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How do we get the ADL out of schools? A conversation with Nora Lester Murad of #DropTheADLfromSchools.

May 30, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

This interview with me was originally published by The Specter of the Bund on May 30, 2025 and republished by Portside on June 5, 2025.

Since as far back as the 1980s, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has sponsored programs aimed at fighting discrimination in K-12 education. In recent years, however, the organization has narrowed its focus almost exclusively to antisemitism at the expense of other marginalized communities. In doing so, the ADL has created a coercive environment that encourages carceral solutions and monetary donations as a fix for systemic issues. Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in 2023, the ADL’s illiberal leanings have been put on full display as it voiced support for the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, dismissed Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, and done everything in its power to silence criticism of the state of Israel by labeling pro-Palestinian language and activism as “antisemitism” in its public advocacy and statistics, putting the self-proclaimed “anti-hate” organization in alignment with the likes of the Trump administration and Heritage Foundation.

Der Spekter editors spoke to Nora Lester Murad, a member of the core organizing team of the #DropTheADL movement, about what educators are facing in their schools and what needs to be done to replace the ADL’s programs with truly progressive, anti-racist solutions.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Mark Misoshnik, Der Spekter editor: Please tell us about yourself and then more about this movement that you’re a part of.

Nora Lester Murad: I’m originally from California. I live now in Massachusetts, and I’m Jewish. I married a Palestinian Muslim, and we raised three daughters in the West Bank. I’ve been involved with social justice work since my parents dragged me to demonstrations in a car seat, and I come from the same stock that you folks come from: both the villages around Kyiv as well as the Brooklyn left. I’m committed to social justice issues and particularly have been involved in this one even before I got married, which was 40 years ago. So it’s been a real, real long time. I think I’ve always been an anti-Zionist. My parents were anti-racist, so they were basically anti-Zionists.

Obviously the last 18–19 months have been particularly difficult for anyone who is either Jewish or Palestinian for different reasons. And it was during the genocide that the “Drop the ADL From Schools” campaign was birthed and then launched. Around 2020 there was [also] an effort to drop the ADL, which still exists at droptheadl.org, and it focused on helping progressive organizations understand that the ADL is not an ally to progressive groups. There’s also a long history of surveilling and attacking social movements of communities of color, even while they allied with some more conservative and integrationist civil rights organizations when necessary, contributing to the ADL’s undeserved reputation as a civil rights organization over the last several decades.

The 2020 effort to drop the ADL has resulted in over 300 organizations signing on to an open letter saying the ADL is not an ally. Those organizers were being contacted by educators asking for more education-specific materials, talking points, strategies, etc., and so they reached out to several of us who’d also been asking, saying, “Yeah, why don’t you pull some materials together and we’ll throw them up on our site?” But when this group of educators across the country began to meet around a year ago, they didn’t just want materials that focused on schools. They wanted a proper campaign. They wanted the ADL out of schools. And the reasons are not exactly the same as the reasons that progressives would want the ADL out. And that’s important. For example, the Drop the ADL folks say the ADL works with police. And progressives go, “Oh, my God, that’s horrible.” But schools don’t. They go, “Yeah, we work with the police too. That’s one reason why we like the ADL.” So if you’re going to talk to schools, whether it’s educators, parents, students, principals, superintendents, [or] school boards, you have to have an argument that is not just about progressive values. You have to have a pedagogical and education-specific argument. And so we developed that argument, the messaging, advocacy materials, and our own open letter, which is an open letter to educators [saying] the ADL is not a social justice partner. That is the language that schools use: they frequently refer to the ADL as a social justice partner. And we’re saying, “No, they’re not.”

Alex Lantsberg, Der Spekter editor: Have you ever described the ADL as a supremacist organization?

Nora: No, though I do think of farther-right organizations, like CAMERA (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) and ICAN (Israeli American Civic Action Network) as supremacist organizations. There are some others, but I don’t quite put the ADL in that category, not because they’re not horrible, but because they’re maybe smarter. I always talk about an ecosystem of organizations, and the ADL is the famous one: the AIPAC of the educational ecosystem. The whole ecosystem is problematic, but it doesn’t mean that they’re all exactly the same. They play slightly different roles. One will step forward when others step back; another steps forward, and another steps back. So they’re all part of the same dance.

