The previous prime litigation volunteer on the Anti-Defamation League is making public his scorching resignation letter from the group, within the newest signal of Jewish discontent over the group’s shifts throughout the second Trump administration.
Joe Berman, who chaired the ADL’s Nationwide Authorized Affairs Committee from 2018 to 2022 and who volunteered in different capacities till this yr, stated in an interview he left as a result of the commemorated civil rights group had grow to be a “helpful fool” for the Trump administration by failing to reply aggressively to antisemitism on the best.
“Whether or not deliberately or ignorantly, ADL is offering cowl to individuals who intend nice hurt to our nation,” Berman stated in his letter resigning from two nationwide and one regional management our bodies. Berman despatched the letter in March and is making it public now for the primary time by means of the Jewish Telegraphic Company.
Voicing a perspective that’s widespread amongst liberal opponents of Trump, Berman argued that the Trump administration has used the pretext of alleged antisemitism to impose penalties on universities and arrest non-citizens.
“Jews and the combat towards antisemitism are being cynically used to advance an authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda,” he wrote. “For ADL’s nationwide management to not acknowledge these clear and current risks is inexplicable.”
Berman added, ”Make no mistake: this is not going to finish properly, particularly for Jewish People.”
In a response to Berman’s letter, an ADL spokesperson reiterated the argument that CEO Jonathan Greenblatt specified by a latest op-ed: that in a time of dramatically elevated antisemitism, shifting focus and assets away from different societal challenges is just applicable.
“The surprising rise of antisemitic violence in recent times — from Pittsburgh to Poway, from Boulder to Washington, D.C. — has required us to accentuate our deal with defending the Jewish folks,” the spokesperson stated. “The Jewish group is going through an ‘oxygen masks second.’ We wouldn’t have limitless assets, and we should make selections about priorities. Whereas we cheer on these working to guard civil rights for different teams, we’re focusing our time, vitality, and cash on the combat towards antisemitism.”
The ADL is the most important advocacy group by far on the earth devoted to preventing antisemitism. Its statistics are extensively cited, and its operations embody not solely advocacy and litigation however monitoring extremism and advancing analysis concerning the causes of antisemitism.
Whereas it enjoys broad help within the Jewish group, the ADL has many critics on each the left and proper. Berman’s broadside is the most recent expression of unhappiness with the basic adjustments beneath Greenblatt, beneath whose management the group’s focus has narrowed to only preventing antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Amongst different shifts roiling Berman and different onetime supporters of the group are the shuttering this yr of a worthwhile anti-bigotry coaching program, “World of Distinction,” the scrubbing from its web sites of references to its civil rights advocacy, and the reshaping of its storied civil rights litigation unit into one concentrating on solely antisemitism. They are saying the group has given up its alliances with different teams — and with it its standing within the civil rights house.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks on the group’s 2018 Nationwide Management Summit in Washington, D.C. (Michael Brochstein/SOPA Pictures/LightRocket through Getty Pictures)
“We stood up for the LGBTQ group, for the African American group, for immigrants, and it was an actual core a part of our mission,” stated Berman, who additionally served from 2020 to 2023 because the chairman of the ADL’s New England regional board. “And our [legal] briefs have been simply unbelievable. And we’d usually do it in coalition with different civil rights teams, and that’s all gone. That respect that we had is simply fully gone.”
Berman will not be the primary ADL affiliate to resign in frustration this yr over the adjustments: The Ahead in June reported an equally scathing resignation letter by Steven Ludwig, a member of the Philadelphia regional board.
Extra not too long ago, JTA spoke to 11 former staffers, contractors and lay leaders or volunteers for the ADL, some who’re able to go on the document for the primary time. All of them say that they had for years been discomfited by the group’s shift away from its broad civil rights mission, a change that accelerated after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas’ assault on Israel and the next explosion of antisemitism spurred Greenblatt to brazenly declare a narrowed focus.
Stacy Burdett, who served because the Washington-based vice chairman of presidency relations for the ADL from 1993 to 2017, wouldn’t touch upon the group’s trajectory, however she stated that the group’s mission had lengthy been twofold — and that each prongs served American Jews.
“Since Lincoln’s administration, American Jewish advocacy has been rooted in the concept that defending Jewish rights and all civil rights was each a strategic and ethical crucial,” she stated in an e-mail. “Separating them harms each of these aims. The surge of civil rights advocacy from rabbis and Jews everywhere in the nation belies the notion that they’ve to decide on. To them, the 2 are inextricable.”
Greenblatt initially embraced that outlook when he succeeded Abraham Foxman because the ADL’s CEO in 2015, writing in a 2017 coffee-table guide, “The Good Combat,” that the century-old group had widened its purview past antisemitism quickly after its founding.
However just a few years into his tenure, individuals who labored on the group recall, cracks started exhibiting.
Jason Sirois, who was from 2018 to 2021 ADL’s nationwide director of education schemes, stated he tracked with dismay the diminishment of the ADL’s flagship anti-bigotry coaching applications for colleges, often called World of Distinction, which was distinctive in emphasizing holistic anti-bigotry coaching, versus emphasizing the concentrating on of a single weak inhabitants. ADL shuttered this system earlier this yr, a growth first reported by the left-wing journal Jewish Currents.
