"WATCH THE PROBLEM! ADL put a mark on our backs."

author: Daniel Sieradski

For over a 100 years, the League against defamation presented itself as a bridge builder: a judaic civilian rights organization that combined the safety of judaic communities with universal protection and coalition policy. However, the top of the evidence, including leaked interior audio recordings, ex-employees' testimony, national lobbying records, judicial documents, the investigation of territory prosecutors and the organization's own public statements, tells a different story: about an institution that systematically placed pro-Israeli actions above civilian liberties, ignored right-wing threats of adulation, utilized the concept of anti-Semitism against Palestinian rights defenders and dissident Jews, and challenged very progressive movements that it considers allies.

This communicative has now reached its most dangerous chapter. erstwhile the United States and Israel wage a war against Iran, which the Brennan Center for Justice called "unconstitutional" — a war most Americans oppose, which legislature has not approved and which has already led to anti-Jewish force on American dirt — ADL has put all its organization strength into the bombing campaign. In this way he underwent a transformation that lasted for years: from an organization that erstwhile claimed that the safety of Jews depended on the defence of the civilian rights of all, to an organization that put on the abroad policy of the Israeli utmost right and the goodwill of Donald Trump.

The current ADL attitude did not begin with the appointment of Jonathan Greenblatt in 2015. In 1993, San Francisco territory lawyer investigated the ADL case on collecting confidential information about nearly 10,000 activists and at least 700 organizations — including United Farm Workers, NAACP, Greenpeace and Center for Constitutional Rights — and in transmitting that information to abroad governments, including Israel and apartheid South Africa. ADL infiltrator, Roy Bullock, was a regular volunteer at the American arabian Anti-Discrimination Committee office in San Francisco at the time his director, Alex Odeh, was murdered by a bomb planted under the office door.

This communicative matters due to the fact that it shows that the current ADL behaviour is no exception under 1 CEO. This is an intensification of the organization pattern: utilizing the civilian rights brand to legitimize surveillance, repression and supervision of progressive movements — especially those that question Israeli politics or build solidarity over racial divisions.

Greenblatt dropped all the appearances. In December 2015, erstwhile Trump addressed the Republican judaic Coalition with a language referring to ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes, ADL's consequence was not condemnation, but cover. "We do not believe that Donald Trump's intention was to summon anti-Semitic stereotypes," Greenblatt said. A small capitulation of limestone. This early arrangement gave a speech to what became the defining position of ADL towards right-wing anti-Semitism: to treat it as a mistake of intent alternatively than as a pattern of behavior.

Shortly thereafter, the ADL began to defend itself against constitutional rights. Investigation Jewish Currents of 2021, based on interviews with 8 erstwhile employees and national lobbying records, Greenblatt showed that in 2016, Greenblatt ordered the civilian Rights Department "to withdraw" from opposition to the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act — a bill that ADL lawyers themselves defined before legislature as a problem with the First Amendment. 1 of the employees said this directly: "With all due respect to sexual workers, we sale ourselves on prostitutes." national papers confirmed that after private opposition to the bill, ADL lobbied in his favor. erstwhile the politician of fresh York signed an anti-BDS executive regulation, ADL's own constitutional advisor stated that "it violates the First Amendment." Greenblatt inactive supported her. The interior five-year strategical plan listed "Law Enforcement" and "Delegitisation" (e.g. BDS) as precedence initiatives. "Civil rights" didn't appear.

An idealistic divided became apparent in May 2022 erstwhile Greenblatt announced that Students for Justice in Palestine, judaic Voice for Peace and CAIR "were embodying the extremist left, or photo-reverse of the utmost right", and announced that "anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism", reversing the long-standing attitude of ADL, which highlighted the legitimacy of sincere opposition to judaic nationalism. In a leaked audio recording obtained by Jewish Currents He told dissident workers, "If you can't reconcile the fact that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, then possibly this isn't the place for you." In organizations specified as ADL, opposition does not end with a bang. It ends with a letter of resignation, a silent decision aside, a decision not to rise your hand. After the dissidents left, there remained an institution speaking only to itself — incapable to separate between the defending Jews and the defence of the state.

Then it came October 7, 2023. Hamas carried out a devastating attack on confederate Israel, killing about 1,200 people at the music festival and kibbutzes close the Gaza border, and taking about 250 hostages. It was the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Horror was real, regret justified, and the global judaic community was shocked. But here is what should be understood about what happened later: On October 7, he did not make a turn of the judaic establishment towards authoritarianism. It accelerated. It provided an organization cover for transformation, which was already in full progress.