I think they do actually end up supporting the same agenda, but there are important reasons why I would not put them in the same bucket. One is because CAMERA’s tactics are very predatory and aggressive. CAMERA will come up to you at a demonstration…and scream, “Rapist, rapist, rapist!” for 10 minutes. The ADL doesn’t do that. Why it’s important to distinguish is that it’s easy for people to either say, “Oh, the ADL are the good guys. So we don’t want CAMERA; we want the ADL because they’re the good guys,” or just to completely overlook [the ADL] and excuse them because they’re not the worst of the worst. So when we talk about it, we talk about the ecosystem. And I think labeling them a supremacist organization doesn’t add any value because it’s very easy for them to defend against it.

Charles Jacobs, the founder of the Boston chapter of CAMERA, continuously yells “Rapist!” and other insults at a Newton library. Video courtesy of Nora Lester Murad.

As we were pulling all these materials together and the messaging and thinking it through — and it’s not a completely finished project; it’s like a strategy that’s emerging in response to information we get about what’s working and what’s not — the magazine Rethinking Schools heard about us and asked for an exposé of the ADL. Rethinking Schools is the preeminent social justice magazine for K-12 teachers, and it was a huge honor to be asked to do that work. They published it in their Fall issue, around October 1, 2024, and that was our launch.

We launched the article, we launched our open letter, and now we’ve launched all of our advocacy materials. And we have over 90 organizational signatories and 500 or 1,000 individual signatories. We have a core group that’s kind of a leadership team. Most of the educators in that group cannot be publicly identified as working with us because they are working educators, and their jobs would be at risk, or because they’ve already been attacked by the ADL. And then we have an accountability group, which could be a bit more active, if you ask me. But there are about 20-25 people who were involved with the development of materials and are in an ongoing way informed about what we’re doing and asked to be critical and hold us accountable to our principles and to our mission.

And then we have an educators’ chat for educators around the country who are working on these issues. There are some parents in that group who are also working on the ADL, and another piece I think that is important is that we’re really trying hard to get mainstream media coverage of not only the ADL but also the issues that concern us, like attacks and smears against teachers, lawfare, etc., [as well as] the conflation of support for Palestinians with antisemitism. When an activist goes to a principal and says, “We want to get rid of the ADL,” and the principal Googles it, they are going to get 50 pages of the ADL talking about themselves. But we also want there to be some critical materials in credible, reputable, mainstream places so that the principal feels [that] maybe there are some legitimate questions about the ADL.

Mark: What can you tell us about the people that are supporting this movement? For example, teachers, union members? Are there multiple chapters? Are there locals, or is it just a national thing?

Nora: It’s just a national thing, and it’s really an umbrella. We don’t instigate anything on the ground. The ADL turns up in different schools and different districts in really different ways, so each person who comes forward needs to figure out what the ADL is doing that concerns them and also what they can do about it given their own positionality. If they’re high school students, they have different constraints and different opportunities than if they are educators; parents also have different constraints and opportunities. So we’re interested in organizing all those groups. We don’t organize them, but they organize themselves and tend to reach out and connect with us, either for materials or advice or to tell us what they’re doing. And we have heard some great success stories just with people coming forward and saying, “Hey, we got the ADL out of our school.” And we’re like, “That’s amazing. How did you do that?”

[We work with] educators, parents, students, and then the last group are educators who are wearing their union hats. That’s important for three reasons. One is [that] attacks and smears on teachers can happen for their protest activities as individuals, and they need support from their unions. It can also happen for the protest activities of the unions themselves, and we’re finding that unions are getting attacked as unions. Particularly right now, [the] Massachusetts Teachers Association and United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) are targets of right-wing groups — both Zionist groups and union-bashing groups — whose messaging and efforts are converging in at least those two places and some others. And thirdly, and this is something I want to really emphasize: teachers and educators are getting in trouble, not only for protesting the genocide. They’re getting in trouble for teaching [about the genocide], literally doing their job.

