At Leading Anti-Hate Group, Boss’s Embrace of Elon Musk Raises Tensions

Editor's note: Four days after the reporter of this story put out a public call for tips from within the ADL on their CEO's comments, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote a letter to VICE corporate management calling VICE's coverage of the Israel-Hamas war " extremely biased against Israel and, at times, antisemitic" and listed a number of examples of "one-sided" coverage of the war. Some of those examples included the following:

"Vice has posted a multitude of TikTok videos and Instagram Reels showing the anguish of Palestinians, while failing to show the equally important trauma of Israelis who lost loved ones or who are anxiously praying for the return of the 240 hostages still held captive by Hamas more than six weeks after the October 7 terror attack."

"Vice posted an Instagram Reel about the deaths of premature babies in Al Shifa hospital, while failing to mention the context that Prime Minister Netanyahu had offered to fuel this hospital, but Hamas refused the offer."

"Vice posted a TikTok and Instagram Reel on November 6 covering the Pro- Palestine rallies across the United States and Canada. At one point during the video, the narrator says, “This comes nearly a month after the October 7 Hamas attack which killed 1,400.” The narrator completely omits mention that 1,200 of those killed were Israeli."

The letter to VICE did not ask for any factual corrections. 

Late last year, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, joined CNBC to discuss Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and said something that shocked his rank-and-file employees.

“Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator,” he said. “He is the Henry Ford of our time.” 

Prior to the interview, ADL staffers had provided Greenblatt with extensive talking points on Musk. These noted, for example, the billionaire’s dabblings in COVID-19 denialism and a then-recent lawsuit accusing Tesla of racial discrimination—exactly the sorts of things that many employees at the century-old civil rights organization were working to combat. 

But Greenblatt disregarded their talking points, and instead made a favorable comparison between Musk and Ford, who once started his own newspaper specifically to spread anti-Jewish propaganda and infamously popularized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the foundational text for modern antisemitic conspiracies. This is history of which Greenblatt is well aware, as evidenced by his writing in a 2019 New York Times op-ed that Ford’s antisemitism was “undeniable” and that he’d “used a variety of platforms to promote his unabashedly hateful comments about Jews.” 

Greenblatt later apologized to staff, calling his reference to Ford “flat-out wrong” in a tweet and stressing that he didn’t mean to praise him, nor did he “intend to minimize his contemptible antisemitism in any way.” His remark was generally dismissed as a gaffe, at least internally. 

But to many staffers, it was just the latest embarrassing example of Greenblatt “going rogue.”

VICE News spoke to half a dozen current and former employees at the ADL who said there’s been a noticeable shift in Greenblatt’s priorities and leadership style over the last 18 months, and that staffers have been repeatedly blindsided, frustrated, and left feeling betrayed by his public statements that they say directly undermined their expertise. 

Those frustrations have boiled over recently, as ADL staffers have scrambled to monitor and document soaring rates of antisemitism, both online and offline, while feeling like their findings are being cast aside by Greenblatt, who sources say is laser-focused on casting the pro-Palestine movement as inherently antisemitic. 

Then, last month, Greenblatt doubled down on his public support for Musk,  just as the X CEO was under intense critical scrutiny for his endorsement of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred for white people.” 

Some at the ADL felt like Greenblatt had finally gone too far. That included two members of different advisory boards who recently told Rolling Stone they may resign. 

Current and former ADL staffers fear that Greenblatt has permanently damaged the credibility that the ADL has built as a leading authority on extremism and antisemitism—at a moment when the ADL’s work is more necessary than ever. 

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In a speech in May 2022, Greenblatt made clear that his position—and the ADL’s position— was that anti-Zionism and anti-Zionist groups that are critical of Israel, including Jewish Voice for Peace, often known as JVP, are antisemitic. 

Some current and former staffers feel as though Greenblatt, while treating Musk with kid gloves, is abdicating the ADL’s clearly-defined mission—”to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all”—by casting anti-Zionist Jews as extremists, or, as he’s repeatedly said, “the photo inverse of white supremacists.” 

