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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It wasn't me that came up with the "lefty shill site", which I assumed was typical of conservative thinking. Bad assumption. I've been told this was meant to make former slaves citizens, which makes sense seeing as it was ratified in 1868. But just wondering ... the USA was rapidly expanding westward. Was that intended to make "natives" citizens as well?

Anyway, I'm pretty agnostic on the topic myself bc I haven't thought very much abiut it, but I'd certainly like "anchor babies" to be illegal.

*****

From my work in a regulatory agency, I know that in order to properly interpret a regulation (law, amendment) you sometimes have to dig into rule development notes (discusions, letters, other records etc) and on occasion nothing will do but to talk to the original author(s). Would be nice if we could buttonhole them in this case.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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there are those walking among us who are not required to obey U.S. laws.

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Diplomatic immunity comes to mind. It's not enuf to be a citizen of another country visiting or living in the USA to be exempt from our laws, but diplomatic immunity will do. IDK if (some? all?) tribal reservations - which are their own nations - are subject to USA law.

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We know we live in a 2-tiered justice system. I just found it cute that they don't make any attempt to hide it anymore.

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Now, IDK if "diplomatic immunity" was a "thing" back then when that was written, so I don't know if that's what is being referred to.

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Well, right.... right? Who knows? Nobody knows. How many are there? How did they get this status? Why do they have this status? Are they citizens? If not, what is their business here and how long will they be staying? Are there any living on my block?

All questions that you'll never have answers to because nobody with more than 5,000 twitter followers is ever going to ask and Elon Musk isn't going to re-tweet it. It should go without saying that the media will never ask this question.

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If your quote is correct, then everyone born in the USA is automatically a citizen (except children of foreign diplomats who apparently inherit their parents' citizenship) and "anchor babies" are legal.

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Oh... Trust me. I have no opinions on how true or untrue this quote is. It's an extremely watered down interpretation for normies of what might be thousands of pages of legalese.

Even if the agency didn't have a bias either way and was planted firmly in the realm of reality, I think that's a really tall order.

I wouldn't go making any assumptions based off of that, and even if they state that specifically somewhere in the document, I'd want to see the actual proof or at least look into other people's interpretation of it.

Even if there is a string of legal cases that set a precedent for them to come up with this assessment, and even if their assessment was 100% correct as the laws stand today, these are all very low-level to mid-level court cases that have yet to make it up the chain. Things may look very different on this issue in 4 years with the speed at which things are playing out right now.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I didn't even notice.

*****

Looked up Levin. I hope SCOTUS thinks as he does.

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Originally posted by THG:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I didn't even notice.

*****

Looked up Levin. I hope SCOTUS thinks as he does.

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What's this, comrade this is my thread. You said nobody ever posts in them. And you're chatting with Jack. Oh **** and there's JEWELSTAITEFAN. What is he doing in one of my threads? Jerk.

T

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

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Originally posted by THG:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I didn't even notice.

*****

Looked up Levin. I hope SCOTUS thinks as he does.

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What's this, comrade this is my thread. You said nobody ever posts in them. And you're chatting with Jack. Oh **** and there's JEWELSTAITEFAN. What is he doing in one of my threads? Jerk.

T

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We just come here to see what dumb shit you post and to laugh at you and your dead party.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It wasn't me that came up with the "lefty shill site", which I assumed was typical of conservative thinking. Bad assumption. I've been told this was meant to make former slaves citizens, which makes sense seeing as it was ratified in 1868. But just wondering ... the USA was rapidly expanding westward. Was that intended to make "natives" citizens as well?

Anyway, I'm pretty agnostic on the topic myself bc I haven't thought very much abiut it, but I'd certainly like "anchor babies" to be illegal.

*****

From my work in a regulatory agency, I know that in order to properly interpret a regulation (law, amendment) you sometimes have to dig into rule development notes (discusions, letters, other records etc) and on occasion nothing will do but to talk to the original author(s). Would be nice if we could buttonhole them in this case.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Their stated Mission: ... immigrant integration.

Good clue right there.



Those 3 Amendments were specifiuc to the purpose of Emancipated slaves.

Mark always goes into the intents and writings of the authors, when possible. You should enjoy his explanation.

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Originally posted by THG:
T

Tim Miller UNLOADS on Biden’s Inner Circle

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Originally posted by THG:
T

James Carville: Watch the polling and get prepared

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Originally posted by THG:
Sen. Booker (D-NJ): I Am Sick and Tired of this Kind of Heated Partisan Rhetoric

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

You've been saying this for 3 months every day and yet it never materializes.



You don't have a political party, Ted. There is no opposition to Trump.

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Originally posted by THG:
Then why are the republicans so scared?

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Originally posted by THG:


Texas fires starting shot in redistricting war

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

What a joke. Can't even pretend to protest.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Hey! Would you look at that....

Something all 3 of us can agree on.