The convos jumbled in my heart and head

May 19, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

There were too many feelings and ideas, too big to name or hold. They were jumbled in my heart and head and still are. I had to shake them off me, expel them, or at least release some of the pressure, so I could reclaim my body. I needed to look at my guilt, despair and fury outside my body, so I could understand how they collide inside me as I witness the slaughter of Palestinians. Month after month, ten feelings pop up in a conversation, and before I process or respond, ten different feelings take over preventing all connection. I can’t catch up with myself. Or breathe.

Watching a genocide in real time through WhatsApp messages from friends is heavy and isolating. I feel crazy most of the time. Am experiencing generational Holocaust trauma for real now, understanding how so many people let it happen to us, to others, because I see so many people let it happen again. I confessed my anxiety to a friend in exercise class and she said, “You can only do what you can do.” She let herself off the hook for doing more before she had done anything. Nobody gets it. I moved away.

So, to be able to climb out of my overwhelm and refocus on the political challenge, I sat down to write. I wrote a letter to a girl in Gaza, the daughter of a friend. I wrote a letter to a Jewish influencer I know who 18-months in still posts photos enjoying meals at cafes with smiling friends. And I wrote a letter to Anne Frank who, unlike me, had the maturity and wisdom to see the beauty amidst the ugly.

I printed each letter out on different colored paper and cut each letter into bites. I interspersed them on my dining table, letting them crash and converge, and while the whole thing makes no sense–not the conversations nor the genocide–I feel calmer having expelled these toxins from my body, slightly stronger to face more. There is so much more to face.

ADL’s Stats Twist Israel’s Critics Into Antisemites

February 19, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

This article was originally published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Media outlets continue to print headlines about antisemitism based on Anti-Defamation League statistics known to be faulty and politicized. In doing so, they grant undeserved credibility to the ADL as a source.

Producing statistics helps the ADL to claim objectivity when they assert that antisemitism is increasing dramatically, prevalent in all fields of society, and emanating from the left as well as the right. Those “facts” are then used to justify policy recommendations that fail to respond to actual antisemitism, but succeed in undermining the free speech rights of Palestinians and their supporters, including those of us who are Jews.

Smearing Israel critics as antisemites

James Bamford (The Nation, 1/31/24) : “The New York Times, PBS and other mainstream outlets that reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying the group’s questionable charges.”

While it frames itself as a civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of actively spying on critics of Israel and collaborating with the Israeli government (Nation, 1/31/24). (FAIR itself was targeted as a “Pinko” group in ADL’s sprawling spying operation in the ’90s.)

Though it professes to document and challenge antisemitism, it openly admits to counting pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic: In 2023, the ADL changed its methodology for reporting antisemitic incidents to include rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans,” even counting anti-war protests led by Jews—including Jewish organizations the ADL designated as “hate groups.”

The ADL’s political motivations are clear in its advocacy for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which alleges that criticizing Israel based on its policies (e.g., “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis“) is antisemitic. The ADL and their allies also deem speech supporting Palestinian human rights to be coded antisemitism.

Criticism of the ADL is increasing. In 2020, activists launched #DropTheADL to raise awareness among progressives that the ADL is not a civil rights or anti-bias group, but rather an Israel advocacy organization that attacks Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights in order to protect Israel from criticism. Last year, a campaign to Drop the ADL From Schools launched with an exposé in Rethinking Schools magazine, and an open letter to educators, titled “Educators Beware: The Anti-Defamation League Is Not the Social Justice Partner It Claims to Be,” that garnered more than 90 organizational signatories. These efforts build off research that exposes the ADL’s work to normalize Zionism and censor inclusion of Palestinian topics in the media, policy circles, schools and in society at large.

In 2023, some of its own high-profile staff resigned, citing the group’s “dishonest” campaign against Israel’s critics. In June 2024, Wikipedia editors found the ADL regularly labels legitimate political criticism of Israel as antisemitic, leading the popular online encyclopedia to designate the group an unreliable source on Israel/Palestine.

