How the ADL Failed the Jewish Community

New Yorkers have elected Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor. His victory raises several questions, but for Jewish New Yorkers, one in particular: What did local and national Jewish organizations do to try to stop a man with Mamdani’s views from rising? 

Almost nothing, it turns out. Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League and other well-heeled Jewish groups helped to make a candidate like Mamdani possible in myriad almost comically stupid ways, from designing anti-anti-Semitism curricula that actually made people considerably more likely to resent Jews to insisting on embracing politicians who despised them while giving the cold shoulder to those who stepped up to protect their interests.

To appreciate their cataclysmic failures, it helps to consider the threat Mamdani poses to New York’s Jews. As a student at Bowdoin College, he co-founded his school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the Hamas-supporting group now banned from several campuses for alleged material support of terrorism. He has crooned about his love for the Holy Land Five, terrorists convicted in 2009 for materially supporting Hamas. 

Mamdani has repeatedly refused to condemn the slogan beloved by anti-Israel rioters—“globalize the Intifada”—which is effectively a call for violence. He has claimed that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF”—a doubly spurious claim that not only accuses New York’s finest of wanton brutality but also identifies the world’s sole Jewish state as the real culprit. And Mamdani chose, late in the campaign, to have his picture taken with Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

You would think that, facing the possibility of a Mamdani mayoralty, the Jewish community would organize in full force. And some leaders did just that. 

One Brooklyn synagogue, for example, made national news after it insisted that members would not receive High Holiday seats unless they registered to vote, presumably as part of an effort to block a Mamdani victory. And more than 850 rabbis signed a letter denouncing Mamdani. 

Such last-ditch efforts to oppose Mamdani’s win were noble. But what’s needed is a broader effort to stifle the rise of politicians who pose a threat to the Jewish community’s interests. On that count, Jewish organizations have been inexcusable failures. And no one group embodies the failure more clearly than the Anti-Defamation League.

For decades, the ADL was a serious custodian of the fight against bigotry in general and anti-Semitism in particular. It conducted dependable research and ran invaluable field offices that worked with local communities to curb hateful incidents. 

But in 2015, Jonathan Greenblatt—a former aide to Barack Obama and a tech executive with virtually no Jewish organizational experience—took over the group and began its radical transformation into an amplifier of Democratic Party messaging.

In 2018, Tablet, where I’m an editor, published a report accusing the ADL of flubbing what had been its core offering: delivering credible reports on anti-Semitic attacks. Rather than merely counting actual confirmed incidents of anti-Semitism, the ADL had included merely reported incidents involving “Jews perceiving themselves as being victimized due to their Jewish identity” as well as incidents reported by the media. (The ADL contested our characterization.)

The ADL’s report was cited by numerous media outlets to suggest that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his presidency had contributed to rising anti-Semitism.  Anyone who bothered reading the actual numbers, though, would see how dubious this really was. 

The ADL has worked assiduously, in fact, to support the canard that the Right was primarily responsible for anti-Semitism in America. In 2017, the group released its guide to the “alt-Right” and the so-called “alt-Lite.” Included on the list were people like Gavin McInnes, founder of Vice—who, the ADL informed its readers, was guilty of such sins as hailing “Judeo-Christian values” as superior to all others.

Then, in 2020, Greenblatt joined Al Sharpton—who still has not apologized for his role in the deadly anti-Semitic riots in Brooklyn from 1991—to demand that Facebook censor ads supporting Trump. He said little about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish content on the platform. 

Under Greenblatt’s leadership, the ADL and its officials have repeatedly peddled, and later deleted, progressive propaganda. During the Biden years, the organization enthusiastically promoted critical race theory, which it defined on its website as a tool that “helps us understand how and why racial injustice continues to persist in the U.S.” The group portrayed anyone—including parents—who took issue with CRT as, at best, an extremist, and at worst, something approaching a domestic terrorist. This language has since disappeared from the group’s website. 

Similarly, the ADL’s director of Jewish outreach scrubbed one of her tweets, in which she argued that “Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism.”

Evidence has emerged that the ADL’s left-wing rhetoric, specifically around anti-Semitism, has contributed to Jew hatred. Last month, Tablet ran a piece by Joel Finkelstein, the co-founder and chief science officer of the Network Contagion Research Institute. Partnering with the Rutgers Social Perception Lab, Finkelstein and his colleagues exposed thousands of participants to the ADL’s anti-Semitism curriculum. They asked participants to what extent the material “irritated” them. 

The results were startling: “Participants who read ADL materials reported much higher irritation and stronger feelings of being attacked than those who read neutral or values-based text,” Finkelstein reported. “Their written responses contained 15 times more antisemitic statements than those in the control conditions.” 

The ADL’s approach, in short, has been counterproductive. It has elevated critical race theory and other left-wing frameworks that consider Jews privileged aggressors.  And its attempts at “education” have done nothing but make people more anti-Semitic. 

The Jewish community’s leaders, particularly those in its legacy organizations, contributed to Mamdani’s election by championing critical race theory and other far-left causes. When President Trump stormed back into office earlier this year, dedicated to keeping Americans in general and American Jews in particular safe by closing our porous southern border and penalizing universities that allowed anti-Semitism to flourish on their campuses, a coalition of the Jewish community’s leading groups—including the leadership of both Reform and Conservative Judaism—voiced “deep alarm” over what they alleged was the president’s “scapegoating” of “transgendered people and other marginalized groups,” proving again that they won’t miss an opportunity to prioritize progressive pieties, idiotic as they may be, over the wellbeing of real, living Jews.  As long as these organizations and individuals represent the community, candidates like Mamdani will keep on winning—and New York’s Jews will keep on losing.  

Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League