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Major address by ADL chief omits mention of Trump and followers among antisemitic threats
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a major policy speech, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt doubled down on his argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, emphasized the threat to visibly Orthodox Jews and accused The New York Times of an “antisemitic attack” in its coverage of Hasidic movements.
One topic he didn’t discuss: former President Donald Trump and his extremist supporters, a frequent topic of concern for the ADL and Greenblatt in recent years.
The speech Monday morning, at the ADL’s annual leadership summit in Washington, D.C., was remarkable for barely mentioning what has, for years, been the group’s focus: the threat from the far right, spurred in part by Trump’s ascendance. Instead Greenblatt, in prepared remarks, tacked to the center, remaining focused on a message he sounded at the same summit a year ago — that anti-Zionism is unquestionably antisemitism.
“I know that for bigots — especially those who self-style as “anti-Zionists” — Israel’s Independence Day is a day to redouble their efforts to make sure it is Israel’s last Independence Day,” he said, adding later, “To underscore what I said at this event last year: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Full stop.”
His speech last year drew criticism from the left for marginalizing parts of the Jewish community that criticize Israel, and for equating that sector with a stream of extremism on the other end of the political spectrum that has fueled deadly attacks on Jews.
Despite not featuring in Greenblatt’s speech, the threat from the right was nonetheless very much embedded in the conference agenda; one session was dedicated to the surge of the far right on social media and another was dedicated to ties between the the extremes of the conservative movement today and the John Birch Society, the seminal extremist movement founded in the anticommunist fervor of the mid-20th century.
The conference will culminate on Tuesday with a Capitol Hill rally against antisemitism, held together with the ADL’s traditional partners from minority, LGBTQ and civil rights groups. Its featured speakers include Susan Rice, the former national security advisor who now serves as a domestic policy advisor to the Biden administration, as well as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah of Iran, who has positioned himself as an advocate of Iran-Israel ties.
Greenblatt emphasized in his speech that antisemitism knows no single ideological home. He noted what the ADL has documented as an alarming spike in antisemitic attacks and that more than half of violent attacks have targeted visibly Orthodox Jews.
“This year, we find that the dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents is not due to any single ideology fueling violence, or one group becoming more accepting of antisemitism than another,” he said. “It’s due to every ideology becoming more comfortable with anti-Jewish hate.”
Since he took the ADL’s helm in 2015, Greenblatt has been under fire from conservatives for the organization’s emphasis on threats emerging from the extreme right, though the organization has always focused on far-right antisemitism. On Monday, Greenblatt’s speech touched almost exclusively on themes that have troubled Jewish conservatives: the perceived threat to pro-Israel Jews on campuses, attacks on visibly Orthodox Jews in the northeast, and defending haredi Orthodox Jews from perceived attacks on their lifestyles and education system.
Greenblatt took the New York Times to task for its series of articles reporting on deficiencies and malfeasance in Hasidic schools in New York.
“Our Orthodox brothers and sisters are constantly under threat,” he said. “It is one that needs solidarity and support from everyone – Jewish and non-Jewish alike. So to see this community singled out by elite institutions, like the New York Times, arguably the most important paper in the world, depicting them as clannish and using power to manipulate events … that represents an antisemitic attack on their community.”
Absent from his speech was any mention of Trump, although the former president is seen as the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and has intensified his attacks on “globalists” and on progressive Jewish billionaire George Soros, tropes that the ADL and other groups have said fuel antisemitism. Greenblatt was outspoken last year in criticizing Trump for having dinner with Kanye West after the rapper, who now calls himself Ye, embarked on a string of antisemitic comments. That dinner also included Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust denier and far-right provocateur.
Greenblatt also didn’t mention Ye in a section of his speech on the ADL’s work with corporations, even though the ADL led a campaign last year urging Adidas to end its partnership with Ye. After Adidas ended the collaboration, it announced a partnership with the ADL.
Greenblatt began his speech by celebrating Israel on the occasion of its 75th birthday, despite what he acknowledged as “complexity, worry, anxiety and concern” about the country’s future. A large part of that concern, within the country, has centered on the debate over the government’s effort to weaken the judiciary, which has brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest in the streets. Greenblatt called the protests “something really special,” and “the triumph of Zionism.” He urged compromise on the judicial overhaul.
An ADL report from two weeks ago noted another worry — that Israel’s government includes politicians who “have polluted Israeli public discourse with chilling racist expressions that would have led to the immediate termination of their political careers in other democracies.” The report added that “Jewish racism is as deplorable as other forms of racism, and should never be excused or tolerated.”
Greenblatt did not mention that concern in his speech, though he called for Israel to have “a civil society where non-Jews enjoy the same rights and fulfill the same responsibilities as their Jewish neighbors.”
“There are challenges in Israel right now – and there will be challenges and difficult conversations to come, but ADL will never waver in its support of a democratic, Jewish state,” Greenblatt said in the speech. “Israel is a miracle, and I will never apologize for being a proud Zionist.”
