What Happened Today: November 07, 2022
New York vaccine mandates struck down by NY supreme court; midterm results could stretch into December; Saudi’s alfalfa boon in Arizona
The Big Story
The Supreme Court of New York struck down a pair of New York City vaccine mandates that led to the sacking of roughly 1,700 unvaccinated first responders and other public workers earlier this year. The ruling came about after a group of workers from the Department of Sanitation sued the city for unlawful termination, arguing that a vaccine exemption in March for celebrities, athletes, and “performing artists” undermined the validity of the mandate, as did the several months the city kept workers employed while it considered their requests for exemption. In his Oct. 25 opinion, Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio agreed with the workers, writing, “If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued … If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt.”
The court found that the fired workers should be reinstated as well as compensated for back pay missed because of the wrongful termination. But, for now, that order will likely apply only to the group of sanitation workers who participated in the lawsuit rather than to all public employees who fell afoul of the mandate, until an appeals court weighs in on a challenge to the Supreme Court’s order now being pursued by the city’s attorneys. The city’s vaccine mandate was “arbitrary and capricious,” according to the ruling, with the health commissioner’s policy leading to “identical unvaccinated people being treated differently by the same administrative agency.” In September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the vaccine mandate for private-sector workers would become optional on Nov. 1.
In the Back Pages: No More ADL
The Rest
→ Even though at least 40 million early midterm ballots were cast by Monday morning, it could end up being weeks until election officials determine who controls Congress. All told, 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 in the Senate are up for grabs Tuesday. Dozens of those elections are expected to be tight races, as are many of the 36 contests for governorships. In states where election officials can begin counting early votes before Tuesday, like North Carolina and Florida, early vote counts could lead to “blue mirages” because Democrats typically cast more mail-in ballots than Republicans do. The “red mirage” is just as likely in key swing states like Pennsylvania, where ballots aren’t opened until Election Day and the predominately blue mail-in votes get counted after a surge of in-person red votes placed on Tuesday. With razor-thin polling margins in both directions for the House races, it’s likely to be at least days until winners are determined. If neither candidate scores more than 50% of the vote in Georgia’s Senate race, a forced runoff election would take place there on Dec. 6, which means the Senate could very well be up in the air for another month.
→ Arizona has failed to collect tens of millions of dollars in fees after it leased thousands of acres full of precious ground water to a Saudi corporation known as Fondomonte. According to an AZCentral analysis, the Arizona State Land Department made an expensive error when it contracted the property located near a massive groundwater basin west of Phoenix to Fondomonte for just $25 an acre, with no rules on how much water could be pumped on the property. Aerial photos of the land show that the Saudi corporation has used at least 3,500 acres to grow water-intensive alfalfa hay that’s then shipped back to the kingdom, all while the southwest region confronts a growing water crisis and depleted aquifers. Given the cost of public water and the average volume needed to grow alfalfa, the Saudis are estimated to have been pumping roughly 22,400 acre-feet worth of water annually for the past seven years—or $38 million in water fees that would have gone to Arizonans if it had been collected.
→ Can a journalist go to jail for being a journalist? Though it would seem that a reporter is fully protected by the First Amendment to gather and disseminate news, the latest turn in the case of a Texas journalist jailed by the Laredo Police Department over two stories she published has become a divisive legal matter for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The case involves Priscilla Villarreal’s lawsuit against the Laredo Police Department for her 2017 arrest after police alleged she broke the law by publishing stories that included information verified by a Laredo police officer.
Police said she broke a Texas law, never previously invoked, that makes it illegal for anyone to obtain nonpublic information from a government official if it’s done so by the person “with intention to obtain a benefit.”
Police said the stories about the suicide of a Border Patrol agent broke that law because Villarreal published the name of the agent she confirmed with police and because she distributed the story on Facebook, where she benefited from an increase in followers.
U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho overturned a lower court’s decision to toss out Villarreal’s lawsuit on the grounds that the police are entitled to qualified immunity. “It should be obvious to any reasonable police officer that locking up a journalist for asking a question violates the First Amendment,” Ho wrote.
But last week the Fifth Circuit announced it would take up the case again after one of the court’s three judges, Chief Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman, dissented from Ho’s opinion, saying it was “off base,” as an officer could have suspected Villarreal did have an intent to personally benefit from writing the story.
