Like other major Jewish organizations (and unlike the many Jewish leftist organizations that have existed in opposition to it), the ADL has evinced a strong allegiance with the U.S. state. It was committed to its civilizing mission of settlement, and to capitalist individualism as the framework for rights. In addition to keeping watch over threats to the state—Nazism, Communism, or demands for equality that went too far—the ADL sought out or welcomed ways to participate in the administration of the state. It collaborated with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and 1950s; it also tried and largely failed for several decades to interest the FBI in considering it a partner in monitoring threats. (FBI files made public under Freedom of Information Act requests document some of these efforts.) It found an opening in civil rights work where, ten years after the Voting Rights Act, ongoing racial conflict and white supremacist violence produced a new wave of demands for state action.
The ADL’s quasi-state role took shape from about 1979 to 1990. Not incidentally, these years were also a period of crisis for Israel’s image as a liberation project: decolonizing states in the United Nations charged Israel with colonialism, racism, and violations of international law, and Jewish economic and political inclusion in the United States was soured by the advent of critiques of white privilege. Public debates about white privilege began to implicate Jews in state power on the wrong side of civil rights. The Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 galvanized the first mass Jewish organizing against Israel and the settlements; New Jewish Agenda led that work, and also exposed and protested Jewish organizations’ support for Reagan. The first intifada began in 1987, displacing the narrative of Israel as a benevolent democracy. Domestically, these events produced ten state Democratic party resolutions on Palestinian rights and a debate at the national DNC in July 1988.
In 1979 the ADL began producing an annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. These audits, which found that anti-Semitism was “on the rise” nearly every year, were soon taken up by media and policymakers as a measure of how well the United States was living up to its values of racial inclusion, and how imminently threatening were latent fascist forces—code, at different times, for Nazis, Communists, the U.S. left, and more recently Muslim extremism. These audits remain a potent force in U.S. politics, despite periodic critiques that their methodology and raw data are not made public. Critics have noted that the ADL does not distinguish between teenage pranks designed to shock, such as swastika graffiti, and attacks grounded in bias, nor between expressions of bias and material violence. In the press, the ADL also counts calls for Palestinian rights, and even criticism of the ADL itself, as anti-Semitic incidents. Presumably these are included in the annual count. News media rarely look beyond the numbers, though, as they report “spikes” and “dramatic increases” which correctly remind readers, even if the data are spurious, that white supremacy persists.