“In all the analysis they did, one of many issues they discovered is a majority of individuals have been invested in ADL due to training, and but it at all times felt very very similar to it was taken without any consideration,” he stated in an interview. “It was not invested in despite the fact that we have been revenue-generating and coated our personal bills.”
The ADL spokesperson stated training was nonetheless a key a part of ADL’s mission, though he emphasised training to counter antisemitism, versus the holistic method taken by World of Distinction.
“The continued progress of our training work is important, delivers interventions on preventing antisemitism, educating on the Holocaust, and addressing bias in colleges in a method that colleges need, and is scalable,” the spokesperson stated, “which means we are able to attain extra college students, educators and colleges than ever earlier than as faculty and Okay-12 college students and educators face an unrelenting barrage of antisemitic within the classroom and on campus.”
Melanie Robbins, who labored within the New York and New Jersey regional places of work from 2016 to 2019, finally rising to deputy director, recalled what she characterised as a milestone in Greenblatt’s shift. She stated he appeared livid after the ADL was lacerated from the best when it opposed President Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Courtroom in 2018, citing his document on reproductive rights. One critique, as outlined by the conservative Jewish commentator Liel Leibovitz within the Wall Avenue Journal on the time, was that the ADL was ceding its mission of defending Jews “by weighing in on issues far faraway from its conventional mandate.”
The ADL as a matter after all filed amicus briefs on abortion rights instances. “ADL has filed amicus briefs in each main Supreme Courtroom case since Roe supporting reproductive freedom and opposing efforts to curtail abortion rights,” the group stated in 2019, explaining why it regarded defending abortion as a matter of discrimination and curbing hate.
After the op-ed, Greenblatt responded strongly, recalled Robbins. She stated he erupted at a gathering with the regional workplace’s government board. “Jonathan got here and he was very indignant. He stated girls’s points usually are not core points,” she stated in an interview. She stated he was yelling. One other former staffer recalled the same encounter with Greenblatt concerning the ADL’s Kavanaugh assertion.
The ADL spokesperson didn’t deny the account, however stated reproductive rights have been by no means entrance and heart for the group and the Kavanaugh affirmation had no impact on the group’s coverage.
“Whereas ADL has a coverage place on Reproductive Rights, ADL will not be and has by no means been a reproductive rights group,” the spokesperson stated. “Now we have at all times let different organizations lead on this situation since they’re much better outfitted, educated, and targeted on this situation.”
In the meantime, the disbanding of the ADL’s Civil Rights Regulation crew, together with the departure within the first years of this decade of legal professionals like Michael Lieberman, who was instrumental within the passage of federal hate crime legal guidelines, has alarmed a few of the legal professionals who as soon as contributed briefs pro-bono. (Lieberman declined a request for remark.) They are saying the group has erased their work from a serious search engine for amicus briefs, which not yields outcomes for ADL briefs, although many might be discovered elsewhere on-line.
ADL’s litigation now emphasizes antisemitism, replicating the mission of different teams such because the Brandeis Heart.
The associated fee to Jews of the adjustments is steep, Berman stated.
“There actually isn’t one other Jewish group that has the mission that we did. Now it appears as if the Jews are separate from all of that. And that’s to our detriment,” he stated.
Berman added, “Whenever you don’t work on with different teams, you then’re not going to have these different teams come into your protection. And that was the entire foundation. It’s gone now.”
For him, the purpose of no return got here earlier this yr when the ADL endorsed immigration authorities’ arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a everlasting resident who was an organizer of anti-Israel protests at Columbia College.
“We recognize the Trump Administration’s broad, daring set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism — and this motion additional illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators answerable for their actions,” the ADL stated on the time of the arrest in March.
Berman seen the response as a transparent compromise on core values that might finally hurt Jews. Khalil’s “detention is a transparent violation of the Structure,” he wrote in his resignation letter including that Khalil’s views have been “disgraceful” however protected speech. “For ADL to not acknowledge these fundamental and apparent factors is baffling.”
Extra not too long ago, the ADL has raised eyebrows by not commenting on subjects that will have drawn its censure up to now, together with, notably, Trump’s latest assaults on Somalis in Minnesota.
“The present pivot is to solely combat antisemitism, to desert allyship and to stay silent when different minorities are focused,” Ludwig stated in a textual content. “If it solely issues now to ADL that Jews are secure and to be silent when many others usually are not, that’s at finest shortsighted.”
Practically 9 months after resigning, Berman, who’s the final counsel of the Massachusetts Supreme Courtroom Board of Bar Overseers, stated he nonetheless feels ache over having felt compelled to take action.
“ADL has been a giant a part of my life for the reason that mid-Nineteen Nineties, so it was actually troublesome for me to depart,” he stated. “One of many issues that I actually cherished was the twin mission, the safety of Jews, but in addition development of civil rights, and the way these two have been symbiotic. You actually can’t have one with out the opposite.”
