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The ADL’s turn away from civil rights was years in the making — Oct. 7 accelerated it
The Anti-Defamation League’s broad coalition that helped pass a hate crime law in Georgia at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement six years ago was a classic campaign for the organization, drawing together an alliance of civil rights groups with civic and business leaders to pass a landmark piece of liberal-minded legislation.
After helping the ADL shepherd the bill through Georgia’s legislature, Robert Sills, a young Atlanta-based attorney, decided to apply for a job with the organization. “I thought, ‘I know these people and really like them,’” Sills recalled in an interview.
He was hired in August 2023 to manage state and local policy and set to work on a toolkit to help city governments stop hate groups. “When I joined, the perception was still very much that it was white supremacists and neo-Nazis that we were focused on,” Sills said.
Three years later, much has changed at the nation’s largest Jewish advocacy organization. Sills is gone, and the ADL has shut down its teams focused on democracy and civil rights. Much of the information about #HateFreeGA has been archived and is no longer available on the ADL’s website, nor are hundreds of other pages related to civil rights and extremism, as the organization narrows its focus to antisemitism.
“Core civil rights work is going away,” said Sills, who resigned about a year after he started.
The ADL has tried to walk a fine line between acknowledging a shift away from civil rights while insisting that it remains committed to its historic mission of helping both Jews and non-Jews. The organization said, for example, that removing “protect civil rights” from a prominent section of its website was a technical update; it still notes a commitment to “safeguarding civil rights” in its work countering extremism.
At the same time, Jonathan Greenblatt, the organization’s CEO, has said that the surge of antisemitism following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel has been forcing a retreat from the ADL’s historic commitment to such work.
“This moment has required us to be more and more focused on fighting the rise of antisemitism,” Greenblatt said in an interview. “And I hope when this situation abates — when there’s a cessation of hate, when the numbers start to come down — that we’ll be able to make different decisions about how we allocate our resources.”
But many close observers say Greenblatt began shifting the organization away from work on voting rights, abortion, and LGBTQ+ issues, among others, well before Oct. 7 and that the ADL is unlikely to return to those issues under his leadership — a shift that could have major implications for American Jews given the ADL’s outsize influence in shaping the way Americans understand antisemitism.
“Groups that should be natural allies of a group like the ADL aren’t going to trust anything it says.”
Rabbi Jill JacobsDirector of T’ruah
This article is based on interviews with 14 current and former ADL employees, board members and major donors, along with other Jewish leaders who have worked closely with the organization, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed non-disclosure agreements or because being named would jeopardize their current employment or their working relationship with the ADL.
Jill Jacobs, the director of T’ruah, a liberal rabbis and cantors group, said the ADL’s decision to stop working on behalf of other vulnerable groups, and increasing willingness to antagonize former allies on the left, has been making it hard for every Jewish organization trying to convince partners to take antisemitism seriously.
“Groups that should be natural allies of a group like the ADL aren’t going to trust anything it says — and aren’t going to trust much of what’s said publicly about antisemitism by anyone,” she said.
Sherman Fabes, a spokesperson for the ADL, defended the organization’s track record and said that even as it focuses more narrowly on antisemitism it recognizes that “we can’t do it alone.” Fabes pointed to Greenblatt’s decision to sponsor the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington shortly before Oct. 7, ongoing partnerships with the National Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, and lawsuits defending a church targeted by white supremacists over its support of LGBTQ+ rights and an Ohio city suing a neo-Nazi group.
But Greenblatt has also spoken publicly since Oct. 7 about his frustration with the civil rights organizations that he believes failed to show up for Jews as antisemitism spiked. And the ADL’s move away from civil rights work in the two years since has alienated several mainstream organizations.
Both GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group and longtime partner of the ADL, and the Asian American Foundation, which was created with support from the ADL, have pulled back from work with the ADL’s Center on Extremism since Oct. 7 as the organization began almost exclusively monitoring antisemitism, according to a former employee. Meanwhile, a global LGBTQ+ rights coalition and the ADL parted ways as well.
The NAACP once partnered closely with the ADL, including on a campaign targeting social media companies, but the organizations have drifted apart more recently and CEO Derrick Johnson has been absent from recent ADL conferences, though Fabes said he remains affiliated with the organization. And several people close to Maya Wiley, who runs the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said she and Greenblatt have repeatedly clashed.
Abe Foxman, the ADL’s former longtime director, cautioned against Jews abandoning civil rights work during a podcast last spring. “We can’t throw it away because at the end of the day we’ll be alone,” he said. “And we can’t survive alone.”
An early retreat from civil rights
Greenblatt had been CEO of the ADL for just over a year when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, and quickly positioned himself as a bulwark against what many feared would be an erosion of civil liberties under the president. “If one day Muslim Americans will be forced to register their identities, then that is the day that this proud Jew will register as Muslim,” Greenblatt declared shortly after the election.
And when Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, Greenblatt issued a statement warning about the risk to “the future of civil rights, civil liberties, and our democracy” and referenced “LGBT rights, voting rights, and women’s rights” before raising an alarm about Kavanaugh’s “demonstrated hostility to reproductive freedom.”
The expression of concern was standard fare for the organization, which was founded in 1913 with a mission “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all” and had been reliably liberal on domestic political issues, including abortion.
But the Kavanaugh statement frustrated conservative Jews already wary of Greenblatt’s background working as a special assistant to President Barack Obama. Liel Leibovitz wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal claiming that “Greenblatt has frequently steered the ADL into the murky waters of party politics” and was “leaving American Jews behind.”
The column was part of a flurry of attacks across right-wing media that seemed to hit a nerve.
“Jonathan utterly freaked out,” said a former senior ADL leader familiar with the incident. He announced that the organization would not change its official position on abortion “but we’re kind of going to bury and downplay it,” the source recounted.