Jewish municipal policy has undergone a dramatic right turn over the past 2 decades. What utilized to be considered liberal Zionism — a commitment to peace negotiations, opposition to the expansion of settlements and support for the Palestinian stateship — was now considered functionally indistinguishable by establishment organizations. The Zionism of the far right was so popular that the judaic institutions of the establishment effectively adopted the ethnonationalist imagination of large Israel. This full thing wasn't a bottom-up evolution. This was a top-down imposition by the donor class, which perceives the endurance of Jews solely through the prism of ethnonationalism, not solidarity, justice or democracy.

October 7 is the event that this establishment has been waiting for — a trauma that will silence all interior criticism, justify any authoritarian instinct and transform any call to Palestinian rights into evidence of genocidal intent. Regret was sincere, and instrumentalization was immediate. Within a fewer days, the full judaic community became under martial law, from which it never withdrew: anyone who questioned Israel's consequence was Hamas' sympathizer; anyone who called for a ceasefire was an anti-Semite; anyone who noticed the failure of the Israeli government was a traitor.

The central component of this lockdown was the communicative of abandonment — the claim that the progressive left betrayed Jews in their top need. There was a grain of fact in it: any reactions to October 7 were heartless, and any judaic progressives felt truly abandoned by allies who could not mourn the murdered civilians without immediately moving to the geopolitical context. That pain was real. But the establishment utilized this pain with breathtaking velocity and cynicism. Posts specified as William Daroff — a erstwhile activist of the Republican judaic Coalition, who presently leads the Conference of Presidents of the Main American judaic Organizations — utilized this minute to force ideological compatibility and settle old accounts. After Trump's re-election, alternatively of seeking unity, Daroff complained that the Jews had been portrayed as "prisoners" and blamed marginalized communities for Israel's deficiency of support — as if support for the bombing of Gaza was a prerequisite for the presence on the call for a shiva. Daroff and his co-workers utilized the communicative of abandoning not to rebuild bridges, but to burn the others: to justify breaking ties with civilian rights organizations, attack DEI and intersecration as anti-Semitic by nature, and drive wedges between Jews and any possible ally that could complicate the focus of the establishment on unconditional support for Israel.

ADL's decision to limit civilian rights activities was part of this task — an institution virtually dismantling tools to fight bigotry in all its forms, as a wider mission became uncomfortable for a narrower mission. This consensus has hardened itself to something unprecedented in American judaic life: a complete combination of judaic identity, interests of the Israeli state and suppression of opposition, forced by institutions that claim to represent a community whose majority of members have never voted for.

ADL practices with data turned this merger into political ammunition. The Intercept obtained a strict data collection behind the ADL map after October 7 "Anti-Semitic Incidents and Anti-Israeli Wires". Of the 1,163 applications, 54 percent were protests of solidarity with Palestine — not acts of hatred. ADL confirmed that the anti-Semitism database included a judaic Voice for Peace protest at Grand Central Station, attended by about 4,000 people, including rabbis—while Greenblatt simultaneously called JVP and IfNotNow "groups of hate".

By putting protests and pogroms into the same dataset, we get a illustration resembling a tsunami of hatred for Jews — a illustration that the legislators, whom the university administrators are afraid of, are quoting, and no 1 but a fistful of investigative journalists will break down on the first factors. all time ADL shouted about anti-Semitism at a peace rally, it exhausted the power to describe the real case. Brick by brick, ADL built a planet where real anti-semites could hide behind the devaluation of the charge. In the same month, nearly 200 university rectors were called upon to "immediately investigate" SJP troops for possible terrorist violations with up to 20 years in prison — citing Instagram Stories as evidence. erstwhile asked about the facts, ADL's spokesperson replied, "Our letter speaks for itself."

The arithmetic of the ADL priorities has never been clearer. erstwhile Trump organized in 2024 a rally at Madison Square Garden with racist and anti-Semitic speeches, the ADL issued a message that did not mention Trump, the Republican organization or any of the offensive wordings. Days after reports that Trump's generals described him as a "fascist to the bone", who spoke with admiration of Hitler, Greenblatt published 8 Twitter entries condemning student organizations on campuses. Zero about Hitler. Even the erstwhile ADL manager Abe Foxman publically criticized his successor: "Last night he attacked this guy at CNN and could not mention Trump. It's kind of weird." Foxman condemned Trump's rally on the MSG in terms of the Holocaust: "The gas chambers in Auschwitz did not start with bricks; they started with words." ADL didn't say anything like that.

When Elon Musk performed a clearly Nazi salute during Trump's inauguration ceremony, ADL told the public to "take a breath" — while through her partner JLens set up an ETF accepting investments in Tesla, Meta and Amazon, allegedly attempting to influence the policies of these companies' statements. The man who strengthened the large Alternate explanation — the same ideology that motivated the shooter from the Tree of Life — received a gracious explanation that no student carrying the Palestinian flag would always receive.

