THE CHUTZPAH OF THE ADL’S JONATHAN GREENBLATT: Twitter: “Those who truly care about the Jewish community shouldn’t politicize #antiSemitism.”
The ADL under former and long-time president Abe Foxman was liberal-leaning, but overall was a reasonably fair and nonpartisan broker in antisemitism controversies.
Former Obama staffer Greenblatt, who had no prior experience in Jewish communal work, has spent the last several years making the ADL more and more partisan, culminating in early 2017, when various ADL officials publicly blamed Trump for bomb threats to Jewish institutions that turned out to have nothing to do with him or his supporters. To my knowledge, no one at the ADL was fired or otherwise disciplined for this remarkable display of partisan bias that undermined the organization’s credibility.
The ADL also exaggerated its antisemitism stats last year to create a false impression of a massive increase in antisemitic incidents under Trump, in particular by including the bomb threats in its tally even though it knew by then that they were not antisemitic in origin.
Greenblatt is nevertheless right that we shouldn’t politicize antisemitism. But to suddenly announce that conclusion when Democrats are under fire, after wildly politicizing antisemitism in opposition to Trump, takes some chutzpah.