Is It Illegal To Call a Conservative Antisemitic?

The title of this post feels like an exasperated cry of a liberal media critic.  One can imagine looking at the contortions journalists go through to avoid calling, say, Thomas Massie antisemitic even after he distinguished "Zionism" from "US Patriotism" and introduced a "Dual Loyalty Disclosure Bill" and shouting "Goodness, is it illegal to call a conservative antisemitic or what?"

But alas, this isn't a purely rhetorical question. Eugene Volokh reported the other day that the ADL has apparently settled a defamation case filed by a conservative activist who claimed that the ADL defamed him by calling him an "extremist" and saying he peddles "antisemitic beliefs" (details of the settlement don't appear public, but apparently the ADL has removed references to this activist from its website).

The ADL's statements are quintessential examples of protected opinion, but the presiding judge, far-right extremist (can I say that?) Reed O'Connor, twisted the law into knots to let the claim survive a motion to dismiss. Presumably reading the writing on the wall (including the fact that any appeals would go up to the equally lawless Fifth Circuit), the ADL elected to settle.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the ADL's right-ward pivot over the past few years -- Noah Shachtman had a fantastic deep dive in New York Magazine, and I too have offered some of my thoughts. But one aspect that can be overlooked is the incredible pressure the ADL came under in recent years to stop calling out conservative antisemitism -- paradoxically, precisely because ideas once contained to the far-right were increasingly being embraced by "mainstream" conservatives, which (in the eternal-victim mindset of the right) proved that the ADL was "biased".

For a long time, this pressure mostly came in the guise of working the refs -- just repeating, over and over and over again, that the ADL was left-wing and biased and in thrall to the Democratic Party and ever so unfair to the conservative movement. One would never know from these critics that the ADL was facing mounting criticism from liberals (not the left, which always has loathed the ADL, but mainstream progressives who've long made up the ADL's base) for being too solicitous towards conservatives. Still, their efforts yielded results. Fox News parrots right-wing talking points about the ADL promoting "Critical Race Theory"; the ADL quickly promises a "thorough review" to placate them. Elon Musk demands the ADL denounce the anti-apartheid chant "Kill the Boer" (as part of his promotion of the "White genocide" conspiracy); the ADL immediately obliges.

But now, the conservative efforts are pushing past propaganda and into concrete legal action to harass anyone who tries to police conservative antisemitism. The abuse of defamation law (surely, the irony is intentional) is one manifestation. The Twitter/X lawsuit against Media Matters for (accurately) reporting that hateful content was appearing on the platform next to advertiser content -- also a Reed O'Connor special -- is another. And at least adjacent to the point is the threat by the Attorney General of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, to investigate AI chatbots for daring to give Donald Trump low marks on antisemitism -- literally arguing it is a form of fraud and misrepresentation to not give Trump his flowers on the subject. Bailey insists that giving Trump a superior grade on antisemitism is a matter of "objective historical facts," even as less than a third of American Jews approve of Trump's handling of antisemitism and more than half think is personally antisemitic.

So the pressure is very, very real -- which is not at all to justify bending to it, but we need to pay heed to what is actually going on. The right is committed to abusing its legal power to decimate any organization -- absolutely including any Jewish organization -- which dares try to call out conservative antisemitism. This can and should be called what it is: a declaration of war on the Jewish community, and an existential threat to our security and well-being.

Finally, one cannot miss the parallel here between the ADL and the American university -- another institution whose reputation for liberalism was not entirely unearned but certainly greatly exaggerated.  There, as here, venerable American institutions were slammed over and over again with complaints about "bias". There, as here, that decades long rhetorical war has now crested into the most flagrant abuses of authoritarian power we've seen in my lifetime. And there, as here, the attempt to appease the fundamentally authoritarian with humiliating acts of supplication will not work -- they will never trust you, they will always demand more, and you will never be a better fascist than the true believers.

Does the ADL Care That Republicans Admire Hitler?

Shortly before the election, I posted about the alarming fact that (a) Trump seems to admire Hitler and (b) Republicans don't seem to care that Trump admires Hitler. In the course of that post, I asked rhetorically what the ADL's response to this news was going to be, observing that the actual answer appeared to be covering their eyes with a "lalala" see-no-evil approach. This was of a kind with the new direction Jonathan Greenblatt had taken the organization, which was steadfast and resolute in never, ever, giving offense or more than the most mealy-mouthed critique to the American right no matter how open their antisemitism became.

