By Emmaia Gelman
This is a difficult book to review in a comprehensive manner, most likely due to the complex nature and history of its subject matter. This book is exhaustively researched and provides the reader with an analysis of the ADL, which over time has transformed from an ambivalent special interest group to a national power broker. Its success has mirrored the United States’ development as a successful settler nation, world leader and neocolonial power, while gaining support for the proposition that criticism of Israel’s own colonial/settler ambitions should be construed as anti-Semitic as well as Anti-American. However, as the organization became more closely aligned with anti-communist policies and programs (including actively undermining and spying on left-leaning, mostly Jewish and Black, progressive groups and individuals) and support for neo-conservative adventurism, it also maintained its public identification as a civil rights group and as the national expert on, and opponent of, racism and White hate groups.
Gelman goes through the entire history of the organization, dating back to its founding in 1913. Interestingly, part of the motivation for its founding was to ensure that public perception of Jews in America was not defined through the influx of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th Century. In contrast to the middle and upper class Jews who formed ADL, more recent immigrants were poor, concentrated in ghettos, with many politically identified with socialism. In the introductory paragraph I mentioned that the group was an “ambivalent” special interest group. I use that term because, as I now understand some part of that history, the founders of ADL did not want to be defined as a distinct interest group, but intended to make sure that Jews, as did other European immigrant groups, became members of this country’s White franchise. As such, they no more wanted to be seen as different from any other White group than, say, how people would view members of different White Protestant sects. In fact, the author shows how by the end of the Second World War and continuing through the 1960s, not only had American Jews succeeded in being seen as White, but this development created a new problem for the ADL – apathy regarding the need to advocate for specific Jewish causes and in the defense of Zionism. This required a change in strategy and the need to indoctrinate Jews and the public at large to the belief that anti-Semitism was pervasive and always lurking beneath the surface and prepared at any moment to strike. According to the author, this prompted the ADL to exaggerate claims, writing that many of those claims of anti-Semitic acts of violence were made and accepted by the media without evidence or put forward while contorting facts, or labeling every act of vandalism or even mischief as an anti-Semitic attack on Jews.
The ADL has also been mostly successful in portraying Zionism as liberal democracy, while denigrating assertion of Palestinian and Arab civil rights as terrorism. In making this case, those same groups were portrayed as not worthy of being members of Western liberalism or even being considered in any civil rights discussion. The roots for this position are explained as based upon “German Jews’ communal identity” derived from the Jewish settlers who traveled West from the 1820s through the 1880s. Settler colonialism was viewed as a liberal, civilizing enterprise, one that would eventually extend to support for an Israeli state and its subjugation of Palestinians.
There is much that I found amazing in this book. Besides the ease with which ADL continually adjusted its approach based upon changing circumstances and opportunities, over the years the organization successfully straddled the competing intersections of anti-racism, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, anti-left politics, anti-Black liberation, anti-Blackness (characterized as by one historian as Jewish leaders in America seeking “a pluralism of expanding whiteness”), McCarthyism (supporting it until most of its damage was done), neocolonialism, and Zionism. At its core, ADL supported civil rights work that was “responsible,” meaning it “remained colorblind and did not disrupt state order.” Beyond that, any civil rights advocacy or action was deemed “extremist” and condemned. This positioning at times, along with ADL’s perceived public persona is a bit disorienting. I listened to part of a podcast regarding this book where one of the panelists described a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland experience, where “up is down and down is up.” In many ways, this was my experience as well.
There were many bumps along the way, but the ADL always seemed to adjust and attract support and allegiance. Even given their anti-LGBTQ attitudes, activists in that field continued to court ADL’s support. Along with the adjustments, there were also many consistencies, including a consistent position that Black liberation and left-leaning attacks on capitalism and imperialism were anti-American. Eventually, the ADL and similar groups aligned with White Christian Nationalist groups, essentially selling their soul for support of Israel and its expansionist practices. Quoting ADLs’ leader in the 1980s, Nathan Perlmutter, “Jews can live with restricted abortions…Jews can live without ERA…Prayers in public schools…would not…mean the death of the Bill of Rights or seriously impact Jewish life…Banned pornography is not…a setback for the Jews as would be the alienation of allies who oppose…a PLO dominated state on Israel’s borders.”
The book ends with a description of the ADL connecting Israeli Zionist actions directly to United States foreign policy, while successfully getting legislative action to transform hate crime categories into the realm of domestic terrorism, thereby transforming an individual or group crime into a domestic security threat, implicitly seen as a threat against American values and life connected to Israeli values and life.
So as not to be misconstrued, however, it is important to note that the author is careful to provide evidence that the ADL history is not attributable to all, even perhaps the majority of all those, who identify as Jews. Throughout the account, Gelman documents how so many of those with Jewish backgrounds became leaders in 20th and 21st Century civil rights struggles and other progressive causes, notwithstanding active opposition from the ADL. This was the case even as they and other advocacy and lobbying groups, consistently branded even progressive Jews as “anti-Semites.” All in all, this is a worthwhile read and a book that comes out at a time when, in spite of the more than a century of work by the ADL, the word genocide is increasingly being used to define Israel’s settler actions in Gaza and the West Bank. It would seem that history will define one success, above all, as the work of the ADL. The future of Israel and the United States appear inextricably intertwined, with both at a critical crossroad demanding each to choose between stated ideals or blatant hypocrisy.