By Yaakov Menken

(March 15, 2024 / The Daily Signal) For over a century, the Anti-Defamation League has enjoyed a reputation as the preeminent Jewish organization combating antisemitism and all forms of hate. Its acronym, ADL, has “household name” status—and not just in Jewish homes. This makes its current penchant for partisanship extraordinarily dangerous for, and beyond, the Jewish community.

Last December, Senate Republicans learned that a Joe Biden nominee for a lifetime judicial appointment, Adeel Mangi, was previously a board member and generous supporter of the antisemitic Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School. At his confirmation hearing, they questioned Mangi about his alarming affiliation with that center and his knowledge of its repugnant activities. Just last week, proof emerged that Mangi had worked closely with the center’s director and others with ties to antisemitism and terror.

Yet rather than applaud the senators’ concern, the ADL stunningly accused them of bigotry. It decried supposed “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment” of Mangi that appeared to be “motivated by bias towards his religion”—Islam. Mangi’s faith and ethnicity were never mentioned in the questions, in contrast to the activities and ideology of the center.

For daring to question a nominee’s association with anti-Jewish bias, the ADL accused Republican senators of anti-Muslim bias. One could hardly imagine a more outrageous betrayal of the ADL’s historic mission.

Yet this was no rare instance of the ADL leveling a politically charged but fundamentally wrong indictment. Rather, sectarianism permeates the organization, especially since Jonathan Greenblatt left the Obama Administration to become its CEO in 2015.

Greenblatt’s background is notably lacking in an advanced Jewish education, specifically regarding how Judaism itself has, for millennia, consistently identified antisemitism, the world’s “longest hatred,” using a neutral yardstick. He has surrounded himself with like-minded progressives, such that today’s ADL views antisemitism, like everything else, through a partisan lens.