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.
The failure of mainstream Jewish organizations like the ADL -- an issue worth watching for over 20 years, the response of American Jewish organizations to the "new" antisemitism that appeared in the wake of the 2001 intifada and later the emergence of social media, the Wokesters, and new kinds of political violence stimulated by and organized on social media.
I don't always understand what Liel is getting at or agree with him. But what he's been saying recently about the ADL is not only correct, it's obvious, bordering on the self-evident. The only problem is that he and others have been so late in speaking out about it and specifically speaking out against the ADL. Since Jonathan Greenblatt took over, the ADL has gone off the rails and no longer deserves the support of American Jews or anyone else.
Some now half-jokingly refer to the ADL as an anti-Jewish organization, and like many such jokes, it's uncomfortably close to the truth. It certainly sets off highly defensive liberals still in thrall to the ADL's storied past, caught like a lot of American liberalism since the 1960s, in a haze of nostalgia and distorted history. The current leadership of the ADL relies on this nostalgia and rides on the fumes of the ADL's past reputation, all while driving the organization into the ground, destroying its credibility and putting itself in bizarre situations, effectively in the same corner with Kyrie Irving, Ilhan Omar, and Linda Sarsour. This nostalgia produces reliable automatized reactions, reaching for the checkbook or donate button, instead of greater awareness and accurate reflection.
The ADL can probably be saved, but adults would need to intervene, removing the current leadership and stopping its current agenda. The ADL under Abe Foxman was not an entirely unproblematic organization, and its quasi-official relations with the FBI and police departments were always open to being politicized and abused. But that generation of leadership did know more or less where the red lines are.
And the ADL still has an excellent research department. Unfortunately, its current leadership pays no attention to the results of that research. If it did, it would know that "white supremacism" is a tiny and declining part of American life and has been for decades, since the ADL's first researched it after the war. Among white and Asian Americans, antisemitism has never been more marginal. Since around the 1980s, however, the postwar decline in antisemitism among black and Hispanic Americans has plateaued. That, together with rise of the social media (which energizes and normalizes lone kooks and fringe groups) and the penetration of American politics by hostile foreign entities (think Qatar, al Jazeera, CAIR, and BDS/SJP), are the salient facts we have to start with *today* -- not 1960 or 1940.
In the meantime, since the 2001 intifada, a small army of new, smaller Jewish organizations has arisen to fill in for the failures of mainstream groups like the ADL, JCRCs, and so on. These include StandWithUs, Creative Community for Peace, The David Project, and The Israel Project. Towering above them is the right answer and alternative to the ADL, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the venerable, century-old organization that, among the mainstream, is the one exception to the otherwise dreary scene of organizations living in the past. The AJC is a classic liberal organization that has suffered no discontinuities in its mission or character, ably led for many years by the great David Harris, and lacks the partisan and ideological blinkers that now incapacitate the ADL. The availability of such great alternatives clinches the case: stop supporting the ADL and remove it from its quasi-official role.
The ADL is still useful in attacking "right wing" antisemitism and getting some dems and Lefties on board with that. When it is so blatant they will take on other forms as well ie K West. We just need another organization as powerful and well funded as the ADL that will predominantly take on Left Wing, Islamist and Black antisemitism, and can appeal to the conservatives and Republicans.
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.
The failure of mainstream Jewish organizations like the ADL -- an issue worth watching for over 20 years, the response of American Jewish organizations to the "new" antisemitism that appeared in the wake of the 2001 intifada and later the emergence of social media, the Wokesters, and new kinds of political violence stimulated by and organized on social media.
I don't always understand what Liel is getting at or agree with him. But what he's been saying recently about the ADL is not only correct, it's obvious, bordering on the self-evident. The only problem is that he and others have been so late in speaking out about it and specifically speaking out against the ADL. Since Jonathan Greenblatt took over, the ADL has gone off the rails and no longer deserves the support of American Jews or anyone else.
Some now half-jokingly refer to the ADL as an anti-Jewish organization, and like many such jokes, it's uncomfortably close to the truth. It certainly sets off highly defensive liberals still in thrall to the ADL's storied past, caught like a lot of American liberalism since the 1960s, in a haze of nostalgia and distorted history. The current leadership of the ADL relies on this nostalgia and rides on the fumes of the ADL's past reputation, all while driving the organization into the ground, destroying its credibility and putting itself in bizarre situations, effectively in the same corner with Kyrie Irving, Ilhan Omar, and Linda Sarsour. This nostalgia produces reliable automatized reactions, reaching for the checkbook or donate button, instead of greater awareness and accurate reflection.
The ADL can probably be saved, but adults would need to intervene, removing the current leadership and stopping its current agenda. The ADL under Abe Foxman was not an entirely unproblematic organization, and its quasi-official relations with the FBI and police departments were always open to being politicized and abused. But that generation of leadership did know more or less where the red lines are.
And the ADL still has an excellent research department. Unfortunately, its current leadership pays no attention to the results of that research. If it did, it would know that "white supremacism" is a tiny and declining part of American life and has been for decades, since the ADL's first researched it after the war. Among white and Asian Americans, antisemitism has never been more marginal. Since around the 1980s, however, the postwar decline in antisemitism among black and Hispanic Americans has plateaued. That, together with rise of the social media (which energizes and normalizes lone kooks and fringe groups) and the penetration of American politics by hostile foreign entities (think Qatar, al Jazeera, CAIR, and BDS/SJP), are the salient facts we have to start with *today* -- not 1960 or 1940.
In the meantime, since the 2001 intifada, a small army of new, smaller Jewish organizations has arisen to fill in for the failures of mainstream groups like the ADL, JCRCs, and so on. These include StandWithUs, Creative Community for Peace, The David Project, and The Israel Project. Towering above them is the right answer and alternative to the ADL, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the venerable, century-old organization that, among the mainstream, is the one exception to the otherwise dreary scene of organizations living in the past. The AJC is a classic liberal organization that has suffered no discontinuities in its mission or character, ably led for many years by the great David Harris, and lacks the partisan and ideological blinkers that now incapacitate the ADL. The availability of such great alternatives clinches the case: stop supporting the ADL and remove it from its quasi-official role.
The ADL is still useful in attacking "right wing" antisemitism and getting some dems and Lefties on board with that. When it is so blatant they will take on other forms as well ie K West. We just need another organization as powerful and well funded as the ADL that will predominantly take on Left Wing, Islamist and Black antisemitism, and can appeal to the conservatives and Republicans.
The ADL even Foxman had zero to say or offer re Jewish continuity and acted as if the Free Exercise clause did not exist