’s intention (it’s impossible to prove Musk’s intention) and more about the rapidity with which they have chosen to defend what has become the most famous and vocal antisemite in the U.S. When watching the ADL’s reactions, not only to Musk but to the reactionary shift in American politics, it becomes clear that they are representing the same interests and demographics that helped found the organization as a centrist alternative to the Jewish left in 1913.

Protecting Class Interests and Assimilation

Despite what we often say today, the ADL was founded to protect Jews from antisemitism. But that is not what made it distinct, or say anything about how it understands Jewish safety and flourishing. The ADL was created in response to the prosecution, and subsequent lynching, of Leo Frank, who was falsely accused of rape in the South and summarily dragged from his cell and hung from a tree. The discourse around Frank at the time picked up on some of the most classic antisemitic tropes in the West: the perverted, conniving, conspiratorial, and predatory Jew attacking Gentile white girls. The reality of antisemitism was acknowledged by the upper and middle class Jews who made up the base of B’nai B’rith, a social lodge modeled on the same elite clubs that American Gentiles often excluded Jews from. Another way of describing it is that B’nai B’rith was, and is, an organization to help facilitate Jewish assimilation: an organization for Jews to better match the Gentile norm. 

The ADL would then be a solution to antisemitism, and to advocate for Jewish safety, but built in the image of B’nai B’right’s relatively affluent and politically moderate membership. These were largely affluent Central European and German Jews (which was specifically who B’nai B’rith was designed to serve) who had a longer history in the United States since they immigrated decades before the flood of two million Eastern European Jews came to the U.S. between 1881 and 1914. When the mass waves of immigration hit Ellis Island, many of these earlier Jewish emigres echoed the same kind of xenophobic, and even antisemitic, rhetoric about the unpolished, devastatingly poor, and unmannered Yiddish speaking Jews coming from Slavic countries. Those immigrants had a vision of how to advocate Jewish safety and it came in the form of the radical left from anarchism to Bundism to the Communist Party. Some of them were also Zionists, which at the time was a radical outsider position that no right-thinking upper crust Jew in America would accede to since they had spent their years trying as best as possible to assimilate into the white American norm: they had no interest in being accused of “dual loyalties.” 

So the ADL was an advocacy group for Jewish Americans, but of a certain class, identity, and subsequent ideological affinity. More than anything, the ADL, and similar organizations like the American Jewish Committee (AJC), believed in the meritocratic promise of America and wanted to be on the inside rather than to shake its foundations as rabble rousers. They were not the first Jews to take this strategy: across Christian Europe there were those Jews who occupied places of middling power and sought to influence the aristocracy or nobility in ways that would be ostensibly helpful to Jews, or at least some Jews. This safety strategy produced vastly uneven results as the history of pogroms were often also the history of peasant uprisings, where the disaffected masses attempted to target those in power but brutalized their middle managers instead. The trope of the Jewish money lender is a piece of this, where some Jews were invited to stabilize the economic systems of feudalism through lending at interest while the same practice was demonized in churches. The Jewish community, even though most Jews engaged in no middle agent economic role, were the buffer for the class rage that would inevitably rise. When this safety strategy failed, it was not the upper class Jews who bore the brunt, it was the poorest among them who had no wealth and status to shield them.

As Jews entered a period of Western emancipation and some joined high ranking professions and places of influence in the Gentile world, establishment Jewish groups often offered the same words of caution to those Jews who misbehaved and thus may remind the goyim of just how different Jews are. The authorities of Jewish life in France, scared at the influx of poorer Eastern European immigrants, offered some direction to French Jewry in 1938: 

Do not engage in politics, as the laws of our country prohibit this. Watch your dress. Be polite and discreet. Be modest. Do not boast of the attractions of the countries you have recently come from and that seem to be lacking in France…Quickly learn to express yourself in French. Do not speak loudly and, if you speak in a foreign language, avoid doing so on the street, on public transport or on a cafe terrace. Respect all our laws and customs.