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On June 4, an executive at the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded with a mission to defend the Jewish people and “to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” walked into a room on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower building across the street from the White House. They were there to attend a meeting between Jewish groups and members of the Trump administration. Just a few years before, in the waning days of Trump’s first term, the ADL’s presence at such a gathering would have been inconceivable.

Officials included the Justice Department’s civil-rights chief, Harmeet Dhillon, who had been sparring with the ADL since she was a student at Dartmouth in the 1980s; Trump’s top spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, whom the ADL had once criticized for participating in what it called a “fake Jewish ritual” (a bogus rabbi had wrapped her body in a Torah scroll); and National Security Council counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka, whom the ADL had previously said was linked to “openly racist and antisemitic hate groups.”

The meeting, which included representatives of the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, AIPAC, and others, had been convened to discuss the administration’s next steps in responding to an outpouring of antisemitism. The past two weeks had seen two of the most heinous antisemitic crimes on American soil in decades. On May 21, a young couple, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, two Israeli Embassy staff members, were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., shot by a man who reportedly chose them at random and shouted “Free Palestine” during his arrest. On June 1, in Boulder, Colorado, a group of mostly elderly Jews demonstrating in support of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 were attacked by a man using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. One of the 13 injured was a Holocaust survivor; another, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, later died of her injuries.

Following the attacks, ADL national director and chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt traveled to Boulder and made a series of speeches and media appearances. “I’m angry,” Greenblatt said over and over again. He blamed pro-Palestine activists and social-media influencers for contributing to an environment that radicalized the assailants. On Fox News, visibly agitated, he called out Guy Christensen — a teenage TikTok influencer who had urged “support” for Milgrim’s and Lischinsky’s murderer — and the Twitch personality Hasan Piker, who had not but who said he would continue to speak out against Israel’s “livestreamed child holocaust.” Greenblatt described both as “promoters of hate” alongside the leaders of colleges and universities, who he said had allowed antisemitic attitudes to fester. He referred to a recent commencement address at MIT in which the senior-class president had condemned the school’s cooperation with “the genocidal Israeli military,” declaring that such talk spreads “blood libels” and “creates the conditions” for violence. “We’ve got to stop it once and for all,” Greenblatt said. “I hope the Trump administration will do just that.”

Greenblatt, 54, a former Clinton- and Obama-administration official, was in his tenth year at the helm of the ADL, and he had spent much of his tenure directly opposing Trump. In March 2016, when Trump was competing to become the Republican nominee for president, Greenblatt announced he was redirecting the mogul’s previous donations to anti-bias efforts, citing Trump’s “penchant to slander minorities, slur refugees, dismiss First Amendment protections, and cheer on violence.” In the following years, Greenblatt publicly blamed the president for helping to create the environment that led to the deadly Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally and the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were killed. In 2019, the ADL took to the courts to fight what it called the “widespread violation of immigrants’ fundamental rights” under Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and in 2021, following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Greenblatt became the first head of a major Jewish organization to call for the president to be removed from office.

But all that felt long ago now. For the past several years, and especially since the October 7 attack, Greenblatt and the ADL had insisted that surging antisemitic activity — thousands of violent incidents per year in the U.S. — was being driven largely by the political left. Greenblatt had emerged as a spokesperson for a large swath of American Jews alienated from their traditional liberal allies. For decades, the ADL argued that anti-Zionism could lead to antisemitism, but recently, the group had adopted the position Greenblatt more or less aired on Fox: that opposition to the Jewish state was the same thing as antisemitism, full stop. That tens of thousands of Jews were active in the pro-Palestine movement was not just put aside — it was taken as evidence that they were antisemites, too. Later, at the end of July, when the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza would finally come to the fore of the world’s attention and many long-standing supporters of Israel would call on the government to ease its grip on the territory, Greenblatt would maintain, in the words of a post on X, that “Hamas alone has power to end this tragedy.”

It’s unclear if Greenblatt’s antipathy toward Trump faded as the ADL’s perspective on the left shifted. But he unquestionably saw and took common ground with elements of the MAGA right. In March, when the Trump administration pulled $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University, Greenblatt tweeted, “We at ADL appreciate the Trump Administration’s efforts to counter campus antisemitism.” A few days later, when ICE agents began snatching pro-Palestine activists from their apartment buildings and off the streets, the ADL hailed the administration for its “broad, bold set of efforts.”

Inside the ADL, the change has been deeply controversial. Over the past six months, I spoke with more than 40 current and former staffers, donors, board members, interlocutors in government, and other allies. Seventeen of these people, all of whom were either previously employed by or closely affiliated with the organization, have chosen to quit or part ways with it in recent years. Critics say that rather than “calling balls and strikes” regarding what is and isn’t hate, to use a favored Greenblatt phrase, Greenblatt has seemed to bend the rules for those in power. When Elon Musk threw up a pair of straight-arm salutes on Inauguration Day — which many ADL insiders, including Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abe Foxman, believed to be a sieg heil — the organization’s official X account posted in Musk’s defense, calling the action an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute” and asked for a “bit of grace” for the billionaire. Confused ADL employees blew up the organization’s Slack channels. According to a source close to the ADL, Musk’s perceived support of the Jewish state factored heavily in the decision. As the source put it: “We heard numerous very positive and glowing things, publicly and privately, about what he’s done in Israel.” To this source, this was evidence that Musk had no “antisemitic tendencies.” In recent weeks, Grok, X’s generative AI chatbot, began disparaging Jewish-sounding surnames and proclaimed itself to be “Mecha Hitler.” (In a post on X, the ADL called the bot’s behavior “irresponsible, dangerous, and antisemitic.”)