Melanie Robbins, the former deputy director of the organization’s New York and New Jersey regional offices, told JTA in December that Greenblatt yelled during a meeting following the Kavanaugh hearings that women’s issues were not core issues for the ADL.
Nancy Kaufman, who was CEO of the National Council on Jewish Women at the time, said she also recalled Greenblatt’s decision to stop working on abortion rights following Kavanaugh’s nomination.
“It was the beginning of the retreat by ADL of dealing with the kind of human rights issues that we had come to believe they were supporting,” Kaufman said in an interview. “I was concerned then; I’m concerned now.”
Fabes, the ADL spokesperson, said that the organization had never been an abortion rights organization and that “the confirmation hearings, nor any response, had no impact on the direction of ADL’s work in any area.”
He denied that Greenblatt had been alarmed by right-wing attacks, and said that he “did not yell at anyone.”
Early in his tenure, Greenblatt also diminished the role of the organization’s national commission, a group of several hundred lay leaders that served as its governing board — who were overwhelmingly liberal, committed to broad civil rights work and had long helped set the organization’s policy agenda.
Joe Berman, a Boston attorney who served on the national commission for 15 years, acknowledged that the 350-member body could be unwieldy and said Greenblatt persuaded them to turn power over to a more traditional 20-person board. But Berman said that however practical it may have been, the move “kneecapped” the influence of volunteer leaders and allowed Greenblatt to shift the organization away from a focus on civil rights.
“Let’s be honest, it’s always been a more progressive, left-leaning organization,” Berman said. “Jonathan is paddling upstream against that.”
Fabes said the ADL has always been “strictly nonpartisan and nonpolitical” and that the transition to a more traditional board reflected best practices for nonprofit governance and was made with broad support.
Greenblatt also oversaw the 2017 departure of Deborah Lauter, who had served as national civil rights director at the ADL for nearly a decade when Greenblatt was hired, and shortly thereafter several of the organization’s most senior civil rights staff — including Michael Lieberman, Erika Moritsugu and Moran Benai — departed within a few months of one another, taking with them years of specialized experience.
“It’s always been a more progressive, left-leaning organization. Jonathan is paddling upstream against that.”
Joe BermanFormer member of the ADL’s national commission
Lieberman had served as Washington counsel for the organization since 1989 and led a portfolio focused on hate crime prevention, religious freedom, and LGBTQ+ equality and voting rights, a role that has not been filled. He also managed the ADL’s relationship with many non-Jewish civil rights groups, which gave him credibility to speak with those groups about antisemitism and Israel.
“We need to stand with others if we think that we want them — expect them — to stand with us,” Lieberman said during a speech shortly before he resigned. “If you want a friend, you have to be a friend.”
Eileen Hershenov’s departure without replacement as senior vice president for democracy initiatives in August 2023 marked the end of an executive-level position focused on civil liberties.
When Greenblatt took over in 2015, the ADL had around 10 full-time employees coordinating the organization’s work on its civil rights portfolio. But despite hiring 200 new staff members over the past decade — and nearly tripling the ADL’s budget from $57 million to $163 million — a combination of attrition and the reassignment of regional civil rights counsels to new roles has led to the elimination of any dedicated teams working on civil rights or democracy.
Fabes said Hershenov’s portfolio and the former civil rights counsels were converted to “policy counsels” and folded into a new 29-person “national affairs” team, “the majority of whom do civil rights work.” But he downplayed the significance of these structural changes over the past decade. “All of our work relates to antisemitism,” Fabes wrote in an email. “That’s true now as it was true then.”
In response to a question about how Greenblatt viewed the departures of Lieberman and other senior civil rights staff, Fabes said that the ADL did not comment on personnel matters. But in a recent op-ed Greenblatt lamented that in working on “the broader landscape of social issues” the organization had sometimes “ranged far from our core purpose.”
Oct. 7 and the ‘bolt of lightning’
Greenblatt’s explanation for how the ADL came to eschew a broader advocacy portfolio in favor of a “laser” focus on antisemitism centers on Oct. 7, 2023, and its aftermath. “It was like a bolt of lightning,” Greenblatt told the Forward in an oral history of the day. “I’ve had tough days, but Oct. 7 was the toughest.”
It wasn’t just the carnage in Israel but a sense of betrayal that struck Greenblatt.
“Jews around the world and here in America mourned,” Greenblatt recalled in a speech this past November. “Yet, to our dismay, many of our so-called allies were nowhere to be found.”
One of those so-called allies was the Council for Global Equality, a coalition promoting LGBTQ+ rights overseas that the ADL had helped create in 2008 and that Julie Dorf, the council’s co-chair, said had regularly partnered with the ADL on policy campaigns during the Obama administration.
But as the ADL began working less on civil rights issues, they faded into the background of her coalition, Dorf said.
Still, the ADL believed that the council’s statement about the Israel-Hamas war, which condemned “all attacks on civilian populations” and called for a ceasefire, was a departure from the organization’s mission and “harmful to our ADL community,” according to Fabes.
“CGE was unwilling to acknowledge the harm the statement had caused,” Fabes added. “ADL, therefore, made the values-based decision to end our membership in the coalition.”
Dorf said she wasn’t sure what the ADL’s specific objection was even after meeting with them at the time.
“It was clear they didn’t even read it carefully because they accused us of all kinds of things that weren’t true — I said, ‘Pull it up, do you see these sentences?’” recalled Dorf, who is Jewish. “They were just grasping for something that would make it an antisemitic statement.”
“There was a time before Oct. 7 and there’s a time after.”
Jonathan GreenblattCEO of the ADL
Dorf said she didn’t hear anything from the ADL following the meeting and removed the organization from the coalition herself. The council continues to represent some of the largest LGBTQ+ groups in the country, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project. Following the ADL’s departure, its only Jewish member is American Jewish World Service.