Critiquing the ADL’s statistics does not serve to argue that antisemitism is acceptable or less deserving of attention than other forms of discrimination. Rather, it demonstrates that we can’t rely on the ADL for information about the extent or nature of antisemitism—and neither should media.

A dubious source

This New York Times report (10/6/24) obscured the fact that many of the “antisemitic incidents” counted by the ADL were chants critical of Israel.

And yet corporate media use the ADL uncritically as a source for reports on antisemitism. For instance, the New York Times (10/6/24) not only headlined the ADL’s assertion that “Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in the US,” it chose to contextualize the ADL’s findings “in the wake of the Hamas attack,” and called the ADL a “civil rights organization.”

Important media outlets like The Hill (4/16/24), with outsized influence on national policy discussions, ran similar headlines, failing to note the ADL’s highly controversial methodology.

At least the Wall Street Journal (1/14/25) acknowledged that the ADL has been challenged for counting criticism of Israel as antisemitism. But it immediately dismissed the applicability of those challenges to the ADL’s Global 100 survey, which found that 46% of adults worldwide hold antisemitic views. (The ADL’s Global 100 survey was criticized for its flawed methodology as far back as 2014, when researchers found it “odd and potentially misleading.”)

The media’s willingness to accept ADL claims without scrutiny is evident in CNN’s choice (12/16/24) not to investigate the ADL’s accusations of antisemitism against speakers at a recent conference of the National Association of Independent Schools, but rather to simply repeat and amplify the ADL’s dishonest and slanderous narrative.

Methodological faults

A Jewish Currents report (6/17/24) concluded that “the ADL’s data is much more poised to capture random swastika graffiti and stray anti-Zionist comments than dangerous Christian nationalist movements.”

Even setting aside the ADL’s prioritization of Israel’s interests over Jewish well-being, the ADL’s statistics should be thrown out due to methodological faults and lack of transparency.

Even FBI statistics, frequently cited by the ADL, don’t tell a clear story. Their claim that 60% of religious hate crimes (not mere bias incidents) target Jews is misleading, given the systemic undercounting of bias against other religious groups. Because of the history of anti-Muslim policing, Muslims are less likely to report than people of other religions.

In fact, a national survey of Muslims found that over two-thirds of respondents had personally encountered Islamophobia, while only 12.5% had reported an incident. Almost two-thirds of respondents who encountered an Islamophobic incident did not know where or how to report it. When Muslims experience hate, it is less likely to be pursued as a hate crime.

On the other hand, the ADL has an unparalleled infrastructure for collecting incident reports. It actively solicits these reports from its own network, and through close relations with police and a growing network of partners like Hillel International and Jewish Federations.

Perpetrators’ motivations are also relevant and should not be inferred. In 2017, Jews were frightened by over 2,000 threats aimed at Jewish institutions in the United States. It turned out that nearly all came from one Jewish Israeli with mental health problems. Without this level of investigation, policymakers could enact misguided policy based on the ADL’s sensationalism, like CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s claim that “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.”

Bad-faith accusations

David Klion (Zeteo, 2/4/25): “How did the ADL, which for generations has presented itself as America’s leading antisemitism watchdog, find itself prostrated before the most powerful enabler of white supremacy in recent American history?”

Although critics have long argued that the ADL’s politicized definition of antisemitism and flawed statistics cannot be the basis of effective policy, policymakers continue to rely on media’s deceptive journalism.

Massachusetts State Sen. John Velis cited ADL statistics to claim the state has “earned the ignominious reputation as a hub of antisemitic activity,” and therefore needs a special antisemitism commission. In Michigan, ADL reports of escalating antisemitism led to a resolution that will affect policy in schools across the state. In Connecticut, the ADL referenced its statistics in a government announcement about changes to the state’s hate crimes laws. The ADL’s statistics undergirded the logic of President Joe Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

But how can politically distorted research be the foundation for effective policy?