Perhaps the most revealing minute was January 2025 erstwhile Greenblatt spoke to the Israeli Kneset and referred to the secret Israeli pager-bomb run against Hezbollah — a mass operation of victims that killed dozens and injured thousands of Lebanese civilians — as a model for the fight against anti-Semitism on the Internet. "We request a genius who produced Apollo Gold Pagery for over a decade and infiltrated Hezbollah to prepare for this battle," he said. He didn't pretend to be a civilian rights organization anymore. He asked to be understood as a warrior.

There has been a structural exhaustion: ADL's flagship civilian rights program, No Place for Hate, was closed; In June 2025, 22 employees were fired and the cuts were clearly presented as a withdrawal from civilian rights work; and in October 2025, the "Protect civilian Rights" section was completely removed from the ADL website. The deleted passage read, "Our founders have established an ADL with a clear knowing that the fight against any form of prejudice or hatred cannot be applied without counteracting all hatred." ADL’s spokesperson described the removal as a "distorted maintenance" — as if the institution’s founding rule were a leaking tap to which individual was to go.

Subsequently, on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel carried out joint strikes on Iran. Among them was an attack on a girls' school in confederate Iran, resulting in more than 175 deaths. Brennan's center called strikes "unconstitutionally unconstitutional". Each large group of judaic establishment, but the judaic Council for Public Affairs, issued statements of support. Only 21 percent of Americans support the war. During the Greenblatt conference, he stated, "What we know without a shadow of a uncertainty is that the fall of the muslim Republic makes this planet safer." On Tuesday, ADL published that the murdered Iranian ultimate Leader of Chamenei was a contemporary Haman. Solidarity with dead students on Monday, Purimian memes on Tuesday.

When asked if the decision affected Israel, Greenblatt applied the improved closed ADL mechanism: anyone who focused on Israel's function simply revealed his anti-Semitism. Here is the deepest irony: blaming Israel is frequently anti-Semitic, playing an ancient motif of an intriguing hebrew who pulls strings behind the curtain of non - judaic power. But ADL has no reason to argue. For years, she insisted that the interests of American Jews and the interests of the Israeli state were identical, that criticism of 1 was hatred of another. You can't combine the identity of the community with the abroad policy of the state and then scream erstwhile people blame the community for the state's wars. ADL created this connection. The anti-Semites just accepted it.

Tucker Carlson, for example, clearly stated that the conflict "was happening due to the fact that Israel wanted it. This is the war of Israel. This is not a United States war." Marjorie Taylor Greene shared this sentence, arguing "Make America large Again was to be America first, not Israel first, alternatively than any abroad country," suggesting that US engagement was driven by Israel's agenda. Even erstwhile Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio justified the U.S.'s participation as a defensive measure, they emphasized Israel's determination to act "with or without US support," portraying Israel as the main initiator whose actions required US response. New Zeteo's poll showed that 46% of Americans believe Donald Trump is more open to Israel than to Americans, and among the independents this percent rose to 50%. These crucial social sentiments reenforce the dynamics in which American Jews, deliberately identified with the Israeli state by ADL, are seen as an influential group whose perceived loyalty lies elsewhere.

The consequences came almost immediately. On March 8, 2 Israeli-American men went to a infirmary in San Jose after they were attacked outside the restaurant, speaking Hebrew. Their attackers shouted, "Don't mess with Iran" and "Fuck the Jews." No 1 intervened. (Update: Shortly after the publication of this article, an event was reported with an active shooting in a synagogue close Detroit.)

Meanwhile, the Military Freedom Foundation received over 100 complaints from soldiers who claimed that the commanders described the war with Iran as part of God's plan for Armageddon. This is the coalition chosen by ADL: Christian nationalists who love Israel due to the fact that they believe that it will origin an apocalypse, and then Jews who will not convert will be condemned. These are the allies he accepts, calling judaic Voice for Peace a hatred group.

ADL is now faced with two-party delegation: sixty Muslim, arabian and allied organizations demanded Greenblatt's release; fresh York Times columnist Bret Stephens — with Greenblatt in the audience— said he would "dismant" ADL; and board associate Stephen Ludwig resigned, quoting Greenblatt's own book about authoritarianism: "It could not only happen here, Jonathan, it is happening here. Read the damn book."

Men beaten unconscious in San Jose did nothing wrong. They were not agents of the Israeli government. They were waiting for a table at the restaurant. But the institutions that claim to talk on their behalf have for years assured that there will be no light in the American imagination between average judaic life and bombs falling on Tehran. ADL burned down all the bridges to any community that could stand on their side, and called arson a "actual".

ADL didn't fall. She chose, step by step, to give concessions, to silence after silence, to become what she is: a lobby that speaks the language of the victim while serving the interests of power. The evidence is not ambiguous. The pattern is not random. And this cost is measured in the safety of the people ADL was expected to defend — people who now, thanks to an institution that claims to talk for them, are more exposed and more lonely than always since Shoah.