Fabes said the ADL continues to support LGBTQ+ rights and pointed to recent partnerships with Equality Illinois on a hate crimes training law for police in the state and with Free State Justice on an anti-masking law in Maryland.
Inside the ADL, Sills, who previously worked for Amazon, said Greenblatt began adopting the kind of corporate mantras favored by Jeff Bezos. Instead of “every day is day one,” Greenblatt began telling staff that every day was Oct. 8. “It seemed to communicate the expectation that ADL exists in this trauma response state indefinitely,” Sills said.
Greenblatt has maintained this perspective. “When I say we’re still in an Oct. 8 world, we are — and that doesn’t mean that we don’t adapt and evolve, but there was a time before Oct. 7 and there’s a time after,” he said in an interview.
After Oct. 7, what had been a gradual shift away from working on issues other than antisemitism expanded into what some staff saw as a disregard for safeguarding civil liberties when it came to antisemitism work.
A few weeks after Oct. 7, Greenblatt called on nearly 200 college and university presidents to investigate pro-Palestinian student clubs for “materially supporting” Hamas, and months later the organization endorsed mask bans at political demonstrations.
Sills, the head of local policy at the time, said the anti-masking campaign drove his resignation.
“I laid out the legal argument, commented on the fact that employees at ADL with significant expertise were not being listened to, and said, ‘You’ve got to find somebody else to do this — it’s not going to be me,’” Sills recalled. “It’s unconstitutional.”
Fabes said Sills was not privy to high-level decision making at the ADL and that many experts supported the push for anti-masking laws.
“Ultimately, the proposed anti-masking legislation gained full support from Black and LGBTQ groups because ADL’s approach was responsible and legal, harkening back to the anti-masking laws that were first passed to combat the Ku Klux Klan,” Fabes said. He noted that the NAACP’s local chapter in New York backed a law in the state.
There was also a push within the organization to categorize a wider range of speech as antisemitism, specifically speech targeting Israel. One former employee, who helped the Center on Extremism track antisemitic incidents, said staff initially responded to Greenblatt’s 2022 speech — in which he more forcefully articulated his existing view that anti-Zionism was a form of antisemitism — by defining the concept extremely narrowly.
“The team cared a lot about the data and said, ‘Well, Jonathan has defined anti-Zionism as specifically not supporting a Jewish right to self-determination in Israel, so just saying ‘Israel is a racist state’ isn’t saying Jews have no right to self-determination,’” the employee recalled.
But after Oct. 7, the person said, ADL executives began insisting that the center’s staff classify many pro-Palestinian demonstrations as antisemitic based on the use of anti-Zionist slogans and signs.
The ADL said in a statement to the Forward in January 2024, following the release of its first annual tally of antisemitic incidents following Oct. 7, that it had significantly broadened its definition of antisemitic incidents to include rallies that feature “anti-Zionist chants and slogans.”
“While our methodology may change slightly from time to time, there was no mandate from senior leadership to make changes after Oct. 7,” Fabes said. He added that the ADL only counted 2,596 out of more than 5,000 protests against Israel in 2024 as antisemitic.
The Asian American Foundation, a civil rights organization modeled after the ADL and created with significant support from Greenblatt, has come under pressure to cut ties with the group from 70 Asian American groups and allies frustrated with Greenblatt’s criticism of pro-Palestinian activists. The foundation has maintained its relationship with the ADL, including sharing a board member with the organization, though The New Yorker reported that it ended its partnership with the Center on Extremism in the spring of 2024.
Around the same time, Sarah Moore, who had been monitoring anti-LGBTQ+ extremism in a dual role for both the ADL and GLAAD, started a new role working exclusively for GLAAD. GLAAD did not respond to multiple questions about its current relationship with the ADL, but three former employees said the organization had made an intentional decision to cut ties.
Fabes said the ADL was “proud of the work our teams accomplished together” and “proud that this effort enabled GLAAD to fully fund and house this position within its own team.”
ADL staff in the Center on Extremism wrote a letter to their boss, quoted by The New Yorker, warning that the organization was losing trust with “other extremism researchers, media outlets, anti-hate organizations, civil rights groups and — perhaps most concerningly — large swaths of the Jewish community that we are committed to serving.”
The letter came from “a few people” and “did not represent the views of all staff,” according to Fabes, but he said that Greenblatt met with the team to discuss the issues raised.
The ADL also said that it was in the process of adding a new researcher to the Center on Extremism funded by the League of United Latin American Citizens to monitor threats to the Hispanic community.
Greenblatt made waves early in the second Trump administration for initially defending Elon Musk’s controversial gesture at an inaugural rally as an “awkward gesture,” and then supporting the White House’s “bold” attempt to revoke the permanent residency of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, and detain him at an immigration jail in Louisiana.
The response to Khalil’s arrest was the final straw for Berman, who first joined the ADL’s regional New England board in 2001 and had held leadership positions on the national commission.
Berman had little sympathy for Khalil’s views, which he called “reprehensible” in his resignation letter, but defending the arrest had “irrevocably degraded the ADL’s moral authority.”
“If we don’t stand for civil rights, we stand for nothing,” he added.
The Khalil controversy did little to change Greenblatt’s hostile posture toward campus protesters. In a closed-door meeting with Republican attorneys general over that summer, he compared masked demonstrators at Columbia to ISIS and al-Qaida terrorists.
In an interview, Greenblatt emphasized that his remarks were not intended for the public.
But his intensifying rhetoric toward protesters drove an even deeper wedge between the ADL and other civil rights groups. In the initial aftermath of Oct. 7, many Jewish clergy and other leaders wondered why their interfaith and social justice partners weren’t condemning Hamas more forcefully, while leaders in other communities questioned a perceived lack of sympathy for Palestinian civilians.