Several liberal longtime donors to the ADL told me they have stopped giving to the group. Some said they would not be involved as long as Greenblatt remained in his position. After the Musk incident, Walter Jospin, a Georgia attorney whose family has donated around $1 million over the years, wrote to the ADL’s board, “Most of the past and present regional leadership and donors no longer have confidence in Jonathan. These episodes are embarrassing; Jonathan is making it so hard to support and defend ADL.” Steven Ludwig, a regional board member in Philadelphia and an ADL volunteer since the 1990s who resigned in May, wrote in his own letter that the group has been “silent when it is most needed,” failing “to stand up against the spread of hatred, the erosion of the rule of law, and the threat of authoritarianism.”

At the same time, the organization has been bleeding young staffers. Many who have left mourn the narrowing of the ADL’s mission — that “justice and fair treatment for all” has been put on the back burner.

At the June meeting in the Eisenhower building, attendees listened to a stream of speakers from the Trump administration, including Martin Marks, the White House Jewish liaison; Adam Boehler, who serves as the U.S. special envoy for hostage response; and Leo Terrell, the former talk-radio host now chairing the Justice Department’s antisemitism task force. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles made an appearance, as did staff secretary Will Scharf, who told the group about upcoming steps the administration planned to take in the name of fighting antisemitism: additional “pressure on the universities, more prosecutions by DoJ, things like that,” a source with direct knowledge of the matter told me.

Then Scharf added that Trump would soon be instituting a new version of the infamous “Muslim ban” from his first administration, blocking travel from a dozen countries, most of them majority Muslim. It was implied that this was in response to the recent antisemitic attacks. The ADL had been a committed opponent of the original Muslim ban in 2017, fighting the order in court and lobbying Congress to overturn it. When the Supreme Court upheld the prohibition, Greenblatt had called it a “dark and shameful stain on America’s history,” describing it as “plainly discriminatory, inhumane, and un-American.”

In June, however, behind closed doors, neither the ADL’s rep nor anyone else in the room said a word in objection. In the days ahead, the organization was quiet on the subject, even as other Jewish groups came out against the renewed order. There were no tweets, no mention of the policy during Greenblatt’s media appearances, only a statement posted to the organization’s website that expressed appreciation that the Trump administration had “prioritized the battle against antisemitism” and noted “we do not believe the recent presidential action on immigration directly will reduce the surge of anti-Jewish hate.”

In some ways, it was a perfect encapsulation of the ADL’s new tack. The group was founded on the idea that Jewish rights and safety were inextricably linked to the rights of others. Once the ADL’s primary focus became stopping anti-Zionism, its calculus changed. Its new version of Jewish defense was zero sum and dependent on a conception of a singular Jewish viewpoint. “New plan,” Greenblatt said in his address to national leadership last year, repeating a phrase that had recently been taken up by other Jewish organizations: “Put on your own oxygen mask first.”

Forming relationships with those in positions of power has been part of the ADL’s strategy for decades — the group sees it as a way of keeping Jews safe. “Jewish people have lived under regimes where there was one party that liked Jews and one party that didn’t,” a former ADL staffer said. “If there’s another Holocaust, you need to be able to get a phone call in.”

For more than a half-century, the ADL’s influence has been vast, directly affecting government policy, law-enforcement practices, and conceptions of extremism nationwide. Despite internal dissent and public criticism, Greenblatt’s ADL, with roughly 450 full-time staffers and tens of thousands of individual donors, is by some measures as strong as the organization has ever been. Last year, its revenue reached a record $163 million. It spent $1.4 million lobbying in Washington, D.C., in part to promote bills that would codify anti-Zionism as antisemitism and make it easier for students to file civil-rights complaints against their colleges. In New York State, it helped to pass the Stop Hiding Hate Act, which forced social-media companies to make their moderation practices public. Its education program, which focuses on antisemitism, reached 5 million K–12 students in 2024, and more than 70,000 people participated in its advocacy campaigns against antisemitism and in support of Israel. The group’s counter-extremism research is considered the gold standard in the field, even by the ADL’s critics. The impact of its “campus antisemitism report cards” is undeniable: Last May, congressional Republicans used them to grill university presidents.

According to the ADL, last year its staff trained 17,000 law-enforcement professionals — both cops and FBI agents — on what is and isn’t a hate crime, and the group says it provided more than 2,700 tips related to extremist actors. (It’s cagey about this process but cited two recent examples of people flagged: one, a social-media user from Colorado, who threatened to bomb a synagogue and another, in Canada, whose online antisemitic tirades led to hate-crimes charges.)