With the case now pending, Ho said he found it troubling that the Fifth Circuit did not rule unanimously in such an “exceedingly troubling case.”
→ Hong Kong attorney Kwok Cheuk-kin is challenging the legality of the city’s COVID-19 restrictions, arguing that the current requirement that individuals get three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine verified by the LeaveHomeSafe contact tracing app, which must be shown to enter all public buildings, is undermining the physical and mental health of city residents. “Hong Kong’s economy has been on the decline,” Kwok said. “The slump has affected citizens’ mental and physical health—their emotions have been disturbed.” Last month, Kwok won a case against the city after it sought to invalidate some 20,000 vaccine exemptions it’d handed out to residents who, it said afterward, should not have received them. Though the court ruled in Kwok’s favor, the city’s legislative body, which has largely been hollowed out as a democratic institution in its subservience to Beijing, rewrote the law that then permitted city officials to throw out the vaccine exemptions.
→ Twitter laid off approximately half of its workforce on Friday as part of a massive overhaul of the platform following Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company—but now dozens of freshly laid off employees are hearing from their former bosses asking if they might come back to work. According to media reports on Monday, several of the employees who were fired had been terminated by mistake, though others were fired as intended—except that management then realized they’d still need those workers to build out the new features that Musk wants for Twitter’s next iteration. “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
→ It’s not just Twitter laying people off—Facebook parent company Meta said on Monday that it would make its first significant reduction in its headcount in the 18 years since the company was founded, with at least thousands of members of the company’s 87,000-strong workforce likely to be laid off sometime this week. The large-scale layoffs come amid a shaky period for Meta as it struggles to define its pivot to the virtual Metaverse and figure out how it will make money there after rising expenses and dwindling cash reserves saw the company’s stock drop more than 70% in 2022. Meta has also seen stiff competition from China’s TikTok and a drastic reduction in targeted advertising revenue after Apple required that users opt in to let applications track their device activity.
→ Graph of the Day:
Inflation, the long-tail effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the global energy crisis instigated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have all strained the global electricity supply. For the first time in 20 years, the total number of people worldwide who don’t have regular access to electricity will grow by 20 million by the end of 2022 to 775 million globally. Spiking fuel prices means the problem is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa, where the total number of people without access is close to its previous peak in 2013.
→ It’s been a somber few days in Philadelphia, which had the unfortunate honor to become the first city to lose two major championships on the very same day. Just as the Philadelphia Phillies fell to the Houston Astros in Game Six of the World Series, the Philadelphia Major League Soccer squad, the Union, lost the MLS championship in a penalty kick shoot-out to the Los Angeles FC. The baseball and soccer post-season runs had been a healthy distraction for the city, something it needed as it still contends with a gun violence epidemic that has seen more than 1,400 people shot in the Kensington neighborhood alone since 2015. Home to the biggest open-air drug market in the country, Kensington saw another mass shooting on Saturday night, in which nine people were shot after a group of several perpetrators fired 40 shots upon a crowd outside a neighborhood bar before fleeing the scene.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Search for Israel’s Best Hummus By Dana Kessler
A new book offers a guide to the country’s best hummusiot, and what makes one better than another
Our Own Little Piece of the Earth By Michael Frank
From the remarkable story of Stella Levi, an Italian Jew who lived under Mussolini
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
No More ADL
When it comes to Jews, the organization now does more harm than good
By Liel Liebovitz
Pop quiz:
Which of these two individuals do you find more problematic?
Kyrie Irving, a kooky basketball player who believes that the Earth is flat, that JFK was shot by bankers, that the COVID vaccines were secretly a plot to connect all Black people to a supercomputer, and that Jews worship Satan and launched the slave trade?
Or Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, who accepted $500,000 from Irving last week without even meeting or even talking to the all-star—and who was then forced to give back the donation when Irving blatantly refused to apologize?
Let's think about it for a minute. One of these guys is a weirdo with dumb opinions he may or may not actually believe. The other is running a soulless racket which just made it clear that you can say whatever you want about the Jews and buy your indulgences at a discount price.