Fast forward a few months and some increasingly pathetic acts of ADL supplication, and we reach inauguration day, where Acting President Elon Musk appears to have given a Nazi stiff-arm salute (the Nazis sure think so). 

Is the ADL on the case? Only if dismissing the case counts!

On what possible basis is there to extend any sort of "grace" or "benefit of the doubt" to Elon Musk of all people? He's basically a modern-day Henry Ford (oops, bad comparison)! He's been one the leading figures injecting extreme-right antisemitism back into mainstream discourse! There are few people -- even including Donald Trump -- who have been more open than Elon Musk about wanting to resurrect the reputations and the political influence of the modern-day Nazi movement. Extending "grace" to Elon Musk should be like extending "grace" to, I don't know, the Alternative for Germany party.

But of course, none of that matters. The ADL has, over the past few months, made it abundantly clear that it views the American far-right as its friend, and so will extend infinite grace to them no matter how obvious their antisemitism becomes. It's disgusting. It's despicable. It is a grotesque abdication of the ADL's core mission. And the worst part it is, it's no longer even surprising.

I spent today taking care of my newborn, doing my best to keep him fed, warm, and safe. My only thought on the inauguration I wanted to have was that it was a shameful, shameful day. Which it was -- but it didn't occur to me that the ADL would add to that shame. 

Maybe it should have.

What a shameful, shameful display.

Tech Bros Are Weak Men

When I look at men like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, I see men who are fundamentally weak.

That sounds judgmental. And it is, to an extent. But maybe not quite to the extent one thinks.

All of these men were at one point self-identified Democrats. Zuckerberg flirted with a run for President before he realized that nobody, you know, liked him. Bezos positioned the Washington Post as a guardian of democracy before taking it dark.

As these men, and others in their cadre, have pivoted to the right, one narrative one often hears is that they were effectively bullied into changing their views by mean anti-big tech sentiments amongst progressives. This is far too pat (not the least because Republicans certainly held their own in highly publicized attacks on the big tech companies), but what is fair to say is that these men see themselves as having promoted liberal causes and they did not get the adulation and adoration from Democrats that they felt they deserved. They were not feted as heroes. They were not recognized as titans of industry. They were not handed the reins of leadership. They weren't even generally recognized as progressive allies. They continued to face pressure and mockery and criticism -- much fair, some not -- and they were deeply, deeply resentful for it. 

It's most obvious in the case of Musk, whose desperation to be liked is transparently obvious and who has transformed an entire social media platform into a Potemkin village of praise for the new tsar. But one sees it across the cohort -- this frustration at not being loved, and the beckoning temptation that if they just sold out then at least somebody would cheer them and make them feel like part of the team.

In theory, this shouldn't matter. For those with requisite moral fiber, one does the right thing because it's the right thing, not because one gets plaudits and cookies from it. But in practice, it is a very ordinary vice to thirst for validation and gravitate towards whatever community seems most liable to hand it out. In the face of that temptation, it takes a strong man to align with a given set of values when others holding those same values can't or won't provide that respect.

And our big tech bro leaders? They are not strong in this way. They are weak -- weak in a way that is very familiar and very human, but weak nonetheless. And we all must unfortunately live with the consequences of their weakness.

Who Are The ADL's Donors?

The big news flying about the Jewish blogosphere this week was the announcement by the ADL that they were going to resume buying ads on the-website-formerly-known-as-Twitter. This came in the wake of a cavalcade of antisemitic attacks and conspiracy theories, egged on by Elon Musk, that had the ADL as its target.

A lot of people are calling this a "betrayal", which I get, though it's hard for me to associate that word with such a limp and pathetic decision. It'd be like if Liz Cheney announced tomorrow that she was joining the DeSantis campaign -- sure, it'd repudiate what she had staked her reputation on for the past few years, but ultimately she'd be attaching herself to an abject failure for no discernible gain, so it'd be hard to get into too much of a lather about it.

But don't let my glibness detract from the obvious point that the ADL's decision is both stupid and terrible, and yet another instance of Jonathan Greenblatt's infirm leadership scoring completely unforced own-goals at the expense of the ADL's reputation. The, shall we say, inconsistent principles whereby the ADL refuses to take money from an antisemite like Kyrie Irving, but goes out of its way to give money to an antisemite like Elon Musk, is evidence of a ship gone rudderless. And that at this point my reactions are less that of "anger" and more of the "eyeroll" sort is not a sterling argument in favor of the ADL's current direction.

