“We thought that Mr. Greenblatt, as an alumnus of the Obama administration, would serve as a natural ally in attributing all ills affecting society – especially minorities in society – only to right-wing bigotry.”
New York, April 11 – Organizations that have joined the oldest Jewish civil rights group in combating various forms of bigotry voiced concern this week that the venerable enterprise has fallen far short of its capabilities in the important arena of focusing only on threats to Jews from the right-hand side of the political spectrum.
Officials from the Southern Poverty Law Center, J Street, and several other progressive groups met Wednesday to discuss their qualms with the Anti-Defamation League, now under the leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt. Their chief worry, according to several people present, stems from the ADL’s apparent inability or unwillingness of late to ignore, minimize, or otherwise dismiss the importance of animus and violence toward Jews from groups identified with progressive politics.
“We’re disappointed, and somewhat nonplussed,” admitted one participant who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We thought that Mr. Greenblatt, as an alumnus of the Obama administration, would serve as a natural ally in attributing all ills affecting society – especially minorities in society – only to right-wing bigotry. The ADL has definitely made some important moves in that regard, but in the assessment of all the groups here, their embrace of that modus operandi has been half-hearted in the last year or so, and none of us can explain it.”
“Jonathan has done an OK job avoiding criticism of Muslim leaders, or of making anodyne condemnations of the ones who espouse antisemitism,” agreed another attendee. “But that’s the baseline. It’s not impressive in any way. What we had been hoping for was a more aggressive posture, one that leverages the ADL’s century-old gravitas to really pushing a Democratic, progressive, anti-Israel agenda into the mainstream. With the ADL behind it, an alliance of anti-Israel groups could really come together to make opposition to Jewish sovereignty an essential element in anything being good for the Jews.”
Each of the organizations has shared its concerns in private with Greenblatt over the last eight months, even as the ADL has avoided more than token mention of attacks on orthodox Jews in Brooklyn by African-Americans because that trend does not fit the progressive narrative. None of the officials at Wednesday’s meeting disclosed what, if any, response Greenblatt had to offer them, but the occurrence of the meeting suggests they found any such response unsatisfactory.
“We may have to move ahead on our own,” the first official predicted. “Politicizing antisemitism is part of our plan to unbuckle Jewish support for Israel from American Jewish identity, because only that way can we still avail ourselves of Jewish donors while cultivating the growing Muslim population and their anti-Israel sensibilities. It just would have been so much easier and smoother with more robust buy-in from the ADL.”
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