The Anti Defamation League is a Jewish Problem

Of course the ADL is supposed to fight anti-Semitism.  When folks roll out the anti-Jewish tropes involving money, jewels, lying, deceit, and using blood of children to make their Passover bread, the ADL is supposed to run in and cry foul.  But as non-observant Jews support liberal causes and vote majority Democrat, the ADL has turned into just another liberal trumpet supporting liberal causes.

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This past Saturday night, when Shabbat was over, I opened X, formerly known as Twitter, to see I may have missed. I was immediately hit with a barrage of tweets (are they still called that?) with the hashtag #BantheADL, calling for the Anti-Defamation League to be thrown off the platform.

A few days earlier, Jonathan Greenblatt, the former special assistant to President Barack Obama, who was appointed to head the ADL in 2015, tweeted out the following:

“I had a very frank + productive conversation with @LindayaX yesterday about X, what works and what doesn’t, and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform. I appreciated her reaching out, and I’m hopeful the service will improve. @ADL will be vigilant and give her and @ElonMusk credit if the service gets better… and reserve the right to call them out until it does.”

Let’s be clear about what Greenblatt was saying. Ever since Elon Must purchased Twitter, the social media platform has become much more open to free expression than it had been before. To a great extent, conservative voices are no longer muted in favor of progressives. Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech has been well-documented and has been a game-changer in terms of levelling what had become a biased playing field of information. 

Here in this tweet, Greenblatt was letting the world know that he had met with new X CEO Linda Yaccarino to discuss how X addresses “hate” on the platform. This may seem like a positive sign for Jews. After all, isn’t the ADL all about fighting anti-Semitism? Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. 

As has been well-documented by others such as Jonathan Tobin of JNS (https://www.jns.org/whatever-happened-to-the-adl/) and Rabbi Dov Fischer in the American Spectator (https://spectator.org/adl-jonathan-greenblatt-left/), ever since Greenblatt assumed leadership of the ADL, he has turned the organization into a partisan organ devoted to crushing political conservatives and promoting the most left-wing and progressive causes. I will not document examples here to illustrate this point. Readers can read the linked articles or search online and easily find this information.

We should note that the ADL’s role in online censorship of speech is nothing new. Greenblatt himself has boasted that in 2017 they opened an office in Silicon Valley to work more closely with Google, Youtube, Twitter, Meta, Reddit, and other smaller firms involved in the online information space. None of this would be concerning if it were true that the ADL was devoted to monitoring and combatting actual anti-semitism. 

What concerned me as I scrolled through my feed this morning was the number of posts gaining traction that, in calling out the ADL’s censorious activities, slid into overt anti-semitism. Part of what pained me when I saw these posts was that I agree with the antipathy that the posters feel towards the ADL. As a politically conservative Orthodox Jew who espouses and lives according to traditional Biblical values, I view the ADL as an arm of my cultural and political enemies. And I’m not alone. Far from it.

Orthodox Jews make up only 8-9% of the total Jewish population in the United States. Because they are such a small segment of the overall community, most Americans do not understand the significant differences between the Orthodox and Jewish Americans in general. To cite just one illustrative example, according to a Pew Research study in late 2020, 71% of the total Jewish population (including the Orthodox minority) identified as Democrats. But among the Orthodox, 75% identified as Republican. In political polling terms, these numbers are extreme. And this is far from the only data point. 

https://www.israel365news.com/375219/the-adl-is-a-jewish-problem/