This war on Jewish distinctiveness was not just relegated to actual historical images of Jewishness, but the radicalism often projected onto Jews. Whether it was through Talmud or Das Kapital, Jews were said to threaten the Western order, and since we had just been let in we needed to mind our manners. Western liberalism was assumed to be the best bet for Jewish safety, to blend into this democratic system, so strong politics of any type was likely threatening to what the assumed Jewish interest was.

The ADL explicitly saw both the right and the left as perhaps equal threats to Jews, and this became their subsequent model for “civil rights.” The right challenged the Americanness of Jews, while the left created radical instability that created the conditions by which anger could be directed at Jewish power or Jews themselves. For most of American history, Jews saw the  most pressing threat of antisemitism as emerging from the same ideologies that threatened American Black communities, part of why they had poured into the Civil Rights movement and the left more broadly. But that thinking derived from the same population of Jews that had sustained the radical core of the labor and anti-war movement and was not built in the model of collaboration and political stasis that the ADL was formed for. 

The ADL shifted its position on Zionism at the same time as most major organs of American Jewish life, starting with Israel’s formation in 1948 and accelerating after its victory in the 1967 Six Day War. It was at this point that a wave passed through Jewish identity, cementing an attachment with Israel and moving Zionism from a revolutionary idea to the American Jewish status quo. Zionism was at this point successful not in its ability to act as some kind of radical project, but as a partnership with Western Empire, particularly with the U.S. after 1967 and as Israel came to be seen as a strategic asset in the region. Zionism was a realization of a safety strategy that saw Jewish alliances with power, to provide influence through direct relationships, lobbying, and collaboration, as the only path to stop the real threats Jews had. For much of Zionism’s history, there were significant portions of it that had spoken the language of revolution and autonomy, but much of its founding class, who themselves came from more upper middle class middle and western European stock, believed that the Zionist project would only be successful if they were a essential a patron of a larger Eurocentric empire. Israel’s actual foundation and subsequent history lived out the reality of colonialism rather than the fantasy offered by Poale Zion, and it eventually merged with American interventionism once the Occupation began in earnest. 

It was at this point that the concept of the New Antisemitism was introduced, which was also the title of a book authored by ADL staff that argued that anti-Zionism, which was increasingly ascendant in the anti-colonial New Left, was the new incarnation of classical Jew hatred. Just as the Jew was hated as an ethnic or religious outsider, now anti-Zionism targeted Jews as a political outsider, and Israel was resisted because it was the “Jew of the nations.” “The new antisemitism projects traditional conceptions of ‘the Jew’ onto Israel as the collective Jew,” writes Kenneth L. Marcus in a 2013 paper defending the concept. “[New] antisemitism would include stereotyped negative opinions describing the Jewish state and its members, supporters, and coreligionists as threatening, immoral, and categorically different from other peoples, and of hostile attitudes urging various forms of restriction, exclusion, and suppression as a means of solving the Israel problem.” The New Antisemitism thesis was never disconnected from Israel's own project to remake its public image and counter growing anti-colonial consciousness. Starting in the 1980s, the office of the Israeli President held seminars suggesting antisemitism was motivating the increasing criticism of Israel, and it eventually became a set piece of the new "Antisemitism Studies" world that was itself often funded by Israel. The language of New Antisemitism only became more central after the Second Intifada, the emergence of the War on Terror, and the creation of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, where criticism of Israel had to be delegitimized and where antisemitism was separated from all other forms of oppression. 

There are certainly antisemitic ideas that have been injected into anti-Zionism, from conspiracy theories about Israeli power or demonic perceptions of Israelis and the role of Jewish identity in Israeli violence, but what “New Antisemitism” advocates increasingly focused on was rendering any foundational criticism of Israel and Zionism as categorical antisemitism. Israeli scholars like Natan Sharansky, who became famous as a leader in the Soviet Jewry movement, offered that any time that Israel is “delegitimize, demonized, or held to double standards,” refusing to acknowledge that there are clear reasons why criticism of Israel exists or why activists are demanding a change to the Israeli status quo. More recently, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which has now been roundly adopted by government and institutions around the world, renders almost all criticism of Israel as potential antisemitism, thus solidifying the idea that there is a direct correlation between objections to Zionism and classical Jew hatred.