The ADL’s networks, authority, and expertise allow it to respond to violence and tragedy in a way few other organizations can. Within hours of the murders at the Jewish Capital Museum, the D.C. Metropolitan Police reached out to the ADL for help investigating the alleged killer and any potentially involved support networks. In the days that followed, ADL representatives, at the behest of the FBI, arranged for about a hundred community leaders to meet with federal and local law enforcement, which tried to assure them their synagogues and day schools would be protected. Members of the group’s government-affairs unit worked to restore funding to protect Jewish community centers and houses of worship (it had been frozen under Trump in March), and in late June, the Federal Emergency Management Agency allocated $94 million for 512 Jewish organizations.

Historically, the ADL has tried to use its power for both elements of its dual mission, twisting and turning between righteous action on behalf of broad civil rights and the narrower pursuit of what it understands to be the interests of Jewish people. In the 1920s, it fought the KKK through the introduction of anti-masking laws in state legislatures; in the 1950s and ’60s, the group wrote briefs against school segregation and marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in D.C. and in Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In the aughts, it pushed to outlaw anti-gay hate crimes, and in the 2010s, it battled in the courts for the legalization of same-sex marriage.

It was the same organization, however, that was sued for allegedly selling information on American anti-apartheid activists to the ruling South African regime in the 1980s and that in recent years surveilled left-wing activists who opposed an ADL-backed program to train American cops in Israel. (In a comment, a spokesperson for the ADL said the organization “is not engaged in surveillance of anyone.”) At the height of 2020’s racial-justice protests, the ADL’s support of such programs led a group of more than 100 progressive organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to launch a campaign to #DropTheADL from left-wing coalitions.

Greenblatt still maintains close ties to several civil-rights leaders, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League. But the ADL’s recent decision to step back from work on behalf of other minority groups was, according to senior sources in the organization and Greenblatt’s own public statements, intentional and explicit. Some insiders insist the sheer volume and ferocity of attacks on Jews forced the decision — that the old approach became a luxury. To others, the shift has resulted in a betrayal of the group’s core values.

One former staffer I spoke with in the spring had spent years in the education department of the organization, teaching anti-bias and diversity seminars and helping schools respond to hateful incidents. But after October 7, they were told they had a new mission: to, as they recalled it, “reach out to districts, reach out to school principals, and try to convince them to curb or not allow the student protests” over the Gaza war. They were supposed to be subtle: “It wasn’t ‘Don’t protest.’ It was ‘This particular protest is going to be antisemitic.’” In December 2023, the ADL stopped offering schools its signature broad-based anti-bias program. “Previously, we would respond to anti-LGBTQ incidents or racism,” the staffer said. No more. “That was the most difficult — when I had schools coming to me saying, ‘Hey, we need the support.’ And I had to say, ‘I can’t help you.’”
Photo: Alvin A H Jornada/EPA-EFE/Shutte

When Jonathan Greenblatt talks about his family in public, he talks about his grandfather the Holocaust survivor and often dwells on his in-laws, who escaped the Islamic Republic of Iran as refugees in the late 1980s. After the 1979 revolution, the family stayed, but the regime turned brutally antisemitic, surveilling its Jewish population and teaching schoolchildren that “the Zionist state” needed to be destroyed. Eventually, Greenblatt’s father-in-law managed to transport his family, one by one, to the U.S. “Their story stands as a sober symbol of the vulnerability of Jews and other minorities,” Greenblatt writes in his 2022 book, It Could Happen Here. “It’s also a reminder that cataclysms don’t happen all at once. They unfold gradually, almost imperceptibly. When the outlines of the horror become clear, it might be too late to escape. Genocides start like this.”

Greenblatt grew up in a conservative Jewish family in Connecticut’s Fairfield County. Though he has long believed, since at least his college days, that anti-Zionism is deeply intertwined with antisemitism, as a young man, he was firm in the conviction that opposing views should be heard. At Tufts University, where he hosted a show for the college radio station and liked to grab $8 tickets to games at Fenway (he once called the Green Monster, the ball park’s left-field wall, his kotel, or “holy site”), he took a distinct stance in favor of free speech. As the editor of the opinion page of the school paper, he oversaw articles by anti-Zionists and several editorials standing up for the rights of outspoken antisemites.

In 1993, Greenblatt joined the Clinton administration as an aide in the Commerce Department. He met his wife, Marjan Keypour, seven years later on a blind date when they were both living in Los Angeles. She was an associate director at the local ADL branch. In 2002, Greenblatt started a “socially responsible” bottled-water company with a B-school buddy (a portion of proceeds went to charity) and, within a few years, sold it to Starbucks. He became a VP at the coffee company, managing consumer products.

