News Brief: The ADL's Bogus Origin Story and Its Rise as Ideological Enforcer for Empire and Israel

**Nima Shirazi** (0:04)
Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief, I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:07)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:08)
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All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100 percent listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed. Today, we are going to be joined by Emmaia Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She's taught social and cultural analysis at NYU, and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing has appeared in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere. Emmaia is also the author of the brand new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, published just this month, June 2026, by University of California Press. The book really provides a corrective history of the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, as a vehicle of reactionary Western political agendas. It contrasts the ADL self-styling as a progressive civil rights institution with its actual real-life historical record of upholding, aiding, and laundering white supremacism, the surveillance and police state and settler colonial projects throughout the world. So Adam, let's jump right in by welcoming Emmaia Gelman. Emmaia, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.

**Emmaia Gelman** (1:30)
Thank you so much for having me. Love this.

**Adam Johnson** (1:33)
Yes. Thank you so much for writing this book. It's very good and very needed. We've talked about the ADL quite a bit on the show because the head of the ADL effectively lives in the green room of CNN and MSNBC, Jonathan Greenblatt, where he goes on cable news on an almost weekly basis and accuses all sorts of people of being horrible, racist and anti-Semites and loving terrorists, etc.
and somehow avoids libel lawsuits. I think he's very good at phrasing things in very particular ways.
We want to begin by talking about the origins of the ADL. The ADL CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, insists that it was founded in the wake of the lynching of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, and then adopted its mission of securing justice and fair treatment for all. But as you write, there's a slightly less simplistic truth. We want to begin by talking about that. Can you talk about why the ADL was created and how it's found in contrasts with its image of a so-called civil rights organization, although of course over the last year, they've maybe moved away from that a little bit, but we can talk about that later. Talk about its origins and what its founding logic was.

**Emmaia Gelman** (2:30)
Yeah. The Leo Frank story, for those who don't know it, is a story of the lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia in 1915, two years after the ADL was founded. But the reason that it's so important to the ADL is because it is a point of comparison where the ADL has been able to say, fighting for Jewish rights is just like fighting for black civil rights. We share this origin in racial violence. Of course, that's a later construction. The ADL was founded in 1913
It's not that the Leo Frank case wasn't relevant to it, it was happening at the time. But the ADL was not founded to make comparisons to blackness or even to fight for black civil rights. It was actually an organization that was founded, I would say, to defend whiteness and to defend the whiteness of the Jewish upper classes who had been part of the wave of German-Jewish migration that was really settled and established at that point in time, against the wave of Jewish immigrants who entered the United States as refugees from pogroms, from the Russian czar, the Jews that we think of as part of the narrative of Jewish history being a progressive, founders of the labor movement, fighters for justice, tied to socialism, communism and anarchism, right? Those are all of the parts of Jewish immigration history that the ADL was created to suppress. So just to back up a little bit, the story is that between 1820 and 1880, there was a wave of Jewish immigration to the United States from Central Europe, which is now Germany. And those Jews became, like other Europeans in the United States, they became white, they made their fortunes, and also their identity through the settlement and conquest of indigenous land. Some of them, certainly not all of them, some of them participated in the slave economy, and their identity, like other white people in the United States was as white people. Their Jewishness wasn't their ethnicity, it was their religion. They thought of it sort of the same as Christianity.