The ADL’s process of adapting to a Zionist conception of antisemitism was helpful in justifying its attack on the Black Power movement, infiltrate and monitor left-wing groups of all types, and act as one of the loudest Islamophobic lobbying groups in the country, taking ugly stands in issues such as its opposition to the creation of a Muslim Community Center in New York City because of its proximity to the former site of the World Trade Center. This process has helped to recenter where the ADL identifies what it sees as the true gravity of global antisemitism, which it increasingly believes is most prevalent and threatening on the radical left. It does this by using common Jewish opinion as the standard, questioning the legitimacy of any dissenting Jewish voice, and blurring the lines in how we define antisemitism and even oppression itself.

When Abe Foxman, the former leader of the ADL, finally retired and passed his seat to corporate executive Jonathan Greenblatt, the incoming CEO quickly established the fight against anti-Zionism as their organization’s future. As was outlined in a 2021 piece at Jewish Currents, the ADL’s pro-Israel advocacy got in the way of their stated civil rights work since they had to prioritize pro-Israel politics at a time when Israel was shifting further to the right, increasingly collaborated with far-right (and even antisemitic) regimes around the world, and where the organizations most tasked with fighting the violence of the far-right often took a sympathetic stance to Palestine.

The ADL’s primary targets have been Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and even Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), which they accuse of either of open antisemitism or of harboring collaborators. More recently, the ADL pushed for police or the national guard to enter into student encampments that were disproportionately Jewish, to ban groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, and then even to strip the non-profit status of progressive Jewish organizations, all claiming these measures will secure Jewish safety.

Which Kind of Jewish Safety?

The ADL’s conception of Jewish safety privileges Israel, the supposed safety valve for World Jewry, over all other threats. This is built on a very particular model of Jewish identity, one that assumes all Jews are ideological Zionists and whose most pressing needs are met by a militarized Israel and collaborations with U.S. power. This makes sense given the demographics that formed, operated, and funded the ADL, who then projects their privileged opinion onto the rest of the Jewish world. But if you talk to other Jews, those with intersecting marginalized backgrounds, who are not affluent, and who have different commitments, the claim that Israel is the most important element of Jewish safety breaks down. 

First, for Black, queer, trans, disabled, and Jews of other identities that face extremely visible oppression, the notion that a social movement should be destroyed for not meeting a pro-Israel litmus test seems like a bizarre abdication of responsibility. When the ADL went after the Movement for Black Lives for its solidarity with Palestinians, it tacitly said that the demands to end institutional anti-Blackness and police violence were simply less important than domestic ideological support for Israel. And when the ADL comes to Musk’s defense despite his near constant sexism, his participation in attacks on labor unions, good jobs, medicaid, public sector workers, and his own employees, or his increasingly volatile transphobia, they are saying that the class of Jews not affected by these types of marginalization are who define what Jewish safety really means. The reality is that for Jews who face this type of marginalization, these issues vastly outpace rhetorical debates over acceptable criticism of Israel and the ADL’s willingness to abandon the left is a sign that they are also willing to disregard the needs of the most marginalized sectors of the American Jewish world. 

