WHEN THE FBI RAIDED Anti-Defamation League offices in 1993, the civil rights establishment was shocked. The ADL, a prominent anti-hate organization, was known for surveilling white supremacist groups and sharing intelligence with the FBI. But the raid revealed that it was also spying on organizations like the ACLU, the anti-Klan Center for Democratic Renewal, and local Jewish peace groups, which worked against racism and for human rights. The revelation that the ADL viewed these groups as threats “caused confusion for some liberals,” as The New York Times put it; the organization had gone so far as to infiltrate small South African anti-Apartheid committees and Arab American community groups.
Thirty years after these revelations, the ADL, along with its fellow Jewish advocacy organization, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), continue to “cause confusion” among progressives. Even as they advocate for right-wing causes, the groups present themselves as pillars of the US civil rights movement and exemplars of the Jewish moral tradition, often pointing to their historic allyship with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s. Perhaps for this reason, some left-leaning Jewish organizations are inclined to push them to live up to their claims to work for justice and rights for all. In 2018, Jewish protesters called on AJC to oppose Israeli weapons sales to violent dictatorships and make clear that “this is not who we are.” Last June, when the ADL refused to denounce Israel’s threats to annex the West Bank, activists protested in Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, and other cities, demanding that the organization uphold its avowed democratic ideals. That same month, some celebrated when the ADL signed a letter calling Black Lives Matter “the current day Civil Rights movement”—even though the organization regularly partners with police and opposes many core positions of the BLM movement. (AJC, notably, didn’t sign the letter.) Even today, some staff within the ADL continue to view progressive work as the organization’s central mission, despite institutional policies that push in the opposite direction, as Jewish Currents recently reported.
But the ADL and AJC have never been part of Jewish resistance to power: on the contrary, they were founded to subvert Jewish grassroots organizing. When I began researching the ADL and AJC as a political historian, I was surprised by both the substance of this history and the fact that it was so little known on the present-day Jewish left. Alongside the Jewish Federations, the ADL and AJC were established by a wealthy German Jewish capitalist class intent on suppressing the political power of poor, often radicalized Eastern European immigrants. Over the next century, those leaders and their successors courted wealthy donors who reflected their own political leanings, and closed ranks around an insular directorate. In accordance with the conservatism of their leaderships, the institutions allied themselves only selectively with civil rights organizing, even as they labored to undermine more radical movements—such as Black Power and Third World anti-colonialism—and embraced an increasingly right-wing Zionist politics in Israel/Palestine.