“How is that helping to protect the Jewish community?” asked one former employee, who, like others, VICE News agreed not to identify due to concerns around professional retaliation. “It’s basically saying, ‘Here, these are Jews we don’t care about, you can have at them’.” (An ADL spokesperson told VICE News that “it is squarely within ADL’s founding mission to call out groups who are stridently anti-Israel,” adding that “extreme rhetoric” from groups like JVP “fosters an atmosphere where antisemitism can flourish.”) 

And some said that while they once felt as though ADL was an umbrella organization that could tolerate or encompass multiple viewpoints, they feel that’s no longer the case. “You could have asked five people at ADL what antisemitism is, and you’d get five different answers,” another former employee said. 

“It used to be a space where a plurality of opinions was welcome, because the ADL represents the Jewish community, which has a lot of differing views,” a current staffer said. “It is no longer an environment that tolerates criticism.” Some reported a growing concern of professional backlash if they did express opinions that were unpopular with ADL leadership. 

“There was also this real sense of fear, and many times where myself and other coworkers were afraid to speak up,” said Daniel Hosterman,  a former ADL senior software engineer who was let go earlier this year.

Simmering unhappiness within the ADL rank-and-file was reflected in an internal employee survey in July 2022, which was shared with VICE News. Less than half of the workforce at the ADL expressed confidence in the organization’s leadership—nearly 10 percentage points less compared to the same survey in 2019. 

Just a third of employees felt as though there was “open and honest two-way communication” at the ADL, down 7 percentage points. And just 28 percent reported feeling as though they were kept “appropriately informed about major decisions and events” happening at the ADL. 

Tensions within the ADL were further exacerbated after Oct. 7, when Hamas militants stormed across Israel’s border, killed more than 1,000 people, most of them civilians, and took hundreds of hostages. Israel launched heavy bombardment of the Gaza Strip in retaliation, vowing to wipe out Hamas, and has killed 20,000 people, including thousands of children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. (The ADL has campaigned against media organizations citing the Hamas-run health ministry at face value, because of the propaganda value in inflating casualties. The UN and the World Health Organization have stated that they believe the numbers to be largely accurate, and in the 2014 conflict, the Gaza health ministry’s death toll numbers were very close to those provided by both third-party organizations and Israel itself. Israel recently lowered its death toll numbers from the Oct. 7 attack from 1400 to 1200.)  

The utter brutality that unfolded on Oct. 7, and the staggering Palestinian death toll, has made the latest Israel-Hamas conflict a bitterly, emotionally polarizing issue in the U.S., and unleashed a torrent of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate. 

Meanwhile, Greenblatt has continued to double down on his views on pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist protest groups. 

Sources told VICE News that many have felt increasingly uneasy that the ADL has cast peaceful protests advocating for a ceasefire, including ones led by Jewish anti-zionist groups like JVPand If Not Now, as pro-Hamas and antisemitic.

“These radical far-left groups don’t represent the Jewish community,” Greenblatt posted on X after Jewish-led protesters held a sit-in at the rotunda of the Capitol to demand a ceasefire. “Far from it. They represent the ugly core of anti-Zionism → antisemitism.” 

(In a statement to VICE, an ADL spokesperson doubled down on this position, and said that “identifying as a Jewish organization does not exempt JVP from the antisemitism that is putting the Jewish people at risk.” The spokesperson alluded to media statements made by JVP’s executive director Stephanie Fox following the October 7 attack that described Israel as the “root cause” of the violence that day. In the full interview, Fox also acknowledges the “pain and trauma” on all sides of the conflict, and expressed her hope for the “future of peace that's rooted in justice and freedom and equality for all people.”) 

That protest in the Rotunda, and others like it, were included in a map, published by the ADL titled “Antisemitic Incidents and Anti-Israel Rallies in the U.S. Since Hamas’ Attack On Israel,” an analysis of the data by The Intercept found. 

And then, on November 17, Greenblatt took to X to praise Musk, again. 