He and Marjan had three children and built a home that was kosher, shomer Shabbos, and “very Zionist,” as he told an Orthodox Jewish podcaster last year. By 2011, Greenblatt was in the Obama White House as the head of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, which encouraged corporate philanthropy. In 2014, a headhunter tapped him for the position of ADL national director. In Greenblatt’s telling, it was a surprise; he’d interned with the ADL in college, but that was his only work experience in the Jewish world. Marjan was “the Jewish nonprofit professional, and I was a make-money person,” Greenblatt told the podcaster. “So this is definitely a bit of a role reversal.”

Abe Foxman, Greenblatt’s predecessor, had devoted 50 years to the ADL. Foxman was consistent and pugilistic in his defense of American Jews, American rights, and the Israeli state — against threats big and small, slights major and minor. In his tenure, the ADL cemented its place as one of the country’s most important mainstream Jewish advocacy organizations, alongside groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. At the time, such organizations broadly agreed on domestic issues but often split on Israel. To the ADL’s right were groups such as the Zionist Organization of America; left-leaning outfits like J Street emerged late in Foxman’s tenure. In this period, the ADL furthered its reputation for supporting the civil rights of other minorities, but Arab and Muslim groups were not always included. In 2006, Foxman called interfaith dialogue with Muslim groups a “pipe dream” because, he claimed, not a single one rejected terrorism.

Greenblatt shared Foxman’s hard-charging temperament, but insiders say he moved much more quickly. While Foxman’s approach was described by multiple current and former employees as something like “Ready, aim, fire,” Greenblatt’s was said to be “Ready, fire, aim.” He was impulsive, unconcerned with the status quo, and competitive with other Jewish groups. He was also tech savvy and financially innovative. In the 2010s, under his leadership, the ADL used every tool it had to go after the extremist right and its more respectable supporters in Republican politics and Silicon Valley. Just two months into Trump’s first term, Greenblatt launched a center to combat online hate, putting the ADL ahead of the curve among similar groups. Earlier this year, in a highly unusual move for a nonprofit, the organization pledged its support for a $100 million investment fund on the New York Stock Exchange, one it says is intended to help investors use their money “Jewishly” and fight “anti-Israel” sentiment in the boardroom.

Greenblatt’s disregard for the status quo could also, at times, put him at odds with his staff. After the 2019 mass shooting that targeted Walmart shoppers in El Paso, Texas, for example, he pushed members of Congress for a new law mandating that domestic terror networks be treated like their foreign counterparts. The ADL’s civil-rights team warned that this was a terrible idea, that such measures could easily be weaponized against any administration’s chosen enemies. But Greenblatt kept pushing, asking an outside firm to draft language for a bill when ADL employees dragged their feet. The idea was ultimately shelved, but neither he nor the civil-rights team forgot the incident; it was one of several in which Greenblatt bristled at his own staff’s noncompliance.

One former ADL staffer recalled Greenblatt describing the civil-rights team, after a different dispute: “‘You know, these people are malcontents. These people can’t get with the program.’” In 2020, the organization’s top civil-rights lawyer left, soon followed by many of his leading deputies. The few who remained were renamed members of the “Democracy” team, which itself was eventually dissolved. With Greenblatt’s blessing, one of the nation’s oldest civil-rights groups was left without a dedicated civil-rights division.

In recent years, Greenblatt’s reactive approach has become more visible to the public. A few days before October 7, he backed down from a confrontation with Elon Musk, resuming advertising on X after months of criticizing the billionaire and the platform. Employees were baffled. One frustrated former staffer told me, “I asked if anyone can give me an explanation of what the cost-benefit is.” Even some of the most senior executives struggled to understand Greenblatt’s decision.

Since at least 2016, Greenblatt had expressly made the case that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. By 2020, the idea had become integral in his public pronouncements. “The casual demonization of the Jewish state leads to the demonization of all Jewish people,” he told a rally in Brooklyn. The ADL officially maintained more nuance for a time, acknowledging that “some Palestinians may call themselves anti-Zionists because of how they perceive Zionism has impacted them personally.” The group continued to criticize Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as it had for years; it condemned his political allies for promoting “unabashed and virulent anti-Arab racism, violence, and political extremism.” But for the country’s leading self-proclaimed antisemitism watchdog, anti-Zionism was quickly becoming what mattered most.

In May 2021, Hamas and its allies fired thousands of rockets into Israel, killing 13 people. Israel responded with a massive counterattack, launching a series of strikes on Gaza from land, sea, and air. An estimated 72,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. By the ADL’s own estimate, “at least 248 Palestinians” were killed, “including many children.” Protests erupted around the world at what appeared to be the collective punishment of civilians for militants’ actions. Calls to boycott or divest from Israel grew. ADL data showed anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S. was beginning to edge more into violence: 88 assaults compared to 33 the year before. That September, a group of men jumped out of their cars in front of a sushi restaurant in a heavily Jewish section of Los Angeles, threw bottles, screamed “Dirty Jew” and “Israel kills children,” and started a fistfight. People who know Greenblatt well say that the mounting incidents weighed on him. “I genuinely think he’s been traumatized over the last few years,” one former colleague said. “If you’re the CEO of the ADL during a historic rise in antisemitism, that could probably feel like you’ve let people down.”