More than this, the ADL has a long history of surveilling left-wing social movements, which led to criminal investigations in the 1990s. They have long been accused of targeting Arab American and Black civil rights groups, which represent two ethnic groups that the ADL seems to disproportionately accuse of antisemitism. The ADL supported police in targeting antifascist activists in advance of 2017’s Unite the Right rally and failed to do anything to stop the largest white nationalist gathering in decades. The ADL has also long supported “Countering Violent Extremism” and police programs that target Muslim Americans and immigrants. If you are experiencing the kind of structural oppression that activist movements are built to counteract, then there are real questions as to why the ADL’s model of attacking left-wing social movements would support your goals in any measurable way. It’s also worth noting the direct correlation between queer, Black, and other marginalized Jewish identities and support for Palestine. A 2024 poll shows that Jews who identify as queer are more likely to blame Israel for the conduct of the war on Gaza

Second, the notion that Zionist is synonymous with Jew rejects the actual class dimensions at play (and may reinforce an antisemitic stereotype itself). While the ADL seems to base its sense of legitimacy on the erroneous statistic that 95% of Jews are Zionists, this number obscures more than it illuminates. For example, an earlier Pew study found that only 69% of polled Jews were "attached" to Israel in some way, and another 2018 poll found that even while 67% of those polled said they were "generally pro-Israel," half of those were vocally critical. This is why we come across polls that both show a general affinity of the State of Israel while also leveling foundational criticisms at it, such as the belief it is an apartheid state by 40% of respondents of a 2021 poll. This suggests that our statistics are mostly dictated by how the polling questions are phrased, and when you drill down what respondents mean their Zionism starts to falter. 

Even those who have a generalized pro-Israel position often respond with the types of criticisms common on the anti-Zionist left, or describe a preferred direction for Israel in remarkably similar terms. What this means is that the words "Israel" and "Zionism" often hold more resonance than the actual political reality those terms suggest. 

The critical space the ADL thinks is so verboten is actually so large that, from some directions, it could encompass the majority of American Jewish opinion. For example, a 2020 poll said that less than half of American Jews felt positively about Israel’s government, only a third thought the Israeli government was making a sincere attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more than half believe that an independent Palestinian state is both positive and desirable (and youth is perhaps the biggest indicator of support for Palestine). Yet these views were enough to get an organization like the liberal Zionist J Street to be disallowed to join the Major Conference of Jewish Organizations, a coalition of which the ADL is a leading part. 

And college students, which have been both the center of the recent surge of Palestine solidarity protests and who are the primary target of the ADL, are opposed to Israel’s war by a rate of 80%. Despite the caricatures made of college students by right-wing outlets, they often represent an absence of wealth rather than affluence. But these critical voices are not usually in the ADL’s donor pool, and reporting has roundly shown that funders set the pro-Israel agenda. This is not particularly unique to the ADL and overwhelmingly the money is coming from the pro-Israel direction rather than from anti-Zionist activists, which is especially visible in the millions of dollars flooding into U.S. elections from pro-Israel advocacy organizations and funders (many of which aren’t Jewish). If the ADL is a Jewish defense organization, then the type of Jewish defense they are choosing is constructed according to the interests of the donor class rather than according to some allegedly universal Jewish voice. This is the Jewish community it was built to represent, and this was especially visible when wealthy donors were very specifically indicted in working to orchestrate the police crackdown on student encampments in 2024.

The best data we have shows a positive association between affluence and Jewish Zionism. A 2024 poll found that “students from wealthier families are much more supportive of a Jewish state than those from less wealthy families,” a point it said was also present in a 2022 study conducted before the war. This pattern was true for non-Jewish students as well, meaning there is a direct correlation between being wealthy and supporting Israel, despite what has been falsely alleged about students at elite universities. This distinction is not small either, with 75% of wealthy Jewish students supporting Israel as compared to 40% of poor or working class Jewish students. If this distinction was to hold, it could reveal that the primary element between whether or not someone identifies as a Zionist is class. This is not unusual since geopolitical positions usually associated with the right are likewise statistically connected to wealth, and billionaires have become deeply invested in Israel’s campaign.

One factor that is unique to Jewish students is that rich Jewish students believe that what happens in Israel affects them more as compared with poorer students, a point that could indicate what kinds of financial or familial connections they have with the Jewish state. For wealthy Jews, traveling to Israel and maintaining a relationship (or even residence there) is a viable option, but not for more working class elements. Even amongst poorer sectors of American Jewish life, such as Orthodox Jews, while there may be an attachment (both spiritually and materially) to the State of Israel, it often occupies less of a central role in their identity since Judaism itself is the heart of their Jewishness. 