Ginna Green, the founder of Horizon Philanthropy, which encourages Jewish donors to support liberal democracy, said she understood the fear that led to this schism between not only the ADL but many other Jewish establishment groups and civil rights groups in recent years — but said it was shortsighted.
“The American Jewish community has never been less safe,” Green said. “We’ve never needed the protection of democracy and coalitions and partners more than right now — so to make this move at a time when nobody is safe unless they’re a straight, white Christian male seems like an absolute abandonment of the principles the ADL was founded on.”
A former senior staff member at the ADL who worked there before and after Oct. 7 said he shared the frustration toward the progressive and human rights communities but thought there was an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail.
Instead, the organization’s approach — including the call to investigate students for ties to Hamas — caused a tonal shift among former allies from, “We don’t want to work with the ADL because we don’t think they care about us,” he said, to “We can’t work with them because they’re a hate organization.”
Greenblatt tests ‘old friendships’
The ADL’s shifting approach to civil rights began around 2017, but the rupture with other groups also grew from a new understanding of where antisemitism was coming from, which Greenblatt began to articulate a few years before Oct. 7.
Early in the Biden administration, Greenblatt argued that a record-shattering spike in antisemitic incidents was being caused not just by the right, which was responsible for most of the physical violence toward Jews, but by people criticizing Israel. “When you have people make wild claims about the Jewish state, make unhinged accusations, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that then people attack Jewish Americans,” he said on PBS News Hour in April 2022.
Just a few weeks later Greenblatt delivered a watershed speech at the ADL’s national leadership summit in which he declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and said the groups promoting it — including Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and the Council on American-Islamic Relations — were the “photo inverse” of violent white supremacists.
“These organizations might not have armed themselves,” Greenblatt said, but “if you demonize another group enough, there are more than a few people out there who will act.”
Greenblatt had spoken out against anti-Zionism for years, but the speech marked a new era in which he would start regularly describing anti-Zionists as posing an equivalent threat to white supremacists.
According to several former employees familiar with the matter, he delivered these remarks over the objection of most of the ADL’s senior leadership team, including Oren Segal, who runs the organization’s Center on Extremism and cautioned that law enforcement might take Greenblatt’s remarks as an excuse to surveil peaceful advocacy groups.
“Oren himself says that he has no recollection of ever having a conversation” in which he raised those concerns, Fabes said.
Greenblatt recognized in his speech that the new direction he was plotting would “fray some old friendships” and “cost us some donations.”
One of those old friendships seemed to fray almost immediately.
Greenblatt’s speech was followed by remarks from Maya Wiley, the incoming CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, one of the country’s oldest coalitions of its kind that includes the ADL, NAACP and ACLU, along with scores of smaller groups.
Wiley had not been warned that Greenblatt would unveil a more aggressive posture toward progressive organizations at the event, and it prompted an immediate challenge for her work keeping a sprawling coalition united despite differences over Israel, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The relationship between Wiley and Greenblatt has continued to deteriorate, sometimes in personal terms, three people familiar with the matter said.
Greenblatt unequivocally denied this. “That’s not true,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for Maya.”
Wiley declined to answer questions about her relationship with Greenblatt.
The ADL was not among the 65 civil rights organizations that signed onto a June statement from the Leadership Conference condemning “antisemitic hate crimes” following the attacks at the Capital Jewish Museum and at a rally in Boulder, Colorado, last spring. Wiley also released a statement last summer defending the National Education Association, a member organization, after Republicans pushed to shut it down over a vote to boycott the ADL.
Several Leadership Conference member organizations also took issue with the ADL before Oct. 7 over a preliminary version of survey results about antisemitism in the African American community that they found oversimplified and offensive. The ADL eventually agreed to delay the survey’s release and modify its presentation. Fabes described the incident as part of the ADL’s belief in “a counsel culture, not a cancel culture.”
Fabes said that Greenblatt has a recurring call with Wiley and that the ADL currently serves on the Leadership Conference’s board and sits on its hate crimes task force. He also said that the ADL continues to work with the NAACP, and that Johnson served as co-chair of its Sports Leadership Council even as he has been absent from recent conferences and called for an arms embargo against Israel.
The NAACP did not respond to questions about the current status of its work with the ADL.
Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, is the co-chair of the hate crimes task force that the ADL sits on, and while she once testified alongside Greenblatt during a 2021 congressional hearing about violent extremism, Berry recently said she was pleased the FBI had decided to end its partnership with the ADL.
The ADL has continued to work closely with two Leadership Conference members: the National Urban League, another Leadership Conference member, whose president spoke at its annual conference last year, and the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Wiley said in a statement to the Forward that, despite various divisions, the Leadership Conference has always sought to maintain a diverse coalition committed to “fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate.”
ADL loses longtime supporters
While the ADL has long faced criticism from progressives — including a campaign to #DropTheADL over its support for Israel — many former employees and board members who are speaking out now were unswayed by these previous critiques.
Tracey Lagbold, who served as leadership chair on the national commission and head of the ADL’s education committee, said that “breaking up with ADL was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my entire life.”
She first got involved with the ADL in 2008 after an acquaintance invited her to an event the organization was hosting. “It was the first time I really heard about civil rights from a Jewish perspective,” she said. “I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know I was looking for that my whole life, but that’s what I’ve been wanting.’”
Lagbold eventually became chair of the ADL’s Florida board and assumed several national roles. She stomached a series of frustrating decisions made by Greenblatt, she said, including shrinking the organization’s education programming focused on combating bias and eliminating the dedicated civil rights team.
But presenting an award to Jared Kushner in early 2024 for his work on the Abraham Accords was the final straw.
