The organization’s championing of progressives has increasingly clashed with its stated mission of calling out antisemitism.
The organization’s championing of progressives has increasingly clashed with its stated mission of calling out antisemitism.
N ot long after a slew of attacks on religious New York City Jews, the Anti-Defamation League’s new director of Jewish outreach, Tema Smith, declared, “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.”
In the progressive hierarchy of victimhood, devout Jews — whose ancestors probably knew a thing or two about systemic bigotry — are the ones obligated to wrestle with their alleged, latent racism after being smashed over the head with a brick as they walked down the street minding their own business. Well, that is, if they ever regain consciousness.
Once a champion of Zionism, the ADL now hires a Jewish outreach director who demands that her “community” give a proper hearing to those who defend the targeting of Jewish civilians through suicide bombing. “Here’s the thing,” tweeted Smith, “Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism. The whole problem with the ‘it was 18 years ago, she was in college’ line is that it denies her right to even opine on the Palestinian experience.” Smith made this comment when defending then–president-elect Joe Biden’s pick for deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, Reema Dodin, who said in the wake of the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing that killed 15 civilians (including seven children and a pregnant American woman) that such bombings were “the last resort of a desperate people.”
Does the ADL believe we have a responsibility to hear out every violent white supremacist’s thought process, as well? After all, the ADL spends a lot of time pressuring tech companies and other media outlets to censor speech that it deems hateful (like, God forbid, criticizing leftist banker George Soros). Do certain people get a special dispensation for rationalizing political violence?
Smith is the perfect hire for the new ADL, a Democrat partisan outfit run by former Barack Obama appointee Jonathan Greenblatt, who’s spent years degrading the group’s mission of fighting antisemitism and building its social-justice agenda. (Greenblatt’s new book is yet another play on Sinclair Lewis’s paranoid novel, It Can’t Happen Here. “From Microaggression to Genocide” is one of the chapters, so you get the idea.)
The ADL, self-anointed arbiter of antisemitism, is useful in providing lazy journalists with quotes confirming preexisting notions about antisemitism being largely a right-wing phenomenon. There is the rare perfunctory, half-hearted condemnation of some leftist Jew baiting, but as Seth Mandel points out, in many ways, the ADL is now complicit in normalizing Jew hatred, by shielding from condemnation the progressive politicians who peddle it:
If there’s one organization whose responsibility it is to prepare not just the Jewish community but the wider United States public and its government for emerging anti-Semitic threats, it’s the ADL. Instead, the head of the ADL has been spreading a cynical left-wing myth about anti-Semitism while threats to the Jewish community fester.
And it’s even worse than it looks, because while there’s long been a willful blindness toward anti-Semitism from the left, the ADL and other partisan groups aren’t the ones experiencing this blindness. They’re the blinders.
Other, lesser-known groups — Bend the Arc and the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, to name just two — have also cynically adopted Judaism to advance often-authoritarian, completely irreligious, progressive ideas. All these groups peddle grievances under the idea of tikkun olam, which, roughly translated, means “healing the world,” an obscure open-ended directive from God that’s used as a cudgel by the Jewish Left to convert every one of its partisan causes into religious ones: abortion, socialism, social justice, and myriad other issues that have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism. The ADL’s central dilemma — though perhaps it doesn’t see it as such — is that its championing of progressives has now increasingly conflicted with the organization’s stated mission of calling out antisemitism. The hiring of Smith is just the latest example of this problem. In most cases, the ADL seems to have chosen a side, and it’s not the Jewish one.