One senior ADL source told me, “We went to our Center on Extremism, and I said to them, ‘You need to bulk up. You don’t have enough people looking at antisemitism coming from far-left and Islamist groups.’” Greenblatt did not need convincing. And in May 2022, he made a speech to ADL national leaders that would alter the organization’s trajectory long into the future. He called out groups that supported Palestinian rights — the Council on American Islamic Relations, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace — as “the radical left,” which he said was “the photo inverse of the extreme right that ADL long has tracked.”

For years Greenblatt had warned about rising antisemitism on the left, but declaring these organizations equal to the Klan and neo-Nazis was new. Greenblatt acknowledged that “unlike their right-wing analogs, these organizations might not have armed themselves,” but he insisted they “unapologetically, regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews.” (It is worth repeating that one of these groups is called Jewish Voice for Peace.)

Some ADL staffers were shocked. The rhetorical turn was so jarring that they wondered — and continue to wonder — whether conservative donors had pushed Greenblatt into it. According to one former staffer, “Jonathan was taking a lot of shit from ‘right-leaning donors’ at the time for not being aggressive enough against ‘campus antisemitism.’”

Current and former ADL employees repeatedly mentioned one name in connection with this idea: Marc Rowan, the Republican megadonor and CEO of Apollo Global Management. (Rowan, through a representative, declined to comment for this story.) “I cannot come up with an explanation for why, after years of campus issues, Jonathan changed his position,” said a third former staffer, who noted that the “Marc Rowans of the world” use “kind of similar language and framing” to what Greenblatt landed on at that time. Some staffers believed the decision was at least partially motivated by Greenblatt’s need to win. “He used to talk to us all the time about the competitive landscape,” a second former staffer said, referring to other mainstream Jewish organizations that would be vying for the same funding. “He didn’t want to leave money on the table.”

Shortly after Greenblatt’s speech, a researcher at the ADL’s Center on Extremism wrote in an organizationwide Slack channel that his comments had smacked of “both-sides-ism” and that his assessment was “incompatible with the data I have seen.” Greenblatt had a clear response in an all-hands Zoom a week later: To those who did not agree “that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” he said, “maybe this isn’t the place for you.” Employees at all levels began preparing their résumés.

The dispute was more than philosophical, as some staffers had tried to communicate to Greenblatt before his speech. His analysis could affect activists’ lives. “We have incredibly close and influential contacts with law enforcement,” a former staffer noted. “If we say groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace and CAIR are exactly the same as these neo-Nazi groups, like Atomwaffen, they’re going to go after them. They’re going to surveil them.”
Photo: Fox News

On the night of Saturday, October 7, 2023, on an ADL Zoom, Greenblatt was inconsolable. One participant recalled him pounding his fist. Later, he told the staff that his younger son’s camp counselor had been at the Supernova festival where approximately one-third of the killings of that day took place, and Hamas — these “barbarians” — had taken him. “What Hamas did was not just kill these 1,200-plus people and not just steal these 250 people,” he later told an interviewer with the Jewish Broadcasting Service. “I think they killed something in all of us. They stole something from all of us.”

Many staffers felt the same way. “You work at ADL, everyone you know lost someone,” said one former employee. Some pro-Palestinian groups’ initial reactions to the attacks hardened their sense of abandonment. Students for Justice in Palestine called October 7 “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” As protests emerged nationwide — against Israel and against its 56-year squeeze on Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestinian people — activists argued they wanted to head off another horrific cycle of retribution. To some in the ADL, it seemed like victim-blaming, even spitting on the dead.

Many top staffers felt that few of their traditional liberal allies were interested in helping — many couldn’t even be bothered to call and offer support as violent antisemitic incidents ticked up. That November, University of Massachusetts student Efe Ercelik, to take one example among many, was charged with assault for allegedly punching and kicking in the stomach a Jewish student who was attending a rally in support of the hostages taken by Hamas. “You think you’re so tough waving a flag, Zionist shitbag?” Ercelik allegedly yelled.

Feeling under siege, ADL staff grasped for ideas — any idea — that could help contain what it saw as spiraling hate. One of the former staffers told me, “I remember one of my colleagues saying to me, ‘Hey, really, seriously, go take a ten-minute walk and then call me back. Because everything you just proposed goes against the Constitution.’”

The one step the organization took pains to avoid, at least publicly, was examining how the Israeli government’s actions might be fueling a global movement against it. Not in the war’s opening days, when Netanyahu drove more than a million civilians out of northern Gaza. Not the next year, when videos appeared to show Israeli soldiers throwing corpses off a roof, or when Israeli drones attacked a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers, killing seven. Not when people such as Mahmoud Nafez al-’Aidy of Rafah awoke in hospitals and soon learned that their entire families had been wiped out. “I’m alone in the world now,” al-’Aidy told the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem. “Everything I cared about is gone.”