Walter Jospin, a longtime ADL donor, was also angered by the award, and said Greenblatt’s decision to give it caught the organization’s then-board chair Ben Sax by surprise. “He told me that the national board was blindsided — Jonathan just did it,” Jospin said. “They didn’t like it.”
Sax did not respond to a request for comment, and Fabes said the organization does not discuss Greenblatt’s interactions with the board.
“The ADL was founded on this mission of doing two things that I thought were inextricable: caring for others and caring for ourselves,” said Lagbold, whose resignation from the ADL has not been previously reported. “I don’t think of them as two things, because they need each other, they inform each other — and it became clear in the last few years that’s not the way the organization is operating anymore.”
Aaron Ahlquist, who ran the ADL’s regional office in New Orleans and eventually became a regional vice president, resigned in July over similar concerns with the organization, according to a copy of his resignation letter obtained by the Forward.
In a scathing critique of the organization’s leadership, Ahlquist wrote that national board chair Nicole Mutchnik had told regional leaders that “our sole focus was on an immediate ROI on our activity and we would be looking [for] short-term results only.”
“This is a false assertion and the characterization of Nicole is inaccurate,” Fabes said.
Ahlquist argued that this made it hard to advocate for investing in civil rights issues or in building coalitions with other minority groups, work that often takes “years or decades to earn our place at the table.”
He said that a more forceful emphasis on defending Israel while pulling back on education programs that focused on protecting all minority groups was marginalizing the organization and allowing longtime opponents of the ADL, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to increase their influence.
“Our move away from our integrated mission has potentially done irreparable harm for ADL in non-Jewish spaces,” Ahlquist wrote.
Greenblatt has framed the ADL’s turn away from working on issues beyond antisemitism as one meant to pair the organization’s limited resources with a growing number of incidents targeting Jews.
“Our core purpose is to protect the Jewish people — not in an esoteric way, not in some attenuated manner, but right here, right now.”
Jonathan GreenblattCEO of the ADL
Fabes noted that the organization tallied the highest number of antisemitic incidents on record in 2019 and then again in 2021 and 2022, and that the synagogue shootings in both Pittsburgh and Poway, California, predated Oct. 7. “The growing crisis underscored our hyperfocus on addressing rising levels of antisemitism,” he said.
But some see this as a false binary.
Lagbold is now a board member at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which has argued that preserving democratic norms helps guarantee Jewish safety, and that trading quick wins — like the deportation of college students who protest Israel in ways that some Jews find offensive — in exchange for the erosion of due process is a bad deal. “It’s impossible to separate these issues,” Amy Spitalnick, JCPA’s CEO, said in a text message.
Greenblatt understands this position, and even articulated it in his 2022 book, It Could Happen Here, in which he wrote that “the founders of ADL believed in the simple but powerful premise that America could not be safe for its Jews unless it was safe for all its people.”
Steven Ludwig, a longtime regional board member in Philadelphia, seized on Greenblatt’s previous writing in his resignation letter over the summer.
“Did you mean it when you wrote … ‘There’s still time to stand up for the peaceful, democratic society we want to gift to our children and grandchildren,’” Ludwig asked. “If so, why are you not standing up now?”
In an interview, Greenblatt described the ADL as stepping into a more service-oriented role amid a “tsunami” of antisemitism. “When Jewish people find their homes or their businesses defaced,” he said, “when Jewish professionals are being boycotted from their lines of work, when Jewish members of unions are being harassed — we stand up for them.”
The ADL has responded to these issues with advocacy and also, increasingly, with practical tools, including several helplines that field complaints of discrimination in K-12 schools and on college campuses, which have yielded hundreds of reports and in some cases federal complaints or lawsuits on behalf of callers. Greenblatt said high-minded advocacy on behalf of civil rights or democratic norms was too abstract for the current moment.
“One could make the argument that protecting democracy protects the Jews,” he said. “But our core purpose is to protect the Jewish people — not in an esoteric way, not in some attenuated manner, but right here, right now.”
And, he added, all the work the ADL is doing defending Jews against antisemitism?
“That’s civil rights work.”
The post The ADL’s turn away from civil rights was years in the making — Oct. 7 accelerated it appeared first on The Forward.
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One of Dachau’s last living liberators still has somewhere to be
ATLANTA — Hilbert “Hibby” Margol wears two watches.
It is the kind of detail that seems small until you can’t stop noticing it. One watch is ordinary. It has hands, numbers, the plain mechanics of telling time. The other is a Life Alert, the sort of device sold to people who live alone, or to the people who love them and can’t stand the thought of them living alone.
Together the two watches say something about a man before he’s said a word himself: that he has outlived the need for almost everything, except the people determined to make sure he’s still here.
He is 102. He lives by himself in the same two-story house in suburban Atlanta he shared with his wife of 77 years, Betty Ann, who died at 96 last September. The house still carries the warmth of her memory. Family photographs cover every surface that will hold them: the mantel, the end tables, the walls, climbing toward the ceiling like something that grew there on its own.
There will soon be one more: Hibby’s fourth great-granddaughter, Callie Rose, was born two weeks ago.
A framed photograph of French President Emmanuel Macron pinning the Legion d’Honneur to Margol’s chest — taken in 2024, when Margol was one of dozens of American veterans Delta Airlines chartered to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day — leans against the fireplace, not yet hung, as if the house has simply run out of room to keep up with the life still happening inside it.
The coffee table has disappeared beneath medals and ephemera and the accumulated evidence of a hundred years, and it occurs to you, sitting across from him, that you are not in the home of a man winding down. You are in the home of a man still arriving.
His iPhone buzzed. Then again. He glanced at it and rolled his eyes.
“That’s my daughter,” he said. “Checking on me.”