Only months earlier, the billionaire had amplified a toxic campaign on X, #BanTheADL, which was driven by antisemites and white nationalists. That campaign was a response to an ADL report flagging the surge in antisemitic content on X since Musk had taken over the platform. After Musk’s flirtation with the #BanTheADL campaign, he threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, claiming that their report had resulted in an exodus of advertisers. 

On November 15, Musk found himself facing a fresh barrage of accusations of antisemitism, this time, after agreeing with a post on X that claimed “Jews push the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” Critics said that statement contained echoes of the racist, antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory.” On November 16, Greenblatt criticized Musk’s post. “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories,” he wrote on X. 

Shortly after noon on November 17, Media Matters for America published a damning report showing how X had placed ads from major companies including IBM and Apple next to posts praising Hitler, resulting in an exodus of those corporations. (Musk has since sued Media Matters and told advertisers, specifically Disney CEO Bob Iger, to “go fuck” themselves.)

Then at around 5:45 p.m. that same day, Musk declared on X that a chant heard at recent protests, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” was a call for genocide, and that X would begin suspending users who used that language.

The true meaning and origins of the chant has been a topic of intense debate in recent months. Palestinian activists say it’s a rallying cry for freedom. The ADL updated its definition of the slogan in October to assert that it was inherently antisemitic, which is the position of many pro-Israel groups. 

Twenty minutes after Musk made that declaration, Greenblatt offered a round of public applause. “This is an important and welcome move by @elonmusk,” he wrote. “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.” 

And not only that, ADL has continued to advertise on X—even after Media Matters’ damning report. 

“When IBM, a company [involved in] the Holocaust, pauses its advertising, and the oldest civil rights organization for Jews doesn’t, you have to ask, what are we even doing here?” one former ADL employee asked. 

Musk says he is not antisemitic, but there is little question that he’s enabled antisemitism and other forms of hate online. After buying Twitter, he declared an “amnesty” for accounts that had been deplatformed under previous ownership, including many that were banished in the aftermath of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. 

As a result of Musk’s amnesty, hordes of neo-Nazis came crawling out of the gutters and back into the mainstream, where they’ve since been able to openly recruit others into their hateful ideology, spread antisemitism, and even promote anti-Jewish conspiracies using premium X accounts and blue ticks. 

In an interview on CNBC on Nov. 20, Greenblatt defended his latest praise of Musk, saying he believes in “counsel culture not cancel culture.” He acknowledged that “it’s dangerous when one of the most visible people on the planet” tweets something like what Musk tweeted to his millions of followers. 

“He has a set of political beliefs and a set of ideas, and look, these things can be dangerous,” said Greenblatt. “But at the same time, two days later, he did something incredibly promising.” 

A spokesperson for the ADL said that the nonprofit has “repeatedly called out Elon Musk when he has gotten it wrong and credited him when he has gotten it right.” They added that it would be a “big step forward” if Musk followed through on his commitment to suspend users that use slogans that the ADL considers to be “calls for the eradication of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the seven million Jews who live there.” 

Eli Pariser, who sits on ADL’s tech advisory board, told Rolling Stone that he found Greenblatt’s praise for Musk “both morally wrong and disastrously counterproductive,” and said he was considering resigning. Another member of a different advisory board also told Rolling Stone they were considering stepping down as a result of Greenblatt’s latest flirtation with Musk. 

Even Greenblatt’s predecessor at the ADL, Abraham Foxman, appeared to weigh in, though he did not mention Greenblatt by name. “No amount of acrobatics can justify Musk’s frequent embrace of antisemitic themes…and providing X as a major platform for antisemitism,” Foxman wrote on X.

Greenblatt’s willingness to use kid gloves when it comes to Musk has baffled ADL staffers. Hosterman, the former employee, said that Greenblatt’s seemingly cozy relationship with Musk and Twitter felt like a betrayal to his working group’s remit, which was to “hold Musk accountable.” 