While we often hear that Jews are overwhelmingly Zionists, all of the polling pro-Israel advocates point to have problems. As Jewish Currents discussed, there are huge issues with the system of polling from which erroneous statistics claiming unanimous Zionist politics are derived. Jews disproportionately live in urban areas, but national polls spread out the pool of who is being polled, ensuring that conservative Jews in more rural areas are disproportionately represented compared to the actual ideology of the Jewish community as a whole. The language of the polls often pull at emotional connections to Israel rather than politics, which can skew answers. 

The very notion of centralized Jewish advocacy organization assumes a clear shared interest. In the case of the ADL, the AJC and Federation aligned groups, that interest is being designated primarily by particularly affluent, assimilated, suburban-class of Jew, a view that is increasingly out of step with a modern Jewish people who are increasingly non-white, queer, downwardly mobile, and diverse in all the ways that those funneling money in the ADL are not. When we look at critical views towards Israel among American Jews, there is a direct correlation between age, financial status, gender, racial identity, and sexual orientation and Israel, meaning you are more likely to see Israel as your bottom line if you are white, rich, and straight. Antisemitism in the ADL’s context is not necessarily a fixed ideology that tells a story about power, it is any ideological fixture that is a threat to Jews. But this threat is not always presumed to be physical, and when you look at the language used to talk about campus protests it is often clear that violence is not the primary vector of complaint. When the ADL says that students “reported” antisemitic incidents at a rate 73% larger than before October 7th, they are using a self-reporting structure that preferences subjective feelings over verifiable material reality. “More than a third of Jewish students said they felt uncomfortable speaking about their views of Israel, and roughly the same proportion said they feel uncomfortable speaking out against antisemitism,” writes the ADL, using a language pattern familiar to their reports. “Feel,” “uncomfortable, “concerned, “disrespected” are all words that appear frequently, while “attacked,” “threatened,” “discriminated” are less common. As I have discussed in other articles, there is a verifiable increase in antisemitism since October 7th, but in the ADL’s model of campus reporting, it prioritizes student discomfort over clear, identifiable, and overwhelmingly baleful antisemitic incidents. Many of these experiences are tied to the “central role” Israel has to the polled student’s Jewish identity, where challenging the very founding myths of Israel could be understood as an open assault on their identity.

As Joshua Leifer wrote about in his 2024 Tablets Shattered, the Jewish private day school he attended, was experienced as an “outpost of Israel in New Jersey.” Affluence is a key part of the day school experience (particularly for non-Orthodox Jews) since they are financially prohibited for poor and working class families, and the heavy focus on Israeli education inculcated there helps to associate Jewish identity and Israeli nationalism amongst the privileged sectors that can afford to attend. Polls also show that students who come from “traditional” Jewish environments are more likely to support Israel, but what this phrasing fails to reveal is that those “traditional” vectors of Jewish education are expensive and show familial wealth as much as a connection to Judaism.

If your flourishing is primarily about access to Israel, the land, its legal privileges, the state’s sanitized history, and your own comfort with that position, then this speech could feel like an attack on your flourishing. But if you are more concerned with making rent, with whether or not police will draw their gun on a traffic stop, whether you will be attacked on the street, if Christian nationalists will dissolve your religious liberty, or if white nationalist movements will rise up and physically harm you, then the question about whether or not “Zionism is colonialism” is not the most pressing with regards to antisemitism. Simply put, the interests represented by the ADL’s inquiry may not be that of the working class, and certainly not those whose sense of self, and of Jewishness, was made in the streets, the picket line, or even the shul. The ADL already believes it has solved many of these questions because of its focus on hate crimes statutes, bolstering of police, sensitivity trainings, and other institutions, but all of that relies, just as the ADL did from its founding, on the notion that the American state is a neutral arbiter of human rights. If we see the state as something different, as containing class interests and as invested in maintaining structure of inequality, then the ADL’s claim to eradicate the most pressing threats of antisemitism evaporates. Even as the ADL’s approach dominates our institutions and is put into practice by both police and private security, verifiable antisemitic incidents have still increased. So the question then is what has the ADL’s intensive attack on the left, suppression of free speech, and total abandonment of the legacy of Eastern European Jewish radicalism actually delivered, if not dependable safety. What remains in the ADL’s model is the other end of their advocacy, the one that assumes a sovereign and unaccountable Jewish state must be the centerpiece of collective Jewish joy. American liberalism should already contain all the methodology we need, so let’s support that, let’s partner with power to influence its direction, and therefore we Jews will have what we need. 