By this summer, the ADL would begin to pose measured and implied criticisms, such as in a post on X that stated it would welcome an investigation into an attack, by Israeli Defense Forces, on a church in Gaza, which killed three people. (The IDF blamed the incident on “an unintentional deviation of munitions.”) But these were exceptions. Many ADL insiders believed the time for questioning Israel’s military efforts had ended on October 7. As one ADL executive put it when we spoke this spring, “We’re not getting into the weeds of how Israel prosecutes this war.” Many other employees disagreed — one even wore a keffiyeh onstage at a major ADL event to show it — but Greenblatt and his top deputies held firm.

On October 25, 2023, Greenblatt and Ken Marcus, the former head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, sent an open letter to university presidents with “an urgent request for immediate investigations into local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine” for “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.” This was, in essence, a call to treat these activists like members of the organization that had just kidnapped grandmothers and murdered elementary-school children. Greenblatt and Marcus cited no evidence in their letter that SJP had physically threatened the safety of Jewish students. Instead, the missive, in the words of one former ADL staffer, seemed to be an attempt to “hyperrestrict” the free-speech rights of the ADL’s ideological adversaries. It felt “particularly, frankly, evil to me,” the staffer said. SJP was subsequently banned on several campuses, as was Jewish Voice for Peace.

As the ADL continued its campaign, filing federal complaints against Yale, UMass Amherst, and other schools for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from violence and threats, Greenblatt frequently cited ADL data. There had been more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents in the three months after October 7, he said, a 360 percent jump over the same period a year before. But in January 2024, the organization’s researchers conceded to the Forward that the increase was in part derived from a change in methodology. “Anti-Zionist chants and slogans” now accounted for more than 40 percent of the total incidents.

In June, I spoke with the ADL’s top researcher, Oren Segal, who has defended the shift many times. “I just want to be clear,” he tells me. “You want to say ‘Free Palestine,’ great. We’re not going to include that in the audit. You want to spray-paint that on a Jewish institution, you bet your ass we’re including it.”

When Jonathan Greenblatt congratulated Donald Trump on his election win on November 6 in a post on X, he noted the ADL remained “steadfastly committed” to fighting antisemitism and “all forms of hate and extremism.” As of November 9, however, according to Internet Archive logs, prominent sections of the ADL’s website devoted to voting rights, racial justice, and other civil-rights issues — ones available online as recently as late September — had been removed. The education division’s lesson plans on transgender identity and issues were gone, too, as were webpages on the importance of DEI programs. Books on LGBTQ+ themes had been excised from the ADL’s online bibliography of recommended children’s and young-adult literature.

In March, when the Trump administration detained Columbia University graduate and legal resident Mahmoud Khalil, the ADL hailed its “resolve” to dole out “swift and severe consequences for those who provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations.” (Khalil was never charged with a crime but nevertheless spent 104 days behind bars before a judge ordered his release. He has since filed a $20 million claim against the Trump administration for false imprisonment.)

The blowback was nuclear, especially from the left. “BRB, checking the history books to find out whether ‘tyrant starts redefining peoples’ citizenship status’ usually ends well for the Jews,” posted Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group. In a Washington Post editorial, journalist Matt Bai, who has known Greenblatt for decades, wondered how “a civil rights organization for a minority that has been brutally evicted all over the world” could “not loudly oppose the cruel and unlawful removal of foreigners.”

Eventually, and in response to what he called “the Mahmoud Khalil situation,” Greenblatt sent a letter to the ADL’s regional leaders. He acknowledged that “many are frustrated” but seemed to define the dispute as a problem of messaging and promised to “do better” without addressing the substance of what had been said. (The ADL sometimes gets in trouble when it tries to “manage the news cycle,” he wrote. “We need to slow down.”) In April, after several more instances of ICE abducting foreign-born students off the street, Greenblatt finally wrote an op-ed about the need to protect civil liberties in eJewish Philanthropy, an outlet far more obscure than his usual platforms.

To the Trump administration and many of its right-wing allies, this was more evidence that the ADL wasn’t hard-core enough in its antisemitism agenda. The right had long believed the organization was overly concerned with being “woke.” And even as the ADL shifted focus, it had continued to call out Trump officials for trafficking in antisemitic conspiracy theories and to oppose the far right in some cases. In February, the group sued the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe for intimidating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a leading advocate for the Trumpist crackdown on higher education in the name of fighting antisemitism, put it this way: “Most of the criticism within the Jewish community against the ADL was that they’re way too far left, that they focused way more on transgender issues and Black Lives Matter over the last couple of years.” In January 2024, Kestenbaum sued Harvard University, where he went to divinity school, for allegedly ignoring hate on campus, but did not involve the ADL despite the group’s long winning record.