“My group was trying to put out reports, tracking prevalence and the growth of antisemitic content on Twitter,” said Hosterman “The outcomes that we were providing were not affecting how Jonathan and Twitter were interacting. And there was this concern that Jonathan’s relationship with Musk was somehow unassailable, despite what evidence we might unearth.” 

The ADL has been in the throes of an identity crisis for several decades, sources say. 

The ADL was founded in 1913 as a Jewish advocacy organization, and played an important role fighting Nazi propaganda in the U.S.—including, somewhat ironically, propaganda published by Ford. A recent report by Eric Alterman in The New Republic explored the ADL’s evolution over the years and how its former director Foxman, who took the reins in 1987, began dabbling in other civil rights issues. 

Progress toward possible coalition-building in the broader civil rights arena was stymied by a 1993 federal lawsuit that accused the ADL of conspiring with police agencies to spy on other activists, including Arab Americans, Palestinian rights groups, Native Americans, and opponents of South African apartheid. The lawsuit, which was brought by 12 different political and civil rights organizations, also accused the ADL of selling information about anti-apartheid activists to the South African government. 

The lawsuit was settled six years later. Under the terms of the settlement, the ADL was required to redact or destroy their files on more than 800 groups or individuals that contained secret information. 

“I hope it convinces the ADL that it has better things to do with its limited resources than spy on sister civil rights organizations who in no way pose a threat to the Jewish community,” the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Peter Schey of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, told the L.A. Times in response to the settlement. 

Greenblatt took over as CEO of the ADL in 2015, inheriting an organization with a $60 million budget and a thousands-strong workforce, which included a full-time staff of 300 plus consultants, freelancers, and others, according to The New Republic. Greenblatt’s background was in business and government relations. He’d previously co-founded a bottled water company, and had been appointed as special assistant to the president under Barack Obama and to an office in the U.S. Domestic Policy Council.

As the ADL’s leader, Greenblatt championed a number of liberal causes, speaking out forcefully against Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” and other immigration policies, endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement “unequivocally,” and apologizing for the ADL’s earlier opposition to the Ground Zero mosque. 

As Alterman reported, “all this activism earned Greenblatt some grumbling on the Jewish right for ADL’s alleged woke ideology.” 

Current and former employees told VICE News that they’ve been under mounting pressure to expose extremism on the left, when their own data don’t support that kind of focus. The ADL’s own report on deadly extremism last year noted that “left-wing extremists engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence.” Some have wondered whether Greenblatt—who is widely regarded as a brilliant fundraiser and brought the ADL’s annual revenue to over $100 million —has been trying to placate more conservative donors, while others speculated that he was “terrified” of the ADL becoming overly political and losing its 501(c)(3) status as a nonprofit. 

In February 2022, Greenblatt abruptly revised the ADL’s definition of racism, which, since 2020, had been “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges White people.” 

In an essay, Greenblatt defended his new definition, which omitted the mention of “white,” saying that the previous version (which staffers had spent months on) was “too narrow.” 

Then, in May that year, Greenblatt gave a speech at the ADL’s Virtual Leadership Summit, and declared that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism, full stop”—a controversial position to say the least, given the anti-Zionism of many Jewish people, including Israeli citizens. He said that Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Council on American-Islamic Relations “epitomize the Radical Left, the photo inverse of the Extreme Right that ADL long has tracked,” adding that these “radical actors indisputably and unapologetically regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews.” Hosterman described Greenblatt’s speech as “a well known public pivot point in Jonathan's recent demeanor.”

There have been clear examples of antisemitism on the left, particularly in cases where criticisms of Israel are expressed through antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. But ADL employees told VICE that they felt as though Greenblatt’s new laser focus on leftist anti-Zionist groups, particularly on college campuses, was not supported by their own data on antisemitism. Anti-Zionist groups were responsible for 2 percent of all antisemitic incidents in 2022, most of which were attributed to a single fringe group in Michigan, according to The New Republic. 