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely believe that Irving’s endorsement of a Black nationalist documentary based on an obscure Jew-hating book, to say nothing of Kanye West’s meltdown, will most likely contribute to a surge in antisemitism in America, particularly in the Black community. But we Jews don’t control Kyrie Irving; in theory, we do control the ADL, and we shouldn’t want our chief defense group to behave in a way that advances antisemitic conspiracy theories about shadowy Jews trafficking in money and influence for fun and profit.
All of this leads to one sorry conclusion: It’s time to say goodbye to the ADL. It can’t be killed, so we need to just walk away from this formerly venerable organization, and weaken it before it swerves so far off the road that it takes us with it.
If you think the above is hyperbole, or if you haven’t been paying much attention to the ADL lately and still imagine it as a paragon of the good fight against antisemitism, here’s a sizzle reel of Greenblatt’s years in office. Since leaving the Obama White House and taking over the organization in 2015, Greenblatt has turned the ADL into a partisan attack machine, fueled by corporate cash and increasingly oblivious to any real suffering of any real Jews.
Need some proof? Here we go.
In 2017, the ADL issued a guide to America’s worst antisemites, a 36 (double Chai!) person rogues’ gallery. Louis Farrakhan, the Black supremacist beloved by celebrities, wasn’t on it. Nor was the Oberlin professor who argued that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy. Nor Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March, who argued you can’t be both a Zionist and a feminist, because the former makes you somehow less than human, and who equated Zionism with neo-Nazism. Instead, the ADL picked a posse of minor right-wing nutjobs and no one else. Unironically, it called its guide “Naming the Hate.”
In 2018, the organization came under scrutiny for flubbing its reporting on antisemitic attacks—the group’s bread-and-butter and a major source of its centurylong trust and prestige—perhaps to further the false impression that Jews were under attack by hordes of white supremacists heartened by the rise and rhetoric of Donald Trump.
In 2020, Greenblatt signed on to a campaign calling on Facebook to censor pro-Trump ads. His partner in this assault on free and political speech? Incredibly, it was Al Sharpton—who has still not publicly apologized for his role in inciting the Crown Heights pogroms in 1991. This politically motivated commitment to curbing free speech continues: Last week, shortly after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk (the left’s favorite bogeyman du jour), Greenblatt issued a call to companies to suspend all advertising on the social network. The list goes on.
This rank partisanship is understandable: Impactful leaders make political calculations, and even if they err too enthusiastically on one side or another they may be forgiven for playing hardball to promote their organization’s end. But the organization’s end itself has changed under Greenblatt in ways that make the old ADL unrecognizable. Before Greenblatt’s arrival, for example, the ADL defined racism as “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, [and] that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”
That perfectly sound definition was too much for Greenblatt’s ADL, and so, in 2020, the organization changed its tune to define racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”—a definition they needed to change yet again in the wake of Whoopi Goldberg’s 2022 comment that the Holocaust wasn’t “about race.”
Scroll on to the ADL’s homepage these days and you’ll be treated to a love letter to critical race theory, defined merely as a noble tool that “helps us understand how and why racial injustice continues to persist in the U.S.” Parents who object to CRT being taught in their children’s schools, another page cannily suggests, are borderline domestic terrorists or, at the very least, in the sway of white extremist groups.
Besides, sayeth the ADL, have no fear: “there is no evidence that critical race theory is being taught in K-12 schools.” You know, besides the Critical Race Theory Coalition Summit hosted by the Portland Public School District. Or the Loudon County Public School District’s partnership with a group called The Equity Collaborative to train teachers in CRT. Or the California Department of Education endorsing a CRT-based ethnic studies curriculum despite more than 100,000 objections.
And what of the Jews? In the wake of some complaining that the group founded in 1913 to protect one of America’s most threatened minorities from prejudice and violence seems much less focused on Jews these days, a senior ADL staffer in charge of Jewish outreach tweeted: “One of these days we need to talk about how the Jewish community’s reactions to antisemitism coming from Black people is inherently tied to (implicitly racist) fears of Black violence.”