Antisemitism is surely increasing. Hate crimes have increased in general—most targeting Black people—especially since the first Trump presidency, and hate incidents generally rise during violent outbreaks like the war on Gaza, and during election periods. But since most antisemitism originates in the white nationalist right wing, why focus primarily on people—including Jews—who are legitimately protesting their own government’s support for Israeli actions against Palestinians? Or on Palestinians themselves, who have every right to promote the humanity and rights of their people?

The ADL’s bad-faith accusations weaponize antisemitism to protect Israel at the expense of democratic and anti-racist principles. Anyone who doubted the ADL’s politics should be convinced by its abhorrent defense of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute (FAIR.org, 1/23/25) and its support for Donald Trump.

To pursue effective public policy, policymakers and the public should refuse to cite the ADL’s flawed statistics, and instead develop thoughtful and nuanced ways to understand and address antisemitism and other forms of bigotry and discrimination. Media can play a key role by exposing the politicization of antisemitism by the ADL, including its prioritization of protection for Israel from criticism over the free speech that is fundamental to democratic discourse.

Is Fire Enough to Get Americans to Empathize with Palestinians?

January 20, 2025 by Nora Lester Murad

I am heartbroken by the devastation from fires in Hollywood where I was born, Pasadena where I grew up, and Altadena where I attended high school. As I sit fearing the status of people I love, TV coverage gives me the emotional validation I seek. Newscasters seem to understand that a house is more than a structure. It is a home where people loved, cooked, grew, fought, studied, and sang in the shower. Some newscasters tear up as they scan the burning embers, perhaps imagining how they would feel if they fell victim to such a tragedy.

I have never heard that kind of empathy for my other loved ones, families who live in Gaza. Every day for over 15 months, and still, they live with the constant roar of drones and planes that can kill or maim without warning. Like the California fire victims, they will forever live with the sense of vulnerability that comes from learning that the world is not safe. Like the California fire victims, they will never be able to replace the family photos, legal papers, art, books, and valuables they worked for generations to accumulate.

Still, the situations are different.

My friends in Gaza can’t go find water, food, medical care or shelter with neighbors. They don’t have insurance policies or a government to provide help. They don’t even have their reality affirmed on mainstream TV because Israel has banned all foreign journalists and killed over 250. Only those Americans who intentionally look for the truth see the pictures: a father who frantically digs around a child’s finger sticking up from packed rubble after a bombing, little boys harvesting blades of grass so their families can eat, and the myriad of skin diseases that proliferate when people sleep on wet ground night after night, never getting dry or warm.

And the situation in Gaza is not a natural disaster but rather the result of an intentional policy by Israel to destroy Palestinian society using weapons paid for with over $20 billion in U.S. tax dollars since October 7, 2023 alone. I thought about this when an LA fire victim said on TV that their street looked like it was hit by a bomb. Israel has dropped an estimated 85,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, according to the United Nations.

People use words like “unfathomable” and “historic” to describe the scale of the destruction in Los Angeles County. With a population of 9.7 million residents, 12,000 unfortunate families have lost homes. But if the rate of loss was the same as in Gaza (1 housing unit lost per 15 residents according to the United Nations), Los Angeles County would have lost an unimaginable 640,000+ housing units .

This doesn’t even account for the 83,000 additional housing units in Gaza that are severely damaged but not totally destroyed. And it doesn’t account for damage to non-residential structures like hospitals, universities and schools, and so much other destruction. Significantly, 150,000 people have been displaced in Los Angeles county. But if 90% of the population of LA County were displaced as they are in Gaza, that would affect a staggering 8,730,000 people.

The shocking human suffering in both places where I have loved ones raises questions for me: might the compassion for suffering evoked by the LA fires somehow translate to compassion for Palestinians in Gaza? If so, might more Americans realize that while they can’t stop the fires in California, they actually can save lives in Gaza – by speaking out against U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel’s slaughter? Or is the dehumanization of Palestinians so profound that no loss of life, no destruction of property, and no amount of suffering can inspire more Americans to act?