Jewish Currents obtained audio of a contentious staff meeting following Greenblatt’s speech, and spoke to employees who expressed concern that his “absolutist language” was alienating “natural allies in the fight against antisemitism,” and could—once again— permanently damage the organization’s ability to build coalitions with other civil rights groups.

Then, in September that year, there was another bombshell. Fox News conducted a “review” of classroom materials compiled by the ADL’s Education Department. According to the ADL, their Education Department’s goal is to provide tools to “help people of all ages challenge bias, discrimination and systems of oppression.” 

Fox labeled these materials “critical race theory”—a term co-opted by conservatives to mean any education that touches on themes of racism or inequality in America—and quoted an expert who mused that they were further proof that the ADL, a “once universally respected organization,” had lost its “bipartisan appeal” ever since Greenblatt took over. The editor-in-chief of Jewish News Syndicate wrote an op-ed in response: “After the ADL gets caught spreading woke ideology, Greenblatt must go.”

Meanwhile, Greenblatt gave a statement to Fox, saying “clearly there is content among our curricular materials that is misaligned with ADL’s values and strategy” and vowed to conduct a “thorough review of our education content.” 

Staffers, especially those from the Education Department, felt betrayed and insulted by Greenblatt’s statement, and said it was just the latest example of his unwillingness to stand up for the hard work of his researchers, analysts, and experts. 

“When I was there, there was a pretty serious and rapidly expanding feeling that senior leadership of ADL was ignoring the expertise of its employees, particularly those from the Center of Extremism, Center of Technology and Society, and the Education Department,” said Hosterman.

Sources told VICE News that there’s also a clear cultural division within the ADL, with the Education Department, Center for Technology and Society, and Center on Extremism, generally skewing more progressive compared to the Government Relations, Advocacy and Community Engagement Team, known as GRACE, and its international affairs programs. 

Asked about the perception that Greenblatt’s habit of “going rogue” demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for his employees, a spokesperson for the ADL said that all the examples “were made with input from internal and external experts.” 

“Jonathan receives and seeks output from internal stakeholders, including our subject matter experts, regional offices, and the board of directors, among others, around important decisions affecting our policies and work,” they said. “That said, ADL is an organization with a large and diverse team, and not all members of our team will ultimately agree with every decision.”

Internally, recent controversies involving Greenblatt are being spun by senior employees as “tensions are high, people are stretched thin, and therefore making more mistakes than usual.” But some rank-and-file are concerned that Greenblatt is hell-bent on going after pro-Palestine activists on college campuses, such as Student Justice for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Given the delicacy and rawness of the moment, staffers are increasingly less sure that Greenblatt is the right person to lead the ADL. 

Even as employees contend with concerns that Greenblatt may direct the ADL to bring the hammer down on groups like Student Justice for Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace (with some telling VICE News that they feel increasingly “ashamed” to work there) the nonprofit once again landed in hot water by praising a someone known for antisemitic statements. This time, it was Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who helped direct bombing campaigns in southeast Asia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands at minimum, possibly millions, of Cambodians and Vietnamese people. 

In its post on X, the ADL lauded Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, as a “towering intellect, diplomat and practitioner who—not without controversy—helped shape American foreign policy with a lasting impact worldwide.” “He was unapologetic about his heritage and his embrace of the importance of American global power and democratic values,” the ADL added. 

Readers quickly added their “Community notes” to the post: noting Kissinger’s history of antisemitism. For example, he was once quoted as saying “if it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic,” and once told Nixon “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“The ADL is not Jonathan Greenblatt,” one former employee said. “The sad thing, and I do think it’s a sad thing, is that an organization like the ADL needs to exist. It is not fiction that antisemitism is on the rise. And historically, a rise in antisemitism is a bellwether of political violence.” 

What’s more, that former employee added, the ADL has some of the world’s leading experts on extremism, antisemitism, violence, hate, and tech policy working there. And yet despite that, their expertise has been repeatedly discredited, ignored or undermined by Greenblatt and other senior leadership. An organization like the ADL does need to exist, they said, “but it doesn’t have to be the ADL.”