One of the challenges of having so many new readers on this list—lots of you have joined since June!—is that a number of you won't be familiar with the ideas, perspective, and arguments to which longtime readers of Tablet have been introduced.
Among these has been a discomfort—which started as skepticism but morphed into something more troubling—with the direction over the past decade and a half of the ADL, once a premier communal organization and a moral authority with clear claims to represent American Jews.
Some basic reasons for this feeling, as reported in our pages over the years:
Because its guide to the worst anti-Semites in America somehow managed to point the finger exclusively at a bunch of minor nobodies on the right while failing to include, say, Louis Farrakhan, or any Ivy League professor openly calling for the destruction of the world's sole Jewish state.
Because, up until very, very recently—and only after a massive backlash—it defined "Christian identity" as an extremist ideology, and labeled Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA as "bigoted."
Because, in 2018, it flubbed its own statistics on anti-Semitic attacks—the organization's bread and butter—to give the false impression that hordes of MAGA-hat-clad racists are goose-stepping up the block en route to your local shul.
Because in 2020 its CEO, former Obama aide Jonathan Greenblatt, teamed up with America's most prominent pogromist, Al Sharpton—who, for those keeping tabs at home, still hasn't apologized for inciting a violent race riot in 1991 that led to the murder of a Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum—to pressure Facebook into censoring pro-Trump ads.
Because the group keeps on changing its own definition of racism to mollycoddle whatever dumb progressive celebrity happens to make some vile anti-Semitic statement that needs to be excused away.
The list goes on.
Since October 7, 2023, Greenblatt has been making the rounds of every TV studio that'll have him, arguing that he speaks for the Jews. But even if you're willing to forgive him and his group the many sins which they've never acknowledged, let alone apologized for, you're still obliged to ask an even more rudimentary question: Is the ADL doing any good?
Writing in Tablet today, Joel Finkelstein, the co-founder and chief science officer of the Network Contagion Research Institute and the director of the Network Contagion Lab at the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University, describes the results of a long-term survey that examined the efficacy of the ADL's "No Place for Hate®" curriculum, one of the organization's crown jewels. He writes:
In two national studies, participants exposed to the ADL's anti-oppression messaging grew more defensive and in fact expressed more antisemitism than they had prior to being "educated." Those results mark more than the failure of one organization. They signal the exhaustion of an era. The frameworks that claimed to cure bias are now being proven by data to deepen it. If we want to rebuild moral coherence, we need a new paradigm rooted not in grievance but in shared human values, the same ideals that helped shape the American experiment and long sustained Jewish moral life in this country… The same science that exposes the damage done to American Jews and the wider society by the ADL's bias education programs also points toward a remedy; a moral vocabulary rooted in the universal ideals that once anchored both Jewish and American life.
1 comment:
"Propaganda"(lies)is only needed when the majority of the people see the truth.
--GRA
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