Partnering With Power

This deference to the status quo could easily be reinterpreted as the ADL’s abdication of responsibility since its inaction on the rise of the far-right puts those Jews who do not have wealth to defend themselves are increasingly put in danger of harm. Elon Musk’s journey is the most obvious example as he retweets open antisemitic content, and this became most obvious on November 15th, 2023 when he responded “you have spoken the actual truth” to a tweet from a white nationalist that read “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.” 

He continued with his antisemitic venom, such as making well worn claims about George Soros, and when the ADL finally did speak up he threatened them into silence, picking up on white nationalist Keith Woods (who Musk has retweeted multiple times) call to “Ban the ADL.” The ADL backed down, both because Musk posed a serious financial risk to the organization and because he went all in on supporting Israel in its genocide against Hamas, promising to ban criticisms of Israel on X and earning praise from Greenblatt instead of sanction (including an awkwardly lauding comparison with antisemite Henry Ford). Musk’s antisemitic response was nearly a month after October 7th, a moment when real antisemitism was skyrocketing and where the ADL had already started to pivot to a singular focus on the left. Musk then helped X to change, restoring white nationalists like Nick Fuentes to serve and allowing it to become the most virulent antisemitic platform on the internet today. As this has happened, Greenblatt complimented and assisted rather than condemned Musk, a tactic he then turned to Trump despite openly antisemitic comments across his campaign and his far-right association. “We congratulate President Donald J. Trump, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and all the candidates who won last night. We look forward to working with the incoming Administration, Congress and all elected officials in pursuit of our 111-year-old mission — to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all,” said Greenblatt in a November 6th statement. 

So when the ADL not only defended Musk, but was amongst the first in the world to do so, few were surprised. The reaction was swift and fierce, and from the same kind of Jewish radicals the ADL was founded to quell.

“The ADL claims to be an expert on antisemitism. They are quick to defame pro-Palestinian students, Black and brown elected officials, writers, and professors over accusations of antisemitism. But when the world’s wealthiest man performed a Nazi salute while the world watched, they came to his defense” said the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc, which then launched a petition to demand the ADL retract its defense of the indefensible. From the world of Jewish-led Palestine solidarity organizing, the response was even more gut wrenching given the fact that they have faced the brunt of Greenblatt’s defamation. “We were also appalled that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — which purports to be the leading organization fighting antisemitism — glossed over Musk’s Nazi gesture, admonishing those of us who were aghast at the Hitler salute to give Musk ‘the benefit of the doubt’ — even as the ADL assumes the worst intentions of those in the movement for Palestinian human rights,” said IfNotNow in a January 21st public statement. “This statement marks the completion of the ADL’s transition from a civil rights organization to a willing partner in the neo-fascist governing coalition.”

The ADL is acting on an agenda of a particular Jewish community, but it is not the Jewish community as a whole. Just as they did a hundred years ago, they inhabit the legacy of a particularly privileged strand of Jews who see their path to flourishing as partnering with power, any power, that will allow them to reap the benefits. As many people in privileged positions do, they then project their perspective onto the collective, forgetting the fact that even while everyone they seem to know agrees with them, the majority do not. Instead, we also have the descendents of the Eastern European revolutionaries, those who have grown organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and JFREJ to the size they are today, whose best known tagline is “not in our name.” Instead, we speak for ourselves, and we don’t let the voices of collaboration toss their capitulation into the mouths of those who hold little in common with them. If history echoes, then we already know what little safety is promised to those who simply participate as a cog in the machine of power, whether in European empires or in Weimar Germany: there is no friendship, no donation, no political promise that will ensure Jewish safety, yours or anyone else’s. 