The constant missteps do raise the question of "why"? What is causing the ADL to blunder so regularly? One prospect, raised by Marisa Kabas in MSNBC, is that Greenblatt is trying to appease its "fervently Zionist donors who support Benjamin Netanyahu’s government" at the expense of the broader Jewish community it is tasked with defending. And that explanation got me to thinking -- in all earnestness -- "who are the ADL's donors"?

I'm asking genuinely, because I'm not sure. Certainly, the "rich donors are perverting our leaders' mission to suit their particular interests" is a popular sort of explanation that could explain why the ADL under Greenblatt's watch keeps on doing boneheaded things. But the explanation depends on the actual identity of the ADL's donors (are they "fervent Zionists who support Netanyahu's government"), and that made me realize that I don't have a strong sense about who the ADL's donor base is. Different possibilities render Kabas' explanation more or less plausible. So let's run through some candidates:

(1) No base. It's possible the ADL doesn't have a donor base. Now, to be clear, obviously the ADL gets a lot of money from donors. But it could be that the money is sufficiently distributed across a wide enough range of (relatively) small dollar contributors that there is no single cluster that looms large enough to constitute a "base". Alternatively, even if there are a relatively small number of mega-givers, if that group is itself ideologically diverse enough, then they would seemingly not form a sufficiently cohesive faction to induce the ADL to make political moves in one direction or another. Either way, such a financial set up would make it unlikely that the ADL's policies are largely being driven by the desire to appease a particular donor contingent.

(2) "Fervently right-wing Zionists". Perhaps the ADL's big donors come from the aggressive Zionist right. Obviously, that's a popular explanation for those who've long thought that the ADL is in the tank for right-wing Israeli policies. And certainly, the right-wing Zionist cadre are very much comprised of folks that tend to adore Elon Musk and are indifferent to if not elated by his attacks on the (wrong sort of) Jews. But the problem is that these sorts of donors tend to hate the ADL; they're the sorts who think the ADL has gone off the rails into the realm of "woke" leftism. Even if we imagine the sort of donor who only cares about bolstering support for right-wing Israel policy uber alles, there are other organizations (like ZOA) that are more natural fits.

(3) The corporate world. It's possible that most of the ADL's funding these days comes from various corporate actors -- some perhaps atoning for this or that discrimination disaster, others who see the ADL as a safe place to make a charitable gesture towards justice. Certainly, it seems that the ADL is a sizeable fish in that ecosystem. But if corporate donors are the driving force behind ADL decisionmaking, I don't see the throughline that gets us to "Greenblatt sticks his neck out to help Elon Musk." Corporate America is currently running away from Musk, not towards him, and I'm not seeing much evidence that they have any especial interest in forestalling Twitter withering on the vine.

(4) Middle America. As the quintessential "mainstream" civil rights organization, perhaps the ADL's donor base sits roughly at the midpoint of American political opinion. Two problems here: (1) given ideological polarization (which leads to a bimodal distribution of ideological views), it's not clear there is a large donor base of politically engaged actors sitting right in the middle of American political opinion; and (2) even if there is, it's again far from clear to me that "bailing out Elon Musk" is high on their priority list.

(5) The median Jew. Maybe the bulk of the ADL's donors sit, not at the center of American political opinion, but at the center of Jewish political opinion (a "center" which, of course, rests well to the left of American political opinion writ large, albeit falling more in the territory of "mainstream Democrat" than "raging socialist"). It certainly seems as if some of the anti-ADL antipathy reflects the fact that the ADL adopts views that are broadly popular with the median American Jew as opposed to, say, Mondoweiss. But I also don't see much in the way of evidence that the ADL is responsive to middle-ground American Jewish opinion. And this explanation, even more than "middle America", seems to point away from intervening to save Elon Musk.

(6) PEPpy sorts. "PEP" stands for "progressive except on Palestine", and while I'm not the biggest fan of the term, I'm thinking of groups like DMFI that are generally favorable towards the sort of mainline liberalism the ADL espouses on the domestic front while also being disposed towards defending hawkish Israeli policies towards Palestinians (or at least, ensuring that Israel faces no tangible blowback for implementing them). This seems like the strongest candidate for roughly tracking Kabas' explanation, since unlike the actual "fervent right-wing Zionists" this group is probably positively disposed towards the ADL. That said, leaving aside the evidentiary question of whether this group actually does comprise the ADL's donor base, I'm not convinced that this cadre (particularly right now, in the midst of the democracy protests) actually is all that enamored with the Netanyahu government specifically; nor am I convinced that they harbor any especial love for Elon Musk. So once again, it seems like they make for a poor explainer for why the ADL is behaving as it is.