The possibility that “the Jewish community’s reactions to antisemitism coming from Black people” might be tied to attacks like this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, or many more like them, was obviously out of bounds. Which was actually of a piece with the ADL’s new recommendation for how Jews globally should react when violence is done to us: “Jews,” tweeted the same senior staffer, “*have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism.” In case you’re scratching your head here, let me simplify: The ADL believes that whenever Jews get violently stabbed, shot, blown up, or beaten, our first reaction must be to search our souls for what we must’ve done to deserve it.
Sure, Greenblatt and the gang occasionally murmur some correct condemnation of some real hater, but no one in their right mind can inspect his tenure and deny that he has hollowed out the ADL of any and all connection to its original mandate, instead using its clout to turn it into an effective and stealthy progressive, partisan operation. And this actually puts real Jews in danger, because anyone can now claim that talk of antisemitism on the rise is merely political propaganda. Bad vibes, as the kids say.
Let’s zoom out for a minute and try to understand how we got here.
In 2015, Jonathan Greenblatt was named head of the Anti-Defamation League. Until that point, the organization had been run for nearly three decades by Abe Foxman, a Holocaust survivor who had spent the war hiding with his Catholic nanny. Foxman joined the ADL as a young man and rose through its ranks before taking over as director in 1987. He earned his reputation as a serious moral authority who was unafraid to take unpopular positions.
Most importantly, however, Foxman kept the organization’s focus precisely where it had to be: on its 26 regional chapters staffed by hard-working and dedicated men and women who both diligently collected data about antisemitism on a granular and local level—reporting their findings to law enforcement and keeping Jews safe—and forged meaningful ties with other communities, investing in the education needed to make sure future generations wouldn’t be inflamed with antisemitism’s feverish appeal.
Eight years later, the organization is nearly unrecognizable.
Lots of current ADL critics like to focus on the fact that Greenblatt was a veteran of the Obama political machine. But the rest of his resume may offer even more insight into his views.
In 2002, Greenblatt and his business school roommate founded Ethos Water, a premium bottled water social enterprise later acquired by Starbucks; he also founded All for Good, a volunteerism platform supported by “a coalition of leading companies, non-profits, and government agencies”; was an operating partner at Satori Capital, a private equity firm focused on conscious capitalism (much better than the unconscious kind!); and CEO of GOOD Worldwide LLC, which, among other things, published a broadsheet distributed exclusively at Starbucks. These broadsheets, Greenblatt claimed, were not intended to convince anyone “to vote Democratic or Republican,” insisting his product was ideologically neutral. But the first issue kicked things off with a little lecture on … carbon emissions.
What Greenblatt was an expert in wasn’t antisemitism or bigotry; his real skill—the one every single line on his resume speaks to—was knowing how to launder the expansion of obscene corporate power via costumes of righteousness. This made him a perfect fit for the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, a creation of the Obama administration basically designed to allow the White House to quarterback the donations to, and the investments of, a wide swath of America’s enormous nonprofit sector. Rather than having NGOs operate distinctly, the apparent idea was for the administration to issue marching orders, set agendas, and apply enough pressure for corporations and the donor class to follow suit. If you want to see this synergy of corporate America, social causes, and the Democrat Party in action, just look at the Black Lives Matter movement, which has, to date, raised $49.5 billion in pledged corporate dollars without delivering anything by way of transparency or accountability.
A similar strategy has also done well for the ADL. The organization is now a big business: Its revenue for 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, was $91,313,791—almost double that from the year Greenblatt took over. And while the organization does not disclose the identity of its donors, it did recently reveal that these now include Apple, Uber, MGM Resorts, and other behemoths. With these revenue streams rushing forth merrily, it’s unlikely that anyone, from within the organization or without, would succeed in changing course and restoring this organization to its foundational mission.
The logic here is that the ADL is 10 times more powerful as part of the Democratic Party coalition than outside it. A more powerful ADL gains Jews a proverbial seat at the table, while at the same time augmenting the ADL’s bank account with contributions from party donors and large corporations—which, in turn, makes the ADL an even more powerful advocate. In return for permission to hold the Jewish card, the ADL agrees to play that card on behalf of the party. A little circular, but it works for everyone involved.
