The Daily Dose: Bedfellows In Bigotry

Time to call the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Trump Jewish voices to account.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on an ICE raid in Montebello, California which appeared to target Latino citizens solely because of the color of their skin.

The raid took place last Thursday, when ICE agents descended on the predominantly Latino working-class suburb of Los Angeles. Their target was a car lot which hosts a number of auto body shops and tow-truck businesses. Video footage shows the agents bracing employees against the wall and, in one case, tackling someone to the ground. The questions they asked suggest that they were not searching for anyone in particular and were instead trying to ascertain the citizenship status of the people who work there.

In other words, the agents saw a bunch of Brown people in a particular place and presumed that at least some of them would be undocumented.

Commenting about the article on Bluesky, Ami Fields-Meyer, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, addressed “my Jewish community,” asking why he could find so little opposition to the Trump administration's racist policies:

The US government is rounding people up based on their skin color, and many of the old guard Jewish organizations that have been most vocal about feelings of abandonment from other ethnic minority groups are nowhere to be found. Total silence.

He makes a valid point. Since Hamas's terrorist attacks on October 7^th, 2023, some Jewish organizations have expressed dismay at the lack of sympathy for Jews on the part of Black and Brown people. But the organizations can themselves be accused of ignoring racism against others, a trend which began well before October 7^th.

It gets worse than that, however. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have not only turned away from combating racism against other groups; they have increasingly allied with the very forces doing the racism—namely, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Earlier this month, The Forward reported on a particularly unhinged speech by ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt to an audience of Republican attorneys general. “You have people hiding their faces behind scarves and keffiyehs like they’re in ISIS,” he complained in a reference to pro-Palestine college protesters, adding that they have been “storming libraries, vandalizing buildings and literally—I’m not exaggerating—terrorizing their classmates.”

Doubling down on the comparison of protesters to terrorists, he described the students as “frothing at the mouth, looking like they just came out of Mosul” (the site of a battle against the Islamic State in Iraq). Lest anyone mistake the implication, he declared that “the Founding Fathers didn’t want al-Qaida right running rampant on our streets.”

While he did acknowledge antisemitism on the right, he scorned the notion that it is “a problem on all sides.” Instead, he maintained, the “real deal threat” was “this convergence of what I call the radical left and, like, Islamist groups here in the U.S.”

Last year's campus protests witnessed far too many antisemitic incidents, as I have written in the past. But the notion that a majority of the protesters were motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment cannot be defended—not least because a substantial number of the participants were Jewish themselves.

Despite what Greenblatt claims and many others believe, college students are no more antisemitic than the broader population, according to the two most systematic surveys that have addressed the subject. Both studies were carried out after the October 7^th, 2023 attacks.

Prejudicial antisemitism, or the holding of negative stereotypes toward Jews (e.g. “Jews have too much power in the United States today”), finds no more support among college students than the general public and is a distinctly minority attitude among both groups.

Violent antisemitism, or the belief that Jews deserve to be violently attacked, finds even less agreement and displays no notable differences between students and the public at large.

Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is far more prevalent among university students than the general public. But the surveys also found very little overlap between those who hold antisemitic views and those with anti-Zionist ones. This suggests that the two sentiments are not, in fact, equivalent—which makes sense, given that support for a single state in Palestine that affords equal rights to Jews and Palestinians can hardly be said to reflect any anti-Jewish animus.

The same surveys find that the vast majority of college students—between 70 and 77 percent—believe that advocating genocide against Jews is unacceptable. Granted, the fact that the other 23 to 30 percent would at least tolerate such calls is concerning. But contrary to Greenblatt, the notion that college campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism is just plain wrong.

As for where the biggest threat to Jews lies today, the evidence points squarely to the political right—the very group with whom Greenblatt and the ADL find such common cause. Another survey of predominantly young Americans does identify “evidence of prejudice on the ideological left and among racial minority groups.” At the same time, it concludes, “the data clearly show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”

Indeed, for all its Zionist window dressing, the Republican Party is home to a shocking number of antisemites, including Donald Trump himself. They are not the type who valorize Hamas, of course. Instead, they are the old-school, blood-and-soil variety—the kind that thinks the government is controlled by a secret Jewish cabal bent on destroying the volk.

Yet, these are precisely the forces with whom the ADL seeks to align us.

But there is a reason why Greenblatt and the ADL work so hard to form alliances on the antisemitic right—and why like-minded Jewish organizations find a welcome home there: Both have committed themselves to the oppression of Brown people. The ADL offers unflinching support to Israel and what scores of human rights experts and organizations have determined to be its genocidal assault on Gaza. Meanwhile, the Republican Party and its activist base are trying to remake America in the name of white power.

It makes sense, therefore, that the two sides find so much common ground.