Over the past six months, Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, has stressed repeatedly that he is concerned about rising antisemitism. Unfortunately, he has also made clear that he cares about antisemitism only as he defines it and as it affects people who agree with him on the definition.

The ADL is arguably the most prominent organization in the country dedicated toward countering antisemitism. It is not that the ADL has not faced criticism before (earlier this year, a report from the Intercept charged that the ADL had “lobbied for counterterror legislation that singled out Palestinians”). Nor is it the case that the ADL has never before chosen to cooperate with law enforcement or authority over forging solidarity with left-wing Jews. (Indeed, it did so during the Red Scare.) Still, the group is the go-to American organization on antisemitism, and it also played a prominent role in championing civil rights historically. It has also been a resource for me personally: I have, over the years, interviewed and been greatly informed by various ADL staffers, and have turned to the organization’s research in my own writing and thinking on antisemitism. I believe that a civil rights organization “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” the founding principle of the ADL, remains necessary in this country.

But the ADL, under the leadership of Greenblatt, is insisting on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and it has made this conflation central to the ADL’s work. This has not only muddied the waters of its own antisemitism research, it has also undermined the safety, security, and pluralism of American Jews.

For example, the ADL reportedly mapped protests for a cease-fire led by the Jewish groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow as antisemitic incidents. The ADL also, in its report on antisemitism this year, updated its methodology to include certain anti-Israel incidents in its calculation of how much antisemitism had risen. This not only makes it more difficult to see what the actual year-over-year change in antisemitic incidents was—of course an increase will seem more dramatic if you are now counting incidents that you weren’t before—but it also arguably undermines the rest of the ADL’s reporting on antisemitism. If the group tracking antisemitism considers pro-Palestinian speech or differences in foreign policy preferences to be motivated by antisemitism, how seriously will those who disagree with the ADL on foreign policy take its calls to tackle antisemitism?

At least as troubling as the new research methods, though, are the statements and posture of Greenblatt........

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