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What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum?
What if I told you that this morning, I found the following Truth Social post on my newsfeed?
“THE TRUMP US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM HONORS will be broadcast tonight, on CBS, and Stream on Paramount+. Tune in at 8 P.M. EST! At the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America, I am hosting the event. Tell me what you think of my “Master of Ceremony” abilities. If really good, would you like me to leave the Presidency in order to make “hosting” a full time job? We will be honoring true GREATS in the History of the Holocaust, from the Elders of Zion and the NSDAP to John Birchers and Groypers. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.”
If you said this post wasn’t real, you would be right. If you said that I tweaked a recent Truth Social post, swapping the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for the former John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, you would be right about that too.
But if you said that this post was unthinkable, my response would be “Think again.”
The phrase “Thinking the unthinkable” was all the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was an era darkened by the threat of mushroom clouds, the theatrics of Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, and the theories of Herman Kahn, whose notion of the Doomsday Machine features in Kubrick’s masterpiece. Kahn coined the term “unthinkable,” insisting that while “nuclear war may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — it is not impossible.”
To this very day, the threat of a nuclear holocaust remains all too real and thinkable. But it has been sidelined by a different kind of threat, one that has buried the very concept of the unthinkable.
So many words and acts once considered unthinkable have, under the two Trump presidencies, become not just thinkable and not just doable, but also increasingly unremarkable. Is there any word or act we still consider safely and surely unthinkable? Is there anything at all that, to quote Herman Kahn, while it may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — is not impossible?
To find an answer, it helps to suggest a limiting case on our government’s effort to make all things thinkable, and thus acceptable, even normal. Consider the fake post with which I began this column — namely, that Donald Trump would one day plaster his name on the building that houses the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Can there be anything more unthinkable than Trump stamping his name on the USHMM, the very institution that is dedicated to reminding the world of the consequences of acting on the unthinkable?
In his reflections on life under totalitarian rule, The Captive Mind, Polish poet and Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz observed that all “concepts men live by are a product of the historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can even conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly colored feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in.”
We see such plasticity on the sets of Fox News, the corridors of Congress and in the board rooms of media, legal, and tech titans where talking heads, politicians and CEOs happily crawl about with many-colored tails of feathers. This is also true in the board rooms of the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (The names of these sites must be written in full to fully grasp the absurd character of this era.)
But the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will always be exempt from this creeping rot of the absurd, right?
Wrong.
In early May, the USHMM, which like the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is both privately and federally funded, announced an overhaul of its board. Nearly all its Biden-appointed members were fired, replaced by a choice assortment of Trump appointees. They include Sid Rosenberg, a conservative talk-show host who spoke at a Trump rally last year, denouncing the Democrats as “a bunch of degenerates.”
Another Trump appointee, Martin Oliner, published an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post earlier this year in which he called for the forcible removal from Gaza of Palestinians, whom he described as “fundamentally evil.” In another piece, titled “Make the Holocaust Memorial Council Great Again,” he warned that the USHMM was not meeting its “important role.”
Equally troubling was this fall’s temporary closing until next February of the museum exhibit dedicated to America’s wartime response to the Holocaust. The ostensible reason was to “upgrade the exhibit,” an Orwellian phrase that some staffers fear means the blurring the historical record, one that includes the disinterest of the White House, the fecklessness of most Jewish leaders, and the polite, yet potent antisemitism at the State Department.
In his landmark work The Abandonment of the Jews, the historian David Wyman offers a similar conclusion on the American public’s response to the Holocaust: “Few American non-Jews recognized that the plight of the European Jews was their plight too. Most were either unaware, did not care, or saw the European Jewish catastrophe as a Jewish problem, one for Jews to deal with. That explains, in part, why the United States did so little to help.”
Is it possible that because too many of us remain unaware of or indifferent to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the unthinkable, we have invited the catastrophe now enveloping our nation? A catastrophe that already announces itself in the mass and often violent arrests and deportations of men and women because of their skin color? In the lawless killing of civilians in international waters? In the unconstitutional deployment of the National Guard in our cities? For those who do not yet have an answer, it is worth giving the matter a bit of thought — even if you find those thoughts unthinkable.
The post What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia
Israel became the first country to formally recognize Somaliland, a self-declared sovereign state in the Horn of Africa, in a decision that was immediately condemned by Somalia and other nations.
“The Prime Minister announced today the official recognition of the Republic of Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state,” wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in a post on X. “The State of Israel plans to immediately expand its relations with the Republic of Somaliland through extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology, and economy.”
Somaliland’s president welcomed the announcement from Netanyahu in a post on X, adding that he affirmed the region’s “readiness to join the Abraham Accords,” the normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states that was brokered during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Somaliland proclaimed independence from Somalia in 1991 during the country’s civil war, but has failed to receive recognition from the international community in part due to Somalia’s opposition to its secession. Somalia officially rejects ties with Israel, and has consistently refused to recognize the state of Israel since 1960. Somalia and Somaliland are overwhelmingly Muslim.
