The mainstream media is finally asking some tough questions about the Anti-Defamation League

Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is frequently interviewed by members of the mainstream media.

Usually, it’s to sound the alarm over domestic antisemitism. In the ADL’s world, the U.S. Jewish population is perpetually under threat because the organization openly conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism. In their reports, a person defacing a synagogue with a swastika is treated the same way as a student leading a chant in support of Palestine.

“Anti-Zionism as an ideology is rooted in rage,” Greenblatt told the ADL’s annual leadership summit in 2022. “It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people, a concept as alien to the modern discourse as white supremacy. It requires a willful denial of even a superficial history of Judaism and the vast history of the Jewish people. And, when an idea is born out of such shocking intolerance, it leads to, well, shocking acts.”

That same year, the ADL claimed that antisemitic incidents had increased by 500% over the previous decade.

After that audit, Greenblatt made his usual tour of the cable news circuit, facing absolutely no pushback from a single anchor about the organization’s methodology for measuring antisemitism.

“I..was struck by reading this report about the 41% increase of antisemitic activity reported on college and university campuses,” PBS Newshour host Geoff Bennett told Greenblatt during his appearance on the program. “And doing more reading about it what I learned is that Jewish students often say that harassment is often compounded when criticism of Israel arises. Tell me more about that.”

Greenblatt interviews have largely continued in the same vein, but the second Trump administration has occasionally prompted a follow-up question or two.

Many view the ADL as a civil rights organization, so it’s natural that Greenblatt would occasionally be asked about, say, the crackdowns on peaceful protest or students being kidnapped by the state over their political beliefs.

Earlier this year, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Greenblatt about ICE abducting students off the street and he essentially told her he didn’t care.

“Look, at the ADL, it’s our job to protect the Jewish people,” Greenblatt explained. We’re not sort of public defenders for some of the Hamasniks on these college campuses, and I don’t want to be and I think I really need to say that.

“You take Mahmoud Khalil, who is one of the ringleaders at Columbia,” he continued. “Based on his conduct, we thought he was a very problematic individual. I don’t know if he lied on his visa application or anything like that. But on his conduct, not his speech, the challenge comes when the administration doesn’t substantiate or clarify the specific of the charges. So that’s where this due process thing comes into the works. Now again, it’s not my job at the ADL to find due process for of these young people.”

In addition to shrugging off Trump’s blatant violations of the Constitution, Greenblatt has praised the administration for pulling funding from universities over alleged antisemitism.

Positions like these have led to a full-on “crisis” at the ADL, the details of which are documented in a New York Magazine article by Noah Shachtman.

Shachtman’s overall narrative isn’t exactly compelling. He imagines the ADL to be a previously noble civil rights organization that “used to fight for justice for all” before succumbing to Greenblatt’s delusions. In actuality, the ADL has been smearing activists, aligning with cops, and targeting Palestinians from its inception.

However, Shachtman makes it clear that the ADL’s current positions are alienating former supporters.

The journalist spoke with 40 people connected to the group, and 17 of them said they’ve left or cut ties with the organization. Several longtime donors say they’ve stopped giving the ADL money.

The internal blowback over Greenblatt’s position on Khalil was “nuclear,” and the CEO had to write a letter to regional leaders in an effort to smooth things over.

This is all prelude to the New York Time’s recent interview of Greenblatt by reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

When asked about the New York Magazine profile, Greenblatt dismissed it for relying “on vague anonymous sources.”

Garcia-Navarro pressed Greenblatt on his contention that anti-Zionism is antisemitic.

“I think the challenge is if someone defines their view of anti-Zionism in a way that allows for Jews to exist in a state of Israel but that grants Palestinians rights, but you’re seeing that as antisemitic, people don’t feel like they have the space to have a different view without being tagged with something that is pretty serious,” she explained.

Greenblatt responded by suggesting that all anti-Zionists are connected to murder.

“I can appreciate that for some people, this idea is an abstraction,” he said. “Oh, anti-Zionism, it means such and such to me. I get that. But let me tell you what anti-Zionism doesn’t mean to me but what it results in: It’s a lunatic trying to burn down the governor’s mansion with his family sleeping in it because of his, quote, position on Palestine. It is, again, firebombing elderly people because you want to ‘end all Zionists.'”

After Greenblatt said he didn’t believe Israel was committing a genocide, Garcia-Navarro read him its definition.

It turns out that head of the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t actually know what genocide is.

“It’s a U.N., legal definition, and it says, ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” Garcia-Navarro explained.

“So in fairness, I don’t have that definition in front of me, and I haven’t read it like you have before this, but what I’ll simply say is that I don’t believe the Israeli government is committing genocide,” responded Greenblatt. “I don’t think they are intentionally trying to destroy or annihilate a group of people.”

It’s refreshing to see Greenblatt on the defensive, after years of nothing but softball questions from the press, but this development did not occur in a vacuum.

The New York Times interview comes shortly after the New York Magazine article and the July National Education Association (NEA) vote that saw educators choose to sever ties with the ADL. For years, activists, like the Drop the ADL coalition, have been pressuring progressive organizations to sever ties with the group.

We can probably count on many outlets continuing to embrace the ADL, but something is undoubtedly shifting.