By Nora Lester Murad; Illustrator: Maryam Aswad
This article was published in Rethinking Schools (September 27, 2024)
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) calls itself “the leading anti-hate organization in the world.” But it is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.
The ADL is a divisive political advocacy organization. It is a leader among Zionist organizations — like the Jewish Community Relations Council, the American Jewish Committee, the Institute for Curriculum Services, and the Jewish Federations of North America — that reinforce unconditional support for Israel and erasure of Palestinians in schools across the United States. The ADL harms everyone who opposes racism and supports equality — including Jews.
The ADL’s programs are widespread in U.S. schools, with wholesome names like “No Place for Hate” and “A World of Difference.” According to their website, in 2023 alone they reached 7 million students and provided professional development to 24,000 educators. That’s partly because the ADL makes it so easy for districts and schools to partner with them: They provide free, ready-made materials, from lesson plans on antisemitism and the Holocaust, to professional development on anti-bias for educators, administrators, and even school police. For example, the ADL partners with Boston Public Schools as part of its anti-bias 24/7 Respect initiative, and the Boston Public Schools website prominently features the ADL. When the National Association for Independent Schools recently offered webinars on antisemitism and Islamophobia, they tapped the ADL to provide the antisemitism content. When school districts and educational organizations circulated recommended resources after Oct. 7, 2023, they frequently linked ADL materials — like in the often-shared “Resources for Educators, Families to Discuss the Events in Israel and Gaza with Students,” compiled by the San Diego County Office of Education.
The ADL gives schools an easy route to show that they oppose antisemitism and bias. The ADL provides data, takes incident reports, gives input on educational policy, and offers “Jewish perspectives” without the need for schools to engage with the diverse perspectives of Jewish community members.
But the ADL’s unfounded attacks on groups working for Palestinian rights and the ways it undermines BIPOC communities, have made it unwelcome among social justice groups. A diverse group of more than 300 organizations — from the Movement for Black Lives to the National Lawyers Guild to the Red Nation — have signed on to the #DropTheADL campaign, which reminds progressive organizations that “the ADL is not an ally.” Since #DropTheADL launched in 2020, there has been a plethora of deep analysis by Jewish and non-Jewish sources into the history of misrepresentation and harm caused by the ADL. This includes schools.
Inciting Fear Based on Unreliable and Manipulated Data
From news outlets to school officials, many people rely on the ADL for information about antisemitism. For decades, the ADL’s statistics have been repeated by mainstream media without scrutiny. The ADL presents a terrifying picture of a crisis that escalates year over year. Speaking about the ADL’s 2023 audit of antisemitic incidents, its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, warned: “Antisemitism is nothing short of a national emergency, a five-alarm fire that is still raging across the country and in our local communities and campuses.”
In the past few years, though, multiple analyses, often in Jewish news sources frustrated by the ADL’s sensationalizing claims, have pointed out the ADL’s reliance on vague reports, lack of verification, and the lumping together of weighty and trivial incidents. Jewish Currents points out this “makes it more difficult to measure antisemitism in American life.” The ADL also includes what they call “anti-Israel rallies” in their database of antisemitic incidents. In fact, the Jewish newspaper, The Forward, newspaper reported that of the 3,000 “antisemitic incidents” recorded by the ADL in the first three months after Oct. 7, 1,317 were rallies where activists expressed hostility toward Zionism, not Jews. These practices led to Wikipedia’s recent designation of the ADL as a generally unreliable source. Wikipedia editors took this stance, they wrote, “due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, unretracted, regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. The general unreliability of the ADL extends to the intersection of the topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict.”
ADL statistics are based on conflating criticism of Israel or the political ideology of Zionism with hatred of Jews. One way that the ADL promotes this conflation is by advocating use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition has been critiqued by experts and advocates as circular, racist, and punitive toward critics of state violence. It includes 11 examples, seven of which shut down criticism of Israel and Zionism. One example says that it is antisemitic to: “[deny] the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” This enables the ADL to label as “antisemitic” any discussion of the more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled during Israel’s founding as well as discussion of findings by Israeli and international human rights organizations that Israel is an apartheid state. The IHRA definition is the basis for a spate of laws against the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. These laws aim to control speech of public employees and contractors, including educators like Bahia Amawi, the Austin, Texas, public schools speech therapist who lost her job for refusing to sign an anti-boycott pledge and was featured in Just Vision’s award-winning documentary Boycott. It is also the basis of proposed bills that would deport immigrants without trial if arrested at Palestine-supporting events and strip funding from public schools if they fail to impose repressive measures on teachers or students who criticize Israel or uplift Palestinians.
The reality of antisemitism is more nuanced. On the one hand, antisemitism, along with other forms of racism, has clearly increased with the Trump-era emboldening of right-wing actors. Antisemitism in the United States has gained new visibility in chilling scenes like the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and wounded six, and the 2017 Charlottesville rally of white men marching through the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us!” Yet U.S. Jews no longer experience the material discrimination (in housing, jobs, etc.) they did in previous historical periods, and they enjoy a relatively high standard of living on average, having become integrated into economic and political structures.
The conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is racist because it implicates Palestinians as hateful for talking about their own life experiences.