The most recent Jewish leader to defend Musk has been Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who alleged the tech billionaire is "being falsely smeared" and who he intends to partner with on many exciting ventures in the future. This public performance belies the reality that most of us know in our gut: this project is not about Jewish safety, it’s about these particular Jews’ self-interest. And with Jewish identity more and more shaped by the institutions these donors fund, it can have a deleterious effect on the radical Jewish history that actually shows up in the ancestry of so many American Jews.

Musk for his part refused to be outdone by himself. As Vice President J.D. Vance headed to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Musk flew to Munich, the former center of the Nazi party. There he gave a speech to the inheritors of that tradition, Alternative fur Deutschland, which hides its open nativism in populist rhetoric and has an incredibly long history of antisemitism from party leaders. The party started to do outreach to right-wing sectors of Germany’s Jewish community in the same way that National Rally did in France: wouldn’t it be better for all of us if these Muslims weren’t coming here (and who are obviously antisemites)? Musk told his cheering crowd that instead of the German practice of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, remembrance for Nazi crimes, that “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

He avoided the concentration camp trip since he already did it once, something the ADL applauded. Julie Gray, an advocate whose partner was a Holocaust survivor and was at the camp at the same time Musk was doing his press junket, recalled that he showed no emotion other than the desire to pose for the cameras. "[He] doesn't care whatsoever," she wrote on social media. This led to Musk’s biographer to call him a “sociopath.”

The ADL did eventually take offense at Musk’s behavior when Musk enjoyed a series of Holocaust jokes after his roman salute, such as saying his “pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler.” Yet, the ADL still pays for a premium account, they continue to attempt to collaborate rather than condemn, and their focus is, as it always has been, to be the bird in the ear of power rather than to reflect what the Jewish world thinks and feels. 

This came at a time when Musk had begun to hollow out the entire federal government, attack workers and unions, and disrupt any and all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The young staff hired to DOGE seemed to reflect Musk's own history of antisemitic commentary. Gavin Kliger, an inexperienced engineer, was hired to support DOGE despite the fact that he retweeted white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and explicit neo-Nazi accounts. Another DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, was revealed to have posted racist remarks online (including showing his opposition to miscegenation), and Musk intervened on his firing and rehired him. The ADL said nothing as these revelations became clear, opting for gentle influence rather than antiracist advocacy.

This was exactly how the ADL handled Trump’s barrage of executive orders, which was one of the most sweeping take-downs of civil rights in American history. After attacking the very existence of trans lives, going after public sector workers and unions, and escalating deportations of undocumented immigrants, Trump signed Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism, an executive order that ostensibly mobilizes every federal department against antisemitism. As was true of Project 2025's Project Esther, Trump's EO promises to be used primarily against the political left and the Palestine solidarity movement. The EO specifically criminalizes dissenting speech addressing Israel's dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide of the Palestinian people. It declares that “institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” This ultimately means that foreign students, particularly Arab and Muslim students, could be subjected to deportation for expressing solidarity with Palestine, which the Republicans have largely seen as synonymous with antisemitism and support for terrorism. The idea that the government should go after the student visas of activists has become a recent favorite of the GOP. Elise Stefanik, after railing against college Presidents for their alleged soft reaction to campus antisemitism then was appointed by Trump to act as the UN ambassador, voted to support the order (Stefanik already threatened to withhold UN funding because the government body is allegedly antisemitic). Pam Bondi, who may be plucked to lead the DOJ, voiced support for deporting American citizens who criticize Israel.