His daughter is, herself, a senior citizen. The phone had no case — hadn’t needed one, he doesn’t drop things — which felt like its own kind of answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked: What does it look like to move through a century without ever quite losing your grip?
On the day I visited this June, he had just returned from yet another trip to Normandy, marking another anniversary of a war he’d fought in as a young man and had spent most of the rest of his life not talking about. A week before that, the Atlanta Braves had honored him on the field on Memorial Day for the second year in a row.
For six decades, Margol said almost nothing about what he had seen at the end of that war — not to his wife, not to his three children, not to anyone. And then, in his 80s, he started to talk about it, and he has not really stopped since.
Margol is sharing his experience as one of a dwindling number of U.S. Army veterans alive today who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp.
Inside the camp
He and his identical twin brother, Howard — younger by ten minutes — served together in the war. That alone took some doing: the military generally kept siblings apart, a policy hardened after five Sullivan brothers died together when their ship sank in 1942. (It’s loosely the premise behind Saving Private Ryan.) It took a letter from the Margols’ mother to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to get an exception made.
On the morning of April 29, 1945, the brothers were on the outskirts of Munich when they caught a strange, powerful smell drifting out of the woods.
Howard was the one who placed it. It reminded him of an unpleasant odor he would sometimes catch a whiff of in their mother’s kosher kitchen back home in Jacksonville, Florida — the way she would hold a freshly killed chicken over the gas flame of the stove to singe off the last of its pin feathers. Only this stench was much, much stronger.
The brothers went to find the source. What they came to first was a line of boxcars. The first one they reached had its sliding door open. A dead man’s leg was dangling out of it. They opened the cars and found them packed with dead bodies in striped prisoner uniforms “like sardines,” Hibby would say.
They had a small camera, liberated from a dead German officer a few weeks earlier, and they used it to take a photograph of one of the cars — a copy of which hangs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
They pressed further into the woods and came out at another clearing. Above the entrance was a sign: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work will set you free.
They had found Dachau.
Beyond the gate was a wide-open yard ringed by low barracks buildings — and, in several places, bodies stacked the way you’d stack cordwood. The arrangement of them is the part that refused to make sense. Somebody had piled them, neatly, as routine.
Neither brother had ever seen anything like it. “We didn’t understand what we were looking at,” Margol said. “It sort of reminded us of a movie set.”
They learned only later that the camp’s ovens had run out of coal months earlier, and without coal, there was no way to cremate the bodies. So the corpses had simply been left where they lay.
It took a moment to register that not everyone in the yard was dead. Off to one side, against a barracks wall, were four or five prisoners — some squatting, some just standing, none of them well. But alive.
The camp’s roughly 32,000 prisoners walked free later that same day, once a Swiss Red Cross negotiator talked the SS commander into a peaceful surrender rather than a last stand.
Years later, at a visit to mark the liberation’s 70th anniversary, an elderly survivor found Margol after a memorial service. She told him she’d been too sick with typhus that morning to understand what was happening around her. Then she leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks. “If you guys were two or three days later,” she told him, “I wouldn’t have made it.”
One family, two branches
I’ve spent much of the past year following a different story: a family of cattle farmers in rural Illinois, building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield out of the remains of closing synagogues — a Torah rescued from one congregation, an ark from another, stained-glass windows carried out of buildings that no longer exist. The building will also include a museum of tolerance, sharing the stories of the family’s ancestors — some who died in concentration camps, others who survived by being hidden in the homes of Christian families.
The family is named Jakobs. You’ve met the 41-year-old farmer, Nik, in stories I’ve written about the Pennsylvania synagogue he dismantled, piece by piece, to save it; the groundbreaking of the new one rising in a field; and the family’s roots in the Netherlands, where his grandmother, Edith, spent nearly three years hidden in a farmhouse. This spring, I flew with the family to Stadskanaal, the small Dutch town that was her family’s refuge, to watch a local theater troupe stage a play about her survival.
It was in the Netherlands, reporting Jakobs’ story, that he first mentioned a name: Hibby. Jakob’s brother Bryce who left the farm for a career of his own, is married to one of Margol’s granddaughters. Margol’s great-granddaughters carry both halves of this history. On one side: relatives murdered in the Holocaust, and ancestors who survived it in hiding. On the other: a soldier who helped liberate one of the camps.
I asked Margol what he made of it. He didn’t reach for anything grand. “Well,” he said, “it’s quite a story.”
The silence
For decades, Margol said almost nothing about Dachau to his family. “We had written letters,” he said of the war years. “We figured that was sufficient.”
Life moved on. Margol built a business selling furniture and appliances. He raised a family. The war became something that had happened to a younger man.
Then came an invitation.
In 2012, at 88, Margol joined about a dozen other American liberators on the International March of the Living, traveling to Poland with Holocaust survivors and thousands of Jewish teenagers. For the first time since the war, he wasn’t simply remembering what he’d witnessed. He was walking beside people whose lives had continued because soldiers like him had arrived when they did.
“It was such an emotional experience,” he later recalled of walking from Auschwitz to Birkenau, “that when I got home I said, now I have to start talking about it.”
His first talk was at the public library near his home. More than 90 people showed up, on word of mouth alone. Then came another invitation. And another. Synagogues. Churches. High schools. A World War II roundtable. Adult education classes at Emory University. He stopped counting after 200 presentations. Today, he estimates he’s given close to 300.
But talking about Dachau and reliving it are not the same thing. Years ago, touring the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with a small group, he had to walk through a boxcar on exhibit to continue the tour — cleaner and newer-looking than the one he remembered, but a boxcar all the same. “Emotionally,” he said, “I broke down.”
For most of his life, Margol had carried the story alone. Now he worried what would happen if no one carried it after him.