Israel’s claims to act on behalf of world Jewry, even as it slaughters Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, complicate matters. Peter Beinart, a prominent commentator on Jewish politics, notes that “three academic studies — one in the U.S., one in Belgium, one in Australia — over the last 20 years all show a strong correlation between substantial Israeli military operations that kill a lot of Palestinians and a rise in reported antisemitic incidents.” So, there may be a connection between the genocide in Gaza and anger toward Jews. But how do we parse out what is and isn’t actual antisemitism when both the Israeli government and the IHRA definition consider it hateful to protest human rights violations against Palestinians?
The ADL’s framing makes it difficult to see the role antisemitism and its weaponization play in upholding white supremacy. Instead, they falsely smear social justice movements, including those standing up against genocide, Islamophobia, and police violence — and they erase the Jewish communities who support and participate in those social justice movements. And when the ADL misreports acts against Zionism as discrimination against Jews, it blurs the distinction between political disagreement and hatred against a group.
Furthermore, the ADL’s conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is racist because it implicates Palestinians, and supporters of Palestinian human rights, as antisemites who commit “hate acts” merely for talking about their own life experiences as refugees, living under Israeli occupation, or fighting colonialism.
Unfortunately, despite the occasional exposé of the ADL’s distorted statistics, no organization provides alternative data — partly because measuring antisemitism, like measuring racism, is a more complex project than lists of “incidents” can reflect and partly because groups concerned with racism often don’t address antisemitism separately from other forms of discrimination.
Claiming to Support Students and Educators but Actually Bullying Them
The ADL leverages its reputation and relationships with policymakers and funders to rail against groups with whom it disagrees politically. Greenblatt characterized Black Lives Matter as “wrong on the facts and offensive in tone” when the Movement for Black Lives 2016 policy platform recognized links between U.S. policing and Israeli militarism. In 2022, the ADL declared Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to be antisemitic. In November 2023, the Intercept reported that the ADL labeled Jewish organizations calling for a ceasefire “hate groups,” later reporting that the ADL urged schools to investigate students based on the “unsubstantiated accusation that Students for Justice in Palestine had sent money to Hamas, urging schools to investigate students without providing evidence.”
In schools, the ADL works with partners to bully educators and students directly by disparaging their reputations, calling for disciplinary action against them, and submitting formal complaints that subject schools, educators, and students to invasive and exhausting investigations. To protect Israel, the ADL deceptively mixes legitimate calls against antisemitism with politicized calls to censor Palestinians and their supporters.
For example, for years the ADL has played a leadership role in the right-wing opposition to liberated ethnic studies. In February 2024, in cooperation with the Louis D. Brandeis Center, the ADL filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against the Berkeley Unified School District alleging that administrators failed to take action to stop the “nonstop bullying and harassment of Jewish students by peers and teachers.” Civil rights organizations like Palestine Legal say the ADL and its partners are increasingly weaponizing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race, national origin, and shared ancestry. By claiming that schools that allow criticism of Israel create a “hostile environment,” they essentially argue that students who support Zionism — a political ideology — are a protected class under the law.
The ADL’s punitive response to what they deem as antisemitic interferes with efforts to implement restorative justice.
In response to this pressure, some school districts are clamping down on educators’ freedom to teach and students’ right to learn. After two high school students in Philadelphia made a podcast comparing the art of Palestinians with the art of enslaved people, it was selected by their teacher and vetted by their principal to be played at the school’s week of Black History Month assemblies. But another teacher at the first assembly claimed the podcast was antisemitic and forwarded it to a local Zionist organization. The organization led a campaign that successfully pressured the school district to remove the podcast from the remaining assemblies. Although the podcast did not mention Jews or Zionism, the ADL nonetheless joined a call to pressure the school district to investigate the students’ teacher, Keziah Ridgeway, an award-winning anti-racist educator.
The ADL’s punitive response to what they deem as antisemitic interferes with efforts to implement restorative justice in schools. Months after joining the call to fire Ridgeway, the ADL brought a Title VI complaint against the School District of Philadelphia. In the complaint, the ADL advocates for the “suspension and expulsion” of students and the “suspension and termination” of teachers, who under the IHRA definition — which the ADL encourages the district to adopt — have engaged in “discriminatory conduct” for being publicly critical of Zionism. With this approach, schools cannot cultivate space to untangle antisemitism from anti-Zionism and grapple with real antisemitic (and other racist) incidents in meaningful, restorative ways.
The ADL uses right-wing tactics in its policy advocacy at the local, district, and state levels and in attacks on public schools. It uses anti-critical race theory rhetoric to derail antiracist curriculum, promoting a watered-down anti-bias pedagogy that hides rather than explores power, systemic analysis, and historic context. It denounces DEI programs in education and the private sector, including in a February 2024 appearance by Greenblatt on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where he asserted the need to “overhaul DEI,” because these programs, according to Greenblatt, “perpetuate the exclusion of Jews.” Meanwhile, anti-racist educators argue that while all forms of bigotry and discrimination have their own histories and manifestations, they must all be understood in the context of white supremacy and fought together in a framework of collective liberation. The ADL’s cynical efforts to privilege the comfort of some Jews over the human rights of Palestinians, and above the right of all students to learn in a safe and uncensored environment, should disqualify them from participating in any aspect of U.S. education.
