In this year’s Democratic primary elections, the heavily funded American Israel Public Affairs Committee has emerged as the heaviest conservative donor and will likely remain so in the general elections to follow. But the role and the underlying politics of AIPAC were established generations ago by the Anti-Defamation League. The difference between the two groups is a matter of tactics and scale.
Emmaia Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, has made an immense contribution to our understanding of the ideology shared by these entities. The details of the Anti-Defamation League’s role in advancing this agenda and its racial aspects have never been documented so thoroughly or explained so carefully as in her recently published book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State.
In recent decades, Gelman notes, the ADL has sought to harden elite and popular opposition to popular left-of-center movements and thereby “strengthen systems of capital, policing, and political culture primarily in support of the U.S. and Israeli states and their imperial expansion.” The ADL’s opposition to movements from below—especially those linked to racial issues—fits with its work supporting movements from above.
How did this happen? Gelman’s answer relates ADL’s own history to the interests of the Jewish business class and its project of building prestige and respectability through advocacy of Jewish nationalism and its glittering presence in large-scale public extravaganzas.
Founded in 1913, the emerging ADL brought together, socially and personally, a largely German American Jewish elite with its better connected and more prestigious Gentile counterparts. These Jewish leaders set out to police the habits and reputation of their more recently arrived, less-educated brethren of Eastern European backgrounds.
The famed role and symbolic significance of “card calling”—in which individual attendees to major events were called on to announce the amount of their financial contribution and urged to give more—began early and remains even now in subtler forms. These strategies, Gelman notes, “tapped the social anxieties of the newly wealthy seeking to secure their class status,” practically without pain, by delivering tax deductions for charitable donations.
By the 1960s, the prestige and connections exceeded announced purposes. By the 1970s, the rise of feminism prompted the ADL to offer especially generous wealthy women the literal symbol of their acquired financial independence: a golden pin.
Meanwhile, the attachment of the ADL to the Jewish state produced a conundrum. Liberalism, in the Cold War era, became a driving cause of advancing individual rights, including the rights of racial minorities, while militantly opposing the left within the Jewish community and beyond. As restrictions upon the opportunities of Jews largely ended, the defense of Jewish interests came to be seen as defense of existing state institutions and organized resistance against efforts at major changes.
By the 1960s to 1970s, African American movements and Arab movements in particular came to be viewed as dangers to be combated in the name of democracy and Israel. No previous scholarly work has identified the process as clearly as Gelman’s.
The New Anti-Semitism (1974) by Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein identified the shift. Highly placed African American reformers offered the ADL their eloquent opposition to campus radicals, peaceniks, and Black Power sentiment. A 1972 split in the small socialist movement found the new Social Democrats, USA—also known as the SDUSA—urging victory in Vietnam, and a range of policies and personalities increasingly identified with neoconservatism.
The ADL had, by then, become a mover in the shift of personalities and influences in think tanks, federal agencies, and the upper levels of the labor bureaucracy. If democracy—in the evolving doctrine—depended upon liberal capitalism, then increased levels of welfare and affirmative action were seen as dangers to be slowed or halted.
In 1993, San Francisco police and the FBI raided the ADL’s California offices, uncovering evidence that its agents had, for decades, been infiltrating reform activist groups of every kind. The ADL had its contacts operating in the ArabAmerican Anti-Discrimination Committee when leading activist Alex Odeh was assassinated in 1985. The connections between advocating Israeli causes and conducting the business of Mossad seem also to have embraced U.S. policies from South Africa to El Salvador and the Philippines. Persistent claims that Black liberation movements were aligned with anti-Israel views led to broad assaults on the Jewish left in both the United States and Europe.
The research and documentation in Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State defy rebuttals, although they are sure to invite denials and counterattacks from Tel Aviv to Texas. The crimes of the Israelis in Gaza, as well as the current war against Iran, surely make the accusations of anti-Semitism against all critics ring false.