In September, Margol is returning to Germany with his son Jerry, 74 — this trip courtesy of the Best Defense Foundation, the veterans organization that has taken the two of them to battlefields around Europe, and which is now making a documentary about Margol and another veteran. The itinerary is still coming together, but it includes a stop that father and son have made together twice before: Dachau.
The next generation
Long before Margol began speaking publicly about the Holocaust, he had already spent years building Jewish life closer to home.
Rabbi Mark Zimmerman saw it firsthand. Zimmerman retired this summer after leading Congregation Beth Shalom in Atlanta for 38 years. He met Margol in 1988, when the rabbi arrived and Margol was, as he put it, “a young man of sixty-something.”
“He still comes to synagogue,” Zimmerman said. “He’s still sharp as a tack.”
But what Zimmerman remembers most isn’t Margol’s longevity. It’s what he built.
In the late 1990s, Beth Shalom needed an educational wing. Before the congregation had raised a dollar toward the project, Margol quietly wrote a $100,000 check so the synagogue could hire a professional fundraiser and launch the campaign. He and fellow congregant Stephen Klein later donated roughly $350,000 each to complete the building.
Today the Klein-Margol Educational Wing houses the congregation’s preschool, administrative offices, chapel, library and youth lounge.
“In many ways,” Zimmerman said, “I owe my staying at Beth Shalom to Hibby and his vision. We still have a tremendous preschool because of that original vision.”
Only years later did Zimmerman learn another part of Margol’s legacy, about liberating Dachau. Margol recently gave Zimmerman a copy of the memoir he and his son self-published, becoming one of the congregation’s living links to the Holocaust.
“His firsthand account is such a rare commodity,” Zimmerman said, “in a world where primary witnesses, for the most part, are dying out.”
Nearly 800 miles away, in Sterling, Illinois, the other side of Margol’s family is at work on a version of the same project. Jakobs is building a synagogue, with a museum inside so his grandmother’s story outlives her. Margol has already seen how it turns out — his wing has held preschoolers for a quarter century. Jakobs broke ground this spring.
A hat, a promise
I asked Margol if I could take his picture before I left. “Let me get my baseball hat,” he said, and disappeared into another part of the house.
It’s the one with the patch of the 42nd Infantry Division — the Rainbow Division, one of the liberating forces at Dachau. The nickname dates to 1917, coined by a young Col. Douglas MacArthur because the division’s ranks were drawn from National Guard units in 27 different states.
Room by room, the 102-year-old wandered through his home looking for the hat. He checked the kitchen. He looked at the hook by the door, where another cap was hanging, then shook his head and kept going.
There was something almost unbearably ordinary about it, set against everything he’d just spent hours telling me. The boxcars. The smell. The gate. And now: Where did I put that hat?
He found it, and came back into the room wearing it — the same hat, more or less, that has sat on his head in front of hundreds of audiences by now. He still says yes to the invitations. He still boards planes to Europe. When I asked what all of it was for, he didn’t hesitate.
“I hope and pray,” he said, “that the offspring of all the Holocaust survivors outlive the offspring of the deniers.”
The Holy Ground reporting project is made possible with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.
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250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.
When I moved from Belgium to the United States for graduate school in the early 2000s, international-student orientation warned me about three areas in which I would experience culture shock: doctors, dating, and food. They were right: I am still looking for good chocolate. But what nobody mentioned was that culture shock can also work in the other direction: you can encounter something so different in a good way that it, too, takes time to understand. For me, that was American Jewish life.
The Judaism I had grown up with in Belgium was timid and a little subdued; it felt to me as though it did not quite dare to put down roots or imagine itself as fully Belgian. American Judaism bewildered me at first by its sheer pluralism: so many denominations, and within them so many people experimenting with what it meant to be and do Jewish in this country and in this world.
Even more surprising was its creativity — the music, the intellectual life, the social activism, the constant invention of new institutions, rituals and communities. It was also loud and argumentative. American Jews tangled about Judaism, politics, Zionism and one another. The old story about two Jews having three opinions was not a joke here but a reality.
I loved it. Not because I agreed with all of it — I certainly did not — but because even the arguing seemed to me evidence that American Jews did not feel they had to hide or be discreet, not even about their disagreements.
Of course, Jewish success in the United States did not mean that America offered the same possibilities to everyone. Jewish integration took place in a country whose deepest structures of exclusion targeted Black Americans. That inequality is part of the American Jewish story and complicates any account of its success.Nor was the American Jewish experience free of prejudice: American Jews encountered social ostracism, quotas in higher education, exclusion from neighborhoods and country clubs, and violence.
And yet, over 250 years, Jews in the United States became deeply woven into the political, cultural and civic life of the country. How the encounter between Jewish traditions brought from many parts of the world and the particular freedoms, tensions and possibilities of American life produced a distinctively American form of Judaism is a question that has stayed with me ever since, and America’s 250th anniversary seems like a good moment to return to it.
I think part of the answer lies in the American idea of hyphenated identities. In a country of immigrants from many parts of the world, the hyphen suggested a social architecture, albeit imperfect, that allowed for multiple communities to coexist within a larger whole. By contrast the Europe in which I grew up remained more attached to myths of national homogeneity that made Jewish belonging harder.
But today, across the political spectrum, people are asking what America as an idea and a national community stands for. Historically, such moments have often made Jews a test case for the limits of inclusion. To those who imagine the nation as a homogenous family, Jews are strangers; to those who imagine it as a universal community, Jews often seem too particularistic.
Amid rising antisemitism, the aftermath of Oct. 7, turmoil on university campuses and intense political polarization, it is not surprising then that many American Jews are feeling anxious about the future. The pessimists believe something fundamental is broken and wonder whether it is time to keep a packed suitcase ready. The optimists insist that America remains different, even exceptional, and that American institutions and laws are strong. This too shall pass, they say.