The ADL joined the chorus of far-right supporters in celebrating Trump’s order. "We welcome today's executive order from [the President] calling for a whole-of-government approach to fighting antisemitism, and we implore each federal agency to take concrete measures to address this scourge," wrote the ADL on X, despite Trump’s incoming administration being what Jewish commentator Elad Nehorai called "the most antisemitic government in American history." Nehorai was referring to multiple Trump appointees, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's believe that the U.S. should run according to Christian dogma, RFK Jr.'s belief in antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID, and Joe Kent, Trump's nominee to lead the National Counter Terrorism center, who has alleged connections to white nationalists. None of this proved Trump’s administration as disqualifying to the ADL, who seemed to be vying for a seat at his table. 

In this moment of severe crisis, in an attack on every marginalized community in the country, the ADL does not even offer the pretense of defending “civil rights” and instead finds its ally in whoever most effectively defends Israel’s image. The ADL went on to signal support for Trump’s plan for the U.S. to take control of Gaza, ethnically cleansing it of Palestinians so that it can bring in developers. They are currently supporting the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which experts on antisemitism say is deeply flawed because of its reliance on the IHRA definition of antisemitism and could be used to primarily attack voices speaking in solidarity with Palestine. The ADL is willing to go along with the profound escalation of antisemitism presented by Trump’s administration, not to mention the other widespread attacks on civil rights and marginalized communities, if the administration will provide further legal tools to silence leftist voices.

Despite the ADL’s claim to speak with a singular Jewish voice, it is Jews who are the loudest in their condemnation of the organization’s attempt to sell out the most marginalized in their quest for power. “As Greenblatt continues to cozy up to the MAGA movement while attacking college students and anti-war activists—many of whom are Jewish—the ADL is increasingly seen for what it is: a laundry service for the reputation of Benjamin Netanyahu and his fascist associates,” wrote IfNotNow national spokesperson Eva Borgwardt in The Nation. “Anyone committed to fighting antisemitism, fascism, and bigotry should, once and for all, stop partnering with the ADL or looking to it for guidance.” 

That organization, along with Jewish Voice for Peace, have doubled in size since October 7th, and the entire Jewish left has seen a resurgence as people are looking for organizations that actually reflect their Jewish identity. New synagogues are being created, protests are flooding the streets, and the phrase “not in my name” has become ubiquitous as young Jews have set out to undermine the notion that the ADL speaks for the Jewish community as a whole. Some of these organizations, like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice or Boston Workers Circle, are the direct inheritors of the Eastern European rabble rousers who built those organizations generations past, and all of them see their history as rooted in the radical Jewish tradition rather than the stilted world of backroom deals and well funded lobbying efforts. On February 13th, a New York Times ad featured the names of over 350 rabbis and Jewish leaders showing their opposition to Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, something the ADL and other affluent Jewish organizations continue to show tacit endorsement of. The ADL doesn’t speak for them.

No matter what major Jewish organizations claim, there is no singular “Jewish community.” When it comes to debates over how to fight antisemitism and for “Jewish interests,” there are numerous factions fighting over what kind of Jewish future we will win. Advocacy is often made in the image of those funding it, and the ADL has always been built for the purpose of assisting assimilation, privilege, and collaboration with the organs of power. When that mission coincides with basic progressive reforms, then you can expect them to lend ostensible support. But when we look at the actual sources of those oppression, unless their destruction lines up with the interests of the powerful, we can expect organizations like the ADL to see demands for change as a threat.

There are other Jewish voices, a growing number whose ancestors were the same radicals the ADL was created to subvert a century ago. Despite attempts to marginalize these voices by Federation outposts and well-funded Jewish non-profits, they are increasing as young Jews see an Israeli state and Zionist political project that is completely disconnected from the prophetic Jewish tradition that drives their identity. We know now what Jewish radicals knew about their assimilatory co-religionists then: there are more of us than them, and we are the ones who will dictate the future of Jewish life. Wealthy donors don’t dictate the future for the rest of us.