Ultimately, I don't know who the ADL's main donor base is. But my confusion, and the fact that none of the above possibilities really seems to fit the ADL's recent behavior and place in the political ecosystem, actually makes me feel more confident that the entire premise we're discussing is wrong. The ADL's repeated, colossal errors of judgment -- most recently in crawling back into Elon Musk's bank account -- are not, I think, primarily donor-driven. I don't think these are externally-imposed failures. I think they represent an internal failure of leadership, and one that falls squarely on Jonathan Greenblatt's head. I can't speak to the precise internal dynamics or culture practices that might have gotten the ADL to this point, or whether a change in leadership will suffice to resolve them. But it seems clear right now that the ADL will not right ship unless Jonathan Greenblatt steps down from the helm.

[Image above from Deadline]

Is the ADL Losing Its Liberal Base?

The ADL is America's preeminent Jewish civil rights organization.

That position comes with an inevitable share of gripes. Jews who think the ADL is misusing its position. Non-Jews who don't like the idea of a "preeminent Jewish" (or "civil rights") anything. The day where somebody isn't complaining about something the ADL is doing is a day that doesn't end in "y".

That said, the inevitability and ubiquity of complaints faced by the ADL doesn't mean none of them have merit. Moreover, said inevitability and ubiquity doesn't mean there aren't things to be gleaned from patterns -- who is complaining, how they're complaining, and what they're complaining about.

The latest ADL related flare-up came when chieftain Jonathan Greenblatt seemed to laud Elon Musk's potential takeover of Twitter and compared Musk (positively!) to Henry Ford in the process. Using Henry Ford -- one of America's most notorious antisemites -- as a compliment was bad enough. But Musk's prime motivator for buying Twitter, by his own admission, is that he thinks Twitter has been too heavy-handed in "censoring" or tamping down on hate speech on the platform. This flies in the face of the ADL's social media policy, which has been to this point aggressive in demanding that social media platforms do more to combat hateful speech and conspiracies proliferating on their sites. So why on earth would Greenblatt think Musk's purchase of Twitter is a cause for optimism? The impression many got was that, in an effort to curry favor with the right's new fair-haired plutocrat, Greenblatt was selling out his organization's stated committed to fight extremism and hate online. The right-wing loves Musk, so Greenblatt felt obliged to love him too.

Greenblatt has since apologized for the Henry Ford comparison. He also suggested that what he was really doing was "laying down a gauntlet about what we expect Elon Musk to do," which -- talk about don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Greenblatt was not "laying down a gauntlet," he was very clearly trying to butter up Musk now that Musk has become a right-wing hero. I'd be delighted if he changed course on that. But don't patronize me by pretending you weren't doing what was obvious to all of our eyes.

Again, it must be stressed that Musk has become a right-wing hero because he's sworn to make it easier for the far-right to spread extremism and hate on a major social media platform. The reason this is such a scandal isn't solely or even primarily because of an ill-advised comparison; it is because it seemed as if Greenblatt either no longer had the stomach or no longer had the desire to stand against a truly dangerous development for the safety of Jews online if it meant standing up to a powerful and popular figure on the American right. That failure -- whether of nerve, of will, or of interest -- represents a serious problem for the ADL's credibility.

Now, it isn't at all surprising that the Jewish left would jump all over Greenblatt's miscue. And to the extent that the complaints were coming from the usual "drop the ADL" suspects, there would not be much new to be said under the sun. The source of the critique wouldn't make it wrong (as I like to say, if you fail so badly that JVP can fairly dunk on you, that's a you problem, not a JVP problem), but it wouldn't reflect any broader political shift.

But it did seem to me that this latest incident with Musk was evincing a notable and qualitatively different type of response, both in terms of what was being said and who was saying it. Most specifically, I've been seeing a lot more chatter taking the form of (at least considering) calling for Greenblatt to resign.

Why is that noteworthy? It's not just that it's a relatively drastic demand to make. The bigger story is that resignation calls suggest that discontent with the ADL's direction has migrated over from the aforementioned "usual suspects" to a more moderate liberal tranche. The complaints and frustrations are boiling over not from those who've always hated the ADL and will take any opportunity to stick a knife in, but from those who think the ADL has done and continues to do much good work, but has over the past few months gone badly off the rails.