As a historian, I am skeptical of both positions. The past is full of moments that look inevitable in retrospect because, once we know what happened, it becomes harder to imagine other outcomes. But in the moment, multiple futures are always possible. History cannot tell us which one will become ours, but it can broaden the range of possibilities we are able to see.
That is one reason I created a new public course at Brandeis this fall, America and Its Jews at 250. I wanted to see what becomes visible when the questions troubling American Jews today are placed against that much longer historical horizon. Over the course of the semester, 28 scholars and public thinkers will examine the relationship between Jews and America from the colonial period to the present. At a moment when so much attention is understandably focused on Israel, I also wanted us to look more closely at the American Jewish experience and what Jews built here.
Doing this at Brandeis is especially meaningful. Many of America’s oldest and most influential universities grew out of Christian religious communities. Brandeis represented something different: the possibility that a university could be rooted in American Jewish life while being as intellectually ambitious and universal as any of them. A course about America and its Jews belongs in that tradition because these are not two histories that happened in parallel; they are intertwined.
Time has cured most of my culture shock, but I have not forgotten the surprise I felt 26 years ago at the vibrancy and pluralism of American Jewish life. Much of our discussions, in this anniversary year, focus on the country’s uneven path toward more justice and equality, and rightly so. But that should not obscure the immense creativity that this messy and contested American experiment made possible. American Jews embraced its possibilities with a vitality that produced forms of Judaism few of their forebears would have recognized, yet that remain deeply connected to what came before. That dynamism also produced disagreements and fragmentation, and anxiety about what still holds Jews together.
Culture and creativity depend on the soil in which they develop. Protecting American jewish life therefore means not only to fight for Jews and Judaism, but also for the pluralistic republic that allowed them to flourish. Perhaps one day historians will give this entanglement of Judaism and America a name. But for now it remains unnamed because it is still being made, and because its future, I hope, is still in our hands.
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El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining issue of his campaign in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. On Sunday, as the party’s nominee, El-Sayed explained why he supported sending American military aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia but opposes sending aid to Israel as it fights Hamas and other armed groups in the region.
“In Ukraine, you’re talking about attacks from a leader of a neighboring sovereign country, who clearly violated international law in attempting to breach the sovereignty of the Ukrainian public,” El-Sayed said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That is conditional on that circumstance.”
As for Israel, he argued, the United States has “been offering unconditional foreign military aid to Israel independent of the circumstances for years and years and years.”
The distinction comes as El-Sayed tries to draw a clearer line around his position on Israel aid as he moves into the general election, following a narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens, who was backed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel Jewish groups.
Since his primary win, El-Sayed said in media appearances that his opposition to unconditional military aid — including funding to the Iron Dome defense system — goes beyond Israel. He pointed to Egypt, where his parents were born, as well as to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, saying those U.S. allies should not receive unconditional American military support either.
“It’s not just Israel,” El-Sayed said, adding, “It’s about the conditions.”
When pressed on whether there was any scenario in which he would support military aid to Israel, El-Sayed said he could consider supporting it if Israelis and Palestinians reached an agreement that guaranteed, as he described it, the “Palestinian people and Jewish Israeli people” equal rights to “peace, dignity, and self-determination.” During the primary, El-Sayed stopped short of explicitly backing a two-state solution.
The Jewish voter test
El-Sayed’s position on Israel is becoming a test of whether he can unite Democrats for the general election in one of the nation’s most important swing states. Many Jewish Democrats remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty” — even as the party needs their support to defeat Republican Mike Rogers and improve its chances of winning back the Senate.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, which backed Stevens and said its volunteers made nearly 100,000 calls on her behalf, said that the “razor-thin margin” in El-Sayed’s victory is evidence that pro-Israel Democrats remain an important electorate within the party.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s chief executive and a Michigan native, said in a Substack post Friday that Jewish Democrats are standing “on a political fault line” after El-Sayed’s victory. “Jewish voters’ concern with El-Sayed and other far-left candidates is rooted in concern for our safety and security given rising antisemitism and antisemitic violence, including when Jews are blamed for the actions of Israel,” she wrote.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan, but they could still prove decisive in a close race. Michigan has been decided by narrow margins in recent elections: Donald Trump won the state in 2016, Joe Biden flipped it in 2020, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate race in 2024 even as Trump carried the state in the presidential race.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, which spent more than $30 million in the primary, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Rogers. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street — a progressive alternative to AIPAC — urged El-Sayed to take a different approach to the Jewish voters who opposed him. Ben-Ami wrote in a Substack post that El-Sayed should spend significant time listening to Jewish Michiganders and their concerns about vulnerability and antisemitism, while making clear “in words and in actions” that Jews who care deeply about Israel have a place in his coalition.
‘I love and revere Judaism’
In the Sunday interview, El-Sayed sought to reassure Jewish voters who remain skeptical of him.
Asked to respond to President Donald Trump’s comments that El-Sayed “hates” Israel and Jewish people “with a passion that burns in his heart,” El-Sayed said, “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people. I believe they’re a light unto the world.”
El-Sayed recalled growing up in Bloomfield Hills, a metro Detroit community with a large Jewish population, and being invited to Passover Seders, synagogues and bar and bat mitzvahs. “I’m really honored for what I learned and got to share with my Jewish sisters and brothers,” he said. “But they are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.”
The candidate also disavowed some remarks by Hasan Piker, the popular pundit and streamer who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail. El-Sayed said Piker’s statement that “America deserved 9/11” was “dumb,” though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
The test in the coming months is whether El-Sayed can win over skeptical Jewish and moderate Democrats without moderating his views on Israel or losing the progressive and pro-Palestinian voters who propelled him to victory.
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