Everyone, that is, except actual Jews. Jewish interests are abandoned in exchange for permission to run a protection racket. When your raison d’etre is being the go-to guy for blessing or denouncing misbehaving celebrities—depending, of course, on where they fall on the political spectrum and how “contrite” they’re willing to be in public—you can’t actually protect the dentist in Cleveland who wonders why his kid in college just had her mezuzah ripped off her doorpost or the Hasidic kids in Brooklyn now regularly getting their heads bashed in.
To understand why, think, for a moment, about Kyrie Irving. What would the head of a serious version of the ADL have done? It’s actually pretty simple. First call attention to how messed up this situation is, not by issuing pompous statements with corporate logos slapped all over but by doing exactly what a bunch of Jewish kids did at a Brooklyn Nets home game earlier this month: wearing a T-shirt that says “Stop Anti-Semitism” in the front row of the stadium. Those kids probably invested a few hundred bucks, and in return received news coverage all over the world, appearing not as shadowy peddlers of indulgences but as what Jews actually are: outsiders getting pummeled left and right by bigots and haters.
Then, this ADL chief would go on TV and instead of cozying up to Sharpton, America’s greatest living pogromist, simply deliver the following speech: “I feel bad for Kyrie. I admire what seems like his willingness to seek out knowledge and to stand alone for what he thinks is true. But for all his alleged seeking, he still can’t find the right answer. He’s making the same mistake that millions have made throughout history—being smart and curious enough to wonder how the world works, but only finding imaginary Jews at the end of every road. This is the road to ignorance and misery, not to knowledge.”
Except, of course, that you can’t give that speech if your current or hoped-for donors are made up of the real thing Kyrie would uncover if he looked a bit more carefully: the very large corporations who have melded with government to create an almost impregnable, opaque, all-containing blob that controls American life, from dictating public health priorities to changing the way we produce and consume food.
Instead, all you can do is shame people who are confused and undereducated using the brute force you have at your disposal: corporate power. Cancel their contracts! Nix their ad campaigns! Make them bleed cash! Which, as we all saw this week, only amplifies the original noxious allegation.
This is why having no ADL would be so much better than having the one we currently have. Because of its own massive conflicts of interests, the ADL under Greenblatt may very well be , inadvertently or otherwise, contributing to the growth of antisemitism, not its diminishment.
This is as much of a philosophical question as it is a practical one. If your goal is to exterminate antisemitism—make the world’s most ancient and persistent hatred disappear, vanish, go kaput—then what we’ve seen from Greenblatt this week is understandable: Let’s educate or punish one hater at a time, until they’ve all reformed or disappeared. But if you believe, like me, that antisemitism will never go away, this approach is nothing more than a silly game of whack-a-mole. If we believe antisemitism is here to stay (and if you doubt it, do I have a few really good history books for you), then what you need is a real defense organization—one that doesn’t waste time with selling indulgences but instead forms bonds with groups and communities across the American spectrum, remains very vigilant to every attack no matter the perpetrator’s identity, and provides real education in large part by, ya know, speaking the truth clearly and unequivocally.
Here, then, is my solution to the problem that is Jonathan Greenblatt’s ADL: Let’s accept that the ADL is no longer a Jewish organization and ask for a divorce. Greenblatt can keep everything: His anti-racism, AstroTurf organization and all the corporate money trees he shakes on its behalf. We amcha Jews walk away with nothing—nothing, that is, but our dignity and our safety, both improved by no longer being pawns in a profit game that is endangering us more by the day.
Liel, Thanks for your much needed article. The Wizard needs to be exposed for what he really is and who he is really benefitting. The ADL has been completely hollowed out, but I don't think we need to replicate it with another iteration. It may be more beneficial to focus locally, like the yeshiva students wearing their t-shirts. I would love to see our communities become more prideful of their Judaism. We do matter, we do count and Israel is a beautiful, nation. Work with and financially support Jewish organizations on campuses, become active in state school curriculum committees, synagogue board meetings etc. I certainly don't have the definitive answers, but the thought of another bloated national Jewish agency isn't at all appealing. Liel, you are fighting the good fight. May you continue doing so for many, many years.
Aloha - respectfully, the ADL has defended Jews and other groups for as long as I've been alive and has always been vigilant and careful in their response. All organizations grow, change, mutate, but public pressure and commentary has been enough to correct the ADL path for generations. Please consider more moderate approaches rather then dissolution.