“The ministers affirmed their total rejection and condemnation of Israel’s recognition of the Somaliland region, stressing their full support for the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement following a phone call between Egypt’s foreign minister and his Somali, Turkish and Djiboutian counterparts, according to Reuters.
In November, the Israeli think tank Institute for National Security Studies argued in a report that recognizing Somaliland could be in Israel’s strategic interest.
“Somaliland’s territory could serve as a forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis,” the report read.
It is unclear if the United States will follow suit. In August, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote to Trump urging him to recognize Somaliland.
“Somaliland has emerged as a critical security and diplomatic partner for the United States, helping America advance our national security interests in the Horn of Africa and beyond,” wrote Cruz.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘Jesus is a Palestinian,’ claims a Times Square billboard. Um, not quite
“Merry Christmas,” proclaims a billboard in Times Square: “Jesus is Palestinian.”
Countless people will walk by the display or see it on social media, and many will believe it.
So, let’s go through why that statement is such a mistake, once again.
Jesus was a Jew. He was born to Jewish parents, was circumcised under Jewish law — traditionally, on Jan. 1, which is how that day became known as the Feast of the Circumcision — and lived as a Jew. He taught from the Hebrew Scriptures. He worshiped in the Jerusalem Temple. He observed Jewish festivals. He debated Jewish law with other Jews using Jewish modes of argument.
Go back to the Gospels in the New Testament — specifically Luke 4:16: “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.” Or, John 4:9, in which a Samaritan woman asks Jesus: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
Cross-reference other ancient sources. Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian, refers to Jesus as a Jewish figure executed in Judea. No serious historical study of Jesus elides this basic truth: Jesus was a Jew.
Yet many efforts through history have sought to sever Jesus from his Judaism — often, if not always, in an attempt to denigrate Jews.
In the second century, the theologian Marcion sought to completely sever Christianity from Judaism. For him, the God of Israel was inferior and the God of the Christians was morally superior. Jesus, therefore, belonged to a different moral universe. The early Church condemned Marcionism precisely because it erased Jesus’s Jewish roots, and ultimately dismissed the idea as a heresy that needed to be rejected.
In the twentieth century, Nazi theologians attempted to portray Jesus as Aryan and anti-Jewish, which Susannah Heschel documents in her book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.
But it’s not just because of his religion that Jesus shouldn’t be considered Palestinian.
“Why not?” you might ask. “Didn’t he live in Palestine?”
The short answer is: Not yet.
When Jesus lived, the land of Israel was called Judea. It was under Roman rule, and it fell under several administrative districts: Judea, Galilee, and Samaria.
So, what is the source of the name “Palestine” for that area? It comes from the ancient people known as the Philistines, a perennial enemy of the Israelites. After the Romans crushed Jewish independence, they deliberately renamed the province in an effort to sever Jewish historical ties to the land, as well as to humiliate them by naming the land after their ancient foes.
To call Jesus “Palestinian” is therefore anachronistic.
Yet even so, the idea of Jesus as Palestinian appears in some strands of Palestinian liberation theology. Those strands tend to envision the Palestinian people as Jesus on the cross — crucified by Israel and the Jews, in an image that recalls the longstanding and deeply misguided allegation that “the Jews killed Jesus.”
This language appears repeatedly in the writings and sermons of Naim Ateek, the influential founder of the Jerusalem-based Christian organization Sabeel. In his 2001 Easter message, he wrote “as we approach Holy Week and Easter, the suffering of Jesus Christ at the hands of evil political and religious powers two thousand years ago is lived out again in Palestine,” adding that “Jesus is the powerless Palestinian humiliated at a checkpoint, the woman trying to get through to the hospital for treatment, the young man whose dignity is trampled, the young student who cannot get to the university to study, the unemployed father who needs to find bread to feed his family; the list is tragically getting longer, and Jesus is there in their midst suffering with them.”
Yes, of course, Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer. But illustrations of that suffering should not include the pretense that Jesus was Palestinian. It suggests that Palestinians need to be seen as akin to Jesus to deserve safety and dignity, when in fact they deserve safety and dignity simply because they are human. And casting Israel and the Jews as crucifiers only resurrects medieval theology and hatreds; it adds nothing to the hopes for justice for Palestinians.
Mainstream Christianity has rejected this foul mythology. We have recently celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Christian world’s most vociferous denial of that ancient hatred. In 1965, Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate explicitly rejected the charge that Jews are responsible for Jesus’s death. The World Council of Churches issued similar warnings about reviving Passion-based antisemitism — the revival of the ancient accusation that Jewish leaders were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and that Jews bear that guilt eternally.
History matters. Theology matters. And words matter — especially when they carry two thousand years of blood-soaked memory.
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