Simply put, one doesn't call for new leadership in organizations one thinks are intrinsically risible. I detest Mort Klein and ZOA, but I never say "Mort Klein must resign from ZOA". Practically speaking, I don't care who runs ZOA because I think ZOA is at its core a terrible organization. It'd be like me calling for "new leadership" from Hamas. By contrast, I was very vocal in calling for David Harris to resign from helming the AJC because, as annoying as I sometimes find the AJC, they lie on a fundamentally different tranche for me than does ZOA and I do care that about who leads them and what direction they go.

The fact is that the Musk incident is part of a pattern of gaffes and controversies from Greenblatt over the past few months which have infuriated Jewish liberals, virtually all of which have come from attempts to placate or cozy up to right-wing actors. To give a few more examples:

• In July, Greenblatt retweeted a truly unhinged rant by fringe congressional candidate Brian Robinson accusing several liberal Jewish groups (generally those affiliated with JFREJ) being "LARPers" and otherwise masquerading as Jews. The retweet was eventually removed; and the ADL backtracked by saying that "the RT was not meant to imply agreement with all aspects of the thread" and that "we reject any attacks on the Jewish identity of people we have disagreements with."
• In August, Greenblatt said a cartoon which called out AIPAC for backing Republican insurrectionists was "stoking the flames of antisemitism" (the cartoon in question, which was a mashup of a meme featuring Steve Buscemi and a 1/6 insurrectionist, was certainly a very sharp elbow, but it was not antisemitic -- it hit hard because AIPAC made a morally bankrupt decision which they can be hit hard over).
• Last month, Greenblatt sided with groups attacking the New York Times coverage of educational failures in Orthodox private schools, including suggesting without any evidence that the article might contribute to antisemitic violence against Orthodox Jews.
• Also in September, the ADL agreed to "launch a thorough review" of its educational materials in response to complaints by Fox News -- an organization the ADL has often expressly called out for being prime purveyors of hate and bigotry -- that the organization was "far-left" (other organizations which the ADL deems to be vectors of antisemitic extremism tend not to receive such accommodating responses!).

And while I wouldn't characterize it as a "gaffe" per se, all of this has gone hand-in-hand with Greenblatt taking a far more aggressive tone in characterizing anti-Zionism as antisemitism -- a pivot that many observers described as evincing greater "combativeness" by the ADL towards the left. Put it all together, and the pattern from the last few months have been one of a noticeable pivot by the ADL towards the right. And Jewish liberals -- again, mainstream Democrat types, not the far-left -- are noticing this pivot, noticing the associated gaffes, and are increasingly fed up by it.

For their part, the Jewish right has always hated Greenblatt and wanted him out, and nothing about the ADL's more recent change in practice is going to change that. And the Jewish far-left just doesn't like the ADL, period, and so Greenblatt inherited their disdain. Those polar oppositions perhaps could be taken for granted. But it means that if Greenblatt is also losing normcore Jewish liberals, then his base of support starts to look awfully narrow.

For my part, I take no position on whether Greenblatt should call it quits (in part because I share concern that the ADL's next leader might come from even more conservative quarters). I certainly don't endorse the view that the ADL is an irredeemably flawed or toxic organization; I continue to believe they do much great and necessary work. But I do agree that the ADL has been a ship adrift over the past few months -- making decision after decision that are morally indefensible and practically insulting to the mainstream liberal Jews who have historically comprised the core of the ADL's support base. 

One of the most compelling diagnoses of why Bernie Sanders' failed to secure the Democrat nomination was simple: you cannot be the standard-bearer of a party you despise. It doesn't matter how many loud voices on Twitter laud you, it doesn't matter how many donors shower you with resources. If you're going to lead Democrats, you have to like the average Democrat. The ADL would do well to internalize a similar lesson: you cannot be, and will not stay, the preeminent Jewish leader if you disdain the median American Jew. And the median American Jew is politically left-of-center -- not on the far-left, but a mainstream liberal. That might not characterize who trends on Twitter, and that might not characterize the most profligate donors. But it characterizes most Jews, and the ADL chases right-wing clout at our expense at its peril.

The "good news", as it were, is that this is hardly the first time that the ADL has sold out liberal Jews. Relationships can be mended, courses can be corrected. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sea change occurring, and patience finally wearing thin. If the ADL doesn't change its trajectory quickly, it is far from clear what the future holds for America's preeminent Jewish civil rights organization.