“The ADL, they’re very quick to condemn conservatives for some stupid shit,” one senior administration official told me. But when it comes to liberal institutions, they said, the organization is “wishy-washy, namby-pamby.” Meanwhile, Christian Zionist groups that have been loyal to the administration have been able to directly influence its policies. Orthodox Jewish organizations, which have been similarly faithful in their support of Trump, have been overrepresented in administration strategy sessions fighting antisemitism. The militant Zionists of Betar U.S. are calling for pro-Palestinian activists to be kicked out of the country — and the Trump administration is apparently listening. In April, one day after Betar claims it “submitted his name for deportation,” as the organization posted on X, the government revoked the visa of Efe Ercelik, the Turkish national who punched and kicked the Jewish student at the University of Massachusetts. According to court documents unsealed in early July, intelligence analysts at the Department of Homeland Security assembled dossiers on more than 75 pro-Palestinian students and scholars based on identifications made by Canary Mission, the ultraright pro-Israel website.

In January, the ADL hired a Republican-leaning lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, to make inroads with the MAGA movement and set up meetings with Trump officials. But until the Boulder and Capital Jewish Museum attacks, that effort was relatively slow going. The organization’s reputation in Trumpist circles as thoroughly left wing — “an ACLU for Jews,” as one source put it — was difficult to shake.

To many outside the Trumpist orbit, however, the group appeared increasingly right wing. On July 6, representatives of the nation’s largest teachers’ union voted to cut ties with the ADL, stating that it is “not the social-justice educational partner it claims to be.” Greenblatt’s team blamed the move on a “pro-Hamas” faction in the union. (The executive committee of the union later rejected the proposal.)

And yet, the organization will soon have a greater say on college campuses: Columbia University, as part of its attempts to appease the Trump administration, has agreed to partner with the group on a new antisemitism training program. The ADL’s work supplying tips to the FBI continues. And the organization is now leveraging its financial might in support of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza: In April, the organization and its new investment fund urged weapons-makers such as Lockheed Martin to reject shareholder proposals that called for examining “apparent war crimes” in the territory. (Such proposals were “designed to pressure the companies into severing ties with Israel,” Greenblatt said in a press release. His group wouldn’t stand for that kind of “insidious antisemitic and anti-Israel activity.”)

At the same time, the ADL worldview and approach is falling out of step with a significant portion of American Jews. Some victims of recent antisemitic incidents tell me they haven’t wanted to turn to the national ADL for support, including Jordan Acker, a member of University of Michigan’s Board of Regents, whose office and home were both vandalized last year. In December, he was awakened at two o’clock in the morning by the sound of broken glass. Someone had thrown jars of urine through his front window and spray-painted FREE PALESTINE on his car. Acker says members of his local ADL chapter comforted his family and coordinated with law enforcement to help them feel safe. But he didn’t want any help from Greenblatt or the national team; he was too concerned the ADL would politicize his family’s pain. The organization was “just so focused” on “calling balls and strikes on what is antisemitism,” he said. “It’s less interested — in fact, maybe even not interested — in protecting the values that made America great for Jews.”

As the ADL digs in alongside the Trump administration, 72 percent of American Jews in a recent poll say they believe the president is “dangerous.” Sixty-one percent say the deportation of pro-Palestinian activists would boost anti-Jewish hate, not curb it. In June’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York, the country’s most Jewish city, Zohran Mamdani won by more than 130,000 votes despite a multimillion-dollar media campaign to brand his pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic.

In mid-July, I spoke with Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who has recently taken on a kind of interpreter role between progressive politicians and Jewish leaders. Without mentioning the ADL by name, she cautioned Jewish groups against aligning themselves with the Trump administration. The Jewish community, she told me, “does not want our legitimate fears to be exploited to advance an extremist antidemocratic agenda.”

“When we allow the rights of one community to be targeted based on their identity or their beliefs, it opens the door for any community to be targeted,” Spitalnick went on. “The idea that any of these efforts to deport people, to undermine people’s fundamental rights, are going to start and stop with some Palestinian activist is naïve at best.” In other words, it wasn’t only wrong to allow the rights of others to be stripped away — the Torah demands Jews treat the stranger as family — it was also dangerous.

The idea is of course familiar. It’s a caution repeated, for centuries, by Jewish thinkers and a concept Greenblatt seems to have embraced in the early days of his tenure, back when Trump was first in power. “When we fight for others,” he told ADL leaders, “we are fighting for ourselves. When we fight for their civil rights, we actually are fighting for our own.”

Now, as the world seems to be waking up to the reality of a forced famine in Gaza — where, according to an international coalition of relief agencies, more than half a million people are at risk of starving to death — the ADL’s choice to defend Zionism above all else has frequently put the organization in an Orwellian bind. Trump says he’s been shocked by the images of “real starvation,” and two of Israel’s best-known human-rights groups are, for the first time, calling the war in Gaza a “genocide.” But representatives of the ADL continue to deflect and deny.

“The suffering of children, in particular, should break all of our hearts and spur action toward a just resolution,” one executive posted, in the last week of July. “But it’s equally vital that the international community does not fall prey to Hamas’s propaganda efforts … There is no famine and no starvation.”

Correction: This story has been updated to clarify the context of Greenblatt’s